didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forgot who we were.
—Joan Didion
finding your voice
The most difficult task facing a writer is to find a voice in which to tell the story. To be heard, you must find a voice. For your ideas to be accepted, for your arguments to be believed, for your work to be admired, you must find a voice. Each of you is an original. Each of you has a distinctive voice. When you find it, your story will be told. You will be heard.
~John Grisham
a luminous halo
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.
acting and writing et al.
“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.
any number of old ladies
“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
martin amis. literature and violence.
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.
to dream
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”.
the art of fiction – no.85
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
on madness. a writing exercise.
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.
grammar girl: between you and me
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.
