On Jorge Luis Borges

The first monument of adult literature I discovered for myself was not Jane Austen at thirteen, but, at seventeen, the dull-green-spined Penguin Modern Classics edition of THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JORGE LUIS BORGES. Borges took me to a place where dry, crabbed, pedantic phrases could be the language of wonder. He made annotation into a technique of shimmering paradox. His footnotes had no bottom to them: you could fall through, and keep falling, tumbling without end into an abyss of recursive possibilities. Reference was the essence of what he did, pointing your attention from one apparently existing thing to another one, but it was always unreliable, because so many of the books, persons, places, flowers, gems, ideas he named were invented by him, glimmering into existence for just that moment at which he referred to them; and so many of the boxes he suggested you open were either empty, or contained an infinitely nested set of other ever-smaller boxes, or were larger on the inside than the outside, or, strangest of all, had no inside at all.

In "The Garden of Forking Paths," he proposed a novel in which, at every point of decision, both outcomes took place, until the book contained "a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times."

In "The Library of Babel," he sketched-or rather, "adumbrated," to use one of the words from his mannered, repetitive vocabulary of favorites-a universe consisting entirely of ventilation shafts and hexagonal galleries, lined with identical volumes, whose pages contain every conceivable permutation of the 26 letters of the alphabet as they can be arranged at random over 410 pages. But not in order; the books are shuffled at random, and a librarian can walk for many miles over many years to find a single intelligible sentence, knowing all the while that, because the library comprises all possible permutations, it must therefore include the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in every language, the interpolations of every book into all books...

Borges's characteristic maneuver was a version, in story, of the Mobius twist that the mathematical philosophers had discovered early in the twentieth century. Hoping to put logic on a foundation of consistent, comprehensive axioms, Bertrand Russell found instead that the ability of a set to include itself as a member set off a rip in the axiomatic fabric into which the whole hope for reliable, consistent knowledge was then inex- orably sucked, like a black hole devouring the philosophic space. Later, Kurt Godel showed that even the simplest mathematical system, like arithmetic, had the potential to eat its own tail in the same way, and therefore could not be proved to map reality reliably. Borges haunted these points of conceptual unmaking, using the power of the authorial voice to be both within the story and (simultaneously) its external sustainer, as his analogue of Russell's problem, and thus the means to pry open a vortex.

Into the classification system of an imaginary Chinese encyclopedia, he introduced the category of "things contained in this encyclopedia," a part which must therefore contain the whole, which in turn must contain the part, that contains the whole, ad infinitum; and this was just one of his most modest and local embodiments of the idea. Here, in Borges's work, story became almost pure form. It contained just enough substance-just enough naming and evocation-to furnish the ideas with a backing, like the film of mercury on the back of a mirror that allows a flat thing to contain ever receding depths. Borges's stories actually reached the state that the dumbest idea-led science fiction only approximated to. They were truly about something other than people. They were about themselves, about the interesting diagrams that the multiplicity of things books do will make, if you reduce them to pure lines and angles: perfect reading, in a way, for Piaget's last age, of "abstract operations."

From THE CHILD THAT BOOKS BUILT by Francis Spufford

Quote: Finishing Cold Mountain

Courtney still means to finish his book (Charles Frazier's COLD MOUNTAIN). It's just that it was taking so long, all that walking across the whole state of North Carolina, it was pretty slow.

from Lee Smith's Novel

The Last Girls

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Often when I ask a writer to name her favorite book on writing, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within is mentioned.

I found the book wildly disorganized, with no discernable structure. Perhaps that's what Goldberg intended but it drove me crazy. That said, she offers some good suggestions, encouragement, and solid advice on many aspects of the writer's craft.

I wouldn't put this is a must read category, but it does have value. The following are a few gems from the work:

Talk is a way writers can help each other find new directions. "Hey, that's great; have you written about it?" "That's a good line, 'I lived here six years and can't remember a thing, not a thing.' Write it down and begin a poem with it." Once I came home from a visit in Boston and said to a friend in passing, "Oh, he's crazy about her." She was in the process of writing a mystery novel in those days and honed in, "How can you tell he was crazy about her? Tell me what actions he did." I laughed. You can't make general statements around writers-they want me not to "tell" but to "show" with incidents.

We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don't have our own style. Don't worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing.

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin. Your ability to love another's writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will only make you bigger; it won't make you a copycat. The parts of another's writing that are natural to you will become you, and you will use some of those moves when you write. But not artificially. Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with. That is what happened to Allen Ginsberg when he wanted to write so that Jack Kerouac could understand him: " . . . being in love with Jack Kerouac he discovered he was Jack Kerouac: that's something love knows. " You are Ernest Hemingway on a safari when you read Green Hills of Africa, and then you are Jane Austen looking at Regency women and then Gertrude Stein doing her own Cubism in words, and then you are Larry McMurtry in Texas walking to the pool hail in a dusty town.

So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us. Don't make writers "other," different from you: "They are good and I am bad." Don't create that dichotomy. It makes it hard to become good if you create that duality. The opposite, of course, is also true: if you say, "I am great and they aren't," then you become too proud, unable to grow as a writer or hear criticism of your work. Just: "They are good and I am good." That statement gives a lot of space. "They have been at it longer, and I can walk their path for a while and learn from them."

It's much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

Even if we go off alone to write in the wilderness, we have to commune with ourselves and everything around us: the desk, the trees, the birds, the water, the typewriter. We are not separate from everything else. It's only our egos that make us think we are. We build on what came before us, even if our writing is a reaction to it or we try to negate the past.

Push yourself beyond when you think you are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.

Some people hear the rule "Write every day" and do it and don't improve. They are just being dutiful. That is the way of the goody-two-shoes. It is a waste of energy because it takes tremendous effort to just follow the rules if your heart isn't into it. If you find that this is your basic attitude, then stop writing. Stay away from it for a week or a year. Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak. Then come back.

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Natalie Goldberg)

Working on the Language

“The temptations is simply to assemble language and forgo the hard work of trying to penetrate it. No doubt everything has been brought up before, by someone else, or even by oneself; but if the language is truly worked, freshness is still possible. Worked language is how the writer can ‘make it new’ in the words of Ezra Pound.”

From “Footprints of Greatness on Your Turf” by Pat Conroy, New York Times 4/8/02

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.

If you're not getting anywhere, it's probably because you are writing something emotionally dishonest.

I write seven days a week. I don't have to write to pay my bills. I like the regularity. My wife-we've been married thirty eight years-she can't quite see it. She thinks it's a little compulsive.

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 ESQUIRE February 2003 How to Write Faster By Stephen J Cannell, creator of 40 TV shows (The Rockford Files, The A-Team, The Commish) and author of 350 movie scripts and eleven novels. (His seventh, The Viking Funeral, is in stores now.)

On Katherine Anne Porter

"What she does have aplenty is the ability to make things actual. The old girl can create the sweating stinking life out of anything, the purely animal."

from Flannery O'Connor's THE HABIT OF BEING letter to A., 23 June 1962 comment on Katherine Anne Porter

The Right Word

If a writer discards the exact but unfamiliar word in favor of the almost exact but generally familiar word, he gives his readers less than his best effort. At the same time, there is even more to be said in favor of writing in a vocabulary that one's readers will understand. He deliberately dumbs down. He deliberately dumbs down. At the same time, there is even more to be said in favor of writing in a vocabulary that one's readers will understand.

from THE WRITER'S ART by James Kilpatrick (Asheville Citizen-Times 11/24/02)