Characters I Invent

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.” (Eudora Welty)


One Writer's Beginnings

Halloween & Charles Williams

When October comes around, I always think about the author Charles Williams. Charles Williams (1886-1945) was a leading member (albeit for a short time) of the Oxford literary group, the "Inklings", with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R Tolkien. He was a prolific author of plays, fantasy novels (there's nothing else quite like it), poetry, theology, biography and criticism.

Williams worked as an editor for the Oxford University Press. His seven novels appeared from 1930 onwards. His first, War in Heaven (1930) has my favorite first sentence of any novel:

The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.

Unlike much fantasy fiction, Williams' novels deal with the "irruption of supernatural elements into everyday life".

All Hallows' Eve (1945), the last novel Williams wrote, is so creepy, it is the first thing I think of when Halloween is mentioned.

The following is from T.S. Eliot 's introduction to the edition I have of All Hallow's Eve and illustrates several of the unique qualities of Williams.

"Williams seemed equally at ease among every sort and condition of men, naturally and unconsciously, without envy or contempt, without subservience or condescension. I have always believed that he would have been equally at ease in every kind of supernatural company; that he would never have been surprised or disconcerted by the intrusion of any visitor from another world, whether kindly or malevolent; and that he would have shown exactly the same natural ease and courtesy, with an exact awareness of how one should behave, to an angel, a demon, a human ghost, or an elemental. For him there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. Had I ever had to spend a night in a haunted house, I should have felt secure with Williams in my company: he was somehow protected from evil, and was himself a protection. He could have joked with the devil and turned the joke against him. To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural. And this peculiarity gave him that profound insight into Good and Evil, into the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell, which provides both the immediate thrill, and the permanent message of his novels."

Use Good Ideas

Don't let your search for the great idea blind you to the merely good idea," advises inventor Bob Metcalfe. "Reject everything except for the very best and you'll end up with nothing." Educator Donald Kennedy has similar feelings: "A lot of disappointed people have been left standing on the street corner waiting for the bus marked Perfection." What good ideas can you use?

from CREATIVE WHACK PACK (Roger von Oech)

The Human Quality of the Novel

"The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided; the novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism. We may hate humanity, but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts, little is left but a bunch of words." (E. M. Forster)

Origins of a Story

Q. How does a story come into being? Do you create it or does it create you? Do you think there's a danger of a writer's exhausting his material?

A. I don't know that I could really say how a story comes into being. I suppose it's about fifty-fifty as to whether you create it or it creates you. If it's a good story, it's as much a revelation to you as it is to the reader. I'm afraid it is possible to exhaust your material. What you exhaust are those things that you are capable of bringing alive. I mean if you've done it once, you don't want to do the same thing over. The longer you write the more conscious you are of what you can and cannot make live. What you have to do is try to deepen your penetration of these things.


Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963

Write Every Day?

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 by Natalie Goldberg

Book Signings

"As a writer friend of mine once said, 'We must show up in person to show the reading public that we are extremely disappointing as people. We must do this for the sake of all literature. We must show them who writers really are. It keeps them more interested in books than in us, which is, after all, good for sales.'"

from a lecture by Lorrie Moore in San Francisco (City Arts & Lectures, March 1, 1997)

Telling the Truth

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. (Virginia Woolf)