Proust Questionnaire

I present to all of you the prestigious Proust Questionnaire. This smattering of questions has helped me out of a creative slump or two. I've used it to jump start poems and for free-write exercises. But I think it works best as a "get to know you" between the writer and character. How would your character respond?

The Infamous "Proust" Questionnaire

In the back pages of Vanity Fair each month, readers find The Proust Questionnaire, a series of questions posed to famous subjects about their lives, thoughts, values, and experience. The young Marcel was asked to fill out questionnaires at two social events: one when he was 13, another when he was 20. (Curious about Proust's responses?) Proust did not invent this party game; he is simply the most extraordinary person to respond to it.

1. What is your greatest fear?
2. What is your current state of mind?
3. What is your favorite occupation (way of spending time)?
4. What historical figure do you most identify with?
5. Which living person do you most admire?
6. Who is your favorite fictional hero?
7. Who are your real-life heroes?
8. What is your most treasured possession?
9. When and where were you happiest?
10. What is your most obvious characteristic?
11. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
12. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
13. What is your greatest extravagance?
14. What is your favorite journey?
15. What do you most dislike about your appearance?
16. What do you consider the most over-rated virtue?
17. On what occasion do you lie?
18. Which words or phrases do you most over-use?
19. Id you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
20. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
21. Where would you like to live?
22. What is the quality you most admire in a man?
23. What is the quality you most admire in a woman?
24. What is it you most dislike?
25. What do you value most in your friends?
26. How would you like to die?
27. If you were to die and come back as a person or an animal, what do you think you would be?
28. If you could choose an object to come back as, what would you choose?
29. What is your motto (words you live by or that mean a lot to you)?
30. Who had been the greatest influence on you?

I...uh...er...um

from this slate article comes the following bit of wisdom.

"Interjections are suitable for online writing, as I say, because of the way online writing mimics speech. But newspaper and magazine writers who spell out interjections and other vocalisms run the risk of coming off as cute—as in yucky ew rather than adorable awwa. Most egregiously abused are what linguists call "discourse markers"—short sounds (it seems a stretch to call them "words") that speakers use to register hesitation, agreement, encouragement, ambivalence, and other responses. Uh, er, and um, in particular, have been flagrantly overused by feature writers and columnists to signal an impending attempt at irony or humor; the maneuver is now well beyond cliché, somewhere in the neighborhood of desperation. A LexisNexis search of major English-language newspapers for um yields 132 hits in just the last week, including a striking number in various newspapers' coverage of the Grammy Awards:

The Toronto Sun's preview: "Watch for Justin Timberlake pairing up with someone in a duet (which often can be quite, um, revealing)."

The Chicago Sun-Times, looking back on a winner of yore: "the Starland Vocal Band, who gave us the, um, unforgettable single, 'Afternoon Delight.' "

The Oregonian, referring to Christina Aguilera: "the girl who was once known as much for her, um, dirrtyness showed she cleans up real nice, too."

So there you have it. stop using UM so goddamned much. it makes you sound stupid.

I agree that these interjections can become a crutch, a shortcut to sounding conversational but I can see the benefit of these "words." They do indeed make for a looser reporting style and in the world of entertainment news breeziness of reporting has always been valued over say, facts. If I read an article about Iraq that read

"George bush is, um, an idiot."

George Bush might well be an idiot but I'd think the writer was a cutesy dumbshit for putting in that "Um." Somehow the use of interjections is more acceptable when the stakes aren't so high. People covering the Grammies know they aren't reporting anything earth-shattering. People reading an article about the Grammies know they're going to find some useless information peppered amongst some flippant commentary. If everyone is in agreement that the "news" doesn't really matter then why not throw in a "Feh" here and there?

Text Message Novel??

Last month a Finland-based publishing company published a 332 page novel comprised entirely of text messages: Hannu Luntiala's The Last Message.

"I believe that, at the end of the day, a text message may reveal much more about a person than you would initially think," Luntiala recently told the Associated Press.

Despite being completely disgusted by this ludicrously gimmicky idea for a book, I went to work the next day and asked everyone to take out their cell phones and read their messages out loud.

To my suprise, each message did reveal quite a lot, not only about the person receiving the call, but about the sender as well. Some messages were a mish-mash of letters, barely even abbreviations, "R U Mad?", "Gr8", "Fkface!","lvd u" (I didn't even ask the guy what his girlfriend meant by this), some written out every word, "Are you busy tonight? Would you like to meet at Aalto for a drink?" or the more formal, "Hello. How are you? I'm fine." (Serously. A real message!). Others cracked me up, but I learned it was just because I was uneducated of the text lingo or the innerperonal lingo -- "D&D" *apparently* stands for dinner & drinks, and NOT Dungeons & Dragons.

But certainly it was the voyeurism of it all and not the writing that was so entertaining, right? Like reality TV or when you find a journal of someone you don't know and read excitedly for 3 pages then immediately get board with their weird self-indulgent ramblings.

And then one person read her text message, "I wish you'd stay." When I asked her what it meant she said, "I think he meant 'I wish you would HAVE stayed'...because I left early...from the party." She assumed this, even though she never outright asked him.

I left work feeling a little confused. Do text messages really say a lot about people? About modern language? And how about blogs? Websites? How do these change literature? How does this change our personal interactions with one another? What do we gain...or lose?

Big question hurt brain.

All I know is when it comes to gimmicks, I've often found the idea is much more interesting then the end product.