Being an obscure writer with an obscure publisher puts you out there on your own. You’re a Willy Loman, chatting up the managers of bookstores, writing snappy letters to regional buyers, and leaving off fliers at libraries. Willy was out there on a shoeshine and a smile. I wear sneakers. Either way, you meet all kinds, and it can be especially exciting if you have a speech problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Since I do a little writing, I enjoy metafiction, stories and novels in which the creative process itself is part of the theme. A great one from a couple of decades back was The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. In this tale a shadowy figure representing the author makes an appearance. In the excellent film adaptation, the movie makers become the story in the last act. Another fine novel was Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler. It is interesting to speculate on how the expectations of readers, not to mention the way minds process information, help to shape the story, and Calvino’s novel begins with the reader browsing in a bookstore. At every stage in If On a Winter’s Night, the reader steps in to have a say. Narratives are driven by the desires of the primary characters, but also, Calvino shows, by the desires of readers. Read the rest of this entry »
The older I get, the more I value short novels. It’s a ratio thing. When I sit down to read, I wonder what percentage of my remaining life will be devoted to the book that is now in my hands. And what percentage of that remaining life am I willing to live vicariously? In college we read War and Peace, a hundred pages a week for nine or ten weeks. I read it all and was impressed with myself. Last year I decided to read it again, just to see how the characters were doing. The second reading was simply a chore. Tolstoy had become long winded–all that theory-of-history stuff! All that editorializing! And Pierre . . . how did Professor Ramsland ever convince us that Pierre was an interesting fellow? Or had Pierre simply become plump and boring from dozing there on my bookshelf all those years? If I were in the book bizz today, I’d put out an edited version of War and Peace–all the lame theorizing would go, and definitely Pierre would be off the team. Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark? I don’t think so–it would be War and Peace without the dumb guy. Read the rest of this entry »
Graywolf Press of St. Paul, MN is publishing a series of books on the art of literary writing, each focusing on a different aspect of that art. Judging from the two I’ve read so far, this may well become the definitive collection for writers, teachers, and readers.
Ron Carlson Writes a Story, by (surprise!) Ron Carlson, takes us through the writing of one of his short stories, discussing his creative process in nearly a line by line fashion. The book is perhaps a more useful version of Robert Olen Butler’s video of himself writing, and it is also reminiscent of Roland Barthes’ S/Z, which offered a line by line analysis of Balzac’s “Sarrasine.” Carlson starts by talking about where the general idea for the story (”The Governor’s Ball”) came from, moves on to how he named his characters, and then to how he placed them in a specific setting. In discussing dialogue, he dismisses the old view that it should serve mainly to advance plot. Carlson’s advice is for the writer of a more modern, character-driven fiction, where dialogue exists as a window into the unconscious and the unsayable, a window into subtext.
I live in Duluth, springtime’s last stop, so my wife and I looked forward to our short stay in the Twin Cities over the weekend. I’ve edited a collection of poems in honor of a great American poet, and we went 150 miles south to do a couple of book events and to see green grass. We called our trip The James Wright Mystery Tour, the mystery being whether anyone would show up for the events. From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright has contributions from some major American poets–Galway Kinnell, C. K. Williams, and others–and also from some fine poets with a more regional fame. A few in this latter group joined me to read both their own poems and Wright’s, and to talk about his importance to Minnesota. Wright had taught at our state university in the Sixties and wrote some of his best poems during those years. Read the rest of this entry »
