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