Among Other Writers

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.


Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg

Writing Advice: Writers as Outsiders

"We are the tools and instruments of out talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with . . . . Personally, I like not being noticed. I like to hang about the shadows of the world both as a writer and as a person; I dislike limelight, and the center of things is a place to watch rather than become involved in."

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

The Right Word

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. (Mark Twain)

The "Wise Reader" Method for Author Feedback

A writer needs feedback on his work especially during the first few draftsof a story. He needs to know what works and what does not, what to cut, what to expand, and so on. While many of us would like to help our fellow authors in this endeavor, most of us are not (mercifully) experienced critics or book reviewers. We read or hear a piece, form a general impression, and then are at a loss for words beyond, "It didn't do much for me," or "I liked it," or "That's pretty good."

Here is a more effective way to read or listen to an author's work, and thenrespond. Advocated by Orson Scott Card in his book How to Write Fantasy & Science Fiction, he calls it the "Wise Reader" method. Briefly, the aim of the method is not to tell the writer what or how to revise (how to fix anything) but instead to report your response to what he has already written so he knows where a story needs work. In Mr. Card's words:

"Rare is the writer who actually knows what he's written when it first comesout on paper. A passage you think is clear won't be. A character you think is fascinating will bore other people silly because you haven't yet grasped what it is that makes him interesting. But you won't know it until someone else has read it and told you.

"Who? Your workshop? A teacher?

"They really can't do the job you need. You need someone to read it now, today, the minute you finish it. Someone who is committed to your career and wants you to succeed almost as much as you do.

"In other words, you need a spouse, or very close friend who is a brilliant critic.

"...Here's the good news: You can turn almost any intelligent, committed person into the Wise Reader you need. But first you have to understand that a Wise Reader is not someone to tell you what to do next, it's someone to tell you what you have just done. In other words you want your spouse or friend to report to you, in detail and accurately, on the experience of reading your story."

Card goes on to say that he prefers a Wise Reader not have formal literarytraining, lest he is tempted to diagnose, analyze, or offer prescriptions. Card says:

"...[Don't] imagine for a moment that he [the Wise Reader] can tell you how to fix your story. All he can tell you is what it feels like to read it."

So how do we become Wise Readers for authors sharing their work with us? Here are five key points a Wise Reader monitors as he reads a story. (Keeping pencil and paper handy during this process is most helpful):

* High Interest? What parts of the story kept you riveted to your seat? Werethere parts where you lost interest or found your mind wandering? Were thereparts that were out-and-out boring?

(This helps point the author toward sections of the story that needrevision, rearranging, or cutting.)

* Engaging Characters? What did you feel about each character? Love him? Hate him? Captured by him? Filled with apathy and inertia? Did you keep getting him confused with another character, or (really bad news!) forget who he was from chapter to chapter?

(This lets the author know when his readership is feeling the right thingsabout a character, and for the right reasons.)

* Clear Presentation? Did you understand all the scenes? If a scene is meant to convey mystery or confusion, did it come off that way? Were there places where you had to reread to get the picture of what the author was trying to say?

(This points to places where exposition is not handled properly, or the writing is plain confusing.)

* High Credibility? Were all the scenes, characters, actions, and dialoguebelievable? or were there spots where you simply could not buy what washappening in the story?

(This highlights cliches and areas needing better detail and explanation.)

* Effective Resolution? What do you think will happen next in the story? Arethere areas of confusion remaining, questions left unanswered, issues leftunresolved?

(If the reading is a fragment, questions left unanswered will notify the author about the conflicts and tensions he has successfully created. On the other hand, in a scene or complete work, it can also tell him what he has failed to explain to the reader's satisfaction.)

Card ends his exposition on wise readership with good news and bad news. The good news, he says, is that industriously applying the method assures an author his work is as polished as he can get it, and increases, perhaps dramatically, his likelihood of publication. The bad news is that no one becomes a part-time Wise Reader. Once we have learned the technique, we apply it to all the books we read, all the movies we see. We find ourselves grumbling over art we used to enjoy in blissful naivete. Nonetheless, wise readership is worth the effort and cost because, in the end, it make betterreaders and writers of us all.

by Fred W. Hansen

I Fight with Words

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

Short Stories (Richard Ford)

The Granta Book of the American Short Story

An excerpt from Richard Ford's excellent (6500 word) introduction: STORIES I LIKE

My own until-recently-private standards for what comprises a good story written by somebody other than me should be, I think, mentioned here, along with two or three gate-keeping remarks: that standards almost always come after the fact and by themselves neither predict nor produce great short stories; that the very best stories observe standards all their own, discovered unpredictably in the private rigors of writing; that toward short stories I feel vulnerable to any conception of form that inspires invention and discovery; and that I'm willing to call a piece of writing a short story if that's what the writer says it is. Ultimately, it's a good thing that American short stories remain as dissimilar and as formally under defined as they are.

As for me, I've always liked stories that strain my credulity, rather than ones that affirm what I know, and in payment for that strain make me aware of something I didn't know-the otherwise inaccessible. These are stories that prove, for example, the connection between bliss and bale, or the discrepancy between conventional wisdom and the truth, or that reveal affection residing where before it had seemed absent. Such stories concede what I believe-that literature is a privileged speaking which readers come to hungry for what lived life cannot usually provide.

I've always liked stories that make proportionately ample rather than slender use of language; feeling as I do that exposure to a writer's special language is a rare and consoling pleasure. I think of stories as objects made of language, not just as reports on/or illustrations of life, and within that definition, a writer's decision to represent life 'realistically' is only one of a number of possibilities for the use of his or her words.

Forgive me, but I like stories that I finally come to feel I understand; that is, whose purport I become confident about because of some gesture in the story itself-this, even though the story may not make a lick of ordinary sense. I don't consider stories to be documents for analysis or texts for study. But since as a willing reader I know stories are made things and without a natural form, I like them to have contemplated all the important curiosities they arouse in me, or at least create the illusion that they've contemplated them.

I like stories that end rather than merely stop, stories that somehow assure me that their stopping point is the best moment for all progress to cease.

In broader terms, I like stories I don't feel I could have written myself, and that are at least smarter than I am about their own subject matters. Otherwise, why bother reading them if you don't have to?

Beyond that, even though I prefer stories in which the goings-on inside seem to matter in the way life and death seem to matter, if that is not the intention, then I like the story's effects to compensate for that preference of mine. I like stories whose ends you can't predict when you've read to the middle. Often mid-way of a story I make just such a silent prediction and am always disappointed when I'm right. Though whatever's there at the end needs, for greatest power, to arise somehow (plausibly?) out of the story's terms.

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace 'out there' there exists an urgency-a chaos, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers.

Giving Up the Ghost

"On any given week, up to half of any nonfiction best-seller list is written by someone other than the name on the book," declared a 1997 New York Times piece that examined the growing presence of ghostwritten books in the publishing world. "Add those authors who feel enough latent uneasiness to bury the writer's name in the acknowledgements and the percentage, according to one agent, reaches as high as 80."

Sadly, very few of them are worth reading, including many of those I'd had a hand in producing.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us--so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

Cocktail party material aside, somewhere along, the way, I lost my way. When I started I told myself that ghostwriting was as good a training ground for a novelist as most any other kind of writing, that someday I would resurrect my unpublished novel and be equipped, at long last, with the necessary skills to fix it. That by studying others' voices I would learn how to shape and refine my own. This was the crux of my John Hopkins voice class. Learning to modulate, even appropriate another's voice was useful, I instructed. Yet after a while, I warned my students, ghostwriting becomes an exercise in ventriloquism and nothing much else.

THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE (Volume 35, Number 1) from "Giving Up the Ghost" by Barbara Feinman Todd

Description

A writer should not be an interpreter. He should not try to explain the facts of life. He should only describe them, make them alive as possible.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Writing Advice: Seduced by 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 Chapter One, Stein on Writing: Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

Telling the Truth

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

A Character's Change/Resolution

"In the best stories, the odyssey from complication to resolution changes the character profoundly. In fact, the resolution often results not directly from the action but from a growing enlightenment -- often a suddenflash of insight -- as the character finally realizes what he has to do to solve the problem.

"Screenwriters often call this flash of insight or self realization, a 'plot point.' Screenwriters talk about two plot points, the first being thecomplication and the second coming near the end of the story, where the character finally fully perceives the nature of his problem and, as a result, sees how to solve it. But since we are discussing complication and resolution form, we have the need to refer to only one plot point, the second, or point of insight....

"Once you identify the plot point, you know you have found a story in which the character"s struggle leaves him a better, more mature individual. You have thus tied the character irrevocably to plot, and you have a viable story....

"If your story meets all the criteria it will, in the language of editors, 'work.' That means it will consist of a real person who is confronted with a significant problem, who struggles diligently to solve that problem, and who ultimately succeeds -- and in doing so becomes a different character....

"But the deeper satisfaction comes when the reader learns with thecharacter. The reader, like the character, thus becomes a better and wiser person; the story, in the final analysis, is an artificial experience. It doesn"t moralize but, like all experience, it teaches."


Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner by Jon Franklin (pages 89-90)

Staying Close to the Edge

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. (Kurt Vonnegut)

Humor

Whenever a person has wit, there's always a victim of this wit. He always makes fun of somebody, and it is always a human being. You don't say that a dog is funny or a horse is funny. No one will say that a rock or a river is funny. If you say that a table is funny, you make fun of the carpenter who made the table. Actually, humor is a criticism of human behavior.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Literature and Entertainment

I don't believe in forced reading, where students are forced by professors or they compel themselves to read. Since I believe that literature is basically entertaining, the quantity is as important as the quality.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Books That Changed My Life

I discovered Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner! in college, when I was in England for my junior year. Certainly, the initial appeal to me was the onrush of language in the novel, and just like Wuthering Heights, the story it tells is full of passion. But there's nothing more passionate in that book than the relentless demand that the story must be told, again and again. The sentences themselves contain that passion. The breathless desperation to get it told, to pass it on, to explain it to someone else--that's the thing that caught me up. That and the sense that the telling of the story itself is of great value,

[Faulkner’s] language [has influenced my writing]--the permission he gives us to let language be lush but not wasteful, the passion for language contained in each sentence. And the idea that there are many ways to tell a story. You don't have to have a rising action and climax.

Writing about Irish Catholics in New York is writing about material at hand; I don't have to consult with anyone to find out what jokes they would tell each other at somebody's funeral. So in some ways, writing about family is the same. I know something about families. But I have no inherent interest in Irish Catholic families in New York as such. I think the great drama of most of our lives takes place in families, and my interests as a writer really come down to how we live, how we deal with one another, how we make sense of our brief lives. And one way to begin to write about that is to write about an Irish Catholic family in New York.

There comes a point in your writing life--and it comes again and again--when you're able to divest yourself of all other concerns about your career, your readers, your publisher, about paying the bills, and you understand that the work is the only thing that matters. It follows very quickly that since the work is the only thing that counts, you must write about the truest things you know. And time and time again what it comes down to for me is that faith--our need for it, our struggle with it--is the most important thing. But as I say, it's not something that you decide once, nor is it something that you're sure to achieve again and again. You never have the sense that, "Ah, I have now said the truest thing. And I'm going to go and say it again." It's more like, "I'm attempting to say the truest thing I know about us, about our existence, about life, and I'm attempting to do it in the best way I know through language. And of course I haven't done it yet." (Alice McDermott)


The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists

Quote: We Must Enjoy Art

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

Advice from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

". . . .the novel is like a tapestry. It's a long and painstaking process, and I have to work on the details and create an alternative world, and it has to, be as.full and rich as I can make it. A short story is like painting a watercolor--the challenge is to have a lightness of touch. What I'm working with is nuance and subtlety and ellipses--what I'm leaving out is important as what I'm putting in. I have to work with the power of suggestion and I love the form because of this.

What I learned from reading so many novels, is that the novel, as it goes on, has to expand. It has to give you a sense of a larger life, not just the story you're dealing with, no matter how well it's told. There must be a sense of resonance, a sense that in that story is the knowledge of a whole larger story whose presence is felt.

One of the things I tell my students at Houston is, "Stop! Don't read so much." Usually teachers are saying just the opposite, but there comes a time when you have to shut down all of the input channels, and you have to go into yourself and. write what's in there. Sometimes students in writing programs are using too much of their logical and critical brainpower and not enough of their intuition.

Be very clear about where the heart of the story is, what is most important, what's at stake. Have you managed to stay focused on that? Is that where the energy is coming from? 0r have you digressed onto other things which are easier or flashier?

from "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" by Sarah Anne Johnson
The Writer's Chronicle September 2002

Demanding Characters

William C. Knott in The Craft of Fiction, advises that you start not with a premise (which he calls a theme), but rather with characters who demand to be whatever life you can create for them on the printed page. It is the characters who must galvanize you to write, insisting that you tell their story.


How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Steb-By-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling by James N. Frey

Superfluous Dialogue

Dialogue which does not move the story along, or add to the mood of the story, or have an easily definable reason for being there at all (such as to establish important characterization), should be considered superfluous and therefore cut." (Bill Pronzini)

Writing About Place: The Boundaries of a Story

"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book-a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell each day." -Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Consider the Five W's:

Who is character;
What is plot;
When is chronology;
Why is motive;
Where is place, the boundaries of the story.

Journalists are pretty good at getting the first four into their work. But "Where" is the least explored and the most poorly executed in American journalism. Why do so many of us write so ineffectively about place?

• Time. As deadline approaches, many of us spend dwindling minutes thinking only in terms of plot and motive and possibly character.

• Inclination. We grow up thinking place is unimportant. Many of us have an undeveloped sense of place in our own lives-we're unfamiliar with our own backyards-and we don't know what things are or how they relate. Meanwhile, the best writing weaves place into narrative and creates literature. Think of Mark Twain on the Mississippi and Cormac McCarthy in Mexico-the land in their work becomes another character. Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Alex Wilkinson, Jimmy Breslin, William Least Heat Moon, and Isabel Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The New Yor Times this year for feature writing, brilliantly use place as well. How can we all do it better?

• Be there. Sounds obvious, but how many times do we end up doing our reporting over the telephone. Sometimes a reporter has time for nothing else, but sometimes the reporter is lazy. Stories filled with disembodied "talking head" experts from government seldom are memorable. Specific details about people and place, gathered by a reporter on the scene, are rewards a writer can sprinkle through a story to hold readers.

• Ask "What's that?" Find an expert who can identify key landmarks for you, from buildings and trees to animals and sounds.

• Become an expert on the community you cover. Find out as much as you can about living things: human, animal, and vegetable. Develop your eye. As Thoreau wrote in an 1851 journal, "The question is not what you look at,but what you see." An exercise: walk in your backyard, look around, close your eyes, and recall specific details of what you've just seen.

• Look for telling details. If it's the oppressive heat, hammer it, not once, but several times, into the narrative,in different places;weave in the humidity, the dripping sweat, the need to constantly drink, the short tempers; make the reader feel it.

• Let place become a character in your story. Environment writers like to sentence readers to breakfast with talking-head politicians, scientists, and statistic- spouting lobbyists. Place is an afterthought in stories that beg for description and even wonder.

• Interview subjects in their natural habitat. Never, ever, let a story subject come to your office for an interview if you can help it.

• Take a field trip with your story subject. Place can provoke new information, funny stories, and great dialogue. The way people talk, and what they talk about, is influenced by their surroundings. They may whisper in church, shout on the basketball court, talk nonsense after a couple of tall boys. Or they may chat about something remarkable they've just seen, something important. Ask people about their "sacred" places. They're vaults where we store ideals. "Where did you grow up?" "What did you enjoy doing when you were a child?" "Where did you do it?" all can open emotional doors. When you interview somebody at home, ask for a tour. Every picture, every book, every piece of furniture, can tell a story.

(Jeff Klinkenberg, St. Petersburg Times)

Viewpoint Mistakes

Making a viewpoint mistake means you've yanked the reader out of her comfortable position without giving her something in return that's worth the disturbance you've caused. Sometimes you switch VP without knowing it, and sometimes you know you've done it but don't realize how much trouble you've caused.

JUST REMEMBER that every time you change VP, you disturb the reader. In effect, you have put her in place and are showing her something when suddenly you grab her by the shoulders & spin her around to look at something else. Of course she's annoyed. Wouldn't you be?

The VP change is not so jarring when it occurs at the end of a scene. Your reader is not expecting to be moved in another VP, but at least she's expecting something different. Even within a scene, you should allow a passage of time or a change of venue if you absolutely have to switch POV and can't end your chapter with one POV and start another POV at just that point. Here's a trick I use. Say I'm in a scene with my hero and heroine, and I start the scene in the hero's POV. I did this in When Somebody Wants You. It was the prelude to the love scene, and my hero, Dev, comes to my heroine's apartment. He sees Elise, the heroine, and we know what he's thinking and feeling. The conversation begins. All from his POV. Then, Elise gets up to go into the kitchen. This part of the scene ends with a thought of Dev's as she leaves. There is a scene break, denoted by a pound sign, the sign that tells the typesetter to put a space there. Then, from Elise's POV, she reenters the room. The reader knows time has passed because Elise comes in with a laden tray. This is kind of cheating, because we haven't really changed the scene, but technically, we have.

But when the VP change comes at the start of a new chapter, there is even less disturbance, because the reader believes she has seen all there is to see from her particular angle, so she is ready to look elsewhere.

VIEWPOINT RULE #1 - Never change viewpoints when you don't have to.

VIEWPOINT RULE #2 - If you change VP make sure you reward the reader for her troubles, with an exciting new scene or chapter, or some compelling new information. This, incidentally, applies to every aspect of your writing. Never disturb the reader without giving something in return. There must always be a payoff.

(Patricia Kay)

Daydreaming

Literature is actually a form of daydreaming, under control or with a purpose. Not with a message, but with a purpose.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Writing Advice: Waiting for Gogol

I feel that America is waiting for a Gogol or a Sholem Aleichem, because behavior in this country has become so standardized that we are slowly losing our sense of human values. It is a result of the fact that the media are so omnipresent in this country. We are fooled by myriads of generalizations and by floods of propaganda.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

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)

Youth

There is something about writers—the first fifteen years of their life is never lost to them. It is like a well which is never exhausted.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Truth

There are a number of writers now who think that when they distort reality, it may magnify their power. Distortion is not the ideal of literature, because deep in his heart every writer wants to tell the truth. He is, in a way, a carrier of the truth, but he carries the truth in his own way, according to his emotions. A writer who will sit down and distort reality arbitrarily will never succeed from a literary point of view. When you read Tolstoy you see that although he's dreaming, he's trying his best to make his dreams as convincing as possible. I feel that now there is a tendency in literature towards distorting the order of things, not to create great art but to be "original" through distortion. Distortion and originality have become synonyms, while actually they are very far from one another.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Human Ocean

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

Kafka

I feel in Kafka a great power, but the truth is that the literary idols of this generation are not my idols‑neither Kafka nor Joyce. I have to make an effort to read them and I don't think that fiction is good when you have to make an effort. After you read, say, fifty pages of THE TRIAL, you get the point.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Giving Characters Life

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

About Editors

Years ago, Ford Madox Ford referred to editors as swinging doors "that authors kick both on entering and leaving." Writer's, of course, tend to describe editors using somewhat different metaphors. Clearly an adversarial relationship is often perceived where, if there were better communication, none needs to exist. Granted, an editor's job is primarily that of a naysayer-at the Georgia Review we are forced to decline over 15,000 manuscripts each year-but that situation only exists because writers freely submit so much work arid would strongly resist any effort to curb that privilege.

One of the questions I am asked frequently at writers' conferences is, "How does it feel to have all the power that goes with being editor of the Georgia Review?" Such a question, it should be noted, is never raised by one aware of how much editing is routine drudgery, how much uncertainty editors have over near-acceptances, how much guilt accumulates over dated correspondence and aging manuscripts still awaiting responses. Power? We're just human beings, making what we hope is a responsible and creative contribution to a literary enterprise that is much larger than any individual writer or editor.

"Of Editors, Writers, and Swinging Doors" by Stanley W. Lindberg
The Writer's Chronicle December 2002

Being a Reader

I don't care if [Shakespeare’s] work was written by Bacon or by some ghost writer. Let the professors worry. I am still a reader. When you are really hungry, you don't look for the biography of the baker.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

When Writing Becomes Literature

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

Precision in Language

The writer who tries to be precise is forced to reject almost all adjectives. He has to function practically with only those nouns which express clear and simple images. The language of technology does not stir the reader's emotions; it has neither the power to entertain the reader nor to lift his spirit. It may sound like a paradox, but the thicker the dictionaries become, the poorer the language is becoming for the writer of fiction. The art of writing nowadays lies not in finding new words, but in avoiding more and more those words which have become nothing but empty clichés, like "good, bad, decent, immoral, charming, ugly, noble, clever, attractive," and many, many others which are now stale.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Writers as Outsiders

"We are the tools and instruments of out talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with . . . . Personally, I like not being noticed. I like to hang about the shadows of the world both as a writer and as a person; I dislike limelight, and the center of things is a place to watch rather than become involved in." (William Trevor)

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

Seduced by 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 Chapter One


Stein on Writing: Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

Writing Advice: Youth

There is something about writers—the first fifteen years of their life is never lost to them. It is like a well which is never exhausted.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Difference Between Fiction and Reality

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. (Tom Clancy)

We Must Enjoy Art

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

Waiting for Gogol

I feel that America is waiting for a Gogol or a Sholem Aleichem, because behavior in this country has become so standardized that we are slowly losing our sense of human values. It is a result of the fact that the media are so omnipresent in this country. We are fooled by myriads of generalizations and by floods of propaganda.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Cult of Personality

When people begin to be less interested in art, they become more interested in the artist and vice versa. When literature and art become overly "erudite" and develop a cult of personality, it means that the interest in art is gone and the artist has become a kind of idol.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

A Child is Not Influenced by Critics

When I was young I used to read books and I never really looked at who the author was. I didn't care. When I was a boy of twelve, I read Tolstoy, but I didn't know it was Tolstoy. I didn't even know that I was reading a translation. What's the difference? I was interested in the story, not the author. I could not repeat the word Dostoyevsky. I didn't care because a real reader, especially a young reader, never cares too much about the author. On the other hand, the aca­demic reader doesn't really care about the story; he cares about the author. We are living now in a time when people are so interested in the author that the story is almost secondary, which is very bad. Many of the readers of today themselves want to be writers. They are interested in the shop; they are interested in the maker. The good reader, the real reader when he is young, doesn't care so much who Tolstoy was and what he was. He wants to read the book and he enjoys it.

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

Choosing the Best Descriptive Details

First impressions, experts tell us, are usually formed in the first ten seconds. The law of "primacy" is at work here--what a person observes first is usually remembered most strongly. This applies to characters in your fiction, just as it does to people you meet in everyday life.

Your task is to create a "visual" for the reader (external), a sense of what is inside the character (internal), and something about that character that sets him or her apart (singularity). That last is crucial because great characters are unique. Even if you are using an "ordinary person" as your main character, you can--and should--give that character a strong individuallife.

So GRAB the reader's attention. If your character is bizarre in some way, that's always good. For more "normal" characters, you'll have to look closely to your imagination for the details that are, to use a general term, "unusual." Why? Because the usual is dull, cliched.

Character description ought to do at least double duty: give us a picture of the character and also indicate something about the character's inner life. Inner life comes from a combination of things: background, habits, living conditions, dreams. There is an infinite universe of connections from which to draw. These are the some basics of creating vivid characters.

from the Creating Dynamic Characters Workshop
http://www.WritersOnlineWorkshops.com

Writing Advice: Truth

There are a number of writers now who think that when they distort reality, it may magnify their power. Distortion is not the ideal of literature, because deep in his heart every writer wants to tell the truth. He is, in a way, a carrier of the truth, but he carries the truth in his own way, according to his emotions. A writer who will sit down and distort reality arbitrarily will never succeed from a literary point of view. When you read Tolstoy you see that although he's dreaming, he's trying his best to make his dreams as convincing as possible. I feel that now there is a tendency in literature towards distorting the order of things, not to create great art but to be "original" through distortion. Distortion and originality have become synonyms, while actually they are very far from one another.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Short Personal Essay

The short personal essay is the most publishable of all genres of creative writing. Unlike the market for fiction or poetry, there is always a place to send a personal essay. If you write something true and honest from your- heart (or funny bone), if there's a point to it, if the subject and word count is right for the market, it will eventually be published.

. . . .Though not adhering to the formal rules of the essays you wrote in English class, the personal essay is crafted and shaped: it has a beginning, a middle and an ending. The opening must draw the reader in, set up expectations for what the essay is about. The essay's tone and subject are clear in the first paragraph.

In the middle of the essay, something happens: An anecdote illustrates your theme. The reader wants to go through the experience with you, not be told about it from a distance. Use the devices of fiction. Set the scene. What were your five senses picking up? What was said? Use dialogue if you can. Be specific in your details and descriptions of people and places.

from "On Writing Personal Essays" by Barbara Abercrombie
The Writer January 2003

Your Characters Weaknesses

Don’t short-change your characters by choosing tepid weaknesses [for them]. Remember, the harder the struggle, the more emotion you can build.

from “Fiction’s Connecting Link: Emotion” by Kathy Jacobson


The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing edited by Meg Leder and Jack Heffron

On Writing and Getting Published

The Importance of Reading

Read. That's the single best thing an aspiring writer can do for his or her work. I once heard an editor say, "Read a thousand books of the genre you're interested in. THEN write yours."

I was astonished and pleased to hear her say this--because that's exactly what I did. During the years when I had no thought of writing for children, I read and read and read. Middle-grade novels. Hundreds of them--easily more than a thousand. Then I wrote mine--and it sold on its first submission. Luck? Coincidence? Maybe...but I doubt it.

My personal reading list draws from a wide variety of genres. I love middle-grade novels best, but I also read Young Adult novels and picture books. I read adult literary fiction, mysteries and nonfiction. I read poetry. I love books on food and travel. Whether a wondrous story or a hilarious passage of dialogue or a beautiful sentence or a memorable image, every bit of reading I do helps my own writing. The rhythm of language and the way words combine to communicate more than their dictionary meanings infuse the serious reader's mind and emerge transformed when that reader sits down to write. That's really the best possible advice I could give any writer--read. But I find that folks are often disappointed with this advice, so I'll offer a few more basic tips.

Discipline

I don't write every day because I also teach part-time. But on my writing days, I sit down at the keyboard in the morning and I don't get up until I've written at least two double-spaced pages. That's about 500 words, which works well for me. Find what works for you.

On bad days, I might get 480 words written and throw them all away the next day. (My theory there is, I figure I'm getting all the awful stuff out of me...) On good days, two pages becomes twenty. But--and this is key--when I sit down to write I never know for sure which kind of day it's going to become. I do my two pages no matter how crummy I feel about writing that day...and when I'm lucky, the act of writing itself turns the day into a good one.

Linda Sue Park's website (December 2000)


A Single Shard

What Makes a Story?

A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.


Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner by Jon Frankli

I Write Whenever It Suits Me

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted. When I cease to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking down dictation, I stop. (Francois Mauriac)

Books that Changed My Life

Isaac Bashevis Singer once said that every writer needs to have an address. Why else do we speak of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy as Russian writers, and of Jane Austen and Dickens and George Eliot as English writers, and of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Márquez as South American writers, and so on? In this connection, and in nuance and perception (and with conscious respect for the obvious differences in stature and renown), I am a Jewish writer as John Updike is a Christian writer, or as V. S. Naipaul is a Hindu writer, or as Salman Rushdie is a Muslim writer. I have been, enchanted by Jewish fable (the golem tale, for instance) or struck to the marrow by Jewish historical catastrophe (as in the little book called The Shawl). It is self-evident that any writer's subject matter will emerge from that writer's preoccupations, and it goes without saying that all writers are saturated, to one degree or another, in origins, in history. And for everyone alive in the century we have left behind, the cataclysm of murder and atrocity that we call the Holocaust is inescapable and indelible, and inevitably marks-stains-our moral nature; it is an event that excludes no one.

And yet no writer of stories should be expected to be a moral champion or a representative of "identity." That way lies tract and sermon and polemic. When a thesis or a framework-any kind of prescriptiveness or tendentiousness-is imposed on the writing of fiction, imagination flies out the door, and with it the freedom and volatility and irresponsibility that imagination both confers and demands. I have never set out to be anything other than a writer of stories. It disturbs me when, as sometimes happens, I am mistaken for a champion of identity in the currently fashionable multicultural sense, with its emphasis on ethnic collectivities. (The Greek origin of the word "ethnic," by the way, refers to anyone who is neither Jewish nor Christian. One of my dictionaries defines ethnic as "pagan.")

Writing Advice: The Human Ocean

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

Writing is Sedentary

Writing is sedentary. Without a regular exercise program, both your body and your creative brain will be in trouble. (Oh, stop whining. You know I'm right.) THE WRITER January 2003 From "What I know, for sure ... I think"

(A best-selling author offers words of wisdom gleaned from 20 years of writing) by Susan Elizabeth Philips

The Young Reader Only Cares About the Story, Not the Author

When I was young I used to read books and I never really looked at who the author was. I didn't care. When I was a boy of twelve, I read Tolstoy, but I didn't know it was Tolstoy. I didn't even know that I was reading a translation. What's the difference? I was interested in the story, not the author. I could not repeat the word Dostoyevsky. I didn't care because a real reader, especially a young reader, never cares too much about the author. On the other hand, the academic reader doesn't really care about the story; he cares about the author. We are living now in a time when people are so interested in the author that the story is almost secondary, which is very bad. Many of the readers of today themselves want to be writers. They are interested in the shop; they are interested in the maker. The good reader, the real reader when he is young, doesn't care so much who Tolstoy was and what he was. He wants to read the book and he enjoys it.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Young Reader Only Cares About the Story, Not the Author

When I was young I used to read books and I never really looked at who the author was. I didn't care. When I was a boy of twelve, I read Tolstoy, but I didn't know it was Tolstoy. I didn't even know that I was reading a translation. What's the difference? I was interested in the story, not the author. I could not repeat the word Dostoyevsky. I didn't care because a real reader, especially a young reader, never cares too much about the author. On the other hand, the academic reader doesn't really care about the story; he cares about the author. We are living now in a time when people are so interested in the author that the story is almost secondary, which is very bad. Many of the readers of today themselves want to be writers. They are interested in the shop; they are interested in the maker. The good reader, the real reader when he is young, doesn't care so much who Tolstoy was and what he was. He wants to read the book and he enjoys it.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The First Fifteen Years of Life

There is something about writers—the first fifteen years of their life is never lost to them. It is like a well which is never exhausted.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Books that Changed My Life

Isaac Bashevis Singer once said that every writer needs to have an address. Why else do we speak of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy as Russian writers, and of Jane Austen and Dickens and George Eliot as English writers, and of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Márquez as South American writers, and so on? In this connection, and in nuance and perception (and with conscious respect for the obvious differences in stature and renown), I am a Jewish writer as John Updike is a Christian writer, or as V. S. Naipaul is a Hindu writer, or as Salman Rushdie is a Muslim writer. I have been, enchanted by Jewish fable (the golem tale, for instance) or struck to the marrow by Jewish historical catastrophe (as in the little book called The Shawl). It is self-evident that any writer's subject matter will emerge from that writer's preoccupations, and it goes without saying that all writers are saturated, to one degree or another, in origins, in history. And for everyone alive in the century we have left behind, the cataclysm of murder and atrocity that we call the Holocaust is inescapable and indelible, and inevitably marks-stains-our moral nature; it is an event that excludes no one.

And yet no writer of stories should be expected to be a moral champion or a representative of "identity." That way lies tract and sermon and polemic. When a thesis or a framework-any kind of prescriptiveness or tendentiousness-is imposed on the writing of fiction, imagination flies out the door, and with it the freedom and volatility and irresponsibility that imagination both confers and demands. I have never set out to be anything other than a writer of stories. It disturbs me when, as sometimes happens, I am mistaken for a champion of identity in the currently fashionable multicultural sense, with its emphasis on ethnic collectivities. (The Greek origin of the word "ethnic," by the way, refers to anyone who is neither Jewish nor Christian. One of my dictionaries defines ethnic as "pagan.")


The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists

Autobiography, The Starting Poing

The [role of autobiography is] a starting point, much in the way that physical details are a starting point for writing about meaning and time and dimension. The reader should think that whatever you write is autobiographical, because they should be convinced intensely of the reality of the piece. They should feel that it comes from somewhere very deep in the writer. But the minute you work in language or fiction, there's a translation that occurs-like the translation from one language to another, from book to film, thought to speech. Life and art are such different forms of being. One fears death; the other subverts it.

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

Quote: Because We Lost the War

When The Moviegoer won the National Book Award, Walker Percy was asked why there were so many good Southern writers. "Because we lost the War," he said, and Flannery O'Connor later glossed his remark with startling eloquence. "What he was saying is that we have had our Fall," she explained. "We have gone into the world with an inburnt sense of human limitations, and with a sense of mystery that could not have developed in our first state of innocence—as it has not developed sufficiently in the rest of the country."

Where a Writer Looks

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.

Many Opinions

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion . . . is but knowledge in the making. (John Milton)

Distortion is not the Ideal of Literature

There are a number of writers now who think that when they distort reality, it may magnify their power. Distortion is not the ideal of literature, because deep in his heart every writer wants to tell the truth. He is, in a way, a carrier of the truth, but he carries the truth in his own way, according to his emo­tions. A writer who will sit down and distort reality arbitrarily will never succeed from a literary point of view. When you read Tolstoy you see that although he's dreaming, he's trying his best to make his dreams as convincing as possible. I feel that now there is a tendency in literature towards distorting the order of things, not to create great art but to be "original" through distortion. Distortion and originality have become synonyms, while actually they are very far from one another.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Heart of the Story

Be very clear about where the heart of the story is, what is most important, what's at stake. Have you managed to stay focused on that? Is that where the energy is coming from? 0r have you digressed onto other things which are easier or flashier?

from "An Interview with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni" THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE September 2002

Writing from Memory

Chekhov was perfectly aware that he wrote out of his memories. He said: "I can only write from my memories, and I have never written directly from nature. The subject must first seep through my memory, leaving as in a filter only what is important and typical." We know some of the memories which were later shaped into stories, and it is instructive to observe what he took from them and what he left out.

from Robert Payne, Image of Chekhov: Forty Stories in the Order in Which They Were Written

A Writer Describes but Doesn't Explain

A writer should not be an interpreter. He should not try to explain the facts of life. He should only describe them, make them alive as possible.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Quote: The Power of Poetry

"The Power of verse is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it SAYS and what it IS. Indefinable is essential to the definition." --Paul Valery, quoted by Edward Hirsch in How to Read a Poem.

Dealing 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)

What Kind of Writing Pays Best?

"I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid best. He said: ransom notes."

from Elmore Leonard, in GET SHORTY

Literature is a Form of Daydreaming

Literature is actually a form of daydreaming, under control or with a purpose. Not with a message, but with a purpose.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Passive Voice

Simply put, passive voice is a verb phrase; that is, a verb string consisting of a being verb plus a past participle; for example: The submarine was (being verb) sunk (past participle).

Also, writers often follow the verb with a prepositional phrase that begins with "by." The object of the preposition, the doer of the verb's action, should be the subject; for example: The submarine was sunk by the Germans.

Sometimes passive voice is necessary.

--from Joy Bagley, writer and workshop leader

Flannery O'Connor's "Moment of Grace"

"There is a moment of grace in most of the stories, or a moment where it is offered, and is usually rejected. Like when the Grandmother recognizes the Misfit as one of her own children and reaches out to touch him. It's the moment of grace for her anyway--a silly old woman--but it leads him to shoot her. This moment of grace excites the devil to frenzy."

from Flannery O'Connor's THE HABIT OF BEING letter to Andrew Lytle, 4 February 1960

Giving Up the Ghost

"On any given week, up to half of any nonfiction best-seller list is written by someone other than the name on the book," declared a 1997 New York Times piece that examined the growing presence of ghostwritten books in the publishing world. "Add those authors who feel enough latent uneasiness to bury the writer's name in the acknowledgements and the percentage, according to one agent, reaches as high as 80."

Sadly, very few of them are worth reading, including many of those I'd had a hand in producing.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us--so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

Cocktail party material aside, somewhere along, the way, I lost my way. When I started I told myself that ghostwriting was as good a training ground for a novelist as most any other kind of writing, that someday I would resurrect my unpublished novel and be equipped, at long last, with the necessary skills to fix it. That by studying others' voices I would learn how to shape and refine my own. This was the crux of my John Hopkins voice class. Learning to modulate, even appropriate another's voice was useful, I instructed. Yet after a while, I warned my students, ghostwriting becomes an exercise in ventriloquism and nothing much else.

THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE (Volume 35, Number 1) from "Giving Up the Ghost" by Barbara Feinman Todd

Children's Picture Book/China: Lon Po Po

Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China by Ed Young (Illustrator)(Caldecott Medal Book 1990) (****)

The art is absolutely gorgeous and resembles Chinese decorative panels. The images are a mix of both abstract and realistic images and the color is subdued and to me provokes a palpable feeling of tension. A beautiful book.

Characters I Invent

The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh--a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jump to the visualizing mind when the story is underway. (Elizabeth Bowen said, "Physical detail cannot be invented." It can only be chosen.) I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close--those known to you in ways too deep, too over flowing, ever to be plumbed outside love--do not yield to, could not fit into, the demands of a story. On the other had, what I do make my stories out of is the 'whole' fund of my feelings, my responses to the real experiences of my own life, to the relationships that formed and changed it, that I have given most of myself to, and so learned my way toward a dramatic counterpart. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.”

(from ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS by Eudora Welty)

Working Without a Net

As John Irving says, none of the novels knows that you've written any of the other novels. Writing is always like working without a net. It doesn't get easier.

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

Rewriting

An old tutor or a college said to one of his pupils: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.


Life of Johnson by Thomas Boswell

One Book Writers

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

Writers Who Annoy Readers

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

The Pen is a Formidable Weapon

The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people.

— George Dennison Prentice, (Prenticeana)

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