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Blog
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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.
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economy
Here is one of the most economical sentence pairings I’ve come across in a while: He couldn’t remember his wife clearly–only the hats she wore. How surprised she would be at hearing from him after this long while; there had been one letter written by each of them since the boy died. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
The exercise:
Compose two sentences in which a great deal is revealed about a character. Like the sentences above, yours should suggest something fundamental about the character’s inner life and/or relationships, as well as revealing something significant about his past.If you think of other examples of this from published works, please post them here in the comments section! (Jordan R., if you’re reading this, I know you can find something that fits the bill! Karl S.–you too.)
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Romney Schell, At the Disco (1979)
I found myself wandering around Midtown, nearly 3:00am on a Tuesday night, finally single, finally alone. The town that never sleeps was asleep, and the storefront lights were out. A streetsweeper moved up and down Broadway, preparing for the the hordes of tourists that would converge with the first crack of sunglight. The vendors’ carts were packed and gone, the T-shirt shops now finally closed. I had been awake for nearly two straight days, and yet even the thought of bed seemed absurd. If I could just kill another hour, I could then hop the one uptown to see Major. He was still baking at the Donutland on West 96th, and, if I remembered correctly, his shift started at four. He would laugh when he saw me. It had been months. “Single again?” He would ask. “Yes.”Then I would settle into the kitchen, put on a pair of gloves, and help him prepare the dough. Later, we would talk. At four in the morning though, it was all about the donuts. First the old fashioneds, then the crullers, and finally the cakes. They had to be ready by six, or it would be too late. With donuts, as Major will tell you, it is all about timing. People don’t eat donuts for lunch or dinner. On a Wednesday morning, if the line isn’t too long, if they’re not running late, commuters will stop in on the way to the train, on the way to work. As with many things, the window is small, and once it is closed it is closed.
Fiction Attic Press occasionally publishes found texts by writers you’ve never heard of. Where did we find them? We can’t tell you.
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Hong Kong Karma
by Kevin Brownfor Suk Kuen Chow
The summer I realized girls didn’t have cooties, my father died of liver failure. I was not present at my father’s death, but figured it even, as he was not present for most of my life.The man I refuse to call Dad worked for people who never looked at him. Walking by, they’d say things like “tea” or “coffee,” or just snap their fingers while my father smiled so wide his eyes closed and bowed until they’d passed. He smiled so much at work he developed a facial tick at home, and believed the only way to relieve it was to never stop frowning.
At home, he rarely spoke when he talked, and never looked at Mom and me for more than a second. He’d drink bottles of Dynasty X.O., then snap his fingers for his shoes. He’d slam chairs and glasses and doors as he left the house, and come back late smelling not like Mom’s perfume. Mom would cry and yell while he sat in his chair, swigging brandy, his cheeks twitching.
“It’s not our fault you’re just a corporate world eunuch!” she’d scream, and I would close my eyes and sometimes hear a sound like slippers slapped together and my mom crying even harder. Most times, I just heard snoring.
His proudest memory was that he’d smelled Bruce Lee in person. He had the chance to shake his hand, but when the star walked by my father smiled and bowed, his eyes closed in instinct. “His cologne was so strong,” he’d tell me, his words slurring, his watery eyes upturned to the ceiling. “It was the smell of an important man.”
One night, my father left to get right and never returned. The last time I saw him alive was the afternoon Mom and I went to yum tsa in Victoria Harbor. He was leaning over the railing, staring at a junk crossing the sea, the dark water like dragon scales in the breeze.
“Father!” I said, waving my hands over my head like scissors. “It’s Cheuk Fan!”
He gripped the rail until his knuckles went white, lowered his head, and walked away.
Liver failure was listed as his cause of death because, Mom said, “You can’t just put ‘failure’ on a death certificate.”
At his funeral, a woman we had never seen before cried. Mom did not.
It is Chinese tradition that if a son is not present at his father’s death, the son must crawl toward the casket, wailing for penance. On my hands and knees, pushing his memory out behind me with each touch of palm and knee to the floor, moving toward the man who had always moved away from me, I could not help but marvel at what I didn’t know was karma—that finally, someone was bowing to my father, except that now, he was flat on his back.
Kevin Brown is in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas. He is the recipient of the Permafrost Literary Journal’s Midnight Sun Fiction Contest, as well as the Baucom-Fulkerson Memorial Award and the Lily Peter Fellowship for fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Ozark Review.