Juvenile Novel: A Single Shard

A Single Shard (Linda Sue Park)

After reading the excellent interview article about the author in THE WRITER, I purchased A SINGLE SHARD. It was a wonderful read with clean simple prose that propels the plot forward. What was amazing about her sentences was how she packed her research and information about Korea in every sentence without taking away from the flow of the story. The two problems I had with the book were the cover illustration and the title (and I don't know if she had control over these two items) I thought both gave too much away, esp. the title.

She has a wonderful website and has photos of the art objects mentioned in A SINGLE SHARD. Also, the website is a great source of information about other author's books because she reviews what she reads and posts the reviews monthly.

Her website:
http://www.lindasuepark.com/books/singleshard/singleshardbs.html

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

The More You See What Other People Do, the More You Learn About Yourself

Literature is not enriched by a man who is all the time looking into himself, but by a writer who looks into other people. The more you see what other people do, the more you learn about yourself.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

A Writer Needs a Tough Skin

". . . A writer, shy or not, needs a tough skin, for no matter how advanced one's experience and career, expert criticism cuts to the quick, and one learns to endure and to perfect, if for no other reason than to challenge the pain-maker." (from Sol Stein in "Stein on Writing"--Chapter One)

First-rate Excellence in Literature

First-rate excellence in literature, as in other matters, is either an accident or the outcome of a process; and in either case demands a course of years to secure." (John Henry Newman)

The Problem is Reading Too Much

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. (Albert Einstein)

Publishing is an Industry Bedeviled by Pessimism

As the number of original titles published in Britain in 1927 numbered 13,810, compared to 119,000 in 2001 (of which about 75,000 were general trade books), it is still harder to sustain the charge that good writers are being passed over. And there is evidence that volumes are actually rising. In the first half of 2002, the number of books bought in the US rose by 1.6 per cent to 557m copies.

Quantity is not everything, but the doomsayers' view that the consumer is being denied a wide choice of books (and thus points of view) is hard to sustain. One could argue that non-mainstream thinking is not published by big houses and therefore not widely available, but to do so would be oxymoronic: what is mainstream if not that which is widely available?

With its over-educated, overworked, underpaid legions, publishing is an industry bedeviled by pessimism. This pessimism blinds people to the fact that we are living in a golden age of book publishing in which quantity and quality rival anything in the past, in which books have never been so well published and in which they occupy a more boisterously visible place in the general culture than ever before.

The future, it seems, belongs to writers, readers and entrepreneurs. There will be as many or as few masterpieces published as ever, but they will enter the world through proliferating channels. More publishers will exist and some of them will also be famous authors. For less well-known writers, making a living from the written word is likely to be hard, but no harder than it is now. From the industry point of view, as it sits on the tail-end of the longest economic boom in postwar history, all this seems somehow unimaginable. From the consumer's point of view, the golden age is set to continue. But for publishers, ordinary writers and booksellers, the next few years could be the last great days of publishing as we have known it since the 16th century.

From "Good Books"
Toby Mundy
Prospect Magazine, October 2002

The Writer's Best Friend

The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend. ISAAC B. SINGER

The Appearance of Reading

"Many [new readers] are making a fashion statement of sorts, carrying around tattered copies of 'in' books-"not necessarily to read, but to be part of a scene," says Jeremy Ellis, a manager at Austin's Book People. Garrett kemps, for example, has everyone from William Shakespeare to William Faulkner on his shelves, but rarely reads more than 40 pages of any one volume. "In this day and age, it's much important to appear like you know something than it is to actually know something," says the 23-year-old Web designer in Los Angeles."

From "Look Who's Reading" by Pooja Bhatia
Wall Street Journal 11/9/01

Experience Becomes Literature. . .

"Experience becomes literature when the reader ceases to care whether or not the story is true." Garrison Keillor

Stories are Better than Truth

Lawyers are storytellers "who take the raw and disjointed observations of witnesses and transform them into coherent and persuasive narratives." The reason that storytelling works is because the linear narrative has been proved to be the best way to persuade a judge or a jury. Also, the disjointed statements of witnesses mean little until they are connected into a single meaningful story.

from "Author argues stories are more important for lawyers than truth", by
Malcolm Abel in the ASHEVILLE CITIZEN TIMES

The Essential Gift for a Good Writer

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof sh*t-detector. ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The Power of Suggestion

The following is a letter to the editor published in the Nov./Dec. issue of Poets&Writers

David Long's "Stuff: The Power of the Tangible" (Sept./Oct. 2002) while invaluable and penetrating, does not address an interesting concomitant question: Why are there so many great works of prose fiction that do not "write about stuff"?

Jane Austen, Stendhal, Henry James, and Marcel Proust have all created palpable fictional universes without cultivating the kind of physical detail and concreteness found in Long's examples. Reread PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and you will notice that Austen's. . . description of Darcy's estate is quite general. Stendhal renders the Battle of Waterloo in THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA with very few particulars. Likewise, neither James nor Proust are much interested in naming objects or listing things for the sake of it.

A work of literature is given life by the reader's memory and imagination. Flat and mundane details of the sort cited by Long can stifle the quickening act of the mind we call reading. Lady Murasaki, and other masters allow us to "see" entire physical worlds for ourselves by the power of their suggestion.

Edmund de Chasca
Senior Editor, Boulevard

The Aim of Every Artist is to Arrest Motion

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. (William Faulkner as quoted in the THE QUOTABLE SOUTH edited by Al Dixon and published by Hill Street Press)

Dialogue

"I was the first reader for an editor of one of the biggest companies in the business. For two years, while writing my own first novel, I dropped by an editor's office once a week to pick up several manuscripts, mostly novels, took them home, read them, and prepared a 'reader's report' including a brief plot summary and a paragraph giving my recommendation as to whether it was a 'hit' or a 'miss' and why. . . .

"I often saw the editor I worked for wander over to the slush pile table and riffle quickly through half a dozen manuscripts before handing me one to read. I was mystified: What could she possibly see from ten seconds of flipping pages? When I asked her, she answered, 'I'm looking for lots of dialogue.' Questioned further, she explained that one of the major flaws in novels from beginning writers was too much narration, not enough lively conversation between characters. Dialogue is vital in getting a reading from an unagented script, not just well written dialogue, but plenty of it."

--Confessions of a First Reader, by Roy Sorrels

Poetry: Wislawa Szymborska (9/11)

I read a Reuter's story about Poland's Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska's moving tribute to the victims of Sept. 11th in the United States and thought the poem "A photograph from Sept. 11" extremely moving.

A PHOTOGRAPH FROM SEPT. 11

They jumped from the burning stories, down
-- one, two, a few more
higher, lower.
A photograph captured them while they were alive and now preserves them
above ground, toward the ground.
Each still whole
with their own face
and blood well hidden.
There is still time,
for their hair to be tossed,
and for keys and small change
to fall from their pockets. They are still in the realm of the air, within the places
which have just opened.
There are only two things I can do for them
-- to describe this flight
and not to add a final word.

I'm a fan of Szymborska's work, Poems, New and Collected: 1957-1997 and thought the poem A Photograph from Sept. 11 extremely moving, especially what I felt was a powerful ending. A friend had a differing opinion about the ending. The poem reminds me of Chekhov. He was a master at painting a picture without the editorials. In the same way, I felt Ms. Szymborska's decision to describe and not comment increased the power of the poem.


Poems, New and Collected: 1957-1997

Don't Write Stage Directions

"Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, telling us how the character said it, or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case. We might understand better what the character means, but we aren't particularly going to care." (David Mamet)

Challenged by a Conflict

Terry Brook’s Rule #3: A PROTAGONIST MUST BE CHALLENGED BY A CONFLICT THAT REQUIRES RESOLUTION.

Conflict is necessary in every book because that's what generates concern for and interest in our characters. The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution. Of course, you can overdo this. Too many threats make the story unbelievable. Too much conflict renders it unrealistic. As with all things, you have to find a balance that works.

From SOMETIMES THE MAGIC HAPPENS by Terry Brooks.

Finding Time to Read

I never understand when people say they don't have time to read. They're lying. It's easy to have the time; just don't watch television and live alone." (John Waters)

Writing a Novel is like Building a Wall Brick by Brick

I quit writing if I feel inspired, because I know I'm going to have to throw it away. Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration. (Frank Yerby)

Richard Ford

After lunch at Dunbar's, [Richard] Ford climbs back in the Jeep to give a quick driving tour of the city; as he passes a particularly seamy-looking housing development, he declares, "There is no street in New Orleans that I wouldn't walk down." He pauses. "But that's not to say that I wouldn't get my ass kicked."

Ford talks a good deal about ass-kicking: He reminisces about the time he foiled a mugging by slamming the hapless thief in the face, and he remembers exchanging punches with a neighbor who refused to keep his dogs from barking, an episode that concluded with Ford in handcuffs and the neighbor in the hospital. At a later point during this interview, while taking a brief walk through the French Quarter, Ford gets into a shouting match with a guy, admittedly a schmucky guy, who is for some reason creeping his car along the sidewalk. The argument begins with Ford calling him a douche bag, continues with the driver asking the Pulitzer Prize winner to lick his balls and ends with Ford making some disparaging comments about the man's mother. "Richard goes directly to his emotions," says Russell Banks, the author of Affliction and Sweet Hereafter and a friend of Ford's. "He comes to full alert whenever anybody acts like an idiot."

from "Ford Tough" by Michael Kaplan, BOOK, March/April 2002

Definition of Story

“A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves. (Jon Franklin, WRITING FOR STORY, p. 71)

Novel: The Outside World

The Outside World (Tova Mirvis) ***

Several years ago Tova Mirvis' first novel The Ladies Auxiliary was my runner-up for favorite novel of the year. So, when I saw the new novel at the bookstore, I picked it up and my wife and I read it on the drive to Florida and back.

Mirvis' gift is drawing a world that many of us will never see. Her representation is detailed and alive and the reader feels transported, and a part of this strange (to us) culture. At the same time, she captures the universality of individuals and relationships and we see ourselves reflected back from the pages.

The plot seems to unravel a bit at the end but this is common with a novel that has so many characters woven through 250 plus pages. But the plot is almost secondary and the time spent inside the orthodox jewish culture was time well spent.


The Outside World

Throw Another Handful of Characters on the Fire

I remember Virginia Woolf was reviewing a book. . .but one of her complaints was when the author lost his way, he would just throw another handful of characters on the fire. (Novelist/Essayist Joy Williams)

Intellectuals Make People Feel Alienated

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

Evoking Sensation

"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it's raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." (E. L. Doctorow as quoted by Sol Stein in "Stein on Writing")

Seduced by the Language

"The best of good writing will entice us into subjects and knowledge we would have declared were of no interest to us until we were seduced by the language they were dressed in." (from Sol Stein in "Stein on Writing"--Chapter One)

A Writer Deals with the Unspoken

[Thornton] "Wilder taught me that what a writer deals with is the unspoken, what people see or sense in silence." (from Sol Stein in "Stein on Writing"--Chapter One)

Books are Potent Things

Walt Whitman called reading "an exercise, a gymnast's struggle." To me it is a creation, a lovemaking of small discoveries, hidden treasures, big dreams, I'm saddened almost beyond words when I think of what's being lost-what's already been destroyed-by people who are afraid of books.. . Books are potent things. . . Books and stories and reading are the meat of revolution and change, they can be dangerous and unpredictable.

Thoreau said, "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."

Only those who already have power have an interest in censorship.

from "Censors and Sensibilities" by Sallie Tisdale
Mirabella, January 1995

Novel: Blue Angel

Blue Angel

Predictable. The plot had no surprises. Her female characters were strong and fully developed, but her male characters didn't make the grade. Swenson, the novel's main character was convincing in his bumbling paranoia, but totally unconvincing in his repetitious endearments for his wife. And the great novel the student was writing, spare me.

I never felt strongly enough about Swenson for me to be engaged in the book.

My favorite line in the book: ". . .Ruby says, "How's your novel coming, Dad?" . . . "Great," he replies. "It's going great!" And for a moment, he thinks it is. All he needs to do is write it."

I felt the confrontation at the end of the book, exploring language and its ambiguity and its openness to varied interpretations was excellent, although it fell short of what I felt was a genius interpretation of the same theme by David Mamet in OLEANNA.


Oleanna: A Play

Short Story Writing Tips

Why do some stories truly ring in the mind while others leave you with the feeling of 'what was the point?'. To make your short stories more effective, try to keep in mind these following points while writing:

1. Have a clear theme. What is the story about? That doesn't mean what is the plot line, the sequence of events or the character's actions, it means what is the underlying message or statement behind the words. Get this right and your story will have more resonance in the minds of your readers.

2. An effective short story covers a very short time span. It may be one single event that proves pivotal in the life of the character, and that event will illustrate the theme.

3. Don't have too many characters. Each new character will bring a new dimension to the story, and for an effective short story too many diverse dimensions (or directions) will dilute the theme. Have only enough characters to effectively illustrate the theme.

4. Make every word count. There is no room for unnecessary expansion in a short story. If each word is not working towards putting across the theme, delete it.

5. Focus. The best stories are the ones that follow a narrow subject line. What is the point of your story? Its point is its theme. It's tempting to digress, but in a 'short' you have to follow the straight and narrow otherwise you end up with either a novel beginning or a hodgepodge of ideas that add up to nothing.

Short Story Writing Tips (from shortstorygroup.com)

Trevor and Truth

. . . .reading Trevor, I feel that I am being told the truth--the melancholy, regrettable, unromantic truth, but a truth I recognize. In its quiet, offhand tone, with its beautiful, measured, clean sentences, Trevor's work tells us: Life is hard and frequently painful; people make devastating mistakes; acceptance and coming to terms with one's lot are more sensible and attainable goals than a blissful sojourn on earth and paradise thereafter. "Truth," Trevor has said, "is the most important thing that there is, and if you lose sight of it, your writing will be destroyed in the end."

from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, December 2002

Trevor and Characters

Asked about his [William Trevor's] unusual ability to "get inside" so many
characters, "regardless of their age, sex, or background," Trevor has described it as a matter of observation--a characteristically unassuming explanation compared with the depths of feeling and empathy, the soaring powers of the imagination that another writer of similar range might claim for himself. "It does seem to me that the only way you can get there is through observation. . . . I think there's something in writers of fiction that makes them notice things and store them away all the time. . . . Writers of fiction are collectors of useless information. They are the opposite of good, solid, wise citizens who collect good information and put it to good use. Fiction writers remember tiny little details, some of them almost malicious, but very telling."

from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in HARPER'S MAGAZINE, December 2002

The Death of Long Articles

There is little evidence to suggest increased television viewership is killing off reading. When asked by Harris to describe their top leisure-time activities, Americans still regularly put reading at the top of the list (28 percent of those polled in 2001), outscoring even the boob tube (20 percent). Nor has increased television viewing sapped the time we spend reading, according to time-diary studies. While the average time spent reading a newspaper declined dramatically between 1965 and 1995, "all other reading, including books and magazines, is increasing," reports John P. Robinson, a professor at Maryland, who authored the study.

Long narratives, in the form of books, remain popular with young people. A separate 1999 Gallup poll found book readership rates essentially unchanged over the previous two decades. Fifty-six percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds read six or more books a year, compared to 62 percent of those ages fifty to sixty-four. Of adolescents ages twelve to eighteen, 56 percent reported reading ten or more books in the year, according to another poll by the National Education Association in 2001. Polls by the Pew Center for the People and the Press have come to similar conclusions. Young people read books and magazines at roughly the same rates as older Americans, though men in this category tend to lag behind women.

Rolling Stone traded its rock roots for bubble-gum pop just to keep its mass-market share, with four Britney Spears covers in the last three years. The new Rolling Stone seeks to solve that problem in another way, by increasing the number of stories it runs while decreasing their length, a tactic that more closely resembles the Internet than a book. This tactic, pioneered by Blender, offers more to a wider spectrum of readers, with 100 or 200 album reviews in each issue. In place of a long narrative, the readers create their own story as they pick and choose their way through the magazine. "It's not about your narrative," says Black. "It's about me."

Editors have been forced to design their magazines for an indifferent reader, according to Michael Wolff, media columnist for New York. "We've shoved magazines down the throats of people," Wolff said. "They flip through magazines because they don't really want them."

From "Does Size Matter?"
BY MICHAEL SCHERER
Columbia Journalism Review
October 2002

Jacket Copy

Judging by their fulsome endorsements on the jackets of so many novels, it's apparent that some critics don't get out much. To blurb-bestowers, no work is ever just moderately entertaining. Books are "captivating," "enthralling," "sprawling," and even "festooning." Maybe I'm just naive, but when I read a book that's billed as 'a masterpiece of savage comedy," I expect something like WISE BLOOD or THE LOVED ONE. "Riveting from first page to last" is a description that gets my hopes tip: it promises at least the intensity of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, and a lot more than BABBITT. Obviously, I deal with some disappointment. I guess honesty doesn't make good jacket copy, or we'd see more blurbs like this:

"A dense book in which very little happens."

"A well-written but depressing novel, lacking in excitement what it makes up for in style.

As far as outward versus inward fiction, I think that introspection is here to stay. We're an inward-looking society, and despite what Tom Wolfe says, that's not entirely a bad thing, either for the culture or for the novel as an art form. Many of us. . .actually enjoy all the navel gazing.

from "Looking Up from the Navel" by Betty Smartt Carter, BOOKS AND CULTURE, July/August 2002.

Why Reading Matters To George Mason University Students

During spring 2000 undergraduate students were invited to reflect on why-or if-reading mattered to them. The following are a few student responses.

Heather Doerr
Reading is an art. It is more than just comprehending words on paper. It is an interactive and lively experience for the imagination and a respite for the soul. Characters and story plots come alive in the mind. An entire world can be created simply by letting the imagination digest the language. Society today speeds along so fast that it doesn't take the time to stop and soak in life. Reading lets one enjoy the world around, through personal experiences and point of view. All memories and senses are awake when reading and yet while the outside world is still, the mind and imagination run wild. Reading gives temporary reprieve from the pressures of life and creates a new identity and a new environment. It is about learning. New ideas and opinions are introduced. Theories are proven or disproved. Reading is discovery in its most basic element.

Rachel Donelson
Reading connects me to the rest of the world and helps me define who I am. If you are what you know, what I read is tightly intertwined with who I was, who I am now, and who I will become. I go through phases of what I like to read. When I was young, I liked to read about historical children's adventures, like Little House or Tom Sawyer. In high school I read a lot of mid-twentieth century novels, from the beatniks to the dystopian visionaries. Now I've finally expanded my world to include nonfiction. Reading helps me get out of my mental ruts; it helps me accept other people's ideas. It can also connect me to people of the past. There's something comforting about knowing that my questions and faults are similar to the ones St. Augustine struggled with when he was my age-even though he lived 1700 years ago. Reading makes the vastness of space-time smaller and more manageable.

Alessandra Gazzo
I believe that reading functions as a means of expanding your world. It is a way to gain new perspectives on your world as well as learning about things which are completely out of your everyday life. By reading you can experience things which would otherwise be impossible. We do not live long enough to see or do anywhere near all that we would like to. Reading provides an opportunity to get a glimpse of some more of those things we cannot do.

A Blank Mind Led to RAGTIME

It was not a blank page but a blank mind that led to RAGTIME-the emotional exhaustion that came inevitably after the completion of THE BOOK OF DANIEL. The blank mind, when it has no wish to think or improve upon existence, grants you a simple unreflective being that is very pleasant and peaceable. Fortunately it doesn't last. One day I was sitting in my study, on the top floor of my house in New Rochelle, and I found myself staring at the wall. Perhaps I felt it was representative of my mind. I decided to write about the wall. And then about all the walls together. "My house was built in 1906," I wrote. "It is a great, ugly three-story manse, with dormers, bay windows, and a screened porch. When it was new the shingles were brown and striped awnings shaded the windows .. . ." I then imagined what New Rochelle looked like when the house was new. In those days trolley cars ran along the avenue at the bottom of the hill. People wore white in the summer. Women carried parasols. I thought of Teddy Roosevelt, who was president at the time. And the blank page of my mind began to fill with the words of a book.

But wherever books begin, in whatever private excitement of the mind, whether from the music of words, or an impelling anger, or the promise of an unwritten-upon page, the work itself is hard and slow, and the writer's illumination becomes a taskmaster, a ruling discipline, jealously guarding the mind from all other, and necessarily errant, private excitements until the book is done. You live enslaved in the book's language, its diction, its universe of imagery, and there is no way out except through the last sentence.

from The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work edited by Marie Arana

The Difference Between What People Say and What People Feel

I don't know anything more interesting than the difference between what people say and what they feel. There's a whole universe there below the surface. I'm always interested in the way that feelings underneath leak out and shape behavior. People try very hard to have them not show up or change anything or affect anything. But our defenses leak. That's how we know they're there. I love that. (from an interview with Amy Bloom by Sarah Ann Johnson)

True or False?

In every volume of poems something good may be found.
--Quote from Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON

Writer's Block

Do not confuse writer's block with other emotional states that interfere with your writing such as anger, grief, illness, laziness, horniness, and so on. True writer's block has four primary causes: not knowing your characters well enough, trying to edit and write at the same time, fear of failure, and fear of success. . . .Trying to write and edit at the same time creates class-two writer's block. When you write, you have to first draft your novel without worrying whether every I is dotted and every t is crossed. The manuscript isn't going to be perfect; it's only a draft.

FROM James N. Frey on writer's block in HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD NOVEL

Feng Shui for Writers

Tie three Chinese coins with a red string around your front main entrance inside door knob, on your desk's wealth corner or under your desk. Put a three-legged frog on a low table where he can see the front door. Put crystals (quartz and citrine are best), balls, clusters and pyramids all around. Make a money vase by filling it with stones and beads and Chinese coins (in groups of three), soil from a rich person's garden and other trinkets that are precious and meaningful to you. The vase should be wide at the bottom, narrow in the middle and wide at the top. It should be hidden in a cupboard. Keep nine fish-eight red or gold and one black-to absorb negative energy, in your wealth corner.

The most important thing to remember is intent. You have to want something bad enough to get it. You still have to do the work. You have to have the talent and drive to succeed but a little push in the luck department doesn't hurt at all!

From FENG SHUI FOR WRITERS by Sephera Giron

Trademarks

The best thing is, we don't have to put the little TM symbol next to the trademark, but the trademark people say a writer needs to distinguish what a trademark is by capitalizing the first letter, putting it all in caps, italics or boldface type, or in quotes, then adding the product after the trademark. For example: Apple computers, ZIPLOC resealable bags, "Cheerios" cereal, or Parker (in italics or boldface type) pen. Trademarks should not be pluralized, and it's considered a proper adjective. They should not be used in the possessive form, or as a verb.

From Kay Parkin on TRADEMARKS (from an article found on using trademarks in writing)

Reasons Reading is Good

Reading doesn't cause a hangover, takes very little physical energy and affords few opportunities for public embarrassment.

By the hour, books are way cheaper than psychotherapy. When I'm bitter and alienated, I can turn to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and find solace in kindred suffering: "I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts." It's a rollicking good tale about self-imposed agony.

Similarly, there's Whitman for joy and Neruda for love, or the more contemporary—Lorrie Moore for wit and ... wait—am I describing books as friends? As words that embody empathy and shared ideas? And is that pathetic or wonderful?

--Stacy J. Willis

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

Style

A good many writers have insisted that style can be neither taught nor learned. Like tears or sweat, they say, it is something that springs from within. You either have the gift or you don't. This is probably true, but only to a point. The good stylists work at their craft. Consciously or unconsciously, they master the little dog tricks of euphony and cadence. The novelist searches for the significant details that will put flesh on the bones of a character. Little by little we learn what works for us--bare and bony sentences, or china dogs with pouting eyes, or perhaps no "style" at all.

From WRITER'S ART by James Kilpatrick

Character Description Made Easy

Characters are the heart of a great story. Without great characters and great character development, "The Great Gatsby" can be seen as just another weepy romance and Holden Caulfield as merely a maladjusted teen. Pushcart Prize-winning author Josip Novakovich lends us two exercises from his book "Fiction Writer's Workshop" that will help you develop your characters.

Objective: To learn how to look at evidence of character in the whole body, not just the face. The body expresses the mind.

Describe a character by the shape, posture and gait of his body. Don't describe his head and don't tell us that the character is lazy or happy. Show these traits through body language.

Check: Do we see enough of the body's shape and motion? For a nervous patient in a hospital, did you mention his feet wrapped around a chair's leg like the emblem of medicine?

Objective: To create heroes from people you admire. Admiration for others is a writer's best friend (unlike self-admiration). As you admire a person, you naturally select traits and details that present the person in a heroic light. So you already know how to make heroes! With this capability, you are ready to become a fiction writer.

Describe a remarkable person you admire--a teacher, minister, carpenter, doctor. What makes the person unique? Avoid sentiment statements (e.g. "I know Mother will always be there for me"). Can you make us see her? Hear her? >

Check: Have you given us the person? If not, go back and show us your character struggling with problem.

Learn more about "Fiction Writer's Workshop" ($15.99), at: http://www.writersdigest.com/store/booksdisplay.asp?id=48033

Harris Puts Life on the Page

In 1991, he [E. Lynn Harris] quit his job and moved to Atlanta to write a novel. No one would publish it, so he spent $13,000 to print 5,500 copies. Bookstores balked, so he'd leave a book in beauty parlors ("like a sample") with his name and phone number. Readers who liked what they read while waiting would call him, and he'd deliver a copy in person, $12.95 each.

Eventually the novel made its way into local bookstores and came to the attention of a sales rep for Doubleday who told editors in New York, "There's a book down here making a lot of noise."

In 1992, Doubleday signed him to a $90,000 threebook deal for Invisible Life (in its 44th printing), a sequel and an autobiography he's still trying to finish.

HARRIS PUTS LIFE ON THE PAGE by Bob Minzesheimer (USA Today July 29, 2002)

Verbs

One way to identify and remember being verbs is by categories:

* the be group: be, is, are, am, was, were, been

* the have group: have, has, had

* the do group: do, did, done (usually used for emphasis or to form questions)

* others: must, may/might, shall/should, can/could, will/would

Note, however, that the be, have, and do verbs can be helping or main verbs.
* Jerry is witty (main verb). Jerry is coming (helping verb) home.
* Leon had a pet snake (main). He had caught it in the woods (helping).
* Judy does a good job (main). She does work hard (helping).

Also, must has come into modern usage as a noun; for example, "Another must for Sandburg fans is the performance of his Rootabaga stories." (We won't get into a discussion of the word need.)

FROM Joy Bagley (WNC Writers Facilitator (bagley030@aol.com)ON VERBS

On Jorge Luis Borges

The first monument of adult literature I discovered for myself was not Jane Austen at thirteen, but, at seventeen, the dull-green-spined Penguin Modern Classics edition of THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JORGE LUIS BORGES. Borges took me to a place where dry, crabbed, pedantic phrases could be the language of wonder. He made annotation into a technique of shimmering paradox. His footnotes had no bottom to them: you could fall through, and keep falling, tumbling without end into an abyss of recursive possibilities. Reference was the essence of what he did, pointing your attention from one apparently existing thing to another one, but it was always unreliable, because so many of the books, persons, places, flowers, gems, ideas he named were invented by him, glimmering into existence for just that moment at which he referred to them; and so many of the boxes he suggested you open were either empty, or contained an infinitely nested set of other ever-smaller boxes, or were larger on the inside than the outside, or, strangest of all, had no inside at all.

In "The Garden of Forking Paths," he proposed a novel in which, at every point of decision, both outcomes took place, until the book contained "a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times."

In "The Library of Babel," he sketched-or rather, "adumbrated," to use one of the words from his mannered, repetitive vocabulary of favorites-a universe consisting entirely of ventilation shafts and hexagonal galleries, lined with identical volumes, whose pages contain every conceivable permutation of the 26 letters of the alphabet as they can be arranged at random over 410 pages. But not in order; the books are shuffled at random, and a librarian can walk for many miles over many years to find a single intelligible sentence, knowing all the while that, because the library comprises all possible permutations, it must therefore include the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in every language, the interpolations of every book into all books...

Borges's characteristic maneuver was a version, in story, of the Mobius twist that the mathematical philosophers had discovered early in the twentieth century. Hoping to put logic on a foundation of consistent, comprehensive axioms, Bertrand Russell found instead that the ability of a set to include itself as a member set off a rip in the axiomatic fabric into which the whole hope for reliable, consistent knowledge was then inex- orably sucked, like a black hole devouring the philosophic space. Later, Kurt Godel showed that even the simplest mathematical system, like arithmetic, had the potential to eat its own tail in the same way, and therefore could not be proved to map reality reliably. Borges haunted these points of conceptual unmaking, using the power of the authorial voice to be both within the story and (simultaneously) its external sustainer, as his analogue of Russell's problem, and thus the means to pry open a vortex.

Into the classification system of an imaginary Chinese encyclopedia, he introduced the category of "things contained in this encyclopedia," a part which must therefore contain the whole, which in turn must contain the part, that contains the whole, ad infinitum; and this was just one of his most modest and local embodiments of the idea. Here, in Borges's work, story became almost pure form. It contained just enough substance-just enough naming and evocation-to furnish the ideas with a backing, like the film of mercury on the back of a mirror that allows a flat thing to contain ever receding depths. Borges's stories actually reached the state that the dumbest idea-led science fiction only approximated to. They were truly about something other than people. They were about themselves, about the interesting diagrams that the multiplicity of things books do will make, if you reduce them to pure lines and angles: perfect reading, in a way, for Piaget's last age, of "abstract operations."

From THE CHILD THAT BOOKS BUILT by Francis Spufford

Quote: Finishing Cold Mountain

Courtney still means to finish his book (Charles Frazier's COLD MOUNTAIN). It's just that it was taking so long, all that walking across the whole state of North Carolina, it was pretty slow.

from Lee Smith's Novel

The Last Girls

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Often when I ask a writer to name her favorite book on writing, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within is mentioned.

I found the book wildly disorganized, with no discernable structure. Perhaps that's what Goldberg intended but it drove me crazy. That said, she offers some good suggestions, encouragement, and solid advice on many aspects of the writer's craft.

I wouldn't put this is a must read category, but it does have value. The following are a few gems from the work:

Talk is a way writers can help each other find new directions. "Hey, that's great; have you written about it?" "That's a good line, 'I lived here six years and can't remember a thing, not a thing.' Write it down and begin a poem with it." Once I came home from a visit in Boston and said to a friend in passing, "Oh, he's crazy about her." She was in the process of writing a mystery novel in those days and honed in, "How can you tell he was crazy about her? Tell me what actions he did." I laughed. You can't make general statements around writers-they want me not to "tell" but to "show" with incidents.

We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don't have our own style. Don't worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing.

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin. Your ability to love another's writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will only make you bigger; it won't make you a copycat. The parts of another's writing that are natural to you will become you, and you will use some of those moves when you write. But not artificially. Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with. That is what happened to Allen Ginsberg when he wanted to write so that Jack Kerouac could understand him: " . . . being in love with Jack Kerouac he discovered he was Jack Kerouac: that's something love knows. " You are Ernest Hemingway on a safari when you read Green Hills of Africa, and then you are Jane Austen looking at Regency women and then Gertrude Stein doing her own Cubism in words, and then you are Larry McMurtry in Texas walking to the pool hail in a dusty town.

So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us. Don't make writers "other," different from you: "They are good and I am bad." Don't create that dichotomy. It makes it hard to become good if you create that duality. The opposite, of course, is also true: if you say, "I am great and they aren't," then you become too proud, unable to grow as a writer or hear criticism of your work. Just: "They are good and I am good." That statement gives a lot of space. "They have been at it longer, and I can walk their path for a while and learn from them."

It's much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

Even if we go off alone to write in the wilderness, we have to commune with ourselves and everything around us: the desk, the trees, the birds, the water, the typewriter. We are not separate from everything else. It's only our egos that make us think we are. We build on what came before us, even if our writing is a reaction to it or we try to negate the past.

Push yourself beyond when you think you are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.

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 (Natalie Goldberg)

Working on the Language

“The temptations is simply to assemble language and forgo the hard work of trying to penetrate it. No doubt everything has been brought up before, by someone else, or even by oneself; but if the language is truly worked, freshness is still possible. Worked language is how the writer can ‘make it new’ in the words of Ezra Pound.”

From “Footprints of Greatness on Your Turf” by Pat Conroy, New York Times 4/8/02

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.

If you're not getting anywhere, it's probably because you are writing something emotionally dishonest.

I write seven days a week. I don't have to write to pay my bills. I like the regularity. My wife-we've been married thirty eight years-she can't quite see it. She thinks it's a little compulsive.

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 ESQUIRE February 2003 How to Write Faster By Stephen J Cannell, creator of 40 TV shows (The Rockford Files, The A-Team, The Commish) and author of 350 movie scripts and eleven novels. (His seventh, The Viking Funeral, is in stores now.)

On Katherine Anne Porter

"What she does have aplenty is the ability to make things actual. The old girl can create the sweating stinking life out of anything, the purely animal."

from Flannery O'Connor's THE HABIT OF BEING letter to A., 23 June 1962 comment on Katherine Anne Porter

The Right Word

If a writer discards the exact but unfamiliar word in favor of the almost exact but generally familiar word, he gives his readers less than his best effort. At the same time, there is even more to be said in favor of writing in a vocabulary that one's readers will understand. He deliberately dumbs down. He deliberately dumbs down. At the same time, there is even more to be said in favor of writing in a vocabulary that one's readers will understand.

from THE WRITER'S ART by James Kilpatrick (Asheville Citizen-Times 11/24/02)

Oscar Hijueols' intro to Jorge Luis Borges' “The Aleph”.

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED 'THE ALEPH" BY THE GREAT ARGENTINE WRITER Jorge Luis Borges one afternoon over twenty years ago, in 1973-I believe- when I was down on the Lower East Side visiting a friend, a young Armenian intellectual, such as one might meet at City College in those days. While he fiddled about in his kitchen (or walked his dog, or pleaded/conversed with his girlfriend on the telephone), I sat on his itchy, cat-haired, roach-egged couch, idly riffling through a pile of books that I had pulled from his shelves, among them a mildewed, jaundiced-looking, much-read-over pocketbook edition of THE ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES by Borges. Now, just a few days earlier I had been informed about the results of an aptitude test I had taken, the upshot being that I was apparently most suited for the profession of accounting. That well may have been my destiny, but I am happy (unhappy?) to report that the experience of reading "The Aleph" for the first of many times had a great effect upon me and my future; I have loved and will always love that story-and I will always be indebted to Borges for having written it-because, aside from its many wonderful qualities, it will always hold a special meaning for me: quite simply, "The Aleph" is the story that first inspired in me the desire to one day write.

As for the story itself, "The Aleph" is part love tale, told in a voice that is both obsessively introspective and delicately urbane; it has an undertone of near horror, like a ghost story-as in an Edgar Allan Poe tale the object of the narrator's love, Beatriz Viterbo, exerts a great power long after she has been dead; it has a quite visual, nearly cinematic, narrative that is a pleasure to read. Ironically, Borges, who suffered from a hereditary progressive blind-ness, had often spoken about the influence of film upon his writing. In the economy and vividness of its details, it is instructive to young writers-note how effortlessly Borges suggests the shifting universe by opening with a most introspective and bemused narrator noticing yet another new brand of Ameri-can cigarette being advertised on the billboards of Constitution Plaza in Buenos Aires. And it is quite funny-especially to writers-when, for example, the narrator, Borges himself, muses over the critical success of a decidedly second-rate talent, Carlos Argentino Daneri, who to the narrator's cha-grin has risen to the top of the poet's profession while the narrator has not.

For a final note; without betraying the essence of the story, which is the "Aleph" itself, nor this story's spectacular climax, I will leave the reader with my sense that in this work, as in certain others-"Funes, the Memorious," for example-Borges is really writing about and paying tribute to the writer's consciousness, which, through its command of and access to the imagination and language, can contain and replicate everything that has existed or will ever exist in this universe.

From YOU’VE GOT TO READ THIS. The following is the introduction by Oscar Hijueols to Jorge Luis Borges story “The Aleph”.

Say No to Censorship!

It is just plain silly that some of the books listed below are listed. On the other hand, I abhor some of the books on the list. But in the final analysis I strongly oppose censorship. What goes around, comes around. Some of the books we now live by could also be censored in the future.

The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–20001
from the ALA (American Library Association)

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
11. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. Sex by Madonna
20. Earth's Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
24. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
28. The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
29. Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
30. The Goats by Brock Cole
31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
33. Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
34. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
35. We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
36. Final Exit by Derek Humphry
37. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
40. What's Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
46. Deenie by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
48. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
49. The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
58. Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
61. What's Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
62. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
63. Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
64. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
65. Fade by Robert Cormier
66. Guess What? by Mem Fox
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
68. The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Fantasies by Nancy Friday
73. Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
74. Jack by A.M. Homes
75. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
76. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
77. Carrie by Stephen King
78. Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
79. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
80. Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
81. Family Secrets by Norma Klein
82. Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
86. Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where's Waldo? by Martin Hanford
89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
92. Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
93. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
94. The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
95. Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
97. View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
98. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
99. The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
100. Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

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.

from Sometimes the Magic Works by Terry Brooks

The Future of Film

"Whatever it is called in the future, it's going to start with someone wanting to tell a story to someone else. I don't think there is anything in the technology or financing that can mess that up. Can they make stories and compelling dramas that are entertaining, charming, inventive, romantic, funny, that somehow moves forward the human spirit, and support the best of who we and what we are as individuals? Can we do that and still have it be a good business? That's the real challenge."

from a FRONTLINE Documentary about Movies

Structure

Without a structure you just might build yourself a Corvette without an engine or a rhinoceros without any legs: impressive to look at maybe, but neither one of those things is going anywhere. Faulkner made money in Hollywood because he understood these things. The structures he chose for many of his own novels might have been inimical to film structure, but he obviously knew the difference. And in The Reivers, he used his Hollywood know-how to build a different kind of novel.

An Interview with Les Standiford by Steve Glassman. Standiford is the founding director of the MFA program in writing at Florida International University.

Writing in Not a Profession

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.(Georges Simenon)

Schools of Literature Were Invented by Professors

We have now a whole bevy of writers who take pride in annoying the reader. They make him feel guilty and bore him. They weep on the reader's shoulder and this is proclaimed the very mission of the so called serious writer. The great writers always gave joy to the readers even in their tragedies. Kafka, Joyce, and Proust are great talents, but Kafkaism, Joyceism, and even Proustism have become a burden to young students. The fact is that all "isms" are bad for literature. Every "ism" is by its very definition a cliché. In literature and in art generally all schools and disciples are bad. The various schools and "isms" of literature were invented by professors. Tolstoy didn't belong to any school. Only small fish swim in schools.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Children Read for Story, Not the Author

Children are wonderful because they are completely independent readers. A child would not read a book because it was written by a "great writer" —a man with great authority. The fact that Shakespeare has written it will not impress a child‑the child will look over the story by himself and see if he likes it or not. You cannot impress a child by criticism. You cannot say, "This is a wonderful book because such and such critic has said it's wonderful." A child doesn't care about the critics, because the child himself is a critic. A child will not read a book because it was advertised in a very big way. He is actually a more independent reader than the adult, who is impressed by authorities, criticism, and big advertisements in the New York Times or on television. It's harder to fool children than to fool adults when it comes to literature.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Novel: Due East

NOVEL: Due East by Valerie Sayers ****

Sometime in the early 90's I stumbled across HOW I GOT HIM BACK by Valerie Sayers at a used bookstore. I loved her mythical town, Due East, and its characters and searched for her other books. Her first novel (DUE EAST) was no longer in print and although I searched through used stores and wrote to several others, I could not find it. I did find four later novels (THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US, WHO DO YOU LOVE, and BRAIN FEVER), which also took place in the town of Due East. I enjoyed them tremendously.

Recently a made for SHOWTIME movie titled DUE EAST was advertised so I watched it with great anticipation. Although the movie was mediocre, I remembered I had never found the first novel, DUE EAST, by Sayers. Of course, now with half.com and alibris.com, out of print books are easy to find and within minutes I ordered DUE EAST.

The protagonist is Mary Faith Rapple, a pregnant 15 year old. Her mother died of cancer and the baby's father from an overdose of tranquilizers; and her own father is distant and preoccupied. Initially she clings to a virgin birth theory when talking to her dad and is determined to have her baby.

The character of Mary Faith Rapple is skillfully drawn with a wry sensitivity and innocence. The chapters alternate between the first person narrative of Mary Faith and the first person narrative of her dad until the last chapter, which is in third person. The town of Due East, with all its eccentricities, is all that I remember it to be, with the strong undercurrents of faith, sex, and the rejection of faith expected of a damn good southern novel.

My favorite line comes from when Mary Faith and her father go to church:

"All around me I could feel the electric buzz that Dr. Beady set off when he began to speak. In a few minutes, people would drift away, would stop listening to him, but for now, he had them; he had them lined up naked with their legs spread apart and they were trying to shield themselves. He loved those words sin and sinner: he sloshed them around in his mouth like wine and then spat them out, all over the congregation."

Adverb Recognition

Got to thinking. To edit unessential adverbs, we have to first be able to recognize them.

On adverb recognition--nothing you don't already know. After I typed this explanation, I decided it may be too much for your newsletter--probably even boring to most readers. But for whatever . . . .

Just because a word ends in -ly doesn't mean it's an adverb; for instance, the friendly youngster met the crew at the door. But the -ly can be considered a signal. When we see the signal, we must confirm our suspicion that the word ending in the suffix is an adverb.

A grammarian might explain modification, but a nongrammarian may consider an adverb's position in the sentence. If the word ending in the suffix can be relocated without changing meaning, it is an adverb. Although adverbs usually have places they sound and work best in sentences, adverbs are like gypsies--transient.

For example: The couple in the booth appeared to be arguing passionately. Passionately the couple in the booth appeared to be arguing. The couple in the booth passionately appeared to be arguing. The couple in the booth appeared to be passionately arguing.

Adverbs can even split infinitives: The couple in the booth appeared to passionately be arguing.

By the way, in addition to single words, adverbs can be phrases, in which case we can't rely on the -ly signal. But we can ask questions--such as where and when--to test the phrase. Consider the prepositional phrase in the following sentence: In the woods by the edge of the pond, the whipperwills called. "In the woods" not only can be relocated but it also tells where the whipperwills called; thus, the phrase is adverbial. Unlike the adverbial phrase, "by the edge of the pond" answers the adjectival question "which ones," or "which woods"; the phrase is an adjective and should remain next to the adverb, which it modifies.

from Joy Bagley, Night Writers member and WNCWriters Director, on adverbs.

Attacked or Unnoticed

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst think you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

Quote from Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON

The Novel is No Longer Essential

The novel has been dwindling since the end of the 19th century, because of one inescapable fact, which is that it is no longer as essential to people’s cultural lives as it used to be. The movies replaced it, certainly, and television. Novelists have lost the sense that we make a difference." Norman Mailer

Southern Writers

I've been influenced by a lot of the Southern writers for their connection to the physical world, and their enslavement to it.

The Writer's Chronicle, May/Summer 2002
An Interview with Jayne Anne Phillips by Sarah Anne Johnson

The Zest of Good Storytelling

Stories teach by example, and by permitting us to safely participate in crises we hope to never get near. Quotidian life seldom offers opportunities for glorious heroism or grand agonies of defeat, but fictional entertainments offer those opportunities in abundance. Handbooks on fiction-writing persistently point out that at the climax of the plot the principal characters ought to be confronted with a choice that will be definitive, both in terms of the burgeoning chaos around them and in terms of their own psychologies. Often these are moments of personal reform and redemption, even of metamorphosis, as the hero goes against fate, against his or her upbringing, and becomes wholly different, new. Ethical grayness characterizes much of our human experience; and we change only incrementally, through a host of seemingly inconsequential decisions. The zest of good storytelling comes from its gross exaggeration of the frightening and mysterious process of change, so that we see heightened in THE ENGLISH PATIENT or SCHINDLER'S LIST the horrifying possibilities of wrong choices and the health to ourselves and others in choosing rightly.

from A STAY AGAINST CONFUSION by Ron Hansen

Present Tense

"Because flashbacks, summaries, and other techniques that allow us to manipulate the order and duration of time often destroy the illusion of presentness, most writers of present-tense fiction use them sparingly. . ."

ON THE OTHER HAND

"To the philosopher Mary Warnock, the principal consequence [of thesubordination of history] is the diminishment of the imagination. "The greatest enemy of imagination," she says," is to be locked in the present," for the imagination's primary purpose is to make connections between past,present, and future."

FROM Jauss' Remeberence of Things Present in the WRITER'S CHRONICAL (vol. 34, #5)

One of My Favorite Books: Walking Across Egypt

Walking Across Egypt (Clyde Edgerton)

Mattie Rigsby is another independent, strong willed senior citizen (this one as southern as the day is long) and her attempt to do something good is the grist of this hilarious, poignant novel.

Even now, as I write this, each of the books speak to me from the shelf and call out to me reminding me of roads traveled, experiences shared, and characters encountered.

O'Connor and Fanatics

About the fanatics. People make a judgment of fanaticism by what they are themselves. To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics, none greater. And to a lot of the monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. For my part, I think the only difference between them is that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world, getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don't believe anything much at all down on your head . . . . If I set myself to write about a socially desirable Christianity, all the life would go out of what I do. And if I set myself to write about the essence of Christianity, I would have to quite writing fiction, or either become another person.

from Flannery O'Connor's THE HABIT OF BEING letter to Sister Mariella Gable, 4 May 1963

History is Not Truth

"History is not truth. Truth is in the telling." (Robert Penn Warren)

Great Writers are Either Husbands or Lovers

Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. (Susan Sontag)

Fiction Must Tell the Ineffable Truth

. . . Art, by its very nature, cannot be written for the purpose of demonstrating a preconceived idea, even a religious or spiritual one. It must tell the ineffable truth about the human experience. The artist therefore has to be willing to go into that place in her soul which is so deep and so dark that she can't see her way around, where she can't rely on traditional knowledge or conventional ways of knowing, and she has to open her eyes to whatever's there.

Writing is an act of compassion, of empathy, of generosity of spirit, both from writer to character and writer to reader, and reading is the reader's act of reciprocal compassion. Writing is an act of faith, faith that if I tell a story honestly enough it will resonate in to the loves of people who haven't lived these things, faith that if I listen closely.

From a talk by Elizabeth Dewberry, novelist Many Things Have Happened Since He Died and Sacrement of Lies.

The Best Criticism

"The best criticism conveys not only what is good or bad about a film--and why it's good or bad--but also why these distinctions are important.

From the WALL STREET JOURNAL"Pick Your Biopic" by Jason L. Riley.

Mayonnaise

All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a plane higher than lard could ever hope to fly. Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant, falsely innocent as a magician's handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart. Fried oysters, leftover roast, peanut butter: rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from contact with this inanimate seductress, this goopy glory-monger, this alchemist in ajar.

The mystery of mayonnaise-and others . . . have surely puzzled over this-is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine's angry brother), salt, sugar (earth's primal grin-energy), lemon juice, water, and, naturally, a pinch of the ol' calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way as to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and out-right majestic that mustard, ketchup, and their ilk must bow down before it (though, at two bucks ajar, mayonnaise certainly doesn't put on airs) or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the French could have wrought this gastronomic miracle? Mayonnaise is France's gift to the New World's muddled palate, a boon that combines humanity's ancient instinctive craving for the cellular warmth of pure fat with the modern, romantic fond-ness for complex flavors: mayo (as the lazy call it) may appear mild and prosaic, but behind its creamy veil it fairly seethes with tangy disposition. Cholesterol aside, it projects the luster that we astro-orphans have identified with well-being ever since we fell from the stars.

Okay, maybe that's sailing a ways over the top, yet even its detractors must admit to mayo's sheen. And nowhere, under no condition, does it shine more brightly than when lathered upon an ordinary slice of bread.

From Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins

One of My Favorite Books: A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust (Evelyn Waugh)

Another author discovered through Muggeridge. Many consider him the greatest of the British prose writers of the 20th Century. This book along with many of his others: SCOOP, VILE BODIES, THE SWORD OF HONOR TRILOGY, etc., are filled with his barbed wit and eloquent prose. When I ran out of his books, I moved on to his three volumes of letters.


Handful of Dust

Dirty Diapers

My sister-in-law claims she never used more than one baby wipe when her three kids had a dirty diaper. That does not even seem possible. Of course, you have to consider the source. My mother-in-law claims she never lost a sock in doing the washing and drying.

I use as many as it takes. In fact, I have a rating system that grades the movements down under.

0 --false alarm
1 --light
2 --normal
3-- "Some People Pay Good Money for this as Fertilizer"
4-- "Let's Not Feed Her That Again"
5-- "The Threat Level Has Been Elevated"

There is one more after five, but it is special. There's been a lot of talk about the "nuclear option" of late, but all I know is that occasionally when Tian assesses her options, she goes nuclear. That's when you don't count the wipes, you dump the clothes, and hose her off ASAP.

What Does a Grant Have to Do with Writing

When I first arrived in Canada, I told someone that I had had one book published, and had written for The New York Times. "Oh," she said, "I always wanted to be a writer, but I could never get a grant." I was perplexed. What did getting a grant have to do with putting one's bum on a chair, fingers on keyboard? Later (wiser), I did apply. Again, I was perplexed. The form seemed to have been designed for someone (male) in the 1930s, recently come down from Oxford (or the U of T), with neat little spaces to put in where one had studied, what jobs or teaching positions one had held, what books or papers one had published. Most of the blanks I filled in with "housework" or "nothing."

from "Margaret Atwood and After" by Joan Bodger, National Post Online, March
9, 2002

Writing Personality Profiles

An anonomous commentary from fametracker.com about the recent issue of Vanity Fair. I've just excerpted the remarks about the writing of personality articles (in this case profiling the actress in Alias)

The article, on the other hand, is, like all the profiles in this issue (George Hamilton, Michael Caine, David Arquette, DMX) written in a sort of gibberish. Yes, it's English, but it's a subset of the language you could call "Profilese." It involves writing sentences that sound good or, failing that, remind you of sentences you've read elsewhere that sounded good. It involves stringing the sentences together with a pleasing rhythm that's just distracting enough to fill the three hours or so that it takes to fly from Chicago to Phoenix, but that will leave you with no impression whatsoever. Because these sentences are meaningless, by many different definitions.

One of the tactics of Profilese on display in the Garner profile is the one by which you cram your articles with references, both high and low, to prove to the reader that you are not just a profile-churning-out hack, but rather you are well-versed in kitsch and the classics alike. You are Übermensch!

To this end, the profile makes reference to all of the following, all on the very first page, and all in service of describing just what kind of show Alias is: Bettie Page, Kafka, La Femme Nikita, Freud, Nabokov, Charlie's Angels, Michael Crichton, and Dostoyevsky. Phew! Thank goodness all those things existed, or we wouldn't have Alias today!

Another tenet of Profilese is that you must write overly literate-sounding sentences; again, to convince the reader that (a) you are really a much better writer than all this; and (b) this subject actually merits their interest, let alone their attention.

So we have sentences such as: "So those are the hands that pick the pockets that hold the keys that lock the doors that guard the secrets that threaten our sleepy world." Which sounds pretty, but makes about as much sense as the teacher's speeches to the class in a Charlie Brown cartoon.

Or this: "She is the daughter of a chemical engineer who left Texas for points east when Dow and Carbide, lured by the twin sirens of cheap land and lax pollution regulation, flooded the area with money." She's not just Jennifer Garner, she's the heroine in a Richard Ford short story!

Or this: "Like Sydney, like Elektra, Jennifer lives in two worlds." This is the I've Figured Her Out sentence. It is a requisite in every celebrity profile. Note the use of the first name, which drives home just how precisely the writer has nailed the very essence of Garner -- nay, of Jennifer.

Anyway, the whole article is made up of these meaningful-sounding but meaningless sentences. We could go on about this, but we'll just say: celebrity profiles suck. They all suck. And trying to dress them up in flouncy language and fake-resonant observations makes them suck more.

We know people have to write them and make a living and we don't begrudge those people, but understand this: the profiles suck. Sorry, but they do. You might consider yourself a chef, but you are working at McDonald's and you are making Big Macs.

Experiments in Fiction

The experiments which the modernists make all deal with form, with what they call form, with silly things‑whether to punctuate a poem or not to punctuate, whether to sign with capital letters or with small letters. This is of no value. I say to myself, why don't they look into the, human ocean which surrounds them where stories and novelties flow by the millions? It's there where my experiments take place‑in the laboratory of humanity, not on a piece of paper.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

One Book Author

I had the feeling then that my lot was to be one of those writers who write one book and become silent forever. There are such writers. But I said to myself that even if a writer writes one book which makes sense, he's still a writer.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Memory

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

One of My Favorite Books: Body and Soul

Body and Soul (Frank Conroy)

A fairly recent addition to my favorite shelf. I started it about eight pm one night and finished it about twelve hours later. That’s only the third time I’ve pulled an all-nighter to finish a book I couldn’t put down.


Body and Soul

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O'Connor & Malamud

Writers who have mattered greatly to me include Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of course. GATSBY is for me the perfect novel and "Deal with the Dead" has some little homages to GATSBY buried away in it. Later, when I discovered the stories of Flannery O'Connor, I began to understand whole new possibilities for viewing the world. Ultimately, I fell in love with the work of Bernard Malamud and have read everything he has written, many of the books several times. The first stories I wrote were imitations of Hemingway, but Malamud and O'Connor were the influences for the first success I had as a writer. I published seven or eight stories in literary magazines, all trying to tread that line between fabulism and realism that they walk so well.

An Interview with Les Standiford by Steve Glassman. Standiford is the founding director of the MFA program in writing at Florida International University.

Being a Stay-at-Home Dad

I’m a little old to be a new father. Fifty-four to be exact. But life can be amusing at times and it seems I’m now entering the slapstick era of my life. The duties of being a stay-at home Dad were not foisted upon me, nor the result of being unemployed. It was a practical solution to current living arrangements and a position for which I volunteered.

My wife Lorraine teaches 5th grade, is an adjunct professor at the local University (UNCA), a writer, and lecturer. More importantly, she has insurance. I’m a writer, without insurance, who works at home for a few hours a day and spends the rest of the time reading and piddling around. At least I did in my former life. Now I am working for a demanding boss who points, grunts, and expects me to do her will.

It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had. If interested, "fasten your seatbelts," as Betty Davis said in All About Eve, "it's going to be a bumpy ride."

Parsing Out Grammar

Maybe I was just an odd kid, but one of my favorite childhood pastimes was diagramming sentences. I hadn't thought about diagramming in years, until I read recently about a teacher in Gaithersburg, Md., who has re-introduced the lost art into her Advanced Placement English classes in the high school where she teaches.

I learned how to diagram sentences in elementary school or what we used to call, appropriately, grammar school. By the time I was in high school, I drew diagrams only when I was stuck figuring out where to place a modifier or whether to use an adverb or adjective. Today, I suspect you would get a blank stare if you asked even the brightest students the difference between an adverb and an adjective.

Robyn Jackson, the Gaithersburg teacher, didn't learn about diagramming when she was in school. Progressive teachers and their professional associations, especially the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), believe diagramming sentences is make-work that bores students and turns them off to writing. So they banished diagramming from the classroom years ago, along with most grammar instruction.

Just 30 years old, Miss Jackson is, as education reporter Jay Matthews writes in The Washington Post, "as daring as the scientists who revived dinosaurs in 'Jurassic Park.' " Miss Jackson came across the arcane technique of diagramming when she was searching for a way to teach her advanced students about the functions of the various parts of speech. She found an old grammar book filled with odd drawings of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, with words laid out like pieces of a puzzle. The more she studied the diagrams, the more she thought it would be a fascinating way to help her students improve their writing. "Many of my students are very bright and have learned how to counterfeit writing proficiency," Miss Jackson told Mr. Matthews.

Even if the smartest students can fake their way through most writing assignments, most students can't. Most high school students cannot write a coherent, intelligible essay on any topic. According to a recent study of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, barely one-fourth of students write at or above the proficient level, and a shocking 1 percent write at an advanced level.

For years now, schools have been teaching students to "express" themselves, without worrying about transmitting the finer points of grammar and syntax. The latest fads in education theory discouraged teachers from placing too much emphasis on correcting students' work, encouraging them to praise creativity instead. But effective communication always entails understanding the rules. There are no shortcuts to good writing.

So why does the NCTE insist "the teaching of grammar does not serve any practical purpose for most students"? According to these educrats, teaching grammar "does not improve reading, speaking, writing or even editing" for most students. That's a little like saying that structural engineers don't need to understand the properties of certain metals if they want to build better or stronger buildings. Or, telling aerospace engineers they don't need to learn the laws of physics.

I suspect the dismal showing of American students on writing proficiency tests has much to do with the attitudes of educators who don't think it's worth their time to try to teach the rules of grammar. Teaching the parts of speech, the difference between a verbal and a verb, and why the active voice is preferable to the passive in most writing demands hard work on the part of teachers. It's a lot easier to encourage students to scribble their thoughts on a piece of paper, without attention to form. But when we eliminate the basics, we shouldn't wonder why students can't express themselves well.

I bet Robyn Jackson's students will be better writers for her efforts. Who knows, they may even look back fondly on those days spent, rulers in hand, diagramming sentences. As my writing teacher, Sister Marie Florence, used to say, "If you can't diagram it, don't write it."

(Linda Chavez)

Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power

Robert Frost called his art a lover's quarrel with the world. Ernest Hemingway said a writer must have the probity of a priest of God. George Orwell believed the writer's task was to set right the injustices caused by what he called the bloody hand of the empire at work. I think all three men could no more stop writing than they could will themselves to stop breathing. Hemingway, in the same statement about probity, said that once writing became the artist's greatest pleasure as well as his greatest vice, the only thing that could separate him from it was death.

When I was a teacher of creative writing, a student would occasionally ask me if I thought he had talent, if indeed he should try to make a career of his writing. I never answered the question, because the student had asked the wrong question. A real writer is driven both by obsession and a secret vanity, namely that he has a perfect vision of the truth, in the same way that the camera lens can close perfectly on a piece of the external world. If the writer does not convey that vision to someone else, his talent turns to a self-consuming bitterness.

I have never been able to see more than two or perhaps three scenes ahead in a story. For me the creative process is more one of discovery than creation.

Jack Kerouac said that there was no such thing as failure in art, not when you genuinely invest yourself in it. What a critic might call failure is just part of larger work that is ongoing.

The material for the stories is everywhere. The whole human family becomes your cast of characters. You can give voice to those who have none and expose those who would turn the earth into a sludge pit. As an artist you have automatic membership in a group that is loathed, feared and denigrated by every dictator and demagogue in the world.

from Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power (James Lee Burke)

An Interview with Gary Paulsen

What do you think is one of the biggest misunderstandings people have about a writing career?

PAULSEN: I've actually had a young writer say to me, "I didn't know it would be that much work." A lot of people want to have written. A lot of people want to have run the Iditarod or sailed to Fiji on a boat alone, but very few people actually do it. A lot of people want to have done it. They want to be discovered while they're sitting in a bus depot writing poetry on a napkin, but it doesn't happen that way.

What is your first piece of advice to writers?

PAULSEN: You can't learn to write in a work­shop. You can't learn in school or through a class. Writing is not going to help you learn to write. Writing is talking, and on can never learn anything when you're talking. You have to read, and I mean three books a day. Read them all. Reading is the thing that ill teach you. Make it an occupation. Read all the time. Literally, two or three books a day, And read them over again. Read some hooks eight or 10 times.

I've read Moby Dick eight or times, and it changes ever time you read it. One way, it's a about whaling, The next way is metaphysics. Or you can look at it as a love story in kind of a sick way. Stein, Pound, Hemingway‑if on haven't tried to figure out the rhythms and pacings and lion that brain of theirs works, you can't start writing.

Once a writer has studied and is ready, what is your advice as far as writing that manuscript and getting it published?

PAULSEN: It's really simple. Double‑space. 1‑inch margins and no errors. You can't base a misspelling. You have to compete with me. If you arid I send a manuscript to Random House, they are going to pick me because I'm popular and they cart sell a lot of books. That means, right out of the box, you've got to be better than these other guys who've got 200 books published and have won all kinds of awards. You've got to be better than Hemingway or Steinbeck on your first book. On your first book you've got to be that good! It's a hard business. Absolutely brutal. And it's all you. You don't have a boss or someone telling you what to do. It's all about your own self‑discipline. Steinbeck said the hardest thing was getting your ass in back of that typewriter.

from an interview with the children's author Gary Paulsen in THE WRITER June 2004

The Importantance of Punctuation

The importance of punctuation.

Dear John:

I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we're apart. I can be forever happy--will you let me be yours?

Gloria

OR

Dear John:

I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings whatsoever. When we're apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?

Yours, Gloria

One of My Favorite Books: On the Road

On the Road (Jack Kerouac)

This book had a great impact on me at the time I first read it. It does not hold together well over time, but the memories of the time I read it seem fresh and alive. Often a book has more meaning read into it than we can ever get out of it.


On the Road

Great Writers Never Wanted Their Readers to Suffer

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

The One Book Writer

I had the feeling then that my lot was to be one of those writers who write one book and become silent forever. There are such writers. But I said to myself that even if a writer writes one book which makes sense, he's still a writer.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

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.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

My Only Battlefield is My Staff

I'm something of a fatalist. I believe that what is destined will come to me. I would probably have gotten much more if I had gone after love, money, recognition, but it's not in my nature to take any action except in my work. My only battlefield is my desk or lap on which I write. There I fight with phrases, with words, but with people I'm very, very passive.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Great Characters Live

In literature, as in our dreams, death does not exist. Take, for example, the case of Anna Karenina. This book was written more than a hundred years ago but you don't say "the late Anna Karenina" or "the late Madame Bovary" or "the late Flaubert." They are alive. If the writer manages to imbue them with life, then they, together with their author, live forever. When people ask me, "Why do you write about a vanished world?" I answer, "Whether a hero is alive today and will be dead twenty years from now, or whether he died twenty years ago or two thousand years ago‑if the writer has given him life, he or she will be a living part of human conciousness.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer