Pretensions in Writing

I think something horrible happened in American letters, which is that intellectuals started acting as if other people couldn't understand what they were talking about," adds Mr. Silverblatt, a grad-school dropout whose resumé includes such unpoetic occupations as hotel desk clerk, publicist and screenwriter. "That's often true when they're talking about novels and poetry. These are the things we've made. They're our culture. And I think it's a crime when intellectuals make people feel alienated from what is the greatest treasure we have. (Michael Silverblatt)

(Joanne Kaufman quoting "Bookworm" host Michael Silverblatt in the article "A Bibliophile With a Hypnotic Gift of Gab")

Novelists are Oxymorons

Novelists are oxymorons. They are sensitive and insensitive. Full of heart and heartless. You have to be full of heart to feel what other people are feeling. On the other hand, if you start thinking of all the damage you are going to do, you can't write the book-not if you're reasonably decent.

I've always been drawn more toward realism than fantasy, because it seems to me that realism is endlessly interesting and finally indeterminable. Realism is a species of fantasy that's much more integrated and hard-core than fantasy itself; but if you are ready to come to grips with the inevitable slipperiness of most available facts, you come to recognize that realism is not a direct approach to the truth so much as it is the most concentrated form of fantasy.

In the course of fashioning a character, you invariably reach a point where you recognize that you don't know enough about the person you are trying to create. At such times, I take it for granted that my unconscious knows more than I do. As you go through life, you do, after all, observe everyone, wittingly and unwittingly. . . . .the unconscious is a powerful computer that rarely needs new sources to fashion a portrait, because so much knowledge has already been stored away.

Why did Tolstoy dislike Shakespeare so? I expect the answer is that Tolstoy was always searching for subtle but precise moral judgment. That required a detailed sense of the sequence of events that could produce a dramatic or tragic event. You had to know how to assess blame. For that, you needed to know exactly when and why things happened.

But there, very much in the way, was Shakespeare, the greatest movie writer who ever existed-centuries before cinema had a silver screen. Shakespeare was not interested in making careful connections with his characters. Shakespeare was looking to get the most dynamic actors together under any circumstance available, no matter how contrived. He was looking for superb exchanges of dialogue and fantastic moments, vertiginous possibilities for the English language, whereas Tolstoy lived for the sobriety of moral judgment. So he considered Shakespeare a monster who paid attention to causality only when it was useful to him.

from "Birds and Lions: Writing from the Inside Out" by Norman Mailer
The New Yorker December 23 & 30

The Character is the Stronger Narrator

Recognize that the character is a stronger narrator than the author. Any time you start describing the action rather than letting the character experience it, you’re distancing the character from the reader.

from “Fiction’s Connecting Link: Emotion” by Kathy Jacobson from the book The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing

Life as a Pessimist

Since I'm a pessimist, it's very easy for me to resign myself. For me my personal life is always: "If it goes, it goes. If it doesn't go, it's too bad." I don't cry on anybody's shoulder. I wouldn't even cry on my own shoulder. (Isaac Bashevis Singer)

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

About Celebrity Worship

The worship of the trademark has become so important that the merchandise is becoming almost valueless. I think these things should be emphasized because they are at the very root of the crisis of all values in our time. It's true about religion, it's true about art, it's true about politics, and it's becoming true about everything. This is a kind of spiritual system of dictatorship where the authority is everything and the idea is nothing. It is not an accident that the pious Jews knew almost nothing about the life of their prophets, the creators of the Talmud, or their many saints and spiritual leaders. They were interested in what those great men taught, not in whom they married and where they lived. While there are thousands and thousands of books about Jesus, I never read one single book about the life of Moses. Neither did my father. You may say they cared about the medicine, not about the person who prescribed it. (Isaac Bashevis Singer)

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Wisecracks in Writing

[I wouldn't] have Marlowe say things merely to score off the other characters. When he comes out with a smash wisecrack it should be jerked out of him emotionally, so that he is discharging an emotion and not even thinking about laying anyone out with a sharp retort. Try and make similes both extravagant and original. And there is the question of how the retort discourteous is delivered. The sharper the wisecrack, the less forcible should be the way it is said. There should not be any effect of gloating. (Raymond Chandler)


Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959

Raymond Chandler

The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959 edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane

Though he warned that style could not be imitated (even if a writer's tics and "faults" could be), Chandler allowed that progress was possible, recalling that early in his career he "couldn't get characters in and out of rooms."

from "Don't Call it Pulp" by Roger Lowenstein in The Wall Street Journal