Write About Now

Condemned to Tell All

"Today, the writer of an autobiography is condemned to tell all or nothing. If he cannot reveal everything, then he should abandon all attempts at revelation."

-- FRANCOIS MAURIAC
in Memoires Interieurs, p. 10.

The Flavour of the Wood

"It's strange that you can still write drama, but not fiction."

"Ah well, you see, I can do dialogue all right," said Frobisher. "And somebody else does the pictures. But with fiction it's the narrative bits that give the writing its individuality. Descriptions of people, places, weather, stuff like that. It's like ale that's been kept in the wood: the flavour of the wood permeates the beer. Telly drama's like keg in comparison: all gas and no flavour. It's style I'm talking about, the special, unique way a writer has of using language. Well, you're a poet, you know what I'm talking about."

"I do," said Persse.

DAVID LODGE
in Small World, pp. 181-182

The Basement of Enjoyment

"Without a capacity for blaming the sterile, there can be no capacity for praising the vital. Those without a gift for criticism can't be appreciative beyond a certain point, and the point is set quite low, in the basement of enjoyment."

CLIVE JAMES
Cultural Amnesia, p. 127

One of the high points of last week's Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing for me was attending John Wilson's discussion of book reviewing. Wilson, amiable and erudite, is the editor of Books & Culture, making him both a reviewer and a master of reviewers. (His re-cap of the festival is now online.) In the session, he read an essay of Orwell's on book reviewers, then unloaded a stack of prospective volumes onto the table, explaining how he'd approach the problem of reviewing each one -- whether it should be noticed, and if so what kind of notice it should receive (and when), and to whom the review should be assigned. As an inveterate reader of reviews -- a fan of the genre, if you will -- I was in heaven. One thing was clear. In the house of reading enjoyment, Wilson is nowhere near the basement. The task of criticism is a labor of love.

This is sharply at odds with the idea of critics as a bitter lot, working out their spite at the expense of hapless authors whose only crime was to create. It also gives the lie to the notion that critics are, first and foremost, failed or frustrated artists, operating on a hatred for the success of other writers rather than a love for the written word. Wilson was quick to point out that there's little money to be made in book reviewing, especially at the entry level. The only reason to persevere is because you enjoy reading and writing about good books.

The Death of the Death of the Novel

The Southern Review keeps knocking my socks off. I subscribed last year because my friend Allison Smythe had a poem in the Spring 2007 issue, which also features a jaw-droppingly good piece by Mark Jarman on metaphor. When it comes to journal subscriptions, I'm used to disappointment. I can't count how many I've let lapse. Maybe this would be different.

Last night I started flipping through the recently arrived Winter 2008 issue, wondering if it would live up to expectations. It did. Robert Clark Young's essay "The Death of the Death of the Author" is required reading. Young was at the University of Houston a few years before me, and mentions a few of the people I knew there. I wish I'd had a chance to meet him, because he's offered up the antidote to a festering affliction of mine.

A False Notion?

Here's something to think about, from Dana Thomas's Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster:

All this leaves Jacques Polge resigned. "I hear the briefs of [perfume] brands that declare that they want to create a 'classic,' like [Chanel] No. 5," he says with a sigh. "This is a false notion. We should try to create a perfume of its time, and perhaps it can become a classic." (p. 154)

Polge is the "nose" at Chanel. The question is, does the same thing apply to novels? We talk about writing for the ages, but books aren't classics when they're written or published. That takes time, and it's a process over which we have little control.

Great Writer, Rich Writer

From today's NYTBR:

[Ken] Follett was the subject of a profile recently in USA Today in which he recounted this conversation with a friend, the novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi: "We were talking about what readers like," Follett said. "He said, 'I never think about readers.' I told him, 'That's why you are a great writer, and that's why I am a rich writer.'"

Together in the Same Direction

"... 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."

T. S. ELIOT
"Religion and Literature," in Essays Ancient and Modern, p. 107

Mechanisms of Influence

"Mechanisms of influence are hard to trace. Writers tend to think that the way they write was influenced by literature, and of course scholars make a living by following that same assumption. But a writer's ideal of a properly built sentence might just as well have been formed when he was still in short pants and watched someone make an unusually neat sandcastle. He might have got his ideals of composition, colour and clean finish from a bigger boy who made a better model aeroplane. To the extent that I can examine my own case of such inadvertently assimilated education, I learned a lot about writing from watching an older friend sanding down the freshly dried paint on his rebuilt motorbike so that he could give it another coat: he was after the deep, rich, pure glow. But for the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz."

CLIVE JAMES Cultural Amnesia, p. 28

When Telling Is Better Than Showing

"Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers -- namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine 'dramatic' showing with long stretches of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling, and the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out -- don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams 'yay' and jumps up and down for joy -- when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing."

FRANCINE PROSE
Reading Like a Writer, p. 24

Interesting Trouble

"I don't think about structure and form when I write. I don't think, 'Now I've got to avoid an epiphany, and I've got to bring in a counterpointed character.' Nothing that I've thought abstractly, as far as craft is concerned, is much help in the first drafts. I try to see the characters, hear them, and get them into some kind of interesting trouble. It's only in the revisions and the rewriting that those techniques help."

CHARLES BAXTER
in Novel Voices, edited by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais