Thoughts on Richard Brautigan

I've been reading Richard Brautigan on and off for about twenty years now.  I started with Trout Fishing In America.  It was amusing and strange, and full of strange turns of phrase, and comparisons that made sense but were also very strange.  One of my favorite quotes from TFIA is something along the lines of "The smell of sheep was loud, like a thunder clap in a cup of coffee."  That one has really stuck with me over the years.

Trout Fishing In American felt less like a novel, and more like a collection of prose poems or something like that. After that, I read Willard and His Bowling Trophies, which I also quite enjoyed.  Compared with Trout Fishing, it had a lot more coherent story lines worked through it, but there were still a lot of completely random thoughts and images inserted throughout the book.  

In Watermelon Sugar was somewhere in between those two - some through lines, but a lot of strange bits and pieces, too.  It's post-apocalyptic, sort of.  It wasn't my favorite.

Next, I read "The Hawkline Monster," which I quite enjoyed - maybe I just like novels that have a mostly discernable plot, around which all kinds of weirdness can be added.  I read each of his books because I was oddly fascinated by his writing, and his ability to create imagery using nonsensical comparisons.  The Hawkline Monster was the first of his books to inspire me as a writer.  After Hawkline, I started thinking about the every day absurdities that creep into a normal set of circumstances.  It can be a lot of fun to let oddball thoughts and alternate streams of conciousness creep into a story as it's being written.  

I picked up a copy of his poetry anthology "Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt," and enjoyed it, even though I generally don't read a lot of poetry.  If I wrote poetry, I think I would try to write like Brautigan.

Most recently, I've started reading Dreaming of Babylon, a 1940's private detective novel.  I'm about a third of the way through.  It's in the vein of Hawkline Monster, with what feels like a pretty steady through line.   

What I've learned by reading Brautigan:  It's okay to let your mind wander through a story.  Why tell a story the way people expect it to be told?  Your characters have minds that wander, your readers have minds that wander, why should my mind wander, too?  Maybe by the end of the story, my mind will have wandered someplace interesting and unexpected.  Maybe.