November 6, 2009
The arts section of the WSJ is turning out to be a must-read for writers—kudos to whoever the editor is. This week brings us the writing habits of 11 top authors. I liked this section on the habits of Dan Chaon, who works very differently from me:
Dan Chaon writes a first draft on color-coded note cards he buys at Office Max. Ideas for his books come to him as images and phrases rather than plots, characters or settings, he says. He begins by jotting down imagery, with no back story in mind. He keeps turning the images over in his mind until characters and themes emerge.
His most recent novel, “Await Your Reply,” which has three interlocking narratives about identity theft, started out as scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy’s severed hand, resting on ice. He described each scene on a card, then began fleshing out the plotlines, alternating among blue, pink and green cards when he moved between narratives.
During the early stages of writing, he carries a pocketful of cards with him wherever he goes; as they accumulate, he stores them in a card catalogue that he bought at a library sale. It often takes two years before something resembling a novel takes shape. He eventually transcribes the cards onto the computer and writes furiously from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.
from How To Write a Great Novel, by Alexandra Alter
November 3, 2009
This is the Spurwink Church Meeting house in Maine. To the right of this is my father’s grave. My sister was married here, so my father could be there, and celebrated her wedding on House Island, off the coast of Portland, the oldest continuously settled island in the state. There’s an old whaling camp there that is now a place you can get a lobster and some chowder on a tour of the island.
My brother celebrated his wedding on House Island as well. At that time, the late Hilda Doolittle, an old family friend and the matriarch of the family that owns House Island, asked me when it was my turn.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “But when it is, I’ll be here.”
Maine, help me be a part of my family’s traditions. And keep my promise to Hilda. Vote No on 1.
October 27, 2009
[photo via Gothamist]
1.
On the train down to New York Thursday, in the seats across from me, a 26-year-old American soccer player who works on an organic farm and a 30-something Turkish artist talk to each other for most of the trip. The soccer player tells his age when he says he feels old. The artist laughs at him.
The soccer player then confides that his girlfriend is the daughter of his boss. Also, she reminds him of her father, who he met first, and who set them up and wanted them to be together.
I try not to stare. “I see him so clearly in her,” he says. “It’s almost eerie.”
No, I think. It actually is eerie.
Watching them talk of it, it looks like courtship. They are shy and flirtatious with each other, each mentioning their girlfriends but soon they are beside each other playing a game on the computer of the artist. Their heads leaning in.
I want to stand up and say Go ahead.
2.
With no internet connection and a broken phone, I work on the train uninterrupted for 6 hours on editing the manuscript of my second novel, which, when I review it, looks nearly complete.
Otherwise, the broken phone is a blight on my whole trip to New York. Keep reading →
October 16, 2009
But if the world is what it is so are our hearts. One night in August, unable to sleep, sickened that I was giving up, but even more frightened by the thought of having to return to the writing, I dug out the manuscript. I figured if I could find one good thing in the pages I would go back to it. Just one good thing. Like flipping a coin, I’d let the pages decide. Spent the whole night reading everything I had written, and guess what? It was still terrible. In fact with the new distance the lameness was even worse than I’d thought. That’s when I should have put everything in the box. When I should have turned my back and trudged into my new life. I didn’t have the heart to go on. But I guess I did. While my fiancée slept, I separated the 75 pages that were worthy from the mountain of loss, sat at my desk, and despite every part of me shrieking no no no no, I jumped back down the rabbit hole again. There were no sudden miracles. It took two more years of heartbreak, of being utterly, dismayingly lost before the novel I had dreamed about for all those years finally started revealing itself. And another three years after that before I could look up from my desk and say the word I’d wanted to say for more than a decade: done.
That’s my tale in a nutshell. Not the tale of how I came to write my novel but rather of how I became a writer. Because, in truth, I didn’t become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.
Emphasis mine. Junot Diaz’s whole essay is here. Via the excellent Maud Newton, who has quite the Toddy recipe for your winter cold.
October 13, 2009
Yesterday I looked in on a Twitter chat about character flaws that seemed to circle around these statements: “flaws! Yes! Characters have them! What about addiction?” and the whole thing looked just a bit too much like the reason people make fun of Twitter.
Though there were standouts, like Eugenia Kim.
I was observing because I like to watch for new uses for social media and writing, no matter how much eye-rolling is happening around it–technology does occasionally provide more than distractions–and while there may have been something to the 140 character limit that made the whole thing a little blunted, I gave them credit for trying. But in general I’ve lately been greatly discouraged by the way I feel like the contemporary rhetoric about creative writing meant to aid writers too often guides them into sad little corners, where they end up too much like Roombas that can’t turn themselves around. This of course is why Joseph Conrad was afraid of Ford Madox Ford’s pursuit of knowledge around writing–he feared it would harm more than it would help to know what exactly what one was doing. And I do think there’s a kind of advice that doesn’t help, and nowhere do I see this more than with the idea of the Flaw in character design.
Consider instead Adrien Tomine’s Shortcomings, a tiny modern masterpiece (to my mind) about Ben Tanaka, a bitter young man who drives everyone out of his life with his attempts to shore up his insecurities. Part of what is fascinating about the book is how Tomine allows the reader into the gap between who Ben wants you to think he is and who he really is. On one page he’s loudly complaining to his girlfriend about having to see a film on Asian American identity, and on another, he’s upset because she’s leaving him for a white(ish) man. He goes from loudly deploring someone for using being Asian as a way to complain constantly about everything in his life to bitterly fearing rejection by a potential lover for being Asian. He lacks that famous other creative writing hobgoblin, character consistency, in one way–he is absolutely inconsistent in his views–and yet that ends up being what the book is about: he has no core, except a shame at who he is that destroys all his relationships. THAT is his consistency, that is his ‘flaw’. And what’s more, this gap is precisely what creates the dramatic irony that moves the whole book along. Keep reading →
Filed under Koreanish, comics, fiction, fiction prompts, writers, writing, writing exercises
Tags: Adrian Tomine, Aristotle, character design, character flaw, Hubris, Tarot, writing, writing prompts
October 9, 2009
A story of mine that appeared first at Lodestar Quarterly, now defunct, is now up over at Fictionaut: 13 Crimes Against Love, or, the Crow’s Confession.
He had a name everyone had. He was my friend’s boyfriend and in the dark on my bed as I held him he was like a poem about a beautiful naked boy in the dark. Very pale, easy to see. All the light in the room ran to be on him. There wasn’t much, as it is very dark inside the crow’s wing.
He’d needed a place to stay the night as he lived out of town, and I don’t remember why he couldn’t stay with my friend, but he couldn’t. Something about roommates.
We shouldn’t do this, he said, inside our kiss.
You’re right, I said, against his mouth, and turned it into the kiss again. We went on with it. He was afraid and so was I, but somehow we felt it was brave to do something wrong. Outside, the screech of the night wind on the glass that I know now to be the Fates, yelling at all the work we were making for them. Asking us for a rest.
The story is about confusing emotional violence—and the addiction to a false sense of power that comes with the seduction of married men—for love and sex.
Also, I just really like crows. The above photo is graffiti from Argentina.
Later this fall, I’ll put a few more out of print stories up over there as well as over on my author site.
October 1, 2009
Novels are competing for attention with other media that can be peeled off from them. At the same time, novels are social objects and the web is social technology. My novels diffuse through the web in what tends to be a social context. I get new downloads because a bunch of Livejournal people are discussing it. The web makes it easier for people who love books to turn those books into part of their identities. That makes people buy books more. And it’s cheaper to make them, as well as easier to get direct compensation.
So as for the future of the novel – it’s both dying and not dying. You win some new readers, and you lose some.
I feel like this is always true. But most important here to me is this acknowledgment of the novel as a social object. You make it alone, but you do that to connect with people. This is often lost on many would-be writers.
September 28, 2009
Shaun Tan is one of the most interesting comics creators working now. Last year he broke through with his picture novel The Arrival, seen above. This is from an interview with the Guardian, in which he comments on fiction writing:
“The detail adds an element of unexpected something,” Tan explains. “All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details. I’m constantly testing with the details. I go on a hunch and try it out. I might have a character and have a feeling that he needs to have a hat and so I put it in and it feels right and then I realise that he needs to have a hat because he’s trying to hide something.”
The result of this careful attention to detail is that Tan’s worlds, however fantastical they may appear on first glance, have their own internal logic. It is what he describes as “groundedness”, and he regards it as crucial to the success of the stories.
“By itself, just to draw crazy creatures has limited appeal – if I had to give up one thing it would be the wild imagination. When the work becomes too detached from ordinary life it starts to fall apart. Fantasy needs to have some connection with reality or it becomes of its own interest only, insular…”
