from "Place in Fiction" from
by Eudora Welty
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Achieving Place in Story
It may be going too far to say that the exactness and concreteness and solidity of the real world achieved in a story correspond to the intensity offeeling in the author's mind and to the very turn of his heart; but there lies the secret of our confidence in him.
from "Place in Fiction" from by Eudora Welty
from "Place in Fiction" from
by Eudora Welty
Friday, November 18, 2005
Literature is Connected to Ones Roots
Literature is completely connected with one's origin, with one's roots. The great masters were all rooted in their people. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol were as Russian, as Ukrainian as they could be. Write about the people you know best, whether they are Jews or Protestants or Turks.
If you write about the things and the people you know best, you discover your roots, even if they are new roots, partial roots. In other words, you should not deny your father's roots or your mother's roots. You cannot write a love story of two human beings without dealing with their background-what nation they belonged to, what language their fathers spoke at home, and where they grew up. When you talk about a writer you always mention his nation, his language. Writers, more than any other artists, belong to their nation, their language, their history, their culture. They are both highly individualistic and highly attached to their origin.
When you want to write a letter, let's say to someone who lives in Poland, you cannot address it to just "a man." It will never arrive, because there are three or four billion men in the world. You have to address it to Mr. So-and-So, give the name of the country, the city, the street, the number of the house, and sometimes the number of the apartment. The same thing is true in literature. Of course, we know that you are writing about a man, but the question is what man, where does he come from, where does he live, what language does he speak? You have to give his spiritual address. Of course, an address in literature is different from an address on an envelope, but the idea is the same. Go from the general to the particular, until we know there is only one such person. Literature assumes that no men or women are completely alike. Individuality is the axiom of literature.
from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
If you write about the things and the people you know best, you discover your roots, even if they are new roots, partial roots. In other words, you should not deny your father's roots or your mother's roots. You cannot write a love story of two human beings without dealing with their background-what nation they belonged to, what language their fathers spoke at home, and where they grew up. When you talk about a writer you always mention his nation, his language. Writers, more than any other artists, belong to their nation, their language, their history, their culture. They are both highly individualistic and highly attached to their origin.
When you want to write a letter, let's say to someone who lives in Poland, you cannot address it to just "a man." It will never arrive, because there are three or four billion men in the world. You have to address it to Mr. So-and-So, give the name of the country, the city, the street, the number of the house, and sometimes the number of the apartment. The same thing is true in literature. Of course, we know that you are writing about a man, but the question is what man, where does he come from, where does he live, what language does he speak? You have to give his spiritual address. Of course, an address in literature is different from an address on an envelope, but the idea is the same. Go from the general to the particular, until we know there is only one such person. Literature assumes that no men or women are completely alike. Individuality is the axiom of literature.
from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Good and Bad Ideas for Novels
I would like to begin by saying a few words about good and bad ideas for novels: ideas, which as ideas may be worthwhile or impoverished.
Many novels of beginners and others fail before they even get started, because the ideas do not lend themselves to imaginative development. By this I mean that the ideas, to begin with, are such that trivialize experience. In such ideas possibility does not, even in defeat, exist. The possibility of an esthetic and moral development, the two becoming one. I am not arguing that worthwhile ideas are necessarily what we call affirmative experience. The test, however, is that man will be important whether he fails or succeeds; his life will have value for us; the reader will know this value and will feel it.
Granted that there are weak ideas, one would think that a writer would discover and discard his before he is too long involved in them, but such is not always the case. When one has learned the discipline of completing his stories (one of the signs of the professional writer is that he won't abandon a story if he can possibly help it) he will go on with a trivial idea to the very end.
The writer may think he is exercising his will by completing the story, but he is not exercising it by abandoning the idea as trivial. This is what may have occurred in some of the later work of Mark Twain, of Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and others. At this point one may ask: isn't it possible that the ideas of these writers are good but that there is a deficiency of some sort in carrying out the conception, a failure of taste or talent? That is always a danger with any writer, but I think that we may say that even when a man's creative powers, for one reason or another, are on the wane, he can still deal with good ideasfor instance, Tolstoy in RESURRECTION and Faulkner in some of his latest pieces. Compare with Steinbeck's SWEET THURSDAY and Hemingway's ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES.
It seems to me that the most important thing a writer can do to help himself to a good book is first to help himself to a significant idea, a worthwhile theme. “To create a mighty book,” said Melville, “one must have a mighty theme.” By theme is meant idea or concept, perhaps argument; it can of course mean both.
Right now I want to make an obvious statement: that a significant idea (a mighty theme) is not easy to come by. That in order to come by it the author must strive, must strain; he must enlarge himself and his experience. He must obviously not grab at the first thought that flies through his head, no matter how strongly it appeals to him. One says, look into yourself and write, but that is often not enough, because the self may be shallow, even a talented writer's self. I would say, look into the world and write; look into your brother's heart and write. Often if we make the attempt to understand others we begin to understand ourselves. At this point look into your heart and write.
Is there such a thing as a worthwhile idea for a novel, per se? Someone may justly ask: Mayn't it be said that writers working with, let us say, Melville's mighty theme: "the mystery of iniquity" and Faulkner's "the human heart in conflict with itself," can fail with them, come to artistic disaster? Obviously they can, and have. A child who chances upon these themes may fail with them, and so may a writer who doesn't understand them, who can't see farther than the length of his arm. But mayn't it be said that a writer who alights upon these ideas, who discovers them through his own searching, his experience and meditation, who is moved by them, by a vision of the drama inherent in them, by their enormous possibilities of imaginative development, who senses the concealed veins in them, will he not, given the fact that he is as talented as the next man, have far greater opportunities to produce something of importance than he who doesn't have such ideas and can't seem to acquire them?
Let me define a significant idea for a writer as one that is basically dramatic and will therefore lend itself to the uses of imagination. It will have a strong ideational content and compel the writer, in one way or another to deal with ideas as ideas. It will in the end, whether it is affirmatively handled or not, in the sense of an affirmative philosophy of life, so long as it achieves its necessary form, make man seem important, even great, his life of extraordinary importance; and in having these possibilities the idea may be said to possess moral content. At the very least we can say that a writer, good or bad, working with themes that have throughout history been considered to be worthy, important, significant, has a better opportunity for true intellectual and esthetic achievement than he working with ideas that yield little or nothing in the way of insights about man and his condition to the reader. I could now endlessly qualify what I have just said but I shall leave it as it stands.
Why are significant ideas so hard to come by and halfbaked ones so easy?
Bernard Malamud in Talking Horse: On Life and Work
Many novels of beginners and others fail before they even get started, because the ideas do not lend themselves to imaginative development. By this I mean that the ideas, to begin with, are such that trivialize experience. In such ideas possibility does not, even in defeat, exist. The possibility of an esthetic and moral development, the two becoming one. I am not arguing that worthwhile ideas are necessarily what we call affirmative experience. The test, however, is that man will be important whether he fails or succeeds; his life will have value for us; the reader will know this value and will feel it.
Granted that there are weak ideas, one would think that a writer would discover and discard his before he is too long involved in them, but such is not always the case. When one has learned the discipline of completing his stories (one of the signs of the professional writer is that he won't abandon a story if he can possibly help it) he will go on with a trivial idea to the very end.
The writer may think he is exercising his will by completing the story, but he is not exercising it by abandoning the idea as trivial. This is what may have occurred in some of the later work of Mark Twain, of Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and others. At this point one may ask: isn't it possible that the ideas of these writers are good but that there is a deficiency of some sort in carrying out the conception, a failure of taste or talent? That is always a danger with any writer, but I think that we may say that even when a man's creative powers, for one reason or another, are on the wane, he can still deal with good ideasfor instance, Tolstoy in RESURRECTION and Faulkner in some of his latest pieces. Compare with Steinbeck's SWEET THURSDAY and Hemingway's ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES.
It seems to me that the most important thing a writer can do to help himself to a good book is first to help himself to a significant idea, a worthwhile theme. “To create a mighty book,” said Melville, “one must have a mighty theme.” By theme is meant idea or concept, perhaps argument; it can of course mean both.
Right now I want to make an obvious statement: that a significant idea (a mighty theme) is not easy to come by. That in order to come by it the author must strive, must strain; he must enlarge himself and his experience. He must obviously not grab at the first thought that flies through his head, no matter how strongly it appeals to him. One says, look into yourself and write, but that is often not enough, because the self may be shallow, even a talented writer's self. I would say, look into the world and write; look into your brother's heart and write. Often if we make the attempt to understand others we begin to understand ourselves. At this point look into your heart and write.
Is there such a thing as a worthwhile idea for a novel, per se? Someone may justly ask: Mayn't it be said that writers working with, let us say, Melville's mighty theme: "the mystery of iniquity" and Faulkner's "the human heart in conflict with itself," can fail with them, come to artistic disaster? Obviously they can, and have. A child who chances upon these themes may fail with them, and so may a writer who doesn't understand them, who can't see farther than the length of his arm. But mayn't it be said that a writer who alights upon these ideas, who discovers them through his own searching, his experience and meditation, who is moved by them, by a vision of the drama inherent in them, by their enormous possibilities of imaginative development, who senses the concealed veins in them, will he not, given the fact that he is as talented as the next man, have far greater opportunities to produce something of importance than he who doesn't have such ideas and can't seem to acquire them?
Let me define a significant idea for a writer as one that is basically dramatic and will therefore lend itself to the uses of imagination. It will have a strong ideational content and compel the writer, in one way or another to deal with ideas as ideas. It will in the end, whether it is affirmatively handled or not, in the sense of an affirmative philosophy of life, so long as it achieves its necessary form, make man seem important, even great, his life of extraordinary importance; and in having these possibilities the idea may be said to possess moral content. At the very least we can say that a writer, good or bad, working with themes that have throughout history been considered to be worthy, important, significant, has a better opportunity for true intellectual and esthetic achievement than he working with ideas that yield little or nothing in the way of insights about man and his condition to the reader. I could now endlessly qualify what I have just said but I shall leave it as it stands.
Why are significant ideas so hard to come by and halfbaked ones so easy?
1. There are times when society itself conceals the traditionally valuable ideas.I think it is now clear what I meant when I said before that it was necessary to strive for the significant theme, to enlarge the self to encompass it. I might add that I am one of those who feeldespite a good deal of evidence to the contrarythat the enlargement of one's character as a person, his wisdom, knowledge, power to love, will not hurt him as an artist.
2. The writer may not be able to recognize the valuable ideas because he has had no education to speak of: no knowledge of himself; no knowledge of the ideals of Western Civilization; no mature philosophy of life.
3. He may not be serious as a writer, a trickster, immature, dishonest so that he will settle for the first thing that looks good. Anything goes if he can possibly sell it and too often he can.
4. He may have a false idea of what drama is, will equate it with trauma or sickness or sensationalism.
5. He may be afraid to take a chance with material that is not to a large extent autobiographical: he may rely too strongly on memory and not enough on invention.
6. He may be led astray by attempting to write what his contemporaries, as contemporaries, are writing. In too many cases he knows modern writing but hasn't read anything before 1900.
7. He may have no love for anyone but himself.
Bernard Malamud in Talking Horse: On Life and Work
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Advice to Writers
Richard Russo finds that short stories pose a lesser risk, but they are much more difficult for him to write. "They are all about control, which I've never had a lot of. I'm a creature of digression. You can't allow yourself to be distracted."
Yet distraction is exactly what Russo goes after in his writing environment. He prefers to write in diners or busy places, where his mind can wander and make connections. "You can end up where you didn't mean to go, but it's probably more interesting than where you meant to go in the first place:'
Russo's advice to novelists in particular is this: "Whatever you're working on, take small bites. A few pages at a time. Whatever you're working on should be the most exciting thing. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component:'
Also: "Don't keep a journal because you'll think what you remembered to write down was important when it's actually not:'
From WRITER'S DIGEST February 2003
"Master of the Tragicomedy: Richard Russo" by Jane Friedman
Yet distraction is exactly what Russo goes after in his writing environment. He prefers to write in diners or busy places, where his mind can wander and make connections. "You can end up where you didn't mean to go, but it's probably more interesting than where you meant to go in the first place:'
Russo's advice to novelists in particular is this: "Whatever you're working on, take small bites. A few pages at a time. Whatever you're working on should be the most exciting thing. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component:'
Also: "Don't keep a journal because you'll think what you remembered to write down was important when it's actually not:'
From WRITER'S DIGEST February 2003
"Master of the Tragicomedy: Richard Russo" by Jane Friedman
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
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.
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 "How to Write Faster" by Stephen J. Cannell, Esquire February 2003
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.
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 "How to Write Faster" by Stephen J. Cannell, Esquire February 2003
Monday, November 14, 2005
I Need a Rest Badly
"I need a rest badly and I cannot rest until this is done and I sometimes think that when it is done it will feel as tired as I am and it will show."
--Raymond Chandler in a letter to Jamie Hamilton August 19, 1948
--Raymond Chandler in a letter to Jamie Hamilton August 19, 1948
Sunday, November 13, 2005
The Thinking Period
For me, it begins with just thinking about what I want to write-the plot, characters, setting, mood, pacing, point of view, twists and turns, thematic structure, anything and everything that has to do with the story. I have learned it is a process I cannot rush. Sometimes it goes quickly and sometimes it takes forever. Think of it as a percolation period, when you let your ideas brew and the flavor of your story build.
Lots of ideas occur to me while this is going on. I don't write them down. I don't write anything down-except for names, which go on a name list I carry with me everywhere. But nothing else. It's a firm rule. I used to think that if I got an idea, I should write it down immediately so that I wouldn't lose it. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night with brilliant ideas that I would dash down on slips of paper so they would be saved for when I awoke the next morning. What happened was that either I couldn't make sense of them or they turned out to be not so brilliant after all. So I've changed my thinking on this. If an idea doesn't stick with me for more than twenty-four hours, it probably wasn't all that hot in the first place.
Anyway, this thinking period-this dream time-is crucial to everything that happens later, but particularly to the construction of my outline. I want to be able to picture my story in images before I try to reduce it to mere words. I want to think about the possibilities. Everyone asks a writer where he gets his ideas. You've already seen the chapter on that. The truth is that coming up with ideas is easy; it's making up the stories that grow out of them that's hard.
by Terry Brooks
Lots of ideas occur to me while this is going on. I don't write them down. I don't write anything down-except for names, which go on a name list I carry with me everywhere. But nothing else. It's a firm rule. I used to think that if I got an idea, I should write it down immediately so that I wouldn't lose it. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night with brilliant ideas that I would dash down on slips of paper so they would be saved for when I awoke the next morning. What happened was that either I couldn't make sense of them or they turned out to be not so brilliant after all. So I've changed my thinking on this. If an idea doesn't stick with me for more than twenty-four hours, it probably wasn't all that hot in the first place.
Anyway, this thinking period-this dream time-is crucial to everything that happens later, but particularly to the construction of my outline. I want to be able to picture my story in images before I try to reduce it to mere words. I want to think about the possibilities. Everyone asks a writer where he gets his ideas. You've already seen the chapter on that. The truth is that coming up with ideas is easy; it's making up the stories that grow out of them that's hard.
by Terry Brooks
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