Books That Changed My Life

I discovered Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner! in college, when I was in England for my junior year. Certainly, the initial appeal to me was the onrush of language in the novel, and just like Wuthering Heights, the story it tells is full of passion. But there's nothing more passionate in that book than the relentless demand that the story must be told, again and again. The sentences themselves contain that passion. The breathless desperation to get it told, to pass it on, to explain it to someone else--that's the thing that caught me up. That and the sense that the telling of the story itself is of great value,

[Faulkner’s] language [has influenced my writing]--the permission he gives us to let language be lush but not wasteful, the passion for language contained in each sentence. And the idea that there are many ways to tell a story. You don't have to have a rising action and climax.

Writing about Irish Catholics in New York is writing about material at hand; I don't have to consult with anyone to find out what jokes they would tell each other at somebody's funeral. So in some ways, writing about family is the same. I know something about families. But I have no inherent interest in Irish Catholic families in New York as such. I think the great drama of most of our lives takes place in families, and my interests as a writer really come down to how we live, how we deal with one another, how we make sense of our brief lives. And one way to begin to write about that is to write about an Irish Catholic family in New York.

There comes a point in your writing life--and it comes again and again--when you're able to divest yourself of all other concerns about your career, your readers, your publisher, about paying the bills, and you understand that the work is the only thing that matters. It follows very quickly that since the work is the only thing that counts, you must write about the truest things you know. And time and time again what it comes down to for me is that faith--our need for it, our struggle with it--is the most important thing. But as I say, it's not something that you decide once, nor is it something that you're sure to achieve again and again. You never have the sense that, "Ah, I have now said the truest thing. And I'm going to go and say it again." It's more like, "I'm attempting to say the truest thing I know about us, about our existence, about life, and I'm attempting to do it in the best way I know through language. And of course I haven't done it yet." (Alice McDermott)


The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists

Quote: We Must Enjoy Art

We must enjoy art. No commentary or footnote should explain our pleasure. It is true that there are vulgar readers who enjoy kitsch but the enjoyment of kitsch is better, in my eyes, than the masochism of the reader who reads out of duty or to adjust himself to some vogue of art. It is also true that the great writers were all sufferers but they never wanted the reader to suffer‑the very opposite, they wanted him or her to forget their troubles while they read.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Advice from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

". . . .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.

What I learned from reading so many novels, is that the novel, as it goes on, has to expand. It has to give you a sense of a larger life, not just the story you're dealing with, no matter how well it's told. There must be a sense of resonance, a sense that in that story is the knowledge of a whole larger story whose presence is felt.

One of the things I tell my students at Houston is, "Stop! Don't read so much." Usually teachers are saying just the opposite, but there comes a time when you have to shut down all of the input channels, and you have to go into yourself and. write what's in there. Sometimes students in writing programs are using too much of their logical and critical brainpower and not enough of their intuition.

Be very clear about where the heart of the story is, what is most important, what's at stake. Have you managed to stay focused on that? Is that where the energy is coming from? 0r have you digressed onto other things which are easier or flashier?

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

Demanding Characters

William C. Knott in The Craft of Fiction, advises that you start not with a premise (which he calls a theme), but rather with characters who demand to be whatever life you can create for them on the printed page. It is the characters who must galvanize you to write, insisting that you tell their story.


How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Steb-By-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling by James N. Frey

Superfluous Dialogue

Dialogue which does not move the story along, or add to the mood of the story, or have an easily definable reason for being there at all (such as to establish important characterization), should be considered superfluous and therefore cut." (Bill Pronzini)

Writing About Place: The Boundaries of a Story

"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book-a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell each day." -Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Consider the Five W's:

Who is character;
What is plot;
When is chronology;
Why is motive;
Where is place, the boundaries of the story.

Journalists are pretty good at getting the first four into their work. But "Where" is the least explored and the most poorly executed in American journalism. Why do so many of us write so ineffectively about place?

• Time. As deadline approaches, many of us spend dwindling minutes thinking only in terms of plot and motive and possibly character.

• Inclination. We grow up thinking place is unimportant. Many of us have an undeveloped sense of place in our own lives-we're unfamiliar with our own backyards-and we don't know what things are or how they relate. Meanwhile, the best writing weaves place into narrative and creates literature. Think of Mark Twain on the Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy in Mexico-the land in their work becomes another character. Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Alex Wilkinson, Jimmy Breslin, William Least Heat Moon, and Isabel Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The New Yor Times this year for feature writing, brilliantly use place as well. How can we all do it better?

• Be there. Sounds obvious, but how many times do we end up doing our reporting over the telephone. Sometimes a reporter has time for nothing else, but sometimes the reporter is lazy. Stories filled with disembodied "talking head" experts from government seldom are memorable. Specific details about people and place, gathered by a reporter on the scene, are rewards a writer can sprinkle through a story to hold readers.

• Ask "What's that?" Find an expert who can identify key landmarks for you, from buildings and trees to animals and sounds.

• Become an expert on the community you cover. Find out as much as you can about living things: human, animal, and vegetable. Develop your eye. As Thoreau wrote in an 1851 journal, "The question is not what you look at,but what you see." An exercise: walk in your backyard, look around, close your eyes, and recall specific details of what you've just seen.

• Look for telling details. If it's the oppressive heat, hammer it, not once, but several times, into the narrative,in different places;weave in the humidity, the dripping sweat, the need to constantly drink, the short tempers; make the reader feel it.

• Let place become a character in your story. Environment writers like to sentence readers to breakfast with talking-head politicians, scientists, and statistic- spouting lobbyists. Place is an afterthought in stories that beg for description and even wonder.

• Interview subjects in their natural habitat. Never, ever, let a story subject come to your office for an interview if you can help it.

• Take a field trip with your story subject. Place can provoke new information, funny stories, and great dialogue. The way people talk, and what they talk about, is influenced by their surroundings. They may whisper in church, shout on the basketball court, talk nonsense after a couple of tall boys. Or they may chat about something remarkable they've just seen, something important. Ask people about their "sacred" places. They're vaults where we store ideals. "Where did you grow up?" "What did you enjoy doing when you were a child?" "Where did you do it?" all can open emotional doors. When you interview somebody at home, ask for a tour. Every picture, every book, every piece of furniture, can tell a story.

(Jeff Klinkenberg, St. Petersburg Times)

Viewpoint Mistakes

Making a viewpoint mistake means you've yanked the reader out of her comfortable position without giving her something in return that's worth the disturbance you've caused. Sometimes you switch VP without knowing it, and sometimes you know you've done it but don't realize how much trouble you've caused.

JUST REMEMBER that every time you change VP, you disturb the reader. In effect, you have put her in place and are showing her something when suddenly you grab her by the shoulders & spin her around to look at something else. Of course she's annoyed. Wouldn't you be?

The VP change is not so jarring when it occurs at the end of a scene. Your reader is not expecting to be moved in another VP, but at least she's expecting something different. Even within a scene, you should allow a passage of time or a change of venue if you absolutely have to switch POV and can't end your chapter with one POV and start another POV at just that point. Here's a trick I use. Say I'm in a scene with my hero and heroine, and I start the scene in the hero's POV. I did this in When Somebody Wants You. It was the prelude to the love scene, and my hero, Dev, comes to my heroine's apartment. He sees Elise, the heroine, and we know what he's thinking and feeling. The conversation begins. All from his POV. Then, Elise gets up to go into the kitchen. This part of the scene ends with a thought of Dev's as she leaves. There is a scene break, denoted by a pound sign, the sign that tells the typesetter to put a space there. Then, from Elise's POV, she reenters the room. The reader knows time has passed because Elise comes in with a laden tray. This is kind of cheating, because we haven't really changed the scene, but technically, we have.

But when the VP change comes at the start of a new chapter, there is even less disturbance, because the reader believes she has seen all there is to see from her particular angle, so she is ready to look elsewhere.

VIEWPOINT RULE #1 - Never change viewpoints when you don't have to.

VIEWPOINT RULE #2 - If you change VP make sure you reward the reader for her troubles, with an exciting new scene or chapter, or some compelling new information. This, incidentally, applies to every aspect of your writing. Never disturb the reader without giving something in return. There must always be a payoff.

(Patricia Kay)