How to Tell a Story

Now, literal-minded men might think it's a mistake to exaggerate while telling a story. They think, Oh, I'll lose my credibility. This is incorrect. A good storyteller knows that exaggeration is key, that it's worthless unless it's extreme, and that it doesn't work unless you, as the storyteller, begin to actually and truthfully (99.9 percent) believe in it. (Jeanne Maria Laskas in Esquire, November 2000)

Books on Writing

Almost every autobiography or biography of a writer I've read includes self-deprecating words about their work. For instance, I just ran across this in a book my wife and I are reading together:

Kenneth Tynan's widow Kathleen, in her introduction to his letters, states, first line,

"Writers hate to write, almost all of them." She goes on to describe, in loving remembrance, her husband "blocked in the main endeavor of a book or an article" turning to his journal, "where he might deliver himself of a self-punishing complaint about his own indolent and hateful character." Writers do chastise themselves, with seriousness and skill, as though it were a matter of personal failure not to be steadily equal to one's talent. . . ." (From Jayne Anne Phillips essay "The Widow Speaks" in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop edited by Frank Conroy (1999, p.41))

Books on writing and publishing also help me to peak under stories to see layers of thought and construction that went into the stories, as well as learning more about the problems writers encounter. For instance, it was a wonderful discovery to find 216 pages into The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien how the story that became The Lord of the Rings developed:

". . .if you wanted to go on from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the dark Lord would immediately appear. As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point. So the essential Quest started at once. But I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. . . . Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. . ." To W.H. Auden on June 7, 1955 from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien(1995).

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.

THE NEW YORKER December 23 & 30 from "Birds and Lions: Writing from the Inside Out" by Norman Mailer

Books on Reading

On a shelf nestled under my favorite books, sits a growing group of favored companions--books on reading. Some people may think, "This guy is sick. He even loves to read books about reading." Guilty. I gravitate towards books of this kind for two reasons: 1). They are a great source for finding out about great books I haven't yet read, and 2). They allow me a certain feeling of kinship to the author. My favorites in this category include How to Read Slowly: Reading for Comprehension by James W. Sire (1978), A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel (1996), How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen (1998), andEx Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman (1998). Here's a quote from Ex Libris:

. . .there is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind. I was such a child. Later as a teenager under the influence of Hardy, I could not fall in love without classifying the boy as a Damon or a Clym. Later still, I lay with my husband (a Clym) in a bed that was lumpy with books, hoping the delivery of our first child would resemble Kitty's birth scene in Anna Karenina but fearing it might be more like Mrs. Thingummy's in Oliver Twist.

Reading about reading puts me in touch with others like me (who would be close friends if we actually knew each other).

An Interview with Li-Young Lee

In the May/Summer 2002 issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Marie Jordan interviewed poet Li-Young Lee. I had not heard of Lee, but the interview was stimulating and I wondered what I had been missing. His books include Rose, The City in Which I Love You, Winged Seed: A Remembrance, and Book of My Nights. Of course, because I have a book addiction I immediately bought all the titles.

Here are a just a few quotes from the lengthy interview:

An Interview with Li-Young Lee by Marie Jordan

I understand all poems to be projections. And to study those projections is to begin to understand the projector, the mind, or ground, of the projection. Let me add here that by the word mind I mean what the Chinese mean when they use the word shin. That is, mind and heart. A poem is an image of the maker, as a human being is an image of God. But a poem doesn't simply transpose being. It also proposes possibilities of being.

If I look around, everything that goes on is saturated with meaning and mystery that I can't quite get my mind around. I see it and sometimes I can verbalize or find the verbal equivalent -or correspondence in the world. Doing laundry is an instance. I do laundry every day, or watch my wife, kids, or my mother do it.

We're always folding or doing laundry and I come into the presence of an eternal mystery while folding clothes! I don't know why, but it feels that the world around me is saturated with another presence, mystery, and splendor all the time. It's a matter of cocking our heads the right way and seeing it. Poetic presence is there all the time, even while doing laundry.

Some of the problems with the state of reading in the country, and the world, might stem from people not being able to read presences, not knowing how to read the presence a poem projects. On top of that they may never recognize that it's a projection they're reading. And if they never recognize that they're reading a projection, they never learn to interrogate it....Is it hysteria that's being projected? Ignorance? Intelligence? Anger? Compassion? Love? What presence gets imparted by, say, a Dickinson poem? Or a Blake?.

I have to believe [reading the unsayable within a work can be taught] or I’d feel as if there was no hope in the world.

The thing that obsesses me is always beyond language. Language is almost an inconvenience. I have a feeling that no matter what kind of art we're practicing, at some point we become hyper-aware of our medium. If we're painting it's paint and if writing it's the language. But if we don't at some point move beyond our hyper-consciousness of language, we're stuck in the land of the medium. On that plane, only the relationships of words to other words is available, while the relationships of words to their ground, mother-silence, on the one hand, and to the concepts they name, on the other hand, gets abandoned. That would be like seeing the significance of people only in relationship to other people, in other words, only as social units. Meanwhile, their relationship to the ground of their being and to their individuality is disregarded.

The Chinese, especially the T'ang and the Sung Chinese poets, believe that the poem is an object through which to contemplate or experience cosmic presence. I happen to feel that's true.

I do rewrite. But revision is a process for me of uncovering. I have the feeling that when I'm writing there is my will and then there is this bigger mysterious will and the two of us are in some sort of negotiation on the page. A lot of times when I revise it's because my own will is too present in the first draft. I have to uncover the other, the deeper will. Sometimes the Big Mind doesn't make it the whole way to the page. It gets refracted or distorted.

Reading a Book More Than Once

I've read many of my favorite books more than once. For these books are "so thick with human nature I keep them close in hopes that I can take them with me into the afterlife." (the sentiment of the main character in ANIL'S GHOST by Michael Ondaatje (2000, p. 54))


Anil's Ghost

Ring Lardner

"Shut Up He Explained" by Terrence Rafferty is an article GQ (October 2002) about sports writer and short story writer Ring Lardner (1885-1933). Rafferty laments the fact that Lardner has fallen into obscurity, although at one time he was one of the high paid and best-known writers in America. I bought a collection of his short stories twenty years ago at a library sale without knowing a thing about him. His stories show a superb craftsmanship and an eye for telling details.