That Bloody Motor: How to Read and Write the Extreme Story

2011-01-13T08:12:00.000-08:00

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About the author:
Jason Bellipanni began writing fiction in January 1995 while studying culinary arts in Florence, Italy. In 1999 he received an M.A. in English from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He attended the the Vermont Studio Center and moved to New Hampshire in 2001. In 2006 he received an M.F.A from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. He has published work in the short story anthologies, Feather and Cigarettes, Blink: Flash Fiction, and A World of Words and in journals such as the Berkeley Fiction Review, The Cream City Review, and Sniper Logic. He is the author of the English composition textbook Go Deep: The Writer's Approach to Creative and Critical Thinking and That Bloody Motor: How to Read and Write the Extreme Story. He teaches composition at Southern New Hampshire University and Saint Anselm College.

That Bloody Motor

How to Read and Write the Ex Story

Authored by Jason Bellipanni

The title, 'That Bloody Motor,' refers to the human heart in a metafictional story by Grace Paley entitled, A Conversation with my Father. This literature textbook of the same name contains experimental fiction and brief explanations of the techniques used to create as well as the methods required to decode the four main types of this fiction: Metafiction, Surrealist Fiction, Absurdist stories, and Science Fiction. The author, Jason Bellipanni, also a Professor of Composition at Saint Anselm College, has brought together his teaching and writing talents to create an engaging and thoroughly enjoyable study of what he sometimes calls extreme fiction.
"Despite the vast differences that exist among the various types of extreme or experimental fiction, each type seeks to explore the less accessible, but no less true, areas of human experience. They all operate on the principle that the limits imposed on realistic fiction, make it ill-suited to the discovery of the deeper truths about being human. Possibly the most enduring consequence of experimental fiction is that the work forces the reader to shift in their approach to fiction. The reader is blocked from traditional interpretation and forced to look for the meaning of the story in a different place. Successful interpretation of an extreme story is dependent on the reader's ability to shift their focus and their expectations as they begin to read the story. This means that the reader must locate the place in the story which contains the meaning or at least, the author's intention. A reader's approach to a story will determine whether or not the reader succeeds. This book attempts to present experimental fiction along with brief comments about the purpose and intention of 4 types of extreme fiction: Science Fiction, Surrealism, Absurdism, and Metafiction."

On Experimental and Extreme Fiction

2011-01-04T09:54:00.000-08:00

The example: You tell your friend to come over to watch the football game. But the game has been delayed so you have changed the channel to catch the end of a baseball game. You friend arrives, sits down, and appears to be watching the baseball game with you. After a few minutes, your friend turns to you and says, ‘this is the worst football game I’ve ever seen.”

What is the problem here? Is the baseball game to blame, for not being football? Is the football game to blame for not being on the screen when the friend arrives to watch? Is the friend to blame for not speaking up and explaining that they are watching baseball instead of football?

Obviously, the only person to blame is the friend, who has failed to shift his expectations from seeing a football game to watching a baseball game.

This happens all the time in the art world. Many people who disparage abstract or modern art seem to blame what they are looking at for not conforming to their expectations. “What’s that supposed to be?” is not an uncommon question and it is a direct result of the viewer’s inability or unwillingness to shift their own expectations and assumptions prior to viewing the art.

All stories are concerned with revealing truths having to do with the experience of being human. Whether the story seeks to reveal truths about a sequence of events, as in the story of a war, or whether the story tries to highlight emotional truths, how it feels to have a human experience or what it means to be human, story is primarily concerned with communicating truth.

Story attempts to highlight the struggles and triumphs of human emotion, to reveal the motivations, the complications, and the necessity of our relationships with others. Certain stories even attempt to expose the truths we may hide from ourselves and from others.

It is also worth noting that just as much as stories attempt to reveal, they also provide models for our behavior. Whether we recognize it or not, much of what we do, how we react, or the decisions we make are based on models of behavior that have been provided by stories. The so-called ‘American Dream’ is nothing but a story that has been turned into a template for living. Whether or not your own personal goal flow with or rebel against the American Dream, the fact remains that the American Dream is playing a role in shaping your life.

Despite the vast differences that exist between the Extreme forms of fiction examined in this book, they are all similar in that they seek to explore less accessible, but no less true, areas of human experience. They all operate on the principle that the limits imposed on realistic fiction, make it ill-suited to the discovery of the deeper truths about being human. In short, realistic fiction and its boundaries or rules, can never access those realms of human experience that contain deeper truths.

Extreme story forces a shift in the reader’s approach to fiction. The reader is blocked from traditional interpretation and forced to look for the meaning of the story in a different place.

Successful interpretation of an extreme story is dependent on the reader’s ability to shift their focus and their expectations before they even begin to read the story. This means that the reader must be looking in the right place as they read a story, in order to properly interpret the meaning. This means that a reader’s approach to a story, what a reader is looking for, will determine whether or not the reader succeeds.

It takes practice, but anyone can learn to alter their expectations with regard to art, in the same way they alter them when they read a newspaper instead of a science fiction story. The shift is all about knowing where to focus one’s attention and being willing to acquire some familiarity with the material that they are encountering.

The Story Review

That Bloody Motor: How to Read and Write the Extreme Story

That Bloody Motor

How to Read and Write the Ex Story

On Experimental and Extreme Fiction