A Writer Deals with the Unspoken

[Thornton] "Wilder taught me that what a writer deals with is the unspoken, what people see or sense in silence." (from Sol Stein in "Stein on Writing"--Chapter One)

Books are Potent Things

Walt Whitman called reading "an exercise, a gymnast's struggle." To me it is a creation, a lovemaking of small discoveries, hidden treasures, big dreams, I'm saddened almost beyond words when I think of what's being lost-what's already been destroyed-by people who are afraid of books.. . Books are potent things. . . Books and stories and reading are the meat of revolution and change, they can be dangerous and unpredictable.

Thoreau said, "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."

Only those who already have power have an interest in censorship.

from "Censors and Sensibilities" by Sallie Tisdale
Mirabella, January 1995

Novel: Blue Angel

Blue Angel

Predictable. The plot had no surprises. Her female characters were strong and fully developed, but her male characters didn't make the grade. Swenson, the novel's main character was convincing in his bumbling paranoia, but totally unconvincing in his repetitious endearments for his wife. And the great novel the student was writing, spare me.

I never felt strongly enough about Swenson for me to be engaged in the book.

My favorite line in the book: ". . .Ruby says, "How's your novel coming, Dad?" . . . "Great," he replies. "It's going great!" And for a moment, he thinks it is. All he needs to do is write it."

I felt the confrontation at the end of the book, exploring language and its ambiguity and its openness to varied interpretations was excellent, although it fell short of what I felt was a genius interpretation of the same theme by David Mamet in OLEANNA.


Oleanna: A Play

Short Story Writing Tips

Why do some stories truly ring in the mind while others leave you with the feeling of 'what was the point?'. To make your short stories more effective, try to keep in mind these following points while writing:

1. Have a clear theme. What is the story about? That doesn't mean what is the plot line, the sequence of events or the character's actions, it means what is the underlying message or statement behind the words. Get this right and your story will have more resonance in the minds of your readers.

2. An effective short story covers a very short time span. It may be one single event that proves pivotal in the life of the character, and that event will illustrate the theme.

3. Don't have too many characters. Each new character will bring a new dimension to the story, and for an effective short story too many diverse dimensions (or directions) will dilute the theme. Have only enough characters to effectively illustrate the theme.

4. Make every word count. There is no room for unnecessary expansion in a short story. If each word is not working towards putting across the theme, delete it.

5. Focus. The best stories are the ones that follow a narrow subject line. What is the point of your story? Its point is its theme. It's tempting to digress, but in a 'short' you have to follow the straight and narrow otherwise you end up with either a novel beginning or a hodgepodge of ideas that add up to nothing.

Short Story Writing Tips (from shortstorygroup.com)

Trevor and Truth

. . . .reading Trevor, I feel that I am being told the truth--the melancholy, regrettable, unromantic truth, but a truth I recognize. In its quiet, offhand tone, with its beautiful, measured, clean sentences, Trevor's work tells us: Life is hard and frequently painful; people make devastating mistakes; acceptance and coming to terms with one's lot are more sensible and attainable goals than a blissful sojourn on earth and paradise thereafter. "Truth," Trevor has said, "is the most important thing that there is, and if you lose sight of it, your writing will be destroyed in the end."

from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, December 2002

Trevor and Characters

Asked about his [William Trevor's] unusual ability to "get inside" so many
characters, "regardless of their age, sex, or background," Trevor has described it as a matter of observation--a characteristically unassuming explanation compared with the depths of feeling and empathy, the soaring powers of the imagination that another writer of similar range might claim for himself. "It does seem to me that the only way you can get there is through observation. . . . I think there's something in writers of fiction that makes them notice things and store them away all the time. . . . Writers of fiction are collectors of useless information. They are the opposite of good, solid, wise citizens who collect good information and put it to good use. Fiction writers remember tiny little details, some of them almost malicious, but very telling."

from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, December 2002

The Death of Long Articles

There is little evidence to suggest increased television viewership is killing off reading. When asked by Harris to describe their top leisure-time activities, Americans still regularly put reading at the top of the list (28 percent of those polled in 2001), outscoring even the boob tube (20 percent). Nor has increased television viewing sapped the time we spend reading, according to time-diary studies. While the average time spent reading a newspaper declined dramatically between 1965 and 1995, "all other reading, including books and magazines, is increasing," reports John P. Robinson, a professor at Maryland, who authored the study.

Long narratives, in the form of books, remain popular with young people. A separate 1999 Gallup poll found book readership rates essentially unchanged over the previous two decades. Fifty-six percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds read six or more books a year, compared to 62 percent of those ages fifty to sixty-four. Of adolescents ages twelve to eighteen, 56 percent reported reading ten or more books in the year, according to another poll by the National Education Association in 2001. Polls by the Pew Center for the People and the Press have come to similar conclusions. Young people read books and magazines at roughly the same rates as older Americans, though men in this category tend to lag behind women.

Rolling Stone traded its rock roots for bubble-gum pop just to keep its mass-market share, with four Britney Spears covers in the last three years. The new Rolling Stone seeks to solve that problem in another way, by increasing the number of stories it runs while decreasing their length, a tactic that more closely resembles the Internet than a book. This tactic, pioneered by Blender, offers more to a wider spectrum of readers, with 100 or 200 album reviews in each issue. In place of a long narrative, the readers create their own story as they pick and choose their way through the magazine. "It's not about your narrative," says Black. "It's about me."

Editors have been forced to design their magazines for an indifferent reader, according to Michael Wolff, media columnist for New York. "We've shoved magazines down the throats of people," Wolff said. "They flip through magazines because they don't really want them."

From "Does Size Matter?"
BY MICHAEL SCHERER
Columbia Journalism Review
October 2002