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Category: On Writing
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On the Difficulty of Editing Well
“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
Blaise Pascal -
A Toy and an Amusement
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
~Winston Churchill -
Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje
I’ve just finished reading the ARC of Michael Ondaatje’s extraordinary new novel Divisadero, which will be published in May. The book begins with a harrowing familial violence on a farm in Petaluma and ends in another country at another time. San Francisco residents will recognize the title, which is the street where the novel’s overriding consciousness, Anna, lives as an adult. I say “overriding consciousness” because, while Anna narrates some portions of the novel, there are also large swaths of omniscience, as well as points at which the omniscient narrator collides, unexpectedly, with Anna’s voice.
Years after the violence that shatters her family, Anna moves to France to temporarily inhabit the home of Lucien Seguro, a famous French poet. After a detailed and arresting account of the lives of Anna, her sister Claire, their father, and a cardsharp named Coop who was raised alongside the two girls, the novel’s focus shifts to Lucien: his upbringing in the French countryside, his affection for a neighbor woman, Marie-Neige, and her husband Roman, his childhood. Slowly and brilliantly, these stories intersect, held together by a man named Rafael, who becomes Anna’s lover in France.
This is a story about orphans, and about events that drastically alter the landscape of family. It is a patient, gentle book. Ondaatje writes truthfully and unflinchingly about desire. One of the most memorable aspects of the novel is his portrayal of parent-child relationships, particularly between mothers and sons. (more…)
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Ray Bradbury at Home
I just came across this odd and wonderful little collection of video clips, taken at Ray Bradbury’s home in LA in 2001, by the folks who publish raybradbury.com. In it you’ll see the chaotic basement where the exceedingly prolific Bradbury works, and hear him joking about holding the record for rejections from The New Yorker. I didn’t realize until visiting the site that Bradbury had a new book out in 2006, Farewell Summer, a follow-up to Dandelion Wine, first published in 1957. You’ll also see Bradbury talking about linked story collections, something he did way back in the 1940s with The Martian Chronicles, and on how he put together his collection of metaphorical objects from Hollywood and beyond that surround him (according to Bradbury, in the old days all you had to do was ask for something and it could be yours).
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David Mamet on Hollywood
Mamet was interviewed in Time Out New York by Joshua Rothkopf. The subject: Mamet’s new book about film, Bambi vs. Godzilla.
Hollywood is capitalism at its best: opposing forces working it out, using the tools of the marketplace. As such, it’s vastly messier than totalitarianism, but it kills a lot less people.
On audience:
I write for the audience. The small market or the mass market may be a function of the worth of my script, or of the assiduousness by which it was sold. But, like any other artist, I consider my potential audience everybody alive and half of the people who are dead.
And, by my vote, a Mamet must-read for writers: Writing in Restaurants, circa 1987.
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the feel of the pen
Empires fall, votes are accorded, but to those people writing in the circular room it is the feel of the pen between their fingers that matters most.
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel -
Write Well. Imagine Deeply.
Today, in the graduate fiction workshop I teach, we’re discussing a story written by a young white woman who grew up somewhere in the middle of the country. The story is told from the point of view of an older black woman in New Orleans. The student told me she’s never been to New Orleans. Still, the story works; in many ways she’s defied the edict “write what you know.” She may not know what it means to be an older black woman in New Orleans, but what this young writer does know is music, and, wisely, she enters the story through music. I always tell my students not to take “write what you know” too literally, not to allow themselves to be constrained by it so much that they confine their writing to the most obvious realms of their knowledge. What we know goes far deeper than details of place or race or age or occupation. Emotional knowledge, or the knowledge of how human beings act and feel, is essential to a good story. Many of the external things that are alien to you can be filled in by research.
For example, I have another student who recently wrote a story about coalminers; the story seemed so true, so detailed, so accurate, that I thought she came from a coal mining family. After we discussed the story, she told me she had never met a coal miner, and had labored for a long time on the internet researching various types of mining, terminology, locations, and so forth.
Miss Snark wrote back in April:
One of the best books of all time is Stewart O’Nan’s The Speed Queen. Stewart O’Nan isn’t a girl, he’s not on Death Row and as far as I know, he’s never worked in a drive in. You’d never know it from reading the book. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was written by a man who did not serve in the Civil War. I’m pretty sure Anne McCaffrey as never seen a dragon, JK Rowling has never seen a wizard…That all of these people can imagine a world completely apart from their everyday haunts and suck me in so far that I not only think their worlds are real, I can’t imagine they AREN’T, is a testimony to their writing and imagination. Write well. Imagine deeply. That’s all you need to do.
The exercise:
Write a story in which the external circumstances are something you don’t know. Use what you do know about human nature to give the story emotional resonance. Use research to lend accuracy to the details. -
Claire Messud on ambition
Here’s a good interview with Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children, on the Kenyon Review blog.
So is ambition ever justified? There’s always something insane about it, there’s something always unjustifiable about it. But what would ever get done without it?
Nanomo Writing Exercise:
Write a story that is propelled in part by a character’s blind ambition. -
John Gardner on detail
“In addition to watching the rhythm of his scene–the tempo or pace–the writer pays close attention, in constructing the scene, to the relationship, in each of its elements, of emphasis and function. By emphasis we mean the amount of time spent on a particular detail; by function we mean the work done by the detail within the scene and the story as a whole.” John Gardner, The Art of Fiction
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good advice from Frederick Barthelme
Frederick Barthelme’s The 39 Steps: A Primer on Story Writing, begins:
Step one in the great enterprise of a new and preferable you in the house of fiction is: Mean less. That is, don’t mean so much. Make up a story, screw around with it, paste junk on it, needle the characters, make them say queer stuff, go bad places, insert new people at inopportune moments, do some drive-bys. Make it up, please.
Expect more of the same plainspoken, excellent advice in the following 38 steps, which range from the enigmatic–#9)Grace Slick (yes, people, that’s the entire entry for #9)–to the fundamental: #11)Be sure there’s a plot for the reader to grasp; while not necessarily the center of the story, it’s key to lulling the reader into that comfort zone where he’s vulnerable.
The 39 Steps now appears on the blog of the long-respected Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, where Barthelme has taught for almost three decades. You can also read an interview with Barthelme at Southern Scribe, which is a great spot for reading up on Southern writers.