Last fall I took a writing workshop with Daniel Wallace, a man who knows a thing or two about bringing books to the big screen. The film rights to Wallace’s novel, “Big Fish”, was purchased by Columbia Pictures. Steven Spielberg sat on the project for a while but it was Tim Burton who eventually directed Ewan McGregor in the starring role.

When Wallace started applauding the talents of the screenwriter who adapted the novel, John August (Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), I felt a little smug and did a knowing nod. I’ve followed August and his blog for a few years now and lately I find myself hanging onto his every word.

Last week August blogged “in defense of fake tears”. It’s about writing as acting and about feeling your way through it all. “One basic goal of creative writing,” said August, “is to evoke a desired response.”

He said this too:

“Screenwriters are basically actors who do their work on the page rather than the stage. Both professions earn their keep by pretending things are much different than they are. Actors ignore the lights and cameras and missing walls. Writers ignore the missing everything, summoning locations and characters to enact scenes which they can later transcribe….Actors and writers are trying to create moments that feel true, despite being completely invented….Experiencing the moment is what writers do, too.” – John August

John August’s Blog
John August’s Twitter

Last month Rachel Cusk had a brilliant article in the Guardian on women’s writing. She made several good points that illustrate the conundrum many of us find ourselves in. Importantly, she asked whether women’s writing should seek equivalence or distinction from its male counterpart. She’s inclined to agree with Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and think the latter. Just as we need a room of our own, we should rightly have a literature of our own. Not simply writing by women, but writing that ‘arises out of, and is shaped by, a set of specifically female conditions’.

She also acknowledged people were sure to question: Why does it have to be politicised? Why can’t we just get on with it?

I’ve managed to misplace the article, so I can’t give proper attribution, but I clipped a quote which might just sum it up. In any case, it gives pause for thought – which is something I plan on doing a lot when my teeth stop hurting.

‘This is an important book,’ the critic assumes, ‘because it deals with war.’

‘This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.’

Eighty years after A Room of One’s Own was first published – and 50 years after The Second Sex – the same value system prevails.

“I’ve never liked talking about art or literature in general, and I’ve always hated artists who talk about their work rather than doing it.”
-Orson Welles

The man voted Greatest Director of All Time by the British Film Institute essentially said that he didn’t dare think about deconstruction and criticism of art and literature because such things would occupy his mind with what were, ultimately, unworthy distractions for any artist.

There’s a lot of talk between The Euro and I about the relationship between acting and writing fiction and the shared goals of the two. The word ‘truth’ is thrown about a lot.

Here Welles tells the interviewer that he doesn’t believe acting (writing fiction) is anything except convincing the audience (reader) of something that isn’t true. This may seem to fly in the face of Stanislavski and all those literary Russians I love so much, until one makes the ‘artistic truth vs. affective memory/emotional truth’ distinction. You’ll also want to remember that Stanislavski was greatly influenced by Tolstoy and the Count didn’t care much for overly cerebral artists…which is what Welles seems to be saying too.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” – Virginia Woolf

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done.

But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion.

- Virginia Woolf

Buffy,

You know what I find exhilarating? Reading something like this:

The light of our cigarettes
Went and came in the gloom.

It is a simile with “like” suppressed: Pound called it an equation, meaning not a redundancy, A equals A, but a generalization of unexpected exactness. So this tiny poem, drawing on Gauguin and on Japan, on ghosts and on Persephone, on the Underworld and on the Underground, the Metro of Mallarm’s capital and a phrase that names a station of the Metro as it might a station of the Cross, concentrates far more than it ever need specify, and indicates the means of delivering post-Symbolist poetry from its pictorialist impasse. “An “Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time“: and that is the elusive Doctrine of the Image. (Hugh Kenner)

…and being overwhelmed by all the potential new information – things to reference in it.

It always reminds me why I love what I love.

Flynn

Every literature or creative writing course I’ve ever taken has addressed this topic: Britishness. What does it mean to be British? Do we do the same thing in The States? I don’t think so. (I never did.) But I’ve never taken a literature/writing course on U.S. soil. So, maybe…

Zadie Smith was the first writer I explored with this particular question in mind: What does it mean to be British? In my view, she answers it fantastically. But I’m a Yank. So what do I know? I’ll tell you what, this – Smith is a brilliant comic novelist (you will especially agree with me if you’ve ever heard her read aloud her work.) And I think Amis does a disservice by not pointing it out. But again, who am I to question the son of Sir Kingsley?

Manchester Centre for New Writing

According to Professor of Creative Writing Martin Amis, he and fellow ‘Literature and Britishness’ panellist Howard Jacobson are the last remaining British comic novelists. If successful humour hinges on implied superiority over other groups we have become a nation terrified of referring to people collectively at all, let alone to any kind of grudge or rivalry based on national identity.

Jacobson claimed to be uncertain whether Britishness actually exists, and certainly not to believe in multiculturalism. In his view, the concept is a device of the English intelligentsia, which would hate its own country’s culture if it couldn’t dismiss the English aspects and embrace those from elsewhere. Yet he spoke of an appealing English quality in the voices of novelists like George Eliot, which he described as simultaneously satirical, tolerant, aloof, and aware of its own absurdity.

He agreed with comments by Amis about the effective tradition of sexual symbolism in British writing, going so far as to say that “…the best sex in an English novel has no mention of sex”. In Amis’s view this is again related to British writing being unusually grounded in sanity, with a median, middle class world its traditional subject matter.

* Listen to the full debate online
* Download the full debate as an mp3 file

Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the muse and ancient understanding – from the TED series.

“The thing to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in the stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well.”

-Flannery O’Connor in a letter to friend and playwright Maryat Lee in 1959.

“Fiction begins where human knowledge begins. With the senses.”

- Flannery O’Connor

It’s the great sweep of time that allows us to make sense of our lives and the lives of people.

I subscribed to American Public Media’s newsletter “Speaking of Faith” several months ago, but never got around to reading or listening to any of it until tonight. After a few minutes I started taking notes like this:

(Novelists) know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

Interesting interview with Pulitzer Prize nominee, the captivating Mary Doria Russell. Plus, she talks about Steve Martin. And Flynn will tell you what’s up with that.

There’s no ignoring the ‘faith-cenetric’ aspect of the piece but it’s more about the novelist playing the role of God, as as a creator of peoples and worlds.