I feel like you’re missing this one though: Trololo – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTSA_sWGM44

Yuck, that sounds pretty bad. There’s a possibility that my problems stem from spending a month backpacking with a heavy bag—certainly, that wasn’t good for my back. So while I am fortunate in not apparently having actual identifiable problems, perhaps, I still have a mild swayback posture that just isn’t easy to notice because I’m skinny, apparently.

Uuf, though, years and years of this sounds terrible. I would like to avoid that, please.

What’s the stretch you say you do multiple times a day? Lunges?

To add some icing to the cake, a couple years after the fall we realized that I have minor scoliosis. I suspect that it is a result of my sacrum being at an angle (and it was nearly a year after the fall before I went to a PT, because I was living in Costa Rica at the time it happened, and then wasted some time with a chiropractor when I got back, which was completely unhelpful for me), but it’s not really possible to confirm that. So anyway, I focus on the main things you mentioned: supporting with my core rather than letting my butt puch out (overly curved spine); stretching back, hips, hip flexors, and ham strings; and doing exercises to increase back and core strength. As you mentioned, I also sit funny — I just try to keep it balanced. So if I sit cross-legged, cross my legs the other way periodically so that no one side is getting a sum stretch or contraction. Or if I sit on a chair with one leg drawn up, I try to remember to switch which leg is drawn up. Same for crossing one leg over the other and standing with my weight concentrated on one leg.

HAH. Did you think you’d get a comment almost as long as your original post?

Uh, should I do a takeway message? Here’s my takeaway message: it will get better if you work at it. It will take a while, but I promise you it will get better. But you have to work at it. You may never again be able to not think about it, but you will almost certainly be able to sit for long periods and stand for long periods and have normal activity. When I first went to the PT I could reach my hands to about my knees when I bent over as if to touch my toes. Within a couple years I could consistently touch my toes (which is actually a first for me — I’m very inflexible in that direction). So, progress! And consistent maintenance.

Similarly: If you happen to write an essay that, when you look back, introduces the main argument in the beginning, provides three or four main supports, and then concludes by summing things up—well, great. But I always hated when it felt forced. “Does the last sentence of the first paragraph list the three arguments I’m going to be making?” I didn’t do so well on the Florida Standardized Writing Exams.

But in a story, if the way you think of it is nonlinear, through the eyes of twenty mice living in the basement of an abandoned house being use as a squat… well, go for it. But you’d better be a damn-good writer. I’ve heard good reviews of Cloud Atlas, but I haven’t read it myself; I did hear that parts of it are much better than others. I’m not sure that odd narrators is quite the same thing you’re talking about, but really playing with characters and narration is something that can be very frustrating. Jumping around in time/thought needs a lot more work than your average story. Or maybe it wouldn’t if we taught it as an option from the first? I don’t know. But imagine sections of The Sound and the Fury if it weren’t written so skillfully? It’d be brambles.

The Freytag’s pyramid is a form that is strongly emphasized in many creative writing classes, which bothers me because it is predated by so many other forms (e.g. the epic poem). It seems like the narrative equivalent to the five paragraph essay (students are taught the form before they are taught to think creatively). It reminds me of the black & white outlines in children’s coloring books, if a kid is going to draw a picture of a house, it should be his creation, and no one should tell him what it should look like.

Novels I admire are cannibalistic and incorporate many forms (Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Sebald’s The Emigrants). I’m not a narrative anarchist, I do think good work requires structure, and there is something to be said for creating something artful within very strict confines, but why repeat an antiquated form when you could do something unique and organic?

I think plot should always come secondary to a system of profluence; the questions and anxieties that drive a work forward, the dynamic sequential element. And this can be line-level (How did this happen? What happens next?) as well as conceptual (problem to resolution, instability to stability). That is what makes a work energaic.

In The Nature of Narrative Scholes and Kellogg say that “Quality of mind, not plot, is the soul of narrative. Plot is only the indispensable skeleton which, fleshed out with character and incident, provides the necessary clay into which life may be breathed.”

I don’t think plot should ever be the first priority; otherwise the work becomes a telenovella.

I also think this is why modular and spatial stories are more effective and more in keeping with our perception of reality than strictly linear stories (I know there are heaps of examples to counter that claim but hear me out). Faulkner believed that time was not linear, but rather spherical, it must be viewed in motion and from simultaneous perspectives.

But it is a weird POV. The via negativa would be a difficult one to use to make sense of language. Imagine trying to learn language based on that.

HAHAHA! GOOD!

Check it out.