Write About Now

The Art of Fiction

One of the first books they put in my hands in creative writing was John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, subtitled Notes on Craft for Young Writers. That subtitle gives young writers an awful lot of credit. I was still rummaging around with nuts and bolts, while Gardner was tuning engines. The more I learned, the more The Art of Fiction made sense, and today it's one of my favorite books on the subject, one of the few worth re-reading. So imagine my joy last weekend when I stumbled across a copy in hardback.

I picked it up for just $7, which is less than either of my two paperback copies cost. Before this, not realizing there even was a hardback, I'd never thought to search. Now I'm wondering whether On Becoming a Novelist and On Moral Fiction are available in hardback, too.

Favorite Poets

The Question of the Day over at The Master's Artist is about poetry: "Tell us your three favorite poets, and why." I kept my answer uncharacteristically succinct:

In chronological order:

Archilochus, not for abandoning his shield, but for writing about it.

Sir Philip Sidney for his sonnet sequence and the probably apocryphal tales of his death (both versions).

Constantine Cavafy for his ability to inhabit the past.

Follow the link for more interesting suggestions -- and to share your own.

Fake Tan Fans?

As crazy as it sounds, there are more tanning salons in my town than there are bookstores. I wrote about it today at The Master's Artist. When it's still snowing in late March, this is the sort of disparity you reflect on.

Drifting (Again)

Bob Robinson posed a question in response to my Comment Q & A:

I wonder if revolutionaries are not just individuals or if there may also be movements that happen, either with intentional conspiring (people bucking the "bad examples" together) or with separate moves of individuals being led by the same Spirit of God (that maybe God himself is the one who wants a revolution). When is it the "spirit of the age" and when is it the Spirit of God?

Instead of giving a straight answer, I thought it might be nice to dredge up an old post from Notes on Craft, written when the passages from T. S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh that inform my answer to the Comment questions first took root in my brain. So with no further ado . . .

DRIFTING

Maybe readers are better off giving contemporary authors a wide berth. With the classics, you encounter books that have stood the test of time. Each of them is a voice in the great conversation and, taken together, they balance each other out. Read widely enough and a kind of synthesis emerges. That's what T. S. Eliot says in his essay "Religion and Literature." With contemporary art, though, you don't really experience the back-and-forth dialectic. Time has not yet thinned the ranks, so instead of a counterpointed conversation between individuals, spanning centuries, in today's books -- whenever today happens to be -- you get a chorus of the zeitgeist. As Eliot points out:

... the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction.

This is a daunting consideration if you happen to be a contemporary author. On the one hand, I hear Eliot's advice and it rings true. As a reader I set great store by old books. But as an author I wonder if this doesn't cast a shadow over my own efforts. Am I just another cog in some contemporary 'mass movement,' or am I one of the few individuals? Eliot considered it harder than ever in his own day to be an individual, and I don't imagine it's gotten easier since then. I would be flattering myself, I suspect, to classify myself in the sacred camp, which means that by passing along Eliot's advice with approbation, I am in essence telling you not to bother to read my work. At the very least, you should wait until I'm dead and history has had an opportunity to give its verdict.

Comment Q & A

Comment Magazine runs a regular Q & A asking "a diverse group of mentors for their stories." The February 29 installment features yours truly, talking about what it means to be a writer.

Q & A with J. Mark Bertrand, Author

Here's a taste:

Comment: What is the best advice you've ever been given?

JMB: Bad advice is always the best. I've learned the most from being told what not to do, from studying bad examples. In writing, there is rarely just one way to solve a problem. Good examples can be imitated, but too much imitation leads to staleness. T. S. Eliot once wrote that, although they believe themselves to be individuals pursuing their own agendas, contemporary authors inevitably work as a group, pushing in the same direction. All those good examples are a way to tap into the spirit of the age, I suspect. Only in time do the real individuals emerge, and they turn out to have been bucking the trend. They're revolutionaries, or in the case of novelists, reactionaries, and I can't help thinking they were probably nurtured on bad examples, as focused on what they were determined not to be as they were on being.

Best advice? Be rigorously honest about the world. Write until you finish, and then edit. Revise. Write about what you love, even if no one pays to read it. When you write, don't bother about current trends or what's relevant or what's selling. Finish, and then worry about the business. Above all, finish.