Jacket Copy

Judging by their fulsome endorsements on the jackets of so many novels, it's apparent that some critics don't get out much. To blurb-bestowers, no work is ever just moderately entertaining. Books are "captivating," "enthralling," "sprawling," and even "festooning." Maybe I'm just naive, but when I read a book that's billed as 'a masterpiece of savage comedy," I expect something like WISE BLOOD or THE LOVED ONE. "Riveting from first page to last" is a description that gets my hopes tip: it promises at least the intensity of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, and a lot more than BABBITT. Obviously, I deal with some disappointment. I guess honesty doesn't make good jacket copy, or we'd see more blurbs like this:

"A dense book in which very little happens."

"A well-written but depressing novel, lacking in excitement what it makes up for in style.

As far as outward versus inward fiction, I think that introspection is here to stay. We're an inward-looking society, and despite what Tom Wolfe says, that's not entirely a bad thing, either for the culture or for the novel as an art form. Many of us. . .actually enjoy all the navel gazing.

from "Looking Up from the Navel" by Betty Smartt Carter, BOOKS AND CULTURE, July/August 2002.

Why Reading Matters To George Mason University Students

During spring 2000 undergraduate students were invited to reflect on why-or if-reading mattered to them. The following are a few student responses.

Heather Doerr
Reading is an art. It is more than just comprehending words on paper. It is an interactive and lively experience for the imagination and a respite for the soul. Characters and story plots come alive in the mind. An entire world can be created simply by letting the imagination digest the language. Society today speeds along so fast that it doesn't take the time to stop and soak in life. Reading lets one enjoy the world around, through personal experiences and point of view. All memories and senses are awake when reading and yet while the outside world is still, the mind and imagination run wild. Reading gives temporary reprieve from the pressures of life and creates a new identity and a new environment. It is about learning. New ideas and opinions are introduced. Theories are proven or disproved. Reading is discovery in its most basic element.

Rachel Donelson
Reading connects me to the rest of the world and helps me define who I am. If you are what you know, what I read is tightly intertwined with who I was, who I am now, and who I will become. I go through phases of what I like to read. When I was young, I liked to read about historical children's adventures, like Little House or Tom Sawyer. In high school I read a lot of mid-twentieth century novels, from the beatniks to the dystopian visionaries. Now I've finally expanded my world to include nonfiction. Reading helps me get out of my mental ruts; it helps me accept other people's ideas. It can also connect me to people of the past. There's something comforting about knowing that my questions and faults are similar to the ones St. Augustine struggled with when he was my age-even though he lived 1700 years ago. Reading makes the vastness of space-time smaller and more manageable.

Alessandra Gazzo
I believe that reading functions as a means of expanding your world. It is a way to gain new perspectives on your world as well as learning about things which are completely out of your everyday life. By reading you can experience things which would otherwise be impossible. We do not live long enough to see or do anywhere near all that we would like to. Reading provides an opportunity to get a glimpse of some more of those things we cannot do.

A Blank Mind Led to RAGTIME

It was not a blank page but a blank mind that led to RAGTIME-the emotional exhaustion that came inevitably after the completion of THE BOOK OF DANIEL. The blank mind, when it has no wish to think or improve upon existence, grants you a simple unreflective being that is very pleasant and peaceable. Fortunately it doesn't last. One day I was sitting in my study, on the top floor of my house in New Rochelle, and I found myself staring at the wall. Perhaps I felt it was representative of my mind. I decided to write about the wall. And then about all the walls together. "My house was built in 1906," I wrote. "It is a great, ugly three-story manse, with dormers, bay windows, and a screened porch. When it was new the shingles were brown and striped awnings shaded the windows .. . ." I then imagined what New Rochelle looked like when the house was new. In those days trolley cars ran along the avenue at the bottom of the hill. People wore white in the summer. Women carried parasols. I thought of Teddy Roosevelt, who was president at the time. And the blank page of my mind began to fill with the words of a book.

But wherever books begin, in whatever private excitement of the mind, whether from the music of words, or an impelling anger, or the promise of an unwritten-upon page, the work itself is hard and slow, and the writer's illumination becomes a taskmaster, a ruling discipline, jealously guarding the mind from all other, and necessarily errant, private excitements until the book is done. You live enslaved in the book's language, its diction, its universe of imagery, and there is no way out except through the last sentence.

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

The Difference Between What People Say and What People Feel

I don't know anything more interesting than the difference between what people say and what they feel. There's a whole universe there below the surface. I'm always interested in the way that feelings underneath leak out and shape behavior. People try very hard to have them not show up or change anything or affect anything. But our defenses leak. That's how we know they're there. I love that. (from an interview with Amy Bloom by Sarah Ann Johnson)

True or False?

In every volume of poems something good may be found.
--Quote from Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON

Writer's Block

Do not confuse writer's block with other emotional states that interfere with your writing such as anger, grief, illness, laziness, horniness, and so on. True writer's block has four primary causes: not knowing your characters well enough, trying to edit and write at the same time, fear of failure, and fear of success. . . .Trying to write and edit at the same time creates class-two writer's block. When you write, you have to first draft your novel without worrying whether every I is dotted and every t is crossed. The manuscript isn't going to be perfect; it's only a draft.

FROM James N. Frey on writer's block in HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD NOVEL

Feng Shui for Writers

Tie three Chinese coins with a red string around your front main entrance inside door knob, on your desk's wealth corner or under your desk. Put a three-legged frog on a low table where he can see the front door. Put crystals (quartz and citrine are best), balls, clusters and pyramids all around. Make a money vase by filling it with stones and beads and Chinese coins (in groups of three), soil from a rich person's garden and other trinkets that are precious and meaningful to you. The vase should be wide at the bottom, narrow in the middle and wide at the top. It should be hidden in a cupboard. Keep nine fish-eight red or gold and one black-to absorb negative energy, in your wealth corner.

The most important thing to remember is intent. You have to want something bad enough to get it. You still have to do the work. You have to have the talent and drive to succeed but a little push in the luck department doesn't hurt at all!

From FENG SHUI FOR WRITERS by Sephera Giron