Who Needs Epigraphs When You Can Have Fragments?

Survey to all writers out there: is it possible to intuitively play with theorizing your own work in the act of creating it while not killing its core transcendence (the thing that makes it art and not acadaemia) in the process?

I'm not going to pretend I understand Deleuze and Guattari. I do know that my mind generally tries its best to reduce these types of theories into digestible tidbits, but I'm not going to even try. Nevertheless, I do believe that my novel will be, on some level Deleuzean (even though I can't yet articulate what that means).

It's funny how the writing process works. For me, for this work, it's all about telescoping. I start with a standard idea [[wouldn't it be cool to put some kind of epigraph at the beginning of each chapter that alludes to the intellectual underpinnings of the story I'm trying to tell?]]

Then, from somewhere, some intertextual memory bleeds into consciousness: [[I really liked how Stephen King used those pseudotextual fragments in Carrie to add a dimension of both realism and complexity to the narrative]]

Then(!) my brain starts making analytical sense of that kind of thing: [[If I did something like that, my text would be multivocal--I could spew all the theories in scholarly discourse while also writing a depraved potboiler novel!--And! it would be, well, Deleuzean. Rhizomatic, destabilized meaning, meaning created between textual interactions]].

Beyond that, since we're on the topic of Deleuze, I have to identify that I believe my plot is Deleuzean. As well as I, John Cortland, as a product of a writer am also Deleuzean.

Of course, when you take a step back, this is all academic hodgepodge, and all I'm really trying to do is tell a story. I don't want to overthink the creativity. So, the final question for this post I open to all writers: is it possible to intuitively play with theorizing your own work while not killing its life in the process?