Characters (Eudora Welty)

The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh--a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jump to the visualizing mind when the story is underway. (Elizabeth Bowen said, "Physical detail cannot be invented." It can only be chosen.) I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close--those known to you in ways too deep, too over flowing, ever to be plumbed outside love--do not yield to, could not fit into, the demands of a story. On the other had, what I do make my stories out of is the 'whole' fund of my feelings, my responses to the real experiences of my own life, to the relationships that formed and changed it, that I have given most of myself to, and so learned my way toward a dramatic counterpart. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

from One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty

One of My Favorite Books: The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

We call our log home in the woods The Last Homely House which "was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, 'a perfect house, whether you like food, or sleep or work, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all'. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness." (The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1965, p. 237)

In late October and early November when I walk through the woods with my St. Bernards, I shuffle through piles of multi-colored leaves and I swear I see hobbits out of the corners of my eyes. I also get an eerie feeling my dogs are not only chasing rabbits.

Twenty to thirty years ago I read The Lord of the Rings seven times. I even tried to name my first daughter Galadriel (although her Mom nixed that idea). The story's been hard-wired into my soul. And only in the last few years when my daughters started reading the books and the first movie came out, did it all flood back

In preparation for the second film's release (The Two Towers), I read "The Hobbit Habit" by Anthony Lane (The New Yorker December 10, 2001)

The Lord of the Rings was, and remains, not a book that you happen to read, like any other, but a book that happens to you: a chunk bitten out of your life.

That one-volume slab was a challenge in itself. The thrill of it was pricking you before the story even began; you turned over the title page, and the next page was bare, except for an eight-line chant. One couplet went straight to your bones:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Even at the time, something cinematic stirred in those words. . . . Six lines into the book and the author had us exactly where he wanted us.

A thousand and seventy-seven pages: the number itself was like a spell. (Tolkien had typed the whole thing out with two fingers.)

. . .this book about a quest is itself a quest.

If you encounter it as a child, it will be the longest book that you have ever mastered, and, for many adults, it will retain that talismanic status. The tale grew in the telling, but, more significantly, the reader grows in the reading; such is the source of Tolkien's power, and it is weirder and more far-reaching than even he could have foretold.

The trek that interested Tolkien was not from one star to the next. His kind of trek was hard on the feet, short on humor, and knee-deep in mud; it may have been imaginary, but, within the boundaries of his busy imagination, it was all true.

To call The Lord of the Rings superior children's literature is not meant as denigration, because it seems ideally suited to superior children-not clever ones, that is, but those who stand on the crumbling brink of puberty and gaze both forward and back.

[Tolkien] fiercely denied all charges of allegory ("I dislike allegory whenever I smell it"); but he told his son

It is a book which bristles with bravado and yet to give into it betrays a certain nerdishness, a reluctance to face the finer shades of life, that verges on the cowardly. That is why boys have traditionally been fonder of it than girls, who are less fazed and flummoxed at the prospect of growing up; women leave their girlhood behind with a glance, whereas men keep looking over their shoulders at the vanishing Shire and asking themselves if it might still be possible, or proper, to head back to their hole in the ground.

I've got too much to read to go through The Lord of the Rings for the eighth time. Instead, I watched The Fellowship of the Ring on DVD which was an excellent attempt to portray the book on film. While it is not entirely successful, it allows me to revisit the memories of my first reading in college. I began the trilogy during a three-week intensive botany class. I could do little else but read and attend class just squeaking by with a C. But I learned more about the world and about myself in those 1,215 pages about Middle-Earth.

Writers as Outsider

We are the tools and instruments of out talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with. . . . Personally, I like not being noticed. I like to hang about the shadows of the world both as a writer and as a person; I dislike limelight, and the center of things is a place to watch rather than become involved in." (from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, December 2002)

The Writing of a Screenplay

The writing of a screenplay is a lot more intellectual than inspirational, more crossword puzzle than poem, but it is not without its own pleasures. (An Interview with Les Standiford by Steve Glassman. Standiford is the founding director of the MFA program in writing at Florida International University.)

The Need from Dialogue

"I often saw the editor I worked for wander over to the slush pile table and riffle quickly through half a dozen manuscripts before handing me one to read. I was mystified: What could she possibly see from ten seconds of flipping pages? When I asked her, she answered, 'I'm looking for lots of dialogue.' Questioned further, she explained that one of the major flaws in novels from beginning writers was too much narration, not enough lively conversation between characters. Dialogue is vital in getting a reading from an unagented script, not just well written dialogue, but plenty of it." (Confessions of a First Reader, by Roy Sorrels)

Dialogue is Immediate

"The twentieth-century reader, influenced by a century of film and a half century of television, is used to seeing what's happening in front of his eyes, not hearing about events after the fact. That's why immediate scenes--onstage, visible to the eye--dominate today's fiction. Dialogue is always in immediate scene, which is on reason readers relish it." (from Sol Stein's STEIN ON WRITING)

The Inner World of Characters

But for all the similarities and all the things a writer can learn from film, movies and fiction are essentially different. The film is at heart about what happens, the external world. But any novel worth its salt is, in the final analysis, about the inner world of its characters. Things happen, but it is the meaning of events that is most important. Fiction is built to explore the inner world of a character that is its stock in trade. It is far more difficult to do so in film. The greatest novels have always had it all, you know: theme, character, place, language, and plot. Suggesting to a student that any one of those things doesn't matter so much-well, a student ought to
get his money back. (An Interview with Les Standiford by Steve Glassman. Standiford is the founding director of the MFA program in writing at Florida International University.)