"What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed." from The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes) samplereadings

Today I'm reading sample chapters on iBooks to find books to read this week. It's like watching movie trailers.

Another Definition of Writing

The process of putting one's obsessions in order. (Jean Grenier)

--from THE CYNIC'S DICTIONARY edited by Aubrey Dillon-Malone

Bringing Down the Fire

In [my Father's] confessing his own weakness [he] had found access to a hidden source of power inside, or perhaps outside, himself. In any case it was a source of power that was magical and mystical.

Until that night I had only understood that the writer's goal was to reveal truths in words manipulated so effectively as to cause movement in the minds and hearts of those who read them. What I hadn't understood was that it would cost anything. I thought I could do those things while remaining secure and safe in myself. I had even thought that writing fiction was a way to conceal my true feelings and weaknesses.

But that night I realized that no matter how good I became at manipulating symbols I could never hope to move anyone without allowing myself to be moved that I would only arrive at slight truths if I wasn't willing to reveal truths about myself.

I didn't enjoy the realization, for I was no fonder of self-revelation than my father was. And although I knew I would love to do with written words what my father had done in speech, I wasn't sure I could pay the price. I wasn't sure I wanted to.

Eventually I would write about my father and his church, in an article that was published in the New York Times. I wasn't exactly afraid to write that piece. But even as I began it I was aware that I would be touching on the marrow of my bones, that I would be playing with fire. And even now I can't say too much about the process, except this: it's still going on. Not writing the piece-that was done two years ago-but writing, or rewriting, myself.

For that's where my understanding of all this has brought me. . . . I also suppose that's how Faulkner [in Absalom, Absalom] may have felt, how he captured the fire to reach across the barriers of generation and origin and race and kindle a light of understanding in my heart. What I had to do to be a writer was to be in two places at once-to both bring the fire and to allow it to wash over me, to change me and touch me and make me different.

It may sound silly, but I believe that to become a better writer I have to try to become a better person, just as I believe that the best preacher is not the saint but the person who allows himself or herself to be touched by the word, even as he or she transmits or interprets it. Of course a writer isn't really a preacher, and a novel isn't divine word. . . Every preacher is not a saint, God knows. But the truth, I hope, is that we come to both a book and a service of worship with the same hopes-that we'll learn something, yes, but, more important, that we'll be touched by something, that we will feel a connection with some source of power and energy and understanding.

from a talk by David Bradley in "Bringing Down the Fire, part of Spiritual Quests, William Zinsser, editor.

Yet Another Definition of a Writer

Somebody a little below a clown and a little above a trained seal. (John Steinbeck)

--from THE CYNIC'S DICTIONARY edited by Aubrey Dillon-Malone

Another Definition of a Writer

A frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull. (Rod Serling)

--from THE CYNIC'S DICTIONARY edited by Aubrey Dillon-Malone

Definition of Writing

Trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. (Virginia Woolf)

--from THE CYNIC'S DICTIONARY edited by Aubrey Dillon-Malone

Similar passages in two books published 5 years apart

By The Associated Press | April 23, 2006

Examples of similar passages in Kaavya Viswanathan's "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" and Megan McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts."

McCafferty's book, page 7: "Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend. But that was before Bridget's braces came off and her boyfriend Burke got on, before Hope and I met in our seventh grade Honors classes."

Viswanathan's novel, page 14: "Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend. We had bonded over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids. But that was before freshman year, when Priscilla's glasses came off, and the first in a long string of boyfriends came on."

------

McCafferty's book, page 6: "Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart."

Viswanathan's novel, page 39: "Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty."

------

McCafferty's novel, page 23: "Though I used to see him sometimes at Hope's house, Marcus and I had never, ever acknowledged each other's existence before. So I froze, not knowing whether I should (a) laugh (b) say something (c) ignore him and keep on walking.

Viswanathan's novel, page 49: "Though I had been to school with him for the last three years, Sean Whalen and I had never acknowledged each other's existence before. I froze, unsure of (a) what he was talking about and (b) what I was supposed to do about it."

------

McCafferty's novel, page 68: "Tanning was the closest that Sara came to having a hobby, other than gossiping, that is. Even the webbing between her fingers was the color of coffee without cream. Even for someone with her Italian heritage and dark coloring, it was unnatural and alienlike.

Viswanathan's novel, page 48: "It was obvious that next to casual hookups, tanning was her extracurricular activity of choice. Every visible inch of skin matched the color and texture of her Louis Vuitton backpack. Even combined with her dark hair and Italian heritage, she looked deep-fried."

Fiction and Non-Fiction

"I make few distinction between straight biographies and novels. They both are works of fiction." Jay Parini in bookslut.com

Definition of a Writer

Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. (Thomas Mann)

--from THE CYNIC'S DICTIONARY edited by Aubrey Dillon-Malone

Dialogue

Dialogue is not just about how characters talk. It is, more than anything else, a writer's trick. Dialogue in even the most "realistic" story is not how real people talk -- it is a convention created by the writer and accepted by the reader. The most effective realistic dialogue is dialogue that supports the illusion to such an extent that the reader forgets they are reading and begins to hear the words in their mind's ear, convinced that this is, indeed, how real people talk.

If you want to see the difference between real dialogue and fictional dialogue, record a conversation, and transcribe exactly what you hear. Written down, it will usually seem confusing, repetitive, fragmentary, and, paradoxically, unrealistic (or at least mannered), because our minds are not used to converting pure speech into text.

posted by Matthew Cheney in mumpsimus.blogspot.com

The Joy of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.



By Wislawa Szymborska
From "No End of Fun", 1967
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
© Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

The Almighty Dollar Trumps Human Rights

Google Defends China Stance
APRIL 13, 2006

GOOGLE has defended its widely criticised censorship policy for China, insisting it must follow local laws, as it launched its new brand for the lucrative internet market.

"We simply don't have a choice but to follow the law," chief executive officer Eric Schmidt said.

Mr Schmidt was attending a launch ceremony in Beijing for the US internet giant's new Chinese name, which translates to "Gu Ge."

"We must comply with the local law, indeed we have all made a commitment to the government that we will absolutely follow the Chinese law. We don't have any alternatives.

"It is not an option for us to broadly make information available that is illegal, inappropriate or immoral or what have you."

Google caused an uproar earlier this year when it launched its new service for China, google.cn, after agreeing to censor websites and content banned by the nation's propaganda chiefs.

The Silicon Valley company, whose rise as a global internet giant was accompanied by the motto: 'Do no evil', joined the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft in bowing to China's censorship demands.

While Google and the other companies have come under pressure in the US not to succumb to Chinese pressure, Mr Schmidt praised China's rulers for their internet strategy that has seen a huge online population develop.

"We look at the rise of China, the investment and the smart people and we are in awe of what has occurred here," Mr Schmidt said.

"And we salute the government, key leaders in the industry and all of you who have made the rise of the internet in China such a tremendous accomplishment."

In the case of Yahoo, it came under fire last year for supplying information to the Chinese government that led to the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao.

Shi was sentenced to 10 years in prison for passing on a government censorship order through his Yahoo email account.

Mr Schmidt refused to answer a reporter's question on whether Google would also supply personal information on its internet users to Chinese authorities if requested.

"I'd rather not answer a hypothetical question," he said.

Geraldine Brooks' MARCH Wins Pulitzer

NEW YORK Apr 17, 2006 (AP)— "March," Geraldine Brooks' novel that imagines the life of the fictional father in Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday.

For the first time since 1997, the Pulitzer board declined to award a prize for drama.

Brooks depicted the life of John March, the father absent for most of Alcott's famed 1868 novel of four sisters growing up in Massachusetts during the Civil War.

By RICHARD PYLE

A Temple of Texts

A Temple of Texts provides the most seductive introduction to Gass's world of words, if only because it includes an annotated list of his favorite books. Originally published as a pamphlet (I am looking at my own copy now), "A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary Pillars" reprinted the extended captions accompanying an exhibition at Washington University in St. Louis, where Gass taught philosophy for many years. He tells us that he dashed off these 100 to 200-word notes in just a few days, but they are marvelous miniatures nonetheless. Each is essentially a love letter, a Valentine. Plato's dialogues, Gass forthrightly claims, "are among the world's most magical texts." Paul Valéry's Eupalinos is "my favorite essay." "Of the books I have loved . . . there has been none that I would have wished more fervently to have written" than Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End stands as "the most beautiful love story in our language." Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space offers "writing which gives me a warm feeling, like sunny sand between the toes." See what I mean? You want to run to a bookstore already.

from a review of A Temple of Texts (William H. Gass) by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post February 19,2006

We Are Losing

"A book can be a significant event in the history of your reading, and your reading (provided you are significant) should be an essential segment of your character and your life. . . . In this country, we are losing, if we have not lost, any appreciation for what we might call 'an intellectual environment.' . . . Libraries have succumbed to the same pressures that have overwhelmed the basic cultural functions of museums and universities . . . so that now they devote far too much of their restricted space, and their limited budget, to public amusement, and to futile competition with the Internet. It is a fact of philistine life that amusement is where the money is. . . . Of course libraries contain books, and books contain information, but information has always been of minor importance, except to minor minds. The information highway has no destination, and the sense of travel it provides is pure illusion. What matters is how the information is arranged, how it is understood, and to what uses it is going to be put. In short, what matters is the book the data's in."

from A Temple of Texts by William H. Gass

Flannery O’Connor

I was profoundly impressed by the stories of Flannery O’Connor – I think she’s probably the American Chekhov. They’re just so beautifully constructed, so powerful, so dazzling that the unexpected shift in plot resists analysis, almost as it does in Raymond Carver’s brilliant story “Cathedral.” The difference is that, with “Cathedral,” you can analyze it, pinpointing the moment of that shift in the triangle between the three people in the story (a lovely way to set up a story because you know that by its end the balance will shift, it’s got to be two against one). The shift there is unexpected, all right; somehow the husband the blind man team up against the wife, whereas at the beginning it’s the wife and the blind man teamed up against the husband. But at least you can follow the shift; you know exactly what’s happening. Whereas with O’Connor, as in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” or “Good Country People,” the story is so artless – or artful – that you don’t know what’s happening until suddenly at the end, there it is, it’s all happened. It’s precisely because you can’t analyze it that it’s so powerful and immediate a story.

by Anne Bernays in “For the Love of Books”

Truth in Memoir

About James Frey's A Million Little Pieces

As long as people are infatuated with “reality” as a way to restore their faith in the hope that they are the masters of their own destinies, then we will have false memoirs like this one. They are a dime a dozen and they sell. But something truer might show a different kind of story—a story that shows us how little control we have in the world, and how vulnerable we are to forces bigger that we are, and that all we have, at the end of the day, are our stories.

from Truth in Memoir by Mara Naselli at identitytheory.com

Treasure Island

This reconsideration of "Treasure Island" can scarcely be called a rediscovery, because "Treasure Island" has never been lost. Still, it is now 125 years old, and it has been more than half a century since I first read it. Even the best and most beloved of books lose some of their steam over the years, as their stories become universally familiar and as their language gradually comes to seem dated and stilted.

. . .A rereading of Stevenson's novel after all those years says nothing to me so much as that good books -- and "Treasure Island" is a very good book -- really have lives of their own, entirely apart from movies and other adaptations of them. Some of the adaptations of the book are very good, but none is as good as the book itself. "Treasure Island" is a genuine classic that still somehow retains its power to surprise, to amuse and -- even though we all know how it ends -- to raise the reader's blood pressure.

Over the years "Treasure Island" (by Robert Louis frequently has been pigeonholed, and dismissed, as a book for boys. To be sure, Stevenson had boys in mind as he wrote it, but many girls have gotten great pleasure out of it and so, for that matter, have many adults, this one included. If we insist on literary categorization, then someone really must invent a category into which could be fit all those books -- Booth Tarkington's "Penrod" novels, Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer," Johanna Spyri's "Heidi" -- that are routinely filed in the children's section yet are often read by adults, and for that matter all those books that are rated "adult" yet can, and should, be read by children of a certain age: Russell Baker's "Growing Up," Richard Wright's "Native Son," Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

A century and a quarter after its publication, "Treasure Island" apparently still is finding plenty of readers. Many different editions of it are available, some (like the Penguin) with scholarly apparatus and appendices, others unadorned and aimed, obviously, at younger readers. This reader, no spring chicken, has no doubt that they will enjoy it as much as he did when he was their age -- and that their parents will, too.

from Stevenson's 'Treasure Island': Still Avast Delight
By Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post (Monday, April 17, 2006)

Meaning in a Short Story

"A good short story should not have less meaning than a novel" (Flannery O'Connor)

A Profane Poem

A Profane Poem?
(from the blog chekhovsmistress.com)

W.H. Auden:

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed on terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Profane? Apparently the asinine officials at the Coral Academy of Science in Reno, Nevada think so. They're forbidding a ninth-grader from reciting the poem in a competition there next week because of the words “hell” and “damn.” The kid's suing. (via The Poetry Foundation)

THE LATEST: A federal judge has now ruled that the school violated the First Amendment. From the opinion by Judge Brian Sandoval:

"Defendants (Coral Academy) apparently consider the poem inappropriate because it contains language that conflicts with the school's policies against students general use of profanity. However, when spoken in the context of a poem at a school-authorized, off-campus competition and written by a nationally recognized poet, the court finds that the language sought to be censured cannot even remotely cause a disruption of the educational mission."

Exfoliating Our Souls

Novels are a place where we exfoliate our souls with the rough edges of life, not pamper ourselves with fantasies that don't seem to know they're fantasies or confuse ourselves with imitation insights. . .

from This Story Will Save You by LEV GROSSMAN, Time (April 17, 2006)

Max Perkins

Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg. First published in 1978; now available from Riverhead Books, 512 pages. Paper, $17.

As a young editor, Perkins had discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, but he had done much more than that, Berg writes:

"Beginning with Fitzgerald and continuing with each new writer he took on, he slowly altered the traditional notion of the editor's role. He sought out authors who were not just safe,' con-ventional in style and bland in content but who spoke in a new voice about the new values of the postwar world. In this way, as an editor he did more than reflect the standards of his age; he consciously influenced and changed them by the new talents he published."

Among the other authors who move through Perkins' sometimes dysfunctional family of writers are Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Taylor CaIdwell, Alan Paton, James Jones, Ring Lardner and Erskine Caidwell.

Berg's book is so compelling that you're likely to dip back into it now and then, and perhaps even reread it some day. Surely the ultimate compliment for a 512-page biography.

from Writer's Digest, October 2002

The 101 Best Screenplays

The Top Ten, chosen by the Writers Guild of America

1. CASABLANCA
Screenplay by Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch. Based on the play "Everybody Comes to Rick's" by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison

2. THE GODFATHER
Screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola. Based on the novel by Mario Puzo

3. CHINATOWN
Written by Robert Towne

4. CITIZEN KANE
Written by Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles

5. ALL ABOUT EVE
Screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Based on "The Wisdom of Eve," a short story and radio play by Mary Orr

6. ANNIE HALL
Written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman

7. SUNSET BLVD.
Written by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder and D.M. Marshman, Jr.

8. NETWORK
Written by Paddy Chayefsky

9. SOME LIKE IT HOT
Screenplay by Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond. Based on "Fanfare of Love," a German film written by Robert Thoeren and M. Logan

10. THE GODFATHER II
Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo. Based on Mario Puzo's novel "The Godfather"

See the remainder of the list at the link above.

A tale of two genders: men choose novels of alienation, while women go for passion

excerts:

The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. . . .

The most frequently named book was Albert Camus's The Outsider, followed by JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.

The results are strikingly different, with almost no overlap between men's and women's taste. On the whole, men preferred books by dead white men: only one book by a woman, Harper Lee, appears in the list of the top 20 novels with which men most identify.

"We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do," said Prof Jardine. "They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals."

"The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading," she said. Ideas touching on isolation and "aloneness" were strong among the men's "milestone" books.

Prof Jardine said that the research suggested that the literary world was run by the wrong people. "What I find extraordinary is the hold the male cultural establishment has over book prizes like the Booker, for instance, and in deciding what is the best. This is completely at odds with their lack of interest in fiction.

"On the whole, men between the ages of 20 and 50 do not read fiction. This should have some impact on the book trade. There was a moment when car manufacturers realised that it was women who bought the family car, and the whole industry changed. We need fiction publishers - many of whom are women - to go through the same kind of recognition," Prof Jardine said.

The list in full

The Outsider by Albert Camus
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Ulysses by James Joyce
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1984 by George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent for The Guardian
Thursday April 6, 2006

Books are Such Magical Things

From a blog:

"Books are such magical things, and one of my greatest fears as a parent is that my children won't read as they get older. Few of my friends do. So I encourage her to read and demonstrate that a book is far better entertainment than television. Books make you think, they help you learn, and they let you experience the world in ways reality never will."

The Purpose of Writing?

I picked this up at a blog:

If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing. (Kingsley Amis)

FINDING HER ROOTS
By Sharon Miller Cinrich

When it came time to write, [Park] relied on a combination of creativity and solid research to breathe life into the ideas that had been rolling around in her head for decades. "I definitely chose the path of fiction based on the lack of resources about Korean history," she says. "It was a conscious decision. Although I love nonfiction too, I chose fiction because I knew I'd have to fill in the gaps myself."

[Linda Sue] Park, 42, [winner of the Newbery Award for A SINGLE SHARD credits her love of reading as a child growing up in suburban Chicago and her consumption of thousands of grade-school novels for her success as a novelist. "Reading definitely motivated me toward the genre," she says. "I read so many that the pace and structure of a middle-grade novel is kind of hard-wired. It's built in and it's what comes out when I tell the story."

She advocates that aspiring writers read as much as possible. "It's really the best possible advice I could give any writer--read," says Park, who still follows her own advice as much as she can. "Whether it's a wondrous story or a hilarious passage of dialogue or a beautiful sentence ... every bit of reading I do helps my own writing. The rhythm of language and the way words combine to communicate more than their dictionary meanings infuse the serious reader's mind and emerge transformed when the reader sits down to write."

"It's really not until the story is finished and being worked on that I'm thinking about how other people will see it," she says.

"That's the wonderful thing about historical fiction," she says. "It explores the question of what it is to be human. What is it that makes a 12th-century Korean boy similar to a 21st-century American boy? Although the cultural context may be very different, they definitely have things in common. Part of what makes it interesting for me is to explore or guess what that might be."

To compensate for the unfamiliar setting and ancient time period, Park worked through her first three books using the third person past tense, a very traditional way to tell a story. "Both for me as a writer and as a reader, the settings were so unusual, so unfamiliar, that it seemed enough to have to deal with," she says. "I wasn't going to throw in flashy points of view or unusual structure."

What, then, made A Single Shard stand out from the others? Although the Newbery Award came as a welcome surprise, Park admits feeling something special about A Single Shard during the writing process. "Once I had the basic bones of the story figured out, it wrote relatively easily. I almost couldn't write fast enough to get the story out. It came out whole, like a seamless story. And I think that is reflected in the reading." And while the calendar in the book-publishing business is often characterized as slow moving, Park's editor at Houghton Mifflin read her manuscript and offered her a contract within 24 hours, another indication that there was something exceptional about this piece of work.

Superstition says the third time's a charm, but Park credits the great learning experiences she had with the first two novels as priming her for A Single Shard, and adds that like the others, this one was percolating for a while.

Park had to think out her story on paper. “Everybook has its challenges,” she says. “But this one had 37 revisions.”

Don't Edit Your Subconsious

Sometimes people edit their own subconscious and don't get the most exciting stuff out there. That's damaging to your art."

from "Home at Last: Peter Case," Acoustic Guitar (November 2002)

Women Buy More Books

Publisher Weekly stated that women buy more books than men - to the tune of 68% of all books. (no surprise here). Of books that are read, 53% are fiction and 43% nonfiction., and 64% of book buyers say the bestseller list is not important.

Books are Living Things

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as the soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." (John Milton)

The Writing Process

[My process when working on a novel is] the same process no matter what I'm working on. I work according to language. I work starting with language, so that my process is simply to work my way into the next sentence. Sustaining the voice of a book is level one, where I have to stay to move forward. I work very slowly, until I find my way into the middle of the book. I know what to write next by reading what I've already written.

The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 2002
An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips by Sarah Anne Johnson

Good and Bad Teachers

"I liked the company of most of my colleagues, who were almost equally divided among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher." (Robertson Davies)

Shi**y First Drafts

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shi**y first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look atsuccessful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybeeven doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who writebeautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.

Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness andplayfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California). Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

Your day's work might turn out to have been a mess. So what? Vonnegut said,"When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth." So go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper.Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. (Anne Lamott)


Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Thinking Like a Writer

You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into. I can't remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: "No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep."

The idea that people aren't always what they seem was a startling notion to more beginning students than I like to acknowledge. I thought everyone knew that a person who smiles all the time may very well have a troubled and even murderous heart. This in turn leads to an analysis of what it means to be a) cynical and b) skeptical, and how, if you're going to write fiction it's more productive to be b than a.

If you're going to write fiction that's even vaguely autobiographical--and which of us hasn't?--in trying to decide what to put in and what to leave out, don't consider what your friends, neighbors and especially your immediate family are going to think and/or say, assuming, that is, that they ever read what you write. You don't want to hurt people deliberately; if you've got the proper skills, you can disguise most people so they won't recognize themselves.

From Anne Bernays in Writers on Writing

Carolyn See Needs a Group Hug

What comes through this dipsy-doodle is a longing for acceptance a group hug. Even though Ms. See has published many novels, teaches English at UCLA and serves on the board of the Modern Library (I demand an investigation), she mentions her brushes with "names" such as Joan Didion, John Updike and Shelby Foote in golly-gee wonderment, sounding ore like a lucky fan than a fellow toiler. She's so desperate to please that she still has to stop herself from tacking a quesion mark at the end of her name, Valleygirl style, when she introduces herself on the phone to editors. All those decades writing and teaching and attending confrences, and Carolyn See is still paying for approval, trying to find the secret password that'll admit her to the clubhouse.

from BOOKSHELF by James Wolcott, "The Next Bestselling Author--Why Not You?" a review of Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See, The Wall Street Journal.

Writers Who Distort Reality Distort Logic

A human being cannot escape logic. The great artists were also great logicians. Consider the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. You may say, "What kind of logic is there in Edgar Allan Poe?" Great logic. It is true that he believed in apparitions, and miracles, but once this premise was made he constructed his story accordingly. But the writers who distort reality distort logic.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Point of View

Choosing a point of view is a matter of finding the best place to stand, from which to tell a story. The process shouldn't be determined by theory, but driven by immersion in the material itself. The choice of point of view, I've come to think, has nothing to do with morality. It's a choice among tools. On the other hand, the wrong choice can lead to dishonesty. Point of view is primary; it affects everything else, including voice. I've made my choices by instinct sometimes and sometimes by experiment. Most of my memories of time spent writing have merged together in a blur, but I remember vividly my first attempts to find a way to write AMONG SCHOOLCHILDREN, a book about an inner-city teacher. I had spent a year inside her classroom. I intended, vaguely, to fold into my account of events I'd witnessed there a great deal about the lives of particular children and about the problems of education in America. I tried every point of view that I'd used in previous books, and every page I wrote felt lifeless and remote. Finally, I hit on a restricted third-person narration.

That approach seemed to work. The world of that classroom seemed to come alive when the view of it was restricted mainly to observations of the teacher and to accounts of what the teacher saw and heard and smelled and felt. This choice narrowed my options. I ended up writing something less comprehensive than I'd planned. The book became essentially an account of a year in the emotional life of a schoolteacher.

Tracy Kidder from The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work (edited by Marie Arana)

Good Poetry is the Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful Feelings

For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply." William Wordsworth

What I know, for sure ... I think

Everybody won't like everything you write. Some people won't like anything you write. Get over it.

Stay off an editor's "Life's too short to deal with this person" list. At the same time, don't be a wimp. Practice professionalism.

Don't tell yourself lies about either your strengths or your weaknesses as a person and a writer. Looking yourself in the face is the first step to creating great characters.

Read widely.

from "What I know, for sure ... I think" by Susan Elizabeth Philips
The Writer January 2003

You Can't Imagine a Three-legged Dog

An old saw about a three-legged dog states, "You can't imagine a three-legged dog running." But as soon as you read that sen-tence, your nervous system contradicts it - you do see that three-legged dog. And it's running. The dog is ridiculous, clumsy, endearing, inspiring, or even oddly graceful.

from Let The Crazy Child Write by Clive Matson

Don't Tell Lies About Your Strengths & Weaknesses

Don't tell yourself lies about either your strengths or your weaknesses as a person and a writer. Looking yourself in the face is the first step to creating great characters.

THE WRITER January 2003 From "What I know, for sure ... I think" (A best-selling author offers words of wisdom gleaned from 20 years of writing) by Susan Elizabeth Philips

The Novel is Like a Tapestry, A Short Story is Like Painting a Watercolor

". . . .the novel is like a tapestry. It's a long and painstaking process, and I have to work on the details and create an alternative world, and it has to, be as.full and rich as I can make it. A short story is like painting a watercolor--the challenge is to have a lightness of touch. What I'm working with is nuance and subtlety and ellipses--what I'm leaving out is important as what I'm putting in. I have to work with the power of suggestion and I love the form because of this.

from "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" by Sarah Anne Johnson The Writer's Chronicle September 2002

How to Write Faster

The secret is not to try to be perfect. If you try to be perfect, you procrastinate, you go over and over what you wrote, you make no forward motion. Trying to be perfect doesn't produce masterpieces, only agony and slow writing.

I'm not writing to be remembered fifty years from now,, I'm writing to entertain myself. You have to work with the engine you were given. I get up at 4:30 and exercise for thirty minutes. By 6:00 AM., I'm at my desk. I reread the previous one to four chapters and make pencil edits to get back into my characters' heads. I write on an IBM Selectric because of dyslexia. I try to write a chapter a day in two five-page slugs.

Everything I write is carefully plotted out. For a screenplay, I write a forty page treatment. For a book, I write a seventy-page synopsis. All the hard plotting and thinking comes first. Some writers say their characters ran away with the story. That's the result of an undisciplined process.

Never write for money. You're going to be underpaid at the beginning of your career. When you're old and senile; they'll pay you half a million for a script.

from How to Write Faster by Stephen J. Cannell, Esquire February 2003

The Opening Promise

As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know. She may buy your book because it belongs to a genre that promises certain things (romance, science fiction, horror, political thriller). Or she may come to your story without preconceptions, in which case she'll form them pretty quickly from your characters, tone, plot and style.

By the time she's read your opening, your reader knows what you've implicitly promised. A satisfying middle is one that develops that promise with specificity and interest. A satisfying ending is one that delivers on the promise, providing new insight or comfortable confirmation or vicarious happiness. Even when it's surprising in some way, the ending feels inevitable, because it fulfills the promise of the story. And-this is important-the ending feels satisfying only because the beginning set up the implicit promise in the first place.

In your first scene, however, your main goal is to keep your reader interested. You do that through focusing not on overall meaning but on the four elements that make a first scene compelling: character, conflict, specificity and credibility.

from Beginnings, Middles, and Ends by Nancy Kress

Richard Russo: Advice to Writers

Richard Russo finds that short stories pose a lesser risk ("If short stories fail, it's a month out of your life-damage control"), but they are much more difficult for him to write. "They are all about control, which I've never had a lot of. I'm a creature of digression. You can't allow yourself to be distracted."

Yet distraction is exactly what Russo goes after in his writing environment. He prefers to write in diners or busy places, where his mind can wander and make connections. "You can end up where you didn't mean to go, but it's probably more interesting than where you meant to go in the first place:'

Russo's advice to novelists in particular is this: "Whatever you're working on, take small bites. A few pages at a time. Whatever you're working on should be the most exciting thing. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component:'

Also: "Don't keep a journal because you'll think what you remembered to write down was important when it's actually not:'

From WRITER'S DIGEST February 2003
"Master of the Tragicomedy: Richard Russo" by Jane Friedman

John Steinbeck

"The book Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck noted in the journal that he kept alongside the novel, would be composed 'in a musical technique.' He would try to use ‘the forms and the mathematics of music rather than those of prose.' It would be 'symphonic,' he said, 'in composition, in movement, in tone and scope.' "

from Book Magazine

Publisher's Advice

Many of the publisher's offer advice. The following are a few of those random tips:

"The greatest advice I have heard about writing is: 'No one cares about you.' It may sound callous, but we find that the writing we enjoy most is the writing that concerns itself with the reader, and not solely with the talents and/or cleverness of the author."

"A query must consist of all of the following to be considered (please use non-erasable paper): a brief cover letter stating the subject and word length of the proposed article; a detailed one-page outline explaining the information to be presented in the article; an extensive bibliography of materials the author intends to use in preparing the article; a self-addressed stamped envelope. (Authors are urged to use primary resources and up-to-date scholarly resources in their bibliography.) Writers new to Calliope should send a writing sample with the query. In all correspondence, please include your complete address as well as a telephone number where you can be reached."

"We look for impeccable presentation and grammar, outstanding prose, original story line and the element of difference that forbids me to put the story down. A good opening paragraph usually grabs me. Read one or two copies and study the guidelines. A beginning writer should read as much as possible. The trend seems to be for stories written in first-person/present tense and for stories without end leaving the reader thinking, 'so what?' Stories not following this trend stand more chance of being published by me!"

"We look for writing distinguished by economy, directness, authenticity, and heart."

"There must be a clear conflict/goal, a major decision to be made by the protagonist, or a significant change in attitude/behavior. Strong, sympathetic active protagonist a must--realistic dialogue. Write the kind of stories that you enjoy reading. Submit stories that mean something to you. The readers will feel your passion. Go to bookstores and read other fiction anthologies/magazines. Learn the value of patience, of resting your story for a month and rereading it. Too many publications reject quality stories because of a restrictive word count policy. Hindsight will publish any short story of quality regardless of its size, never rejecting a powerful work because it doesn't fit, nor will it ask a writer to make major cuts to make it fit. New writers with talent but no publications to their credit are not published enough. Hindsight will help correct this for the new writers."

"Professional conduct and sincerity help. Know it's the best you can do on a work before sending it out. Skill is the luck of the prepared. Everything counts. We love what we do, and are serious about it--and expect you to share that attitude. If writing is a casual hobby, time filler, or resume-builder, please direct your efforts toward a more appropriate publication."

"Read the journal and assess the range of contents and the level of writing. We have no guidelines to offer or set expectations; every manuscript is judged on its unique qualities. On essays--query with a very thorough description of the argument and a copy of the first page. Watch for announcements of special issues which are usually expanded issues and draw upon a lot of freelance writing. Be aware that this is a university quarterly that publishes a limited amount of fiction and poetry that it is directed at an educated audience, one that has done a great deal of reading in all types of literature."

"Your first paragraph is crucial. Editors are swamped with submissions, so a plain or clumsy lead will send your manuscript to the recycling bin. Also, too many writers come off as self-important. When writing a cover letter really try to talk to the editor--don't just rattle off a list of publications you've been in."

"Write to the best of your abilities, submit your best work. Present yourself and your work professionally. When we evaluate a submission, we ask, `Is this something we would like to read again? Is this something we would give to someone else to read?' A good manuscript makes the reader forget they are reading a manuscript. We look for attention to craft: Voice, language, character, and plot working together to maximum effect. Unique yet credible settings and situations that entertain get the most attention."

"Tell your story, speak your poem, straight from the heart. We are attracted to language and to good writing, but we are most interested in what the good writing leads us to, or where."

"Reading what we have published is still the best but we do love to see excitement and enthusiasm for the craft, and those who care enough to self-edit. Send SASE for anything you want returned and do not send mail that requires a signature on arrival. Give us a try. We want to see you succeed."

"Proofread your work thoroughly. We will instantly reject your work for spelling and grammar errors. Save your document as plain text and paste it into an e-mail message. We will not open attachments. We want work that the reader will think about long after reading it. We want stories that compel the reader to continue reading them. We like experimental work, but that should not be construed as a license to forget narrative clarity, plot, character development, or reader satisfaction."

"Write well and read some past issues."

WRITING ADVICE from Writer's Market 2003

I Don't Think Fiction is Good When You Have to Make an Effort

I feel in Kafka a great power, but the truth is that the literary idols of this generation are not my idols‑neither Kafka nor Joyce. I have to make an effort to read them and I don't think that fiction is good when you have to make an effort. After you read, say, fifty pages of The Trial, you get the point.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Criticism

Everybody won't like everything you write. Some people won't like anything you write. Get over it. (Susan Elizabeth Philips)

THE WRITER January 2003, From "What I know, for sure ... I think" (A best-selling author offers words of wisdom gleaned from 20 years of writing) by Susan Elizabeth Philips

The Tricks of the Trade

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say. (Raymond Chandler)

Judging Your Work

From an interview with Flannery O'Connor

Q. By what standards do you judge your own work? Is objectivity difficult? Are you ever fully satisfied with a finished work?

A. I suppose the standards are largely instinctive. I have a sort of feeling for what I'm doing, else I wouldn't be doing it. I don't suppose objectivity is difficult. I wouldn't be attached to a sorry story just because I had written it. Sometimes you need time between you and the story before you can really see it whole; usually it's good to see how somebody else reads it. Distance is always a help. Sometimes I'm fully satisfied with something I've written but most of the time I'm just satisfied that this is the best I can do with my limitations.

from Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963

Giving Up the Ghost

"On any given week, up to half of any nonfiction best-seller list is written by someone other than the name on the book," declared a 1997 New York Times piece that examined the growing presence of ghostwritten books in the publishing world. "Add those authors who feel enough latent uneasiness to bury the writer's name in the acknowledgements and the percentage, according to one agent, reaches as high as 80."

Sadly, very few of them are worth reading, including many of those I'd had a hand in producing.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us--so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe."

Cocktail party material aside, somewhere along, the way, I lost my way. When I started I told myself that ghostwriting was as good a training ground for a novelist as most any other kind of writing, that someday I would resurrect my unpublished novel and be equipped, at long last, with the necessary skills to fix it. That by studying others' voices I would learn how to shape and refine my own. This was the crux of my John Hopkins voice class. Learning to modulate, even appropriate another's voice was useful, I instructed. Yet after a while, I warned my students, ghostwriting becomes an exercise in ventriloquism and nothing much else.

THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE (Volume 35, Number 1) from "Giving Up the Ghost" by Barbara Feinman Todd

Dealing with the Unspoken

[Thornton] "Wilder taught me that what a writer deals with is the unspoken, what people see or sense in silence."

Great Deeds & Great Thoughts

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. (Albert Camus)

Alice Walker on Flannery O'Connor

"It was for her description of Southern white women that I appreciated her work at first, because when she set her pen to them not a whiff of magnolia hovered in the air (and the tree itself might never have been planted), and yes, I could say, yes, these white folks without the magnolia . . . and these black folks without melons and superior racial patience, these are like Southerners that I know . . . . That she retained a certain distance (only, however, in her later, mature work) from the inner workings of her black characters seems to me all to her credit, since, by deliberately limiting her treatment of them to cover their observable demeanor and actions, she leaves them free, in the reader's imagination, to inhabit another land-scape, another life ....This is a kind of grace many writers do not have when dealing with representatives of an oppressed people within a story, and their insistence on knowing everything. . . has burdened us with more stereotypes than we can ever hope to shed."

from in "Beyond the Peacock" from:

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

We Are What We Read

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it." (Carl Sagan)

On Work Habits

“I tend to get really going later in the afternoon. But I can do a lot of puttering. I'm an expert putterer. Plus, I have three children, so I can interfere in their lives. I have aging parents. I have plenty to do if I don't want to write. I can keep myself busy for a couple of days without going anywhere near my computer. But basically, when I have work to do, I usually buckle down in the afternoon. Sometimes I'll get a whole day in, but it'll be towards the end of the day. I'll work an eight hour day, but never more than a couple hours at a time at the desk. I have to walk around, check the mail, make a cup of tea. So it's an eight hour day, that unfortunately starts around four in the afternoon.”

THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE, March 2002: from an interview with Amy Bloom by Sarah Ann Johnson

Critiquing Short Stories

When critiquing a piece of writing, consider the following elements: You may find it easier to put your critiques into the headings below, and give your views on each topic. Some prefer to break the story down into parts and refer to each element in the story that they feel needs further work.

What can be problematic is when a person writes about how the story has affected them personally and/or offers praise. Although praise and sentiment are very worthwhile they are not what a writer needs most when trying to "polish" their work to perfection. In the end, it is ultimately whatever you are most comfortable with, but at all times consider what would you most want for feedback on your writing.

CHARACTERISATION: Do the characters seem real with depth and emotion, or are they recognizable stereotypes? Are the motives of the characters understandable and logical to the story? Are the good guy(s) likeable and the bad guy(s) really bad?

The characters are very important to any story and they must be believable. There is room in any critique for characterization.

DIALOGUE: Does the dialogue seem realistic? Can the reader imagine real people talking as the characters do?

SETTING: If the story is, for example, about the rich and famous, details of wealth must be included. If about poor people, the reader has to see that they are poor. Is there atmosphere in the story allowing the reader to experience what the characters experience? Can the reader imagine the location around the characters clearly?

POINT OF VIEW: Is the POV first or third person? If it is third person, is the narrator able to see into the heads of the characters? Is the POV consistent throughout the piece?

DEVELOPMENT: Does the story develop logically, so that the reader can follow the specific changes, which occur in the story, or does the story make sudden leaps, which cause the reader to lose the direction of the narration? Is the progression of characters and events logical, or is the whole story too confusing?

PACING: Pacing is a key to appeal; how well does the reader get involved in the story? Does the action progress slowly or quickly? How long does it take for the story to be set up? Is the reader drawn into the story from the beginning? Is it non-stop action or character development? Different readers prefer different paces in what they read.

MECHANICS: A beginning writer often has trouble with mechanics and needs help. Sentence structure, verb agreement, and aspects of basic style are considered here. If a reader feels that there are problems with mechanics, s/he will specify the problems seen, rather than simply stating that they are there.

Readers react to what they read. Sometimes the gut reaction to the story is more important than anything mentioned above--especially when the writer is more experienced. Gut reaction can negate nearly anything, with the exception of flaming another writer.

SHORT STORY CRITIQUES from shortstorygroup.com

Place

What is there, then, about place that is transferable to the pages of a novel? The best things - the explicit things: physical texture. [Stories]. need the warm hard earth underfoot, the light and lift of air, the stir and play of mood, the softening bath of atmosphere that give the likeness-to-life...

from "Place in Fiction" from On Writing by Eudora Welty

Problem Stories

As I said to my students at Yale the other day, there were four major problems with the stories they just turned in. One was "I'm Smart, You're Dumb." The other was "I'm Smart, My Characters are Dumb." Another one was "I Have a Secret," in which the author tries very hard not to tell the reader what's actually going on. The final one was that complex emotions can only be expressed through complex and convoluted sentences.”

THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE, March 2002: from an interview with Amy Bloom by Sarah Ann Johnson

Dialect is Annoying

Though dialect was used quite extensively in earlier periods, today it is seen as a liability for several reasons. Dialect is annoying to the reader. It takes extra effort to derive the meaning of words on the page; that effort deters full involvement in the experience of the story." (Sol Stein)

Tobias Wolff

Excerpts from an interview in Carolina Quarterly Summer 2002 vol. 54, no. 3

Tobias Wolff is the author of several books of short stories and memoirs and is currently Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. He made a week-long visit to the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence in March, 2002. During his stay, he met with students, faculty, and community members to discuss the art of writing and gave a reading from his novel-in-progress. On the morning of March 21, he sat down with Jonathan D’Amore (JD) and Farrell O’Gorman (FO) to talk about his work as a writer, editor, reader, and teacher.

O’Gorman: You're obviously a reader and editor of contemporary fiction as well as a writer—you've done a lot of work editing short story anthologies—and I was wondering if you think it's still useful to think of American fiction in regional terms? Has it, for example, occurred to you to try and achieve any sort of regional balance in the anthologies you've edited?

Wolff: No, actually, it's never occurred to me to try for regional balance in an anthology. And I haven't given a lot of thought to the larger question.

I've noticed since I came to California a certain prickliness among California writers, a feeling that they've been marginalized. I have to admit that I laughed at the notion. It's not as if this country has failed to appreciate or any number of other California writers: Wallace Stegner Maxine Hong Kingston, Raymond Carver, Ishmael Reed, Michael Chabon, any number of … I could go on. There are a lot of California writers who seem to be getting their due, and rightly so.

Certainly the South has been very proud of its writers, and again, rightly so. But I don't tend to see things in those terms. I notice that Colson Whitehead, in being praised by John Updike as a talented young African-American writer,replied that he thought that Updike was a talented Anglo-American writer. I thought that was a neat way of calling attention to the fact that, in the end, we're all trying to practice this art as best we can. And sure, we bring something of our place with us whenever we write—everything happens somewhere. But I'm sure that no one is sicker of hearing all this stuff about "the great Southern tradition of storytelling" than Southern writers.

The tendency to see our literature in balkanized terms is probably reflecting what's happened in our politics. We relish our differences, obviously; that's what makes things interesting. We wouldn't want to read the same story from everybody. But those differences aren't the point.

I was talking to a woman the other day and she said to me, "What is 'women's fiction'?" I said, "I haven't the slightest idea what that means." And she said, "Well, I read something from a publisher that said they encourage submission of 'women's fiction.'" Anyway, she wrote off—I forget what publisher it was—and got a description of what they thought it was: it emphasized 'relationships,' and 'family,' and all this sort of thing. She really resented it, and I understand why. Then, 'guy's fiction'—what's that? I tend not to parse things out too much in that way. Either I like a story or I don't.

FO: I've seen Stanford somewhere—a magazine or web page—claim you as a "Westerner." And you've commented elsewhere that, on the one hand, your nomadic background has been helpful in exposing you to many different aspects of American life….

TW: Yes.

FO: …but you've also sometimes regretted not having your Yoknapatawpha County. Do you think it's helpful to think of any of your fiction as 'Western'? Back in the World, in particular, seems more strongly unified than your other story collections in this regard.

TW: Yes, that has a Western locale—New West, not cowboy West. I suppose that's true. Again, everything happens somewhere. And at a certain point as a collection is forming, you do look for certain things the stories have in common. With that particular book of stories, I guess I wanted you to have the feeling you have in reading Dubliners, the sense of these people inhabiting a common world. But place there isn't as specific as it is in, say, Tolstoy's Moscow, where restaurants and clubs are named. But yes, there's the atmosphere of a particular place in that collection of stories, an element of coherence, as I hoped.

D’Amore: Your memoirs are certainly very personal stories, even regarding an event like the Vietnam War. In Pharaoh’s Army is about your individual experience more so I think than the experiences of just a soldier—they’re undoubtedly Tobias Wolff’s memories...

TW: Yes. My argument would be that we have generic notions of the experience of soldiers in Vietnam. The mass media obviously feeds those notions. There was no generic experience—everybody over there had a different experience. Certainly my experience was dramatically different from the experience of friends of mine, even those who were in the same kind of unit I was in but were stationed up north. It was the luck of the draw. The closer I get to anybody’s experience the more particular and distinct it becomes. So finally the only kind of honest rendering I could give would be extremely particular—how one person got into this and lived through it, and what it was like to come out the other end. But I was very careful not to generalize from my own experience and I would take that same approach now.

FO: For me as a reader, one of the most unexpected but also compelling things about your two memoirs is the way in which each ends with a meditation upon 'worldliness.' This suggests a kind of religious impulse that is obviously present in at least some of your writing, has shaped at least some of your stories.

TW: Yes.

FO: You've expressed admiration for—though perhaps also some distance from—Flannery O'Connor as a Catholic writer, and you've written of your friend Andre Dubus's "unapologetically sacramental vision of life." Could you say a little about how Catholicism might—or might not—shape your literary imagination, maybe by reference to some other writers?

TW: Well, I didn't really grow up in the Church the way Andre and Flannery O'Connor did. I was baptized when young and confirmed at the age of eleven, but had very little to do with the Church again until I was in my twenties. I have a very difficult relationship with the Church, though I suppose I would still describe myself as a Catholic. In all the versions of reality that are available to us, there is a certain generosity and recognition of human frailty in what I would call the Catholic vision that seems recognizable to me.

But I don't think of myself as a Catholic writer in the way that Andre Dubus is or Flannery O'Connor is; there's a certain allegiance even to Catholic doctrine in their work. In O'Connor's "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" she pits Catholic theology against fundamentalist Protestant theology and has a little argument going on in the songs that they sing back and forth. I would never feel comfortable with or be particularly interested in doing that sort of thing.

Sean O'Faolain said in one of his essays that all the best writing is the writer's argument with God. That's interesting to me, because that locates the sense of the religious in a story out of the realm of doctrine and into the realm of a spiritual discontent, which, when sincere and passionate, is for me the highest kind of literature. I see it in Chekhov, who was an atheist. I think that there's more true 'religious'—if you want to use that word—power in one of his stories than in any number of more pious works that have an argumentative purpose, a persuasive purpose. Keats has that wonderful line: we resist poetry that has a palpable design on us. The key word there is 'palpable': when you can see the salesman coming toward you, you brace.

Flannery O'Connor was for me a very powerful and influential writer at a certain point in my life. Some of the stories I still admire tremendously. But the more I read her, the more apparent her design is to me. I'm much more interested in Katherine Anne Porter, who has more real mystery in her work than Flannery O'Connor does, despite all her talk of mystery. I love Flannery O'Connor, don't get me wrong. Stories like "Revelation," "Parker's Back," "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," any number of stories. But I can see it coming, I can see her hand on the scales a lot of the time, and I don't ever with Porter. Stories like "Noon Wine" and "Flowering Judas" are the highest achievement of a really deeply questioning spirit, a sincerely questioning spirit. Maybe that's what I miss in O'Connor: there's not really a question there. She's already made her mind up, and she's just trying to get you to make yours up the same way.

Does that make any sense? It's a hard question. I don't want to disavow the power of the persuasive impulse. It was the dominant impulse in literature for a long time. It's in the very marrow and sinews of our culture.

Bad Books

Good books may instruct, but bad ones are more likely to inspire. (Northrop Frye)

Translating Literature to the Screen

The axiom in movie criticism--if not in the movie business itself--is that first-rate literature almost never translates to the screen. The problem is that the novel can do one great thing that movies, despite their immense influence and universal appeal, cannot. It can go inside the heads of its characters to tell us what they are thinking. The movies can only attempt to show us the characters, though they have sometimes tried to do both by the device know as "voice over." But from Cervantes through Tolstoy through Henry James through Proust, interiority has been the great glory of the novel, and the movies cannot really compete with it.

(from "Reel Literature" by Joseph Epstein).

Origins of a Story

From an interview with Flannery O'Connor

Q How does a story come into being? Do you create it or does it create you? Do you think there's a danger of a writer's exhausting his material?

A. I don't know that I could really say how a story comes into being. I suppose it's about fifty-fifty as to whether you create it or it creates you. If it's a good story, it's as much a revelation to you as it is to the reader. I'm afraid it is possible to exhaust your material. What you exhaust are those things that you are capable of bringing alive. I mean if you've done it once, you don't want to do the same thing over. The longer you write the more conscious you are of what you can and cannot make live. What you have to do is try to deepen your penetration of these things.

from Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963

Writing with Zest

If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market; or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-excited. He should be a thing of fevers and-enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when arc you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

Wouldn't it be wonderful, for instance, to throw down a copy of Harper's Bazaar you happened to be leafing through at the dentist's, and leap to your typewriter and ride off with hilarious anger, attacking their silly and sometimes shocking snobbishness? Years ago I did just that. I came across an issue where the Bazaar photographers, with their perverted sense of equality, once again utilized natives in a Puerto Rican back street as props in front of which their starved-looking manikins postured for the benefit of yet more emaciated half-women in the best salons in the country. The photographs so enraged me I ran, did not walk, to my machine and wrote "Sun and Shadow," the story of an old Puerto Rican who ruins the Bazaar photographer's afternoon by sneaking into each picture and dropping his pants.

When was the last time you did a story like that, out of pure indignation?

Here's my formula. What do you want more than anything else in the world? What do you love, or what do you hate?

Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go. The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story. The zest and gusto of his need, and there is zest in hate as well as in love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your typewriter thirty degrees.

From Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

The Right Word

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. (Mark Twain)

Choosing Your Main Characters

British novelist and literary critic David Lodge has said, "Character is arguably the most important single component of the novel. ... Nothing can equal the great tradition of the European novel in the richness, variety and psychological depth of its portrayal of human nature. Yet character is probably the most difficult aspect of the art of fiction to discuss intechnical terms."

Probably one of the easiest jobs you will have as you write your novel is that of choosing your main character. In fact, it is likely that the main character is an inseparable part of your original idea: "A young man becomes dissatisfied with his working class life and leaps at the chance to receive a gentleman's education." Your main character is the young man. "A woman fights for custody of her daughter after her ex-husband accuses her of neglect." Your main character is the mother.

Your main character may even have been in your mind BEFORE your story idea: You want to write about someone who's like your feisty Aunt Sally, or base a character on a famous person--or on yourself.

Besides the main character (also called the PROTAGONIST), a novel must have a minimum of two more characters: the ANTAGONIST (the person in conflict with the protagonist) and a SUPPORTING CHARACTER with whom the main character can interact and reveal his thoughts and plans. (Note that in some novels the antagonist is not an actual character. It may be a force ofnature, an oppressive culture or society, or a conflict WITHIN the protagonist, but there must always be someONE or someTHING set in opposition to the main character.)

There is no upper limit to the number of characters you may include in your novel. How many you need will be a function primarily of the plot, as well as of the length and scope of your novel. Use as many as you need--but don't clutter up your novel like Penn Station. Since each character must be distinct and memorable, if you use only as many as you need, you make your job much easier, and in the long run, your novel more powerful.

--from the "Focus On The Novel" Workshop

A Good Modern Sentence

"A good modern sentence proceeds evenly, loosely joined by commas, and its feel is hypothetical, approximate, unstructured and always aiming at an impossible exactness which it knows it will not achieve." (from A.S. Byatt's ON HISTORIES AND STORIES)

Characters and Inner Conflicts

If your characters have no inner conflicts, your work will be a melodrama. Inner conflict confirms that the characters are involved, that something is at risk for them.

from HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD NOVEL by James Frey

A Crucible

Without a crucible to contain the characters there can be no conflict, and without conflict there is no drama. Anytime you put your characters in a crucible, the antagonist and protagonist, for their separate reasons, are committed to continuing the conflict until there is a final resolution.

from HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD NOVEL by James Frey

The Disease of Reading and Writing

“A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and a table set beneath a leaky roof – for he has not much to lose, after all – the plight of a rich man, who has houses and cattle, maidservants, asses and linen, and yet writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of Hell.” (Pg 75).

from Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

Achieving Place in Story

It may be going too far to say that the exactness and concreteness and solidity of the real world achieved in a story correspond to the intensity offeeling in the author's mind and to the very turn of his heart; but there lies the secret of our confidence in him.

from "Place in Fiction" from On Writing by Eudora Welty

A Deadline Bandit's Last Hurrah

When I was in publishing in the 1980s, hardly a season went by without some wonderful piece of gossip about the brilliant new book Douglas Adams was not writing. These tales were matched by scarcely credible reports of the increasingly desperate non-literary techniques employed by his then editor, Sonny Mehta, somehow to liberate this unwritten chef-d'oeuvre and place it before the massive and avid audience engendered by Adams's 1979 cult bestseller The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its successors, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) and Life, the Universe and Everything (1982).

'I love deadlines,' the recalcitrant author used to say. 'I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.' So there's an irony, which Adams would have enjoyed hugely, at the almost indecent speed at which, exactly a year after his untimely death at the age of 49, his widow, literary agent and some of his closest friends have assembled this posthumous volume from the recesses of the CD-ROM on which Adams had accumulated his unpublished writings (letters, speeches, introductions, faxes, pensées). For a man whose reputation went up with every book he didn't write, Adams was privately quite productive, leaving no shortage for his fans.

Robert McCrum
Sunday May 12, 2002 The Observer

The Disease of Reading and Writing

“A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and a table set beneath a leaky roof – for he has not much to lose, after all – the plight of a rich man, who has houses and cattle, maidservants, asses and linen, and yet writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of Hell.” (Virginia Woolf).

from Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

Literary or Commercial

(From WRITER'S DIGEST) ASK THE EDITORS

A reader asks: This may be a dumb question, but what's the difference between "commercial fiction" and "literary fiction"?

Anne Bowling, editor of "Novel and Short Story Writer's Market," says: This is not a dumb question at all, and I think the reason it's asked so often is because the definitions are so subjective. But in general, commercial fiction and literary fiction attempt to reach the same goal, which is to tell a good story. It's the methods and techniques they employ that differ.

Loosely, the commercial category includes mainstream fiction and the genres of romance, science fiction/ fantasy/horror, and mystery. The primary goal of commercial fiction is to entertain, while the dual goals literary fiction are to entertain and enlighten. In literary fiction, behind the plot line, the author will explore more universal themes about the human condition, and often use more sophisticated techniques to do so.

John Grisham is a good example: "Summons" is the latest of the best-selling author's legal thrillers ("The Firm," "The Runaway Jury"). But last year, he published a quiet novel titled "A Painted House," set during the cotton-picking season in 1952 Arkansas, which explores the nuances of class and interpersonal relations between the farm-owning family and migrant workers they've hired to help with the harvest.

The changes the characters undergo in the legal thrillers and "A Painted House" are quite different-- there's usually an action-oriented climax to the legal thrillers, whereas in literary fiction the changes will be more interior, and subtle, though certainly no less profound.

To Write One Must Read

[One of the common problems in student's work is] they just don't read. Even if they think they read, they, in actuality, don't read much. They don't come to writing with various backgrounds in reading. They haven't read a spectrum of writers, or read all the works of six or seven writers. Now more than ever, they're very sound and print-oriented, that is, very popular culture-oriented. They have less and less of a sense of history, and less interest in history. Kids who are 20 now grow up in a world in which emotional literacy is discouraged by the culture they live in. I don't hold them personally responsible. Somebody has to come along and convince them that it's important to read.

The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 2002
An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips by Sarah Anne Johnson

How to Tell a Story

Now, literal-minded men might think it's a mistake to exaggerate while telling a story. They think, Oh, I'll lose my credibility. This is incorrect. A good storyteller knows that exaggeration is key, that it's worthless unless it's extreme, and that it doesn't work unless you, as the storyteller, begin to actually and truthfully (99.9 percent) believe in it. (Jeanne Maria Laskas in Esquire, November 2000)

Books on Writing

Almost every autobiography or biography of a writer I've read includes self-deprecating words about their work. For instance, I just ran across this in a book my wife and I are reading together:

Kenneth Tynan's widow Kathleen, in her introduction to his letters, states, first line,

"Writers hate to write, almost all of them." She goes on to describe, in loving remembrance, her husband "blocked in the main endeavor of a book or an article" turning to his journal, "where he might deliver himself of a self-punishing complaint about his own indolent and hateful character." Writers do chastise themselves, with seriousness and skill, as though it were a matter of personal failure not to be steadily equal to one's talent. . . ." (From Jayne Anne Phillips essay "The Widow Speaks" in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop edited by Frank Conroy (1999, p.41))

Books on writing and publishing also help me to peak under stories to see layers of thought and construction that went into the stories, as well as learning more about the problems writers encounter. For instance, it was a wonderful discovery to find 216 pages into The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien how the story that became The Lord of the Rings developed:

". . .if you wanted to go on from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the dark Lord would immediately appear. As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point. So the essential Quest started at once. But I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. . . . Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. . ." To W.H. Auden on June 7, 1955 from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien(1995).

Novelists are Oxymorons

Novelists are oxymorons. They are sensitive and insensitive. Full of heart and heartless. You have to be full of heart to feel what other people are feeling. On the other hand, if you start thinking of all the damage you are going to do, you can't write the book-not if you're reasonably decent.

I've always been drawn more toward realism than fantasy, because it seems to me that realism is endlessly interesting and finally indeterminable. Realism is a species of fantasy that's much more integrated and hard-core than fantasy itself; but if you are ready to come to grips with the inevitable slipperiness of most available facts, you come to recognize that realism is not a direct approach to the truth so much as it is the most concentrated form of fantasy.

In the course of fashioning a character, you invariably reach a point where you recognize that you don't know enough about the person you are trying to create. At such times, I take it for granted that my unconscious knows more than I do. As you go through life, you do, after all, observe everyone, wittingly and unwittingly. . . . .the unconscious is a powerful computer that rarely needs new sources to fashion a portrait, because so much knowledge has already been stored away.

Why did Tolstoy dislike Shakespeare so? I expect the answer is that Tolstoy was always searching for subtle but precise moral judgment. That required a detailed sense of the sequence of events that could produce a dramatic or tragic event. You had to know how to assess blame. For that, you needed to know exactly when and why things happened.

But there, very much in the way, was Shakespeare, the greatest movie writer who ever existed-centuries before cinema had a silver screen. Shakespeare was not interested in making careful connections with his characters. Shakespeare was looking to get the most dynamic actors together under any circumstance available, no matter how contrived. He was looking for superb exchanges of dialogue and fantastic moments, vertiginous possibilities for the English language, whereas Tolstoy lived for the sobriety of moral judgment. So he considered Shakespeare a monster who paid attention to causality only when it was useful to him.

THE NEW YORKER December 23 & 30 from "Birds and Lions: Writing from the Inside Out" by Norman Mailer

Books on Reading

On a shelf nestled under my favorite books, sits a growing group of favored companions--books on reading. Some people may think, "This guy is sick. He even loves to read books about reading." Guilty. I gravitate towards books of this kind for two reasons: 1). They are a great source for finding out about great books I haven't yet read, and 2). They allow me a certain feeling of kinship to the author. My favorites in this category include How to Read Slowly: Reading for Comprehension by James W. Sire (1978), A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel (1996), How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen (1998), andEx Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman (1998). Here's a quote from Ex Libris:

. . .there is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind. I was such a child. Later as a teenager under the influence of Hardy, I could not fall in love without classifying the boy as a Damon or a Clym. Later still, I lay with my husband (a Clym) in a bed that was lumpy with books, hoping the delivery of our first child would resemble Kitty's birth scene in Anna Karenina but fearing it might be more like Mrs. Thingummy's in Oliver Twist.

Reading about reading puts me in touch with others like me (who would be close friends if we actually knew each other).

An Interview with Li-Young Lee

In the May/Summer 2002 issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Marie Jordan interviewed poet Li-Young Lee. I had not heard of Lee, but the interview was stimulating and I wondered what I had been missing. His books include Rose, The City in Which I Love You, Winged Seed: A Remembrance, and Book of My Nights. Of course, because I have a book addiction I immediately bought all the titles.

Here are a just a few quotes from the lengthy interview:

An Interview with Li-Young Lee by Marie Jordan

I understand all poems to be projections. And to study those projections is to begin to understand the projector, the mind, or ground, of the projection. Let me add here that by the word mind I mean what the Chinese mean when they use the word shin. That is, mind and heart. A poem is an image of the maker, as a human being is an image of God. But a poem doesn't simply transpose being. It also proposes possibilities of being.

If I look around, everything that goes on is saturated with meaning and mystery that I can't quite get my mind around. I see it and sometimes I can verbalize or find the verbal equivalent -or correspondence in the world. Doing laundry is an instance. I do laundry every day, or watch my wife, kids, or my mother do it.

We're always folding or doing laundry and I come into the presence of an eternal mystery while folding clothes! I don't know why, but it feels that the world around me is saturated with another presence, mystery, and splendor all the time. It's a matter of cocking our heads the right way and seeing it. Poetic presence is there all the time, even while doing laundry.

Some of the problems with the state of reading in the country, and the world, might stem from people not being able to read presences, not knowing how to read the presence a poem projects. On top of that they may never recognize that it's a projection they're reading. And if they never recognize that they're reading a projection, they never learn to interrogate it....Is it hysteria that's being projected? Ignorance? Intelligence? Anger? Compassion? Love? What presence gets imparted by, say, a Dickinson poem? Or a Blake?.

I have to believe [reading the unsayable within a work can be taught] or I’d feel as if there was no hope in the world.

The thing that obsesses me is always beyond language. Language is almost an inconvenience. I have a feeling that no matter what kind of art we're practicing, at some point we become hyper-aware of our medium. If we're painting it's paint and if writing it's the language. But if we don't at some point move beyond our hyper-consciousness of language, we're stuck in the land of the medium. On that plane, only the relationships of words to other words is available, while the relationships of words to their ground, mother-silence, on the one hand, and to the concepts they name, on the other hand, gets abandoned. That would be like seeing the significance of people only in relationship to other people, in other words, only as social units. Meanwhile, their relationship to the ground of their being and to their individuality is disregarded.

The Chinese, especially the T'ang and the Sung Chinese poets, believe that the poem is an object through which to contemplate or experience cosmic presence. I happen to feel that's true.

I do rewrite. But revision is a process for me of uncovering. I have the feeling that when I'm writing there is my will and then there is this bigger mysterious will and the two of us are in some sort of negotiation on the page. A lot of times when I revise it's because my own will is too present in the first draft. I have to uncover the other, the deeper will. Sometimes the Big Mind doesn't make it the whole way to the page. It gets refracted or distorted.

Reading a Book More Than Once

I've read many of my favorite books more than once. For these books are "so thick with human nature I keep them close in hopes that I can take them with me into the afterlife." (the sentiment of the main character in ANIL'S GHOST by Michael Ondaatje (2000, p. 54))


Anil's Ghost

Ring Lardner

"Shut Up He Explained" by Terrence Rafferty is an article GQ (October 2002) about sports writer and short story writer Ring Lardner (1885-1933). Rafferty laments the fact that Lardner has fallen into obscurity, although at one time he was one of the high paid and best-known writers in America. I bought a collection of his short stories twenty years ago at a library sale without knowing a thing about him. His stories show a superb craftsmanship and an eye for telling details.

Reinventing ourselves, through fact and fable

By Caroline Leavitt, 2/8/2004

Can reading really alter your life? Can you credit -- or blame -- a particular book for urging you to quit your dead-end job, or fall heedlessly in love, or pack your bags to start a fresh new life in Tobago?

J. Peder Zane, the book-review editor of The Raleigh News & Observer, thinks so, and he charged 34 literary luminaries including Margot Livesey and Peter Cameron to contemplate that very question, asking each writer to focus on the one book that was the most daunting or dangerous or tempting -- or any adjective that might prove that reading is far more transformative voyage than passive pleasure. The results, first published in the News & Observer, are collected in the absolutely superlative ''Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading" (Norton, paperback, $15.95).

There's Charles Frazier, so taken by Antonin Artaud's descriptions of Mexico's canyon country in ''The Tarahumara" that he trekked 2,500 miles to see and experience the land for himself. Marianne Gingher revered Eudora Welty's book ''The Robber Bridegroom" so much that she summoned up courage and risked being fired in order to crash a faculty party and meet her idol. And Zane, who was practicing youthful hipness as a way to belong, got a nudge from Freud's ''Civilization and Its Discontents" that the hippest thing he could really do was to silence the roar of the crowd, question everything, and go it alone.

One of my favorite of the essays is Joan Barfoot's ''The Maddest Book I Read," about the perilous power of books. Barfoot begins with some youthful, romantic notions about insanity. Madness, for her, was a siren song, promising a glittering, heightened awareness that was irresistible. Being crazy was a creative act, a way to strip yourself down to your essential core, and if Barfoot couldn't go mad herself, she could have secondhand experience of it by immersing herself in Doris Lessing's ''discombobulating" masterpiece, ''The Golden Notebook." Lessing's book gave her Anna, a heroine teetering into breakdown, and also ''a fevered contact high" she craved. Barfoot reread it every year, right up until she took in a schizophrenic friend. Unlike the intense, almost wonderful madness in ''The Golden Notebook," that of Barfoot's friend was harrowing to be around. ''Pain spoken and shared" wasn't healing the way it was in the novel -- it was so contagious that Barfoot began to question her own sanity. Shattering yourself in order to put yourself back together might work in fiction, but here, in Barfoot's kitchen, it seemed far too dangerous. ''Even brave, wise, magnificent novels cannot be, should not be, are not intended to be recipe books," Barfoot writes, and she pries herself from the printed page and asks her friend to leave.

Crafting your reality from the true experiences of another is one thing, but what if you're raised to believe that fairy tales are not only true, but your birthright? Laurie Fox's ingenious novel ''The Lost Girls" (Simon & Schuster, $23) introduces us to four generations of Darling women, descended from the original Wendy. Each is said to be visited in girlhood by Peter Pan, whisked off to Neverland to fall in unrequited love, only to be set back adrift in the real world. They're lost girls who can't settle for plain old reality and go mad trying.

Is the problem that these women are ''barking mad"? Or is it that they need to mesh the fantastical elements of their lives with the real ones? Certainly a bit of the fairy tale leaks into their lives. After all, Wendy Darling Braverman, great-granddaughter of the original Wendy, is married to a Peter Pan-ish sort of man, who can't muster up energy to look for a job. And her mother, deserted by an airline tycoon, pens self-help books on the Pan syndrome, trying to nail it down and cure it. But it's not until Wendy's rebellious daughter Berry has her own encounter with Peter, a meeting that ends with her a lost girl in a mental ward, that Wendy has to reexamine the tale and rewrite her own ending.

The conceit of the book is deliciously original, rendered with the tart, modern spin of a fractured fairy tale. Pirates are lost boys who forgot their pledge to never grow up and, finding they have, tend to get a bit peevish. Mermaids don't really drown the men they've lured out to sea. Instead, the men are too humiliated and overwhelmed by the lusty encounters to swim back to their ships and so give themselves up to ocean depths.

I was having so much fun reading that I forgave the book some of its sins. There's a certain heavy-handedness in spelling out its message, a bit of overwrought writing, and a Peter as insubstantial as his shadow, who doesn't make much of a case for five generations of women falling helplessly in love with him.

So is this particular Peter Pan real or a figment of maddened imaginations? Ultimately, that question doesn't matter. Not to me, because the book's flirtation with reality vs. story is so much fun. And not to the Darling women, because it's the legend, the story that became the rudder steering their lives. And to soar above it, while still understanding and embracing its power, takes a kind of magic more powerful than any of Peter's pixie dust.

So can books change our lives? According to these two terrific books, the answer is absolutely. Thrillingly. And sometimes, if you're very lucky, happily ever after.

Caroline Leavitt's new novel is ''Girls in Trouble."