Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. – Virginia Woolf

I’m reading The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf and enjoying it a good bit but I’ll leave the expounding to clever types like Flynn.

I find, more and more these days, that I’m one of Woolf’s commoners. On Saturday I read Silence of the Lambs. It left no impression on me whatsoever. Demme’s interpretation swallowed it whole.

“I trained as an actor in New York, and one discipline I studied was the Stanislavski technique, the basis of which is to live truthfully in the imaginary circumstances. That is what I try to do when I write. I set up an imaginary world, and try to let the characters live truthfully in that world.” DeLauné Michel

The Euro and I talk a lot about the interplay between acting and writing. It was the Chekhov-Stanislavski connection that finally made him realize what I was trying to do as a writer wasn’t so very different from what he was trying to do as an actor. And that, maybe, I wasn’t as nonplussed by his art as he imagined me to be.

His emotional engineering and mechanics of expression are much more concrete, much more tangible than mine. He uses his body, his face, his physical voice. Engages the real eye and not just the mind’s eye. He’s all about immediate interactions and reactions and sussing out wants and needs and objectives. In this last regard he’s become freakishly Freudian.

I don’t have his talent. His stage presence, or his life presence. And when it comes to certain communications, I don’t do physical or verbal very well. Lines drawn on paper and algorithmic keystrokes that turn 1s and 0s into meaning…those are my choice emotional mediums. I accomplish more with writing than I ever do with speaking. With writing, I can make you understand. When I speak I often lose all train of thought and any eloquence I might possess. I may as well beat both our heads against a brick wall. It would be more satisfying and we could get on with things quicker.

So, we talk a lot about acting and writing these days. The truths that join them both. And agree even through our disagreeance that he is perfectly suited for one and I the other. We also eat a lot of chocolate.

“The artist’s only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one…If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.”

– William Faulkner

On Thursday, 1 July 2010, Martin Amis will be discussing literature and violence at The Martin Harris Centre with guests Blake Morrison and John Gray. They’ll be mulling over…

The psychological and cultural roots of violent acts, and the ways in which writers from Shakespeare to JG Ballard depict and respond to it.

I’ve always read a great deal by and about Professor Amis but I never seem to find time to sit down and write about him properly. Ce la vie. I’m sure this discussion, like all the others, will make for good copy. If you’d like to attend, tickets are £7 from the venue – the University of Manchester’s Martin Harris Centre (0161 275 8951 / boxoffice@manchester.ac.uk) located on Bridgeford Street just off Oxford Road.

When I was about twelve I decided there was nothing to it but I had to learn Russian. (I often took on grand ideas during my summer holidays.)

Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky. If these wonderful writers could be transliterated so beautifully into English, imagine how wonderful they must be in their own language.

I still haven’t done it. Learned to read Russian. Though I still think I should. What I’m doing now, right this moment, is leafing through Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Next, I plan to move on to Anna Karenina. I’ve had it laying by my bedside for some months now. I’ve only read it once. I was still in high school and imagine a lot of the subtext was well over my head.

My sister insists I get to it already. “Go read Anna,” she says, “so that we can have a proper discussion.” She really does heart the socks off old Leo and rereads what she sees as his great masterpiece whenever she has time to do it.

Me, I fancy Chekhov. (I’ve told you this before.) There’s a fair number of books out on how to imitate the man, including “How to Write Like Chekhov” which is quite good. But if you really want to learn from the master, read his correspondence.

Below, Chekhov, in a letter to D.V. Grigorovith, critiques a story called “Karelins Dream”.

No one does interviews quite like The Paris Review. In a 1984 interview, Thomas Frick asked English novelist and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction, JG Ballard, how a book took shape for him. Ballard’s reply follows:

“That’s a vast topic and, to be honest, one I barely understand. Even in the case of a naturalistic writer, who in a sense takes his subject matter directly from the world around him, it’s difficult enough to understand how a particular fiction imposes itself.

But in the case of an imaginative writer, especially one like myself with strong affinities to the surrealists, I’m barely aware of what is going on. Recurrent ideas assemble themselves, obsessions solidify themselves, one generates a set of working mythologies, like tales of gold invented to inspire a crew.

I assume one is dealing with a process very close to that of dreams, a set of scenarios devised to make sense of apparently irreconcilable ideas. Just as the optical centers of the brain construct a wholly artificial three-dimensional universe through which we can move effectively, so the mind as a whole creates an imaginary world that satisfactorily explains everything, as long as it is constantly updated. So the stream of novels and stories continues . ..”

Download a PDF of the full interview

In one way or another, the protagonists of Wise Blood, Lolita, On the Road, Franny and Zooey, and The Crying of Lot 49 all have their sanity called into question, and various abnormal mental states (religious enthusiasm, drug hallucinations, and so forth) potentially compromise their rational faculties. Discuss the theme of madness in one of these novels. How are madness and sanity defined and represented? Is madness a wholly undesirable state? Madness is often connected to a protagonist or seems to be a source of authority. What does it mean to have an authorial voice claim madness?

Essay questions from Yale OpenCourse: The American Novel Since 1945, make for wonderful writing exercises. I’ve got a lot of miles out of this one. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the above mentioned novels. Apply the question to something similar that you may have read. Or, use it as a tool to examine a piece of your own writing.

When a song with a grammatically incorrect title becomes a smash hit, that’s a catastrophe. English teachers everywhere were surely gnashing their teeth as students sang along with “Between You and I” by Jessica Simpson in 2006. But she can be forgiven; it’s a hypercorrection heard sputtering from the mouths of many educated people.

The reason it’s wrong is that between is a preposition, and it’s a rule that pronouns following prepositions have to be in the objective case. Me is the objective pronoun; I is a subjective pronoun. Don’t worry about the details, just clear your mind of the song and memorize that the correct phrase is between you and me.

- Mignon Fogarty

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.