"...some particular story seems outer-willed and effortless; it is as if though one were a secretary transcribing the words of a voice from a cloud." [Voice]
He knew he was a writer, never went to college. He had inner visions, heard the Voice. While writing, that's all he did: locked himself away. No friends, just lived between the coffee shop and his room. [Voice]
Looking back, he sees that the book "was
an attempt to exorcise demons: an unconscious altogether intuitive attempt."
[Voice]
..."It didn't have anything to do with changing the reader's opinion about anything, nor did I have an moral --it was just that I had a strictly aesthetic theory about creating a book which could result in a work of art." [Voice]
The point of In Cold Blood was "factual accuracy."
Reality/Truth:
He wants to write objectively, report. He felt that In Cold Blood he arrived at the truth, as a result of hard work, persistence, etc. He took an ethnographic approach.
Truth is there, but getting it is hard work. To get the truth, to write the "nonfiction novel," the work is enormous. "The relationship between the author and all the people he must deal with if he does his job properly--well, it's a 24-hour-a-day job."
Voice:
Emotionality makes him lose control; he has to exhaust emotion before he can work. During the last 6-7 pages of In Cold Blood, he had to use a typewriter because of hand paralysis due to emotion--although all the rest of the time he was in perfect control of himself and his emotions.
Sources:
ï Capote, Truman. Voice From a Cloud. Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels. Ed. Thomas McCormack. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969. 237-265.
ï New York Times on the Web: Writers on
Writing. Dec 97. Truman Capote: the Story Behind a Nonfiction Movie.
12
Nov 99.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-interview.html.
Art:
She always struggles to write the ideal piece, to keep all options, "to be the world. Ten pages in I've already blown it, limited it..." [Women 324]
Style is important: style is sensibility. "Style is character. ... Your style is your sensibility." [Women 325]
"I was one of those children who tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it." [Women 335] She has a literary perception of reality, based on what she's read in books.
Landscapes affect who you are, how you grew up, and thus your writing: "...people are more affected than they know by landscapes and weather." [Women 335] ..."It so happens that if you're a writer the extremes show up. They don't if you sell insurance." [Women 336]
Process:
She practices through imitation, e.g., Hemmingway for sentences, "smooth rivers, clear water over granite..." [Women 323].
The first sentence is the hardest and most important: "Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. [Women 323]
"At the beginning I don't have anything at all, don't have any people, any weather, any story. All I have is a technical sense of what I want to do." [NYT 33a]
She follows certain rituals: writes during the day, then breaks. Then, an hour before dinner, she'll have a drink to help her get distance, then she reviews what she has done that day, and then takes things out and puts other stuff in (that is, she leaves notes to herself on it). then the next day she acts on her notes and gets started again. [Women 330]
Writing nonfiction is tedious (more so than fiction) because "you already know what it's about." The discovery takes place in the research." [Women 331]
She really values an editor she worked with at Vogue where she wrote, who worked with her hard on verbs: "She would sit there and mark it up with a pencil and get very angry about extra words, about verbs not working." [Women]
Purpose
"In many ways writing is the act of saying ëI,' of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, ëlisten to me, see it my way, change your mind.' It's an aggressive, even hostile act." [NYT]
"You're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture...the writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream." Yet ..."the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself." [Women]
Being a writer is like being an actress. "It's the same impulse. It's make believe. It's performance." [Women]
A writer is "a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper." [NYT]
"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want, and what I fear." [NYT]
She is fascinated with big events, important political occurances. "I have been attracted to certain places where conspiracy is a constant ... I got interested in Miami in the '60s, after the Kennedy assassination....my interest in El Salvador came from the fact that the United States was down there playing some kind of role nobody seemed to understand."
She feels a duty to keep important issues in the public eye, tell them the truth in such a way that they will believe it: "I'm a nag, you know. I always think that I'm going to tell people exactly what's going on and they're going to listen. That if you can convey a situation exactly as it is - if you can give someone the weather, make them feel it - then they will see it the way you do. I always thought that was the writer's function - to make people see. Then I realized that no matter how much I tried to write exactly what I saw, the reader was seeing it at a remove. There was a screen [created by] what the reader already believed - a screen of, "That's not what the paper says, that's not what I saw on . "
Reality:
She cannot "forge for [her]self a mind
that can deal with the abstract" or the dialectic or the realm of ideas.
Instead she focuses on the tangible, the specific, the particular.
[NYT]
Topics:
Her subjects reflect what she wants to
do at the time, where she wants to be. [Women]
Sources:
Didion, Joan. 5 Dec 76. Why I Write. The
New York Times Magazine. Nov 00.
http://www.idiom.com/~rick/html/why_i_write.htm
Kuehl, Linda. Joan Didion. Women Writers at Work. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1989, 319-336.
Marvel, Mark. Interview With Joan Didion.
Sept. 96
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1285/n9_v26/18798899/p1/article.jhtml
Art:
"Literary nonfiction" coheres: "The things are in them for the sake of the work itself and insofar as the work itself exists in the service of an idea. The idea is "of great interest to the writer and serves to rouse him out of bed in the morning and impel him to the desk," but it is of "little or no interest to the reader"--who is more interested in how well written, vivid, pleasing, etc., it is. [277]
Form can carry meaning. She devoted fifteen years of study "of how the structures of poems carry meaning." Then she started nonfiction prose which "can also carry meaning in its structures and, like poetry, can tolerate all sorts of figurative language, as well as alliterations even rhyme." ..."it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story." [278]
Process:
"The writer of any work, and particularly any nonfiction work, must decide two crucial points: what to put in and what to leave out." She puts in miscellaneous things. She doesn't want to write about her life and her feelings about life. [270] She has a reason for everything she puts in or leaves out. In: what interests her and she finds important. Out: things that might be irrelevant, her family might object to. [270]
She writes on computer in Cape Cod, and for inspiration keeps nearby a photo symbolizing the essence of what she wants to write about.
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
Purpose:
"to fashion a text." [276]
She is very curious, and this is a way for her to satisfy her curiosity. She is a passionate reader--it's how she learns about the world and all her interests. "I get to inform myself and any readers about such esoterica as rock collecting..." [273] She puts in what interest her.
What impels the writer is a deep love for and a respect for language, for literary forms, for books.
"It's a privilege to muck about in sentences all morning. It's a challenge to bring off a powerful effect, or tell the truth about something." You write because you passionately care about it. [278]
Writing:
The writing becomes more "real" than the life. You can, in writing memoirs, cannibalize your life for parts. The work replaces the memories--you can spend much more time writing about an event than you did living it. You "turn events into pieces of paper." [276]
"You have to like verbal descriptions a lot to keep up this sort of thing. I like descriptions a lot."
"I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it....I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books." [277]
Source:
Dillard, Annie. To Fashion a Text. The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999. 270-278.
Art:
He contrasts solitary, author-driven novels with movies, which are more dynamic, evolving, responsive. "There is a vanity about [being an author], a wish to play the god game, which all the random and author-removing devices of avant-garde technique cannot hide."
Reading demands more of an audience than does the cinema: "This necessary cooperation between writer and reader [imagination], the one to suggest, the other to make concrete, is a privilege of verbal form; and the cinema can never usurp it."
Writing can't be taught, books are not like machines that can be constructed or taken apart.
Process:
He starts with an image, a vision, almost like the opening scene in The French Lieutenant's Woman. The image becomes disrupting and compelling that he has to drop whatever he's doing and write the image and whatever follows.
He used to try starting with a message or theme, and then writing, but it never worked. Instead, he gets a seed, a first image, and then works with that. "Once the seed germinates, reason and knowledge, culture and all the rest, have to start to grow it. You cannot create a world by hot instinct; but only by cold experience."
He rushes through the first draft, maybe ten thousand words per day. He doesn't worry about research or polish at that point. "First-draft and revision writing are so different they hardly seem to belong to the same activity. I never do any ëresearch' until the first draft is finished; all that matters to begin with is the flow, the story, the navigating."
He believes in heavy, vigorous rewriting, harsh, even: "All the best cutting is done when one is sick of the writing."
"Writing is like eating or making love; a natural process..."
Purpose:
He writes for the world: "the proper audience is one without frontiers."
"Ideas are the only motherland."
He feels alone, alien: his real self writes and this is like mountain climbing, sea voyages, or explorations.
"It is not subjects that matter to writers, but the experience of handling them."
Reality:
"One cannot describe reality; only give metaphors that indicate it."
He has one underlying premise, and that is existentialism.
Source:
Fowles, John. Notes on an Unfinished Novel. Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels. Ed. Thomas McCormack. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969. 222-231.
Art:
Uses emotion, inner experience, as fuel for writing: in her memoir of her father, The Shadow Man: "I wrote the book as a memoir and not a novel because I wanted that process of discovery to be part of the subject. I wouldn't have been able to comment on what I was experiencing if I was writing fiction." [AMU]
She is concerned that people are making the political personal, that "everything has become so privatized, so terribly atomized--we're in cars, we use e-mail, we rent videos instead of going to the movies--people don't see themselves in collective units..." "...people are not political today. They are so privatized that they don't work with others for anything, and feminism's a victim of that." [AMU]
Category:
She thinks of herself as a "woman writer...I do think a lot of my subject matter is informed by the experience of being female...everyone reads in a gendered way. Everyone reads a woman writer as a woman writer... " [AMU]
She's interested "in what genuine goodness is," and thinks "that for so many women goodness is synonymous with chastity, or being quiet." [AMU]
Language:
Your language can broaden your work to express your emotions: Dante, for example, exemplified "really big rancor... "If you can find a language appropriate to your subject you can write however you want.... does anybody say [Dante] should have got a grip on himself and been more objective, or that he shouldn't have been putting all those people that he knew into Hell?" [AMU]
Process:
She starts by preparing her mind: 1) reads source material from journals and letters and copies a passage or sentence she likes; 2) reads Proust: 3 page in both English and French and writes what she takes from it; 3) writes in her own journal; 4) reads serious fiction as a "turning fork" "to sound the one I will take up in the fiction I'm writing at the time": 5) Copies paragraphs/sections whose "heft and cadence I can learn from." and some days..."the very movement of my hand, like some kind of dance, starts up another movement..." [NYT]
She believes in the tactile corporeal to get started in writing -- which is excruciatingly difficult (no computers or typewriters for her). she likes fine notebooks and pens. "Writing by hand is laborious...but I believe the labor has virtue because of its very physicality. For one thing, it involves flesh, blood, and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world." [NYT]
Source:
ï Atlantic Monthly Unbound. May 99. Mary Gordon: Catholic. Woman. Writer. 12 Nov 99. http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/factfict/ff9905.htm
ï New York Times on the Web: Writers on
Writing. July 99. Mary Gordon: Putting Pen to Paper, But Not Just Any
Pen or Just Any Paper. 22 Nov 00. http://www.nytimes.com/books/070599/gordon-writing.html.
Art:
"Fiction in general gives you the freedom of exploring the truth without boundaries, to get to a deeper truth, and fairy tales have always been my model." [BP]
Process:
"It's a strange process, writing fiction," she said. "Here, the town kind of appeared for me, then the school and the river, and people moved in and filled it up." [BP]
"More important than the story you tell is the voice you have," said the author, who achieves that voice by not thinking about it too much. "I've always tried to go directly from sleep to the computer, before I have the time to start censoring myself. I like to get up at 5:00. I do my best work early in the morning before the world's awake. For the kind of fiction I write, which is emotional fiction, you have to let go. Let the walls down, the defenses down. Don't worry about what people are going to think." [BP]
She tries to work quickly and never looks over her first draft until she has told the whole story. Then she burnishes her prose. "I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite." [BP]
Purpose:
She writes for escapism, as therapy, as a way to see beauty more clearly. She uses actual episodes, incidents during family crises when beloved ones were dying to help herself think clearly and cope. When she was to have an operation for breast cancer, she put it off to finish her novel: "...I had the need to get to the ending of something. I was desperate to know how things turned out, in fiction if not in life. More than ever, more than anything, I was a writer....I could lie on the table during a bone scan and yet slip into the river where water lilies floated downstream, feet sinking into the soft mud." [NYT]
I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. ... Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed that anything was possible." [NYT]
Sources:
Kanner, Ellen. Book Page. Making Believe:
Alice Hoffman Takes Her Practical Magic to the River. 1 Dec 00
http://www.bookpage.com/0008bp/alice_hoffman.html
New York Times on the Web: Writers on Writing.
Aug 00. Alice Hoffman: Sustained by Fiction While Facing Life's Facts.
Nov 00.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/08/400hoffman-writing.html.
Art:
Working out the craft itself is a major part of the enjoyment: "The rhythm of a sentence, the shape of a paragraph, the coincidental turn of plot; in the very subject of the decline of gritty cities and fractured love chosen for the work of fiction."
Audience:
Awareness of writing must be in the context both of the past and of the reader. It is a dialog with the reader: "For all the voices and masks of my performance, there is an intimacy with the reader. We are in this game together. ... Real reading is a strenuous and pleasurable contact sport. ... reading is not like dating; it's a matter of full engagement."
Purpose:
"I admit to inventing female characters driven to lecture the young on the past, on history if you will, both public and private."
She has developed from being a Modernist, breaking away from Victorian and Edwardian prose, into something more post modern. She looks forward to what "virtual environments might offer," and hopes "for more literature of inclusion."
Source:
New York Times on the Web: Writers on Writing.
Feb 00. Maureen Howard: The Enduring Commitment of a Faithful Storyteller.
Dec 00.
http://www.nytimes.com/books//021400howard-writing.html.
Art:
"I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply. I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story -- better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it." [MJ]
"I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules." [MJ]
Irving wants the reader to be both anticipating what happens, but also misled -- surprised. so, for example, he might begin the novel at a place where the reader is immediately drawn into the story and begins anticipating; but also where "the reader will be most compelled to guess wrong." [WOW 103]
"But when students ask the perpetual question, ëWhat's your advice to someone who wants to be a writer?' I always tell them to read everything they can now, because if you're going to write, you will. If you're going to keep doing it, you won't stop. And once it happens, if it happens, if you really are a writer, it's all you'll want to do. You will not want to read, you will want to write, and that's one way you will recognize that you are a writer. I don't get on a plane with a bunch of books, I get on a plane with a manuscript. And as soon as I can lower the tray table I take out the manuscript and start to work." [Salon]
Novels should have three components: 1) "craftsmanlike quality of the storytelling"; 2) true-to-life quality of the characters; 3) "meticulous exactitude of the language (discernible in every sentence and seeming to be spoken by an unmistakable voice)" [WOW 99-100].
He focuses on style and technique: "...the faults of most novels are the sentences--either they're ambitious or they're so unclear that they need to be rewritten." [WOW 10
Process:
When he first started writing he believed he had little or no talent and so learned to think of himself as an underdog; "he still thinks of himself as that underdog, always revising, always somehow having to make up for his natural shortcomings with very hard work." [Salon]
He has always suffered dyslexia, but doesn't feel that hurt is writing. In fact, he feels it might have helped his writing: "you learn if you have that kind of a learning disability you pay more particular attention to the way a sentence works and the way a word is sounded than people for whom the act comes naturally." [Salon]
"If I do more than three or four pages a day, I'll spend the next day revising. You work seven days a week instead of five and you work whenever you can. The constancy of it is important. I had to do that to get through school and my friends didn't. As a consequence I paid closer attention, and if what I had to pay closer attention to was the language, if I had to go slowly just to understand it, what language was it that I would probably like? Was it going to be history. Un-uh. Sociology? I don't think so. It was going to be fiction, or poetry, because that's where the language is good." [Salon]
He insists on knowing the whole story and plot first, before beginning. that way the story doesn't just wander along, and that way the author has control. [WOW]
Purpose:
"...it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character." [MJ]
"The object of a book is to write it well enough so that the reader can move through it." [Salon]
"I think of the reader as far more intelligent than I am, but a child--a kind of hyperactive prodigy, a reading wizard...paradoxically, a genius with the attention span of a rabbit." [WOW 99]
Sources:
ï Irving, John. Getting Started. Writers on Writing: A Bread Loaf Anthology. Ed. Pack, Robert and Parini, Jay. Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press, 1991. 98-104
ï Mother Jones. Nov 97. Interview: John Irving. 3 Dec 00. http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/MJ97/outspoken.html
ï Salon. March 97. John Irving: A Man
Who Takes His Lack of Talent Seriously.. http://www.salon.com/march97/interview970303.html
Art:
"Every book I have written has been written on the bleeding corpse of my grandmother. ... Every book has been a baby I did not bear, ten thousand meals I did not cook."
Purpose:
Writing is empowerment. Women need to write to be heard. She grew up in a traditional extended family of Russian Jews. Her grandmother had endured everything from pogroms to learning new languages, to revolution, to poverty, to wars, to New York as an immigrant. But her grandmother was a traditional woman: you cook and don't talk about it.
... I wish, above all, to be undivided,
to be whole (this, in fact, is the theme of all my work), but I remain
divided." [106]
Reality/Truth
"Every woman artist has to kill her own grandmother. She perches on our shoulder whispering: ëWrite nice things...' but ënice things' are rarely true things. ... And so we are divided, we creators of the female gender. In some way we identify with the patriarch, or how would we have become creators at all? And in some way we identify with the murdered -- 'Mama' is ourselves." [106]
The problem is that women must write the truth, but are discouraged from doing so: "Patriarchal society has put a gag on women's public expression of feelings because silence compels obedience. ... My grandmother doesn't want me pilloried for my words." [109]
Source:
Jong, Erica. My Grandmother on My Shoulder.
Writers
on Writing: A Bread Loaf Anthology. Ed. Pack, Robert and Parini, Jay. Hanover,
NH: Middlebury College Press, 1991. 105-111.
Art:
He took up nonfiction after his well of creativity had gone dry. However, "it employs techniques of storytelling that never did belong exclusively to fiction." [Courting 184]
He struggled to develop a nonfiction voice, and finally did, although not consciously: "well-informed, fair-minded, and temperate--the voice, not of the person I was, but of a person I sometimes wanted to be." [Courting 185]
The work must stand alone: "a narrative should be judged on its own terms..." [Courting 189]
He leaves dialectics out of his writing, doesn't concern himself with how what he might have seen or learned affects him; nor how his presence might have affected the events or people in the story he is writing.
He is a storyteller, and he views this as reporting, "because the world is so bizarre and so interesting." Choosing the point of view is an important choice: "the wrong choice can lead to dishonesty. ... I made my choices by instinct sometimes and sometimes by experiment." [Courting 185]
He uses the particular, the detail, to get at the big generalities: "I think that almost everything I've written touches on big social issues, but in a particular locale, among particular people." It is, he says, fundamentally a relativistic stance. [AU]
Language:
Writing is a dialog with readers, who offer their belief to the author. The author is obligated to "entertain and inform, without disappointing the reader into a loss of that faith." [Courting 186]
Good writing is "the difference between portraying emotion and merely asserting its existence, between capturing the reflection of something real on the page and merely providing handy cues designed to elicit an emotional response." [Courting 195]
Structure is the key to a book: "Most of the time you don't want the reader to realize it, but if it weren't there the reader wouldn't be happy." [AU]
Process:
He is very much against interpreting scenes and people. He wants to be, instead, immersed in the events of a story: "I take it on faith that the truth lies in the events somewhere and that immersion in those real events will yield glimpses of that truth." [Courting 187]
Nonfiction should be as gracefully told as a fiction story--it is a story. All tools, except invention, should be used.
He writes much too much material. Then he senses where the story is, eliminates much, and always spends time polishing and polishing the final product.
He takes an ethnographic approach, spending years getting inside his subject or subjects. Then he sorts and edits. "It's not because the people involved weren't interesting, but finally they didn't fit into the construction, the architecture that I had created." [AU]
His ethnographic approaches means he includes multiple points of view and perspectives, and tells various stories. In deciding which voice, which point of view to use, "I just try to find the place to stand to tell the story where it works, that somehow allows there to be life on the page." [AU]
He considers himself a storyteller, and so looks for things that interest him and then "tries to find a doorway in." He doesn't like to start with "philosophical propositions": "I like to start with stories, with people, and have the other stuff come in as it will." [AU]
Purpose:
"What I really had in mind was immortality." [Courting 179]
"I think that the nonfiction writer's fundamental job is to make what is true believable."
He wants to create a real world, a true one, "with real people and real names" and actual dialog, "but do so in a way to invite the reader into that world. [Courting 186]
He writes with a message and purpose in mind, as he did in Old Friends, a book about a nursing home: "I wanted to write from the inside about the experience of being old and sick and confined to an institution..." [Courting 192]
"The world seems various to me, and depicting some of the virtue in it seems like a project worth attempting." [Courting 196]
"...it is only the connectedness of the human tribe that can hold despair at bay." It can take many forms: in work, "maybe even in the act of writing." [Courting 197]
"Most [of us] endeavor for connectedness to create the kind of work that touches other lives and, in that sense at least, leaves something behind." [Courting 197]
Reality/Truth:
He takes an ethnographic approach: "I believe in the possibility of imaginatively experiencing what others experience." [Courting 194]
Sources:
Atlantic Monthly Unbound. April 99. Tracy Kidder: "The Architecture of Daily Life. 14 Nov 00 http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/ba990422.htm
Kidder, Tracy. Courting the Approval of the Dead. The Essayist at Work: Profiles of Creative Nonfiction Writers. Ed. Lee Gutkind. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998. 179-201.
Art:
Writing is its own reward: "Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises...the act of writing turns out to be its own reward." [xxvi]
One technique she finds useful if nothing is coming: she takes a one-inch picture frame, which represents short assignments. "All I have to do is write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame." [17]
"Being a writer is about being conscious." [225]
Background:
She loved the attention her childish writing got her, and in college, writing was all she did well, "so I dropped out at 19 to become a famous writer." [xxi]
She particularly longed to be published: "It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print, therefore you exist." [xiv]
Process:
Start by writing down everything you know or remember about a fairly broad topic. Explore the branches and roots -- mine the veins. "Scratch around for details." Just freewrite this. If nothing comes, train your subconscious by sitting down at the same time everyday. "You clear a space for the writing voice ... you begin to compose sentences. You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive." [7]
"All I know is that if I sit there long enough, something will happen." [10]
She is a strong advocate of drafts: "the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts." [22] "Make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper." [32]
"The writer is a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in The Farmer in the Dell standing there alone but deciding to take a few notes. You're outside but you can see things up close through your binoculars. our job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense." [97-98]
Purpose:
She writes "Because I want to and I'm good at it." [xxviii]
She feels a need to write: "Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong." [19]
Good writing is a discovery process. You begin, she says, "to see the underlying essence only when you strip away the busyness, and then some surprising connections appear."
Truth/Reality:
"Good writing is about telling the truth." [3]
She believes there are truths, inner and outer, to be told, and that in trying to write them the writer discovers connections and that they should be communicated to the reader. [96]
"You need to put yourself at [the writing's] center, you and what you believe to be true or right. The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing." [103] She believes in a "moral compass" we can live by.
"Truth seems to want expression. Unacknowledged truth saps your energy and keeps you and your characters wired and delusional." ... Truth is "the bedrock of life." [198-99]
Voice:
She believes in the "little voice" versus the rational mind which can chatter and drive out the more important intuition: "Train yourself to hear that small inner voice." [113]
"We don't have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not to go into. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in--then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home." [201]
"Write straight into the emotional center of things." [226]
Source:
LaMott, Anne. Bird by Bird. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
He considers the rhythm and flow. He'll add something as an authentic voice for his first-person narrator, for example, but finds the rhythm or pace wrong: "gave an uncomfortable rip of rhythm to the mind." [205] But he stuck in such things on purpose, starting at the beginning "to slow my readers from the start, like a fighter who throws his right two seconds after the bell and so gives the other man no chance to decide on the pace." [Last 205]
Process:
When he wrote The Deer Park it took 3 years to get accepted by a publisher. When Mailer reviewed it for print, he decided it needed some extensive revision. He had "been learning new lessons" and the book "read as if it had been written by someone else." The style seemed wrong to him, "false to the life of my characters." He intended to just "tinker a little" but keep the structure. "But the navigator of my unconscious mind must have already make the choice" because he embarked on a whole new book. [Last 201]
Picking the voice is critical. He had always had trouble with the first person voice, it seemed too delicate or false, even though he almost always wrote in the first person. But once he began the revisions, his self confidence and holding firm over his book's integrity infused him: "I was able to use the first person in a way where I could suggest some of the stubbornness and belligerence I also might have...I was able to create an adventurer whom I believed in, and he came alive for me..." [Last 203]
When he is in the flow, he forced himself to work beyond himself when he found himself "creating a man who was braver and stronger than me." So he "worked by tricks" with marijuana and sleeping pills at night, then got new insights during the day. He was trying to avoid his inner critic, the sense, as he pushed the limits of what he thought he could do, that "it was a psychological violation to go in." the drugs, life patterns made: "my powers of logic become weaker each day, but the book had its own logic, and so I did not need close reason. What I wanted and what the drugs gave me was the quick flash of associations." He could read his text "like a hermit savoring the revelation of scripture." [Last]
After having added Benzedrine to keep going, he worries about his reviewers, some of whom he knows will be negative because he's offended them. "I had begun to think of the reviews before finishing the book..." and he knew, for the sake of his inner energy, he "needed a success and needed it badly..." He had liked the change in his life wrought be the success of The Naked and the Dead and then had had a huge psychic drain for years after Barbary Shore was panned and his star eclipsed. "I needed the energy of a new success, I needed blood." [Last 207]
Voice:
When he found his "authentic voice" "I felt as if I finally was learning how to write, learning the joints of language and the touch of a word, felt as if I came close to the meanings of sound... It was close to say the book had come alive and was invading my brain." [Last 202]
Fearing bad reviews and reception, "I could see through to the other side of my fear, I knew a time would come when I would no longer be my own man, that I might lose what I had liked to think was the incorruptible center of my strength." [Last]
He started changing words and phrases to both get more authentic voice of his narrator, but then is concerned "if I were chasing my new aesthetic or afraid of the cops." [208] "In my mind it became a more dangerous book than it really was" so he took out and softened a line here or there. "...it was a mistake to nibble at the edges of censoring myself...it helped to kill the small chance of finding my way into what could have been a novel as important as The Sun Also Rises." [Last 208]
Purpose:
He is driven to write: "Like a starved revolutionary in a garret, I had compounded out of need and fever and vision a fear nothing less than a madman's confidence in the identity of my being and the wants of all others." [Last 214]
Reader:
He is very aware of reader: will he lose the fast readers (which is most of them) if he twists a phrase so that it reads well only if read slowly? [Last 204]
Truth/Reality:
"Discovering the truth is about as simple as getting to know a woman well. It's close to impossible. Truth is a mystery, you see we approach the truth, we never find it. A dear friend of mine was a compulsive writer, he wrote with enormous difficulty. ... I once said to him ëwhy do you keep writing? You can do so many other things....' He looked at me in horror and said "I have to keep writing because the only time I know the truth is at the point of my pen.' And I thought about the remark for years because it is true that you often will write something and at a given moment you'll say to yourself that's true, and how do I know that? ... That doesn't mean that it's ëtrue,' it means that you have one moment when you felt that you were in the presence of the truth, because I think for writers truth is the equivalent of grace for someone who is immensely religious." [NM]
"I love the novel because the novel is a far better way of coming closer to the truth than history or the essay or biography or any of the other form, mainly because the novel (if it's good) insists upon having some sort of inner construction that you can feel. You feel when you're violating that inner construction and you will get a sense of this element belongs to the novel or it doesn't belong. At the end of it, you don't feel that you've written the truth you feel like you've written a ëspace station' from which people can come a little closer to the truth." [NM]
"I wrote in the third person for journalism because my feeling was that one had to (and this goes back to Time magazine) try to break down that notion that the reporter is an objective eye because it's just not true. Everybody sees through their warp, through their bias, through their pretensions, through their needs... all of that." [NM]
Sources:
ï Mailer, Norman. The Last Draft of "The Deer Park." Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels. Ed. Thomas McCormack. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969. 222-231.
ï New York Times on the Web: Writers on
Writing. Oct 00. Norman Mailer Tells A Lot But Not All. 22 Nov 00.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/100400mailer.TV.html.
ï The Space. Sept 00. Norman Mailer
Interview With Ramona Koval. 12/00 http://www.abc.net.au/arts/news/arts_01092000.htm.
Audience:
He writes with readers in mind, some of whom are "smarter, more sensitive, more subtle" than he is; some of whom will have to be told more about the subject. [Science]
Text has a life of its own: "A piece of writing is something in which the figure of an author is just one component. The reader is the most creative thing in a piece of work. The writer puts down the words and the reader creates a scene. Writing is literally in the eye of the beholder." [Twenty 35]
Process:
He loves small details, and collects facts and maps. He makes many lists. "You go out looking for characters to sketch, arresting places to describe, dialog to capture--the way you would gather berries." [Twenty 28]
"I still do note cards--move them around until I get them in the right order. I write the lead first, then work on the rest. And I always know what the ending is going to be. This may sound mechanistic, but it liberates you to write." [Twenty 30]
Revisions are important in his writing: "It's a process of many many revision. Basically four trips through the whole manuscripts and countless subdivisions of that. I work with four full drafts, and the first takes a very long time. I feel that one of the fundamentals of writing is that you do have a chance to improve things, you can rework it till you get what you want." [Science]
Purpose:
He values actual words, tries to remember just what someone said--plus will take lots of notes during interviews. His goal is to try and get the essence of people, their uniqueness. [Science]
He feels an obligation to present honest, credible information to readers: "One pollutant can spread through and taint it all." [Twenty 29]
Reality/Truth:
"You can't exactly reproduce human life; everything is a bit of an illusion. ... the important gradation in the whole thing is that you get as close as you can to what you saw and heard." [Twenty 29]
Reality, or truth, can be conveyed through a type or example, e.g.: the Alaska character is represented by one family in Coming Into the Country. "If I don't succeed in describing them, in capturing their character, then the whole [book] will fall apart." [Twenty 30]
Topics:
Tries to write about what he loves: it's easier to sell your work because "it's far more likely that something you have an emotional commitment to will work out better than some Hessian piece of writing." [Twenty 33]
Sources:
ï Pearson, Michael. Twenty Questions: A Conversation With John McPhee. The Essayist at Work: Profiles of Creative Nonfiction Writers. Ed. Lee Gutkind. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998. 26-34.
ï Science Friday. June 99. Interview
with John McPhee. 4 Dec 00. http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/1999/Jun/hour2_061899.html
Art:
As a storyteller, she likens her childhood explorations (trespassing in forbidden places) to storytelling/writing: "There's always a ghost self, a fictitious self in such settings. For this reason I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression." [NYT]
"To write is to invade another's space, if only to memorialize it....Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished." [NYT]
"...art is...a genuinely transcendental function--a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind..." [Women 366].
She considers herself a postmodernist: "art is not an escape from experience, still less from reality: it is experience, it is reality, in its own inviolable terms." ..."All of us, writing now, are Postmodernists, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. You can't escape your era: can't pretend to not know what is known, what is in the very air. The curse of Postmodernism is this self-consciousness: this inability to not-know what is known. ... The danger in the public's collective response: If your canvas is only your canvas, telling us solely about you, of what value is it? Why should we attend to it? [Excerpts 163-164]
"What are our efforts of fiction and poetry but codified explorations (akin to those signals radio astronomers send out to space in the hope of receiving signals in return: proof of ëintelligent life' elsewhere in the universe) of what it is, what it might mean, to exist as these individuals, these unique men and women standing here, at this time. As folklorists and anthropologists have concluded, despite the universality of their topoi, folk tales/legends/ballads reflect the ëmentalitè' of a particular epoch. Thus are we all involved in a grand collective effort: familial: sometimes rivalrous. But collective." [Excerpts 162]
It is "very difficult for a novelist to have ëopinions.' to see only one side of an issue and stay with it. The world of the novel is always inhabited by aspects of the self that relate in dialectical ways, the movement of beings in time and flux, a kaleidoscope of mirrorselves. Splinters, shards.... the novelist contains them all, thus it's a mirror of the larger organic ëreal' world where we are obliged to see that even those who imagine themselves our enemies, distinctly not in love with us, still have their own truth, their own angles of vision that are legitimate." [Excerpts 167]
"All of us who write work out of a notion that we are participating in some sort of communal activity. Whether my role is writing, or reading and responding, might not be very important." [Women 383]
Language:
"Creating language to communicate our visions to one another, we are engaged in creating rhythms that have to please us first, excite us sufficiently to grant us the strength for sustained periods of effort... To get there you must start from here since there is no other starting point but here." [Excerpts 172]
Process:
She preprocesses and gets ideas when she is running, a daily habit. She's written and run addictively as long as she remembers. [NYT]
1)envisions what she's writing, while running, as a film or dream; 2) writes in longhand; 3) envisions repeatedly: "Every day I loop back to earlier sections to rewrite, in order to maintain a constant, fluid voice"; 4) types formally what she's written and envisioned many times. [NYT]
"For me, stories usually begin...out of some magical association between characters and their settings." [Women 376]
Purpose:
To feel better: "...much of my writing is a way of assuaging homesickness..." [NYT]
"...to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort." [NYT]
"The idea is the important thing. More so than the writer or her structure. Once the soldiers get across, "What does it matter if the bridge collapses?'" [Women 367]
"I try to write books that can be read in one way by a literal-minded reader, and in quite another way by a reader alert to symbolic abbreviation and parodistic elements." [Women 374]
Reality:
it is there, may be forbidden or hidden. Writers must and can find it, uncover it. The process and result might be dangerous. [NYT]
Topics:
She likes to write about locales that intrigue her, or trigger powerful memories or emotions: "I'm fated to write about these sights, to bring them to life (as it's said) in fiction." [NYT]
She is concerned with topics: medicine (after bout with neurologist herself), "Law and civilization" after the 60's. [Women]
Voice:
"...subject matter interests me far less than the establishment of a voice...' [Women 366]
Sources:
ï New York Times on the Web: Writers on
Writing. July 99. Joyce Carol Oates: To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start
Moving Literary Feet. Nov 00.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/071999-Oates-writing.html.
ï Oates, Joyce Carol. Excerpts From a Journal. Writers on Writing: A Bread Loaf Anthology. Ed. Pack, Robert and Parini, Jay. Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press, 1991. 162-174.
ï Philips, Robert. Interview With Joyce
Carol Oates. Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Ed.
George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1989, 361-384.
Art:
Plot is related to the concept of the future, of time; it "is grounded in a high, even noble, human craving to know a craving to push into the mystery of tomorrow." [179]
Uncertainty appeals to us, in fact it may be necessary; so plots should never be too tidy: "There is something both false and trivial about a story that arrives at absolute closure." [181]
Language:
"Language can strive for wholeness, seek continuity and flow, re-create the great illusions of life." [176-177]
"The writer of fiction, like the shaman, serves as a medium of sorts between two different worlds --the world of ordinary reality and the extraordinary world of the imagination...invoked with the magic of language--those potent nouns, those levitating verbs, those tricky little adverbs, those amazing conjunctions, the whole spectacular show of clauses becoming sentences, and sentences becoming paragraphs, and paragraphs becoming stories." [179]
Process:
"Characterization is achieved not through a ëpinning down' process but rather through a process that opens up and releases mysteries of the human spirit." [182]
Purpose:
There are two planes of being and the writer is the medium between them. Writing is an act of faith--faith that there is enlightenment and understanding, Good and Evil--and that stories can take us there to some epiphany.
Storytelling is the essence of fiction writing and as such is in the tradition of shamans, of magicians. Huck Finn and Lord Jim make implicit moral claims on us, serving as models of a sort, suggesting by implication how we might or might not live our own lives."
The characters in our stories remind us that everyone, everything else is essentially ëother,' and "we find ourselves clawing at the darkness of human nature in an effort to know what cannot be known." [181]
The object of storytelling is "to extend the boundaries of the mysterious. ... To reach into one's own heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself." [183]
Reality/Truth:
Fiction writers create a reality, try to penetrate to the unknowable, the mysteries of the human heart. both reader and writers search for "a kind of enigmatic ëotherness'--other people and places, other worlds, other scenes, other souls." He calls it "imaginative knowing"--which "doesn't depend upon the scientific method. Fictional characters are not constructed of flesh and blood, but rather of words, and those words serve as explicit incantations that guide us through the universe of the imagination." [177]
Imagination is the greatest reality and words and language are its power, its illumination.
The world, life, humans are unknowable mysteries.
Source:
O'Brien, Tim. The Magic Show. Writers
on Writing: A Bread Loaf Anthology. Ed. Pack, Robert and Parini, Jay. Hanover,
NH: Middlebury College Press, 1991. 175-183.
Purpose:
"I'm desperate to write. I'm crazy to write. I want to write." [NYT]
She wants to learn and experience everything real: "which mushrooms smell like maraschino cherries and which like dead rats ... to recognize vertically trapped suppressed lee-wave clouds." [NYT]
She started writing fiction rather than articles, because "creating people out of nothing and putting them on paper seemed like an amusing and interesting thing to do." [Conversation]
She's concerned with the larger context of a person's life, how it is set against "mass"--or crushing environment, versus the interior novel: "When you measure one person's life, say, against the teeming millions and billions that are on earth today, it shrinks in magnitude quite stunningly." [Conversation]
Process:
She has never had writer's block, or anything close. "I have at the moment three novels sitting in my head, waiting to get on paper, and I know exactly how each one is going to go," she said. "Each one is like a wrapped package." [NYT]
Imagination is the source of "the ideas, actions, and beliefs that we hold." It is "the human mind's central life strategy." [Conversation]
Nor does she write about what she already knows. She prefers to go somewhere she has never been and write about what she finds. And so she went with a friend to Newfoundland six years ago. "I was intrigued by the place names," she said. Names like Joe Batt's Arm, Seldom Come By, Dead Man's Cove, Heart's Delight, the Annieopsquotch Mountains." [NYT]
She collects "useful books on all possible subjects "because I want to know facts and items about everything." [NYT]
She listens to dialog and stories and conversations everywhere, "noting particular pronunciations and the rhythms of regional speech." She likes the random juxtaposition of stuff found in the old oaken trays of card catalogs, likes pamphlets from all over, menus and recipes; loves to drive around in the West; loves signs and messages on poles, stores, or panhandlers. [NYT]
Reality/Truth
She considers writing to be like digging for the truth; she is always trying to get at the truth from the details: "the digging is never finished because the shovel scrapes at life itself." [NYT]
"The life of the mind, the realm of the imagination is a more real and more compelling one than the world we live in. ... It is everything. Imagination is the central pivot of human life." [Conversation]
She tries to be faithful to reality, to what she observes, using "kernels of real experience to create fictional episodes." [Conversation]
Sources:
Atlantic Monthly Unbound. Nov 97. Annie
Proulx: A Conversation With E. Annie Proulx. 6 Dec 00
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/factfict/eapint.htm
New York Times on the Web: Writers on Writing.
May 99. Annie Proulx: Inspiration? Head Down the Back Road, and Stop
for Yard Sales. Dec 00.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/051099-proulx-writing.html.
May 99. E.Annie Proulx: At Midlife,
a Novelist is Born. Dec 00. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/23/specials/proulx-home.html.
Art:
"I'm interested in how people relate to the groups that they're in (whether those groups are families of communities), in how power is negotiated among people, in character idiosyncrasies, and in the relationship of power to love." [Adventures]
She values multiple views, e.g., in writing about slavery she will examine what Abolitionists wanted, what Southerners wanted, and slaves wanted. [Adventures]
She took a Feminist perspective in A Thousand Acres, wanting to give Goneril and Regan respect: validate their right to be angry. Smiley feels they had valuable concerns, but that female concerns weren't valued then. [Adventures]
She writes about what she observes in detail. [NYT]
"I came to see the novel writing as more like water running through a hose than putting objects into a box." [NYT]
"In his book After Bakhtin, David Lodge reflects upon the failure of much literary theory to grapple with the richness of the novel, and he locates this richness in the variety of voices that enter into the narrative, even when the author seems to have a strong voice of his or her own. This came to be my daily experience: a myriad of voices entering me and holding sway...." [NYT]
"A novel is s spot where language, movement, feeling and thought gel for a moment, through the agency of, let's say, a particular volunteer, but it is not an object or a possession. It is an act of love." [NYT]
Process:
She is outward looking, rather than inward; and drawn deeply to different kinds of subjects: "I tend to get into things, kind of obsessed with them." [Adventures]
Details, history are very important: "You need to honor the details absolutely..." "If you work really hard to get your facts straight, then you're much better off, because you understand the structure better. If you understand the structure then you can extrapolate with pretty fair accuracy." [Adventures]
Purpose:
She will use characters to synthesize or address social type concerns. Lidie Newton was "...an attempt to address a very strongly bifurcated Nineteenth Century way of looking at things. It was also a kind of reconciliation in my own mind between the two halves of my background." [Adventures]
She likes to read her writing and to laugh at her own jokes. She has always been her own audience, and writes for herself. She did recently get an audience, in the form of a lover, and then gradually began to write with him in mind: what he'd laugh at, etc. [Adventures]
Language:
"an ongoing conversation." [Adventures]
Source:
Atlantic Monthly Unbound. May 98. Jane Smiley: The Adventures of Jane Smiley. 12 Nov 00. http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/ba980528.htm
New York Times on the Web: Writers on Writing.
April 99. Jane Smiley: The Muse: The Listener Also Instructs. Dec.
00.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/042699smiley-writing-html.
She considers herself to be a historian, and secondarily as a biographer.
She likes great men, great events: they represent their eras and their study illuminates so many other threads of the time, both past and future.
She is selective in detail and language, and will sometimes clean up language just a little, sometimes just to streamline the narrative to keep readers turning pages. Not a lot of major revisions, though.
Purpose:
"Every creative artist...has the same two objectives: to express his own vision and to communicate it to the reader, viewer, listener, or other consumer." [93]
She wants to please and interest, but not necessarily edify the reader, "because in our epoch we tend to shy away from moral overtones." But she believes that both "aesthetic pleasure in good writing..., and increased knowledge of human conduct....have the power to edify." [93]
She writes for readers, not herself: "I never feel my writing is born or has an independent existence until it is read. ... it takes two to complete the function of the written word." [94]
Her goal is to hold the reader's attention.
She doesn't like the idea of burrowing
into the "private crannies" or "underside" of people's lives or events.
In reading, for example, she doesn't want a lot of information on the private
life of Shakespeare to get in the way of her reading of King Lear.
[103]
Reality/Truth:
She believes she can uncover and communicate truth: for example, Coucy (The Distant Mirror) "was medieval society in microcosm, ... the many-layered elements of Western man." [95] A particular character, like Coucy or John Reed, are a focus and serve to represent their eras.
Biographers and historians must exercise judgment. She does not believe that "all facts are equal." [102]
Source:
Tuchman, Barbara. Biography as a Prism of History. Biography as High Adventure: Life-Writers Speak on Their Art. Ed. Stephen B. Oates. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986. 93-103.
Art:
According to Aristotle: "If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be logical, have at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior...." [NYT]
The best thing to do is to help young writers learn to tell a story. He wishes he'd gone to a writer's workshop because it took him years to learn how to do it. [NYT]
"I don't write well-rounded, breathing characters. ... If you devote a book to developing a living, breathing character, you can't talk about anything else. If you introduce sexual love as a factor, you can't talk about anything else -- the reader won't let you. So you steer clear of those subjects. The Bible is similarly flawed. We don't know the color of Jonah's eyes. We don't know what Mary was like when she was angry. What is interesting about all the people in the Bible is their situation. And in my books, I hope the situation is interesting." [Chat Transcripts]
"...if a student explains in depth why a character does something, I tell the student, "Forget it -- you're not that smart." [Chat Transcripts]
Language:
"The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of 26 phonetic symbols, 10 numbers, and about 8 punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. And now there's the information highway. We don't need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face." [Vonnegut and Clancy]
Process:
"I was at a cocktail party...and an editor said, ëHey, isn't it time you wrote another novel?' And I said, "Yeah, as a matter of fact." And I spoke the whole book. I just went off like a burglar alarm. So then I went home and wrote it." [Salon.com]
"I asked each student to open his or her mouths as wide as possible. I reached in with a thumb and forefinger to a point directly beneath his or her epiglottis. There is the free end of a spool of tape there. I pinched it, then pulled it out gradually, gently, so as not to make the student gag. When I got several feet of it out where we could see it, the student and I read what was written there." [NYT]
"I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I'd never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil." [Vonnegut and Clancy]
Purpose:
We have a preformed notion of what we want to communicate. the trick is to get it out well written, to compose it for an audience. [NYT]]
"And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." [Vonnegut and Clancy]
"Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We're dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something." [Vonnegut and Clancy]
"The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward." [Chat Transcripts]
Sources:
ï Barnes and Noble: Chat Transcripts: Kurt Vonnegut. 3 October, 1997 http://www.barnesandnoble.com/community/archive/authors/vonnegut_1.asp?userid=5WF4UZCZ1V&mscssid=FUHJGVWE7XS12PCL00A3H1WNF7A34VN4&pcount=0&srefer=
ï Frank Houston. Salon.com. Interview:
Kurt Vonnegut. 8 October 1999.
http://www.salonmag.com/books/int/1999/10/08/vonnegut_interview/index.html
ï Kurt Vonnegut Web Archives. Freedman,
D. & Schafer S. Kurt Vonnegut Web. Vonnegut and Clancy on Technology.
1995
http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/vonnegut/clancy.html
ï New York Times on the Web: Writers on
Writing. May 99. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: Despite Tough Guys, Life is Not
the Only School for Real Novelists. Nov. 00.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/052499vonnegut-writing-html.
Purpose:
Writing is telling stories. [NYT]
He feels he is a "survivor and messenger" about the past. He searched for how to articulate his message: but "language became an obstacle": he didn't know how to write about it: "Before these [WWII concentration camp] images, all words disintegrate and fall lifeless into the ashes." [NYT]
Writers write "because they cannot do otherwise... they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them ... It is they who force the writer to tell their stories." [NYT]
"...playing games is not an option [for my generation]. We need to bear witness, we need to know...that some of our testimonies will safeguard the essence of our prayers." [NYT]
He wants to make a difference--free a prisoner, solace the abandoned. "All I have is a few words, and I will give these words. That's what I'm trying to do." [Hall]
"It is still the child in me that asks the questions. It is still the child in me that I am trying to entertain or to reach with my stories." [Hall]
He wrote his first book for other survivors who couldn't speak. He wants to speak so the voices are heard: "The enemy wanted to be the one who speaks, and I felt, I still feel, we must see to it that the victim should be the one who speaks and is heard." [Hall]
Influence
Rabbi Nahman who could turn "prayers into tales," is his teacher by example. [NYT]
He has a passion for Talmud, the sacred, as well as Hasidic stories. His grandfather told stories where the wicked were humbled and "miracles were part of everyday life." [NYT]
His father "taught me how to reason, how to reach my mind. My soul belonged to my grandfather and my mother." He feels them looking over his shoulder as he writes--he still fears their judgment. [Hall]
Language:
"Every word both separates and links: it depends on the writer whether it become wound or balm, curse, or promise." [NYT]
Advice:
Start by observing: the main thing in life is to be sensitive. "...then you listen, and you go out and you hear the birds chirping and it's great. You see a person in the street, you do not know his face, and you think, ëWho knows what secret that person carries?' Which means you learn and you learn and you learn and you become enriched to a point that afterwards it overflows." [Hall]
Questions are most important for young writers: "answers change. Questions don't....There are no absolute answers but there are absolute questions." [Hall]
Process:
"I teach my students not creative writing but creative reading...You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind!" [Hall]
Topics:
About the Holocaust: "There are no words for it, so all I can try and do is communicate the incommunicability of the event. Furthermore, I know that even if I found the words you wouldn't understand. It's not because I cannot explain that you won't understand, it is because you won't understand that I can't explain." [Hall]
Sources:
Hall of Public Service. 29 June 96. Interview
With Elie Wiesel. 20 Nov 00. http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/wieOint-1
New York Times on the Web: Writers on Writing.
June 00. Elie Wiesel: A Sacred Magic Can Elevate the Secular Storyteller.
Dec. 00.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/061900-wiesel-writing.html.
Art:
He liked writing nonfiction, but his goal had always been to write a novel. He likes "bringing disparate things together that you cannot find in a nonfictional form."
Novelists and writers in general have to have curiosity and willingness to "documentalize."
"Every world has its status structure. I think an awareness of status is the most valuable weapon or instrument the writer has."
"...the prime motivation of human beings is... to live a life according to a set of values, that if they were absolute, if God had set them down on tablets, would make that person's group, not the person, supreme."
Process:
The writer's ability always has "a certain musical quality."
In all successful writing, content, the material, the milieu, is about 70 percent of a book, and talent is about 30 percent. When you're young, you think that talent is 95 percent, because that's all you've got, and material is five percent."
Purpose:
"...reporting is the heart of the modern novel. It was always this way in the past: Zola, Balzac, Dickens."
Stories are the point: People read and watch TV because of stories, because they want to "find out about lives other than their own."
"I really do love to write about things I don't know." He likes the research and discovery part of writing: "First I'm attracted by a certain setting, and wonder what's there. And I hope usable characters will walk in."
His mission is discovery: "...for me, discovery is the satisfaction. I love to think I'm bringing the reader inside of a life that is highly interesting or highly important," but that they don't know about.
He also is motivated by audience, "by applause." People, he claims, just like to get published.
Reality/Truth:
Although today's "culture tosses up things almost daily" and reality "is continually outdoing our efforts, ... you relish the fact that you can and should do something about reality." So "novelists have to go out in the role of journalists" because TV news is worthless and the newspapers don't have enough competition to give well-rounded views....In the novel, you have the unusual opportunity of also capturing the psychology of the particular area you've been reporting on and putting into print the things that journalists can't--people's mental state, whatever."
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