Archive for the 'On Writing' Category

Huxley on Snails and Writers

Posted in On Writing on November 23rd, 2009
PDPhoto.org
"Slugs go through life leaving only a fading trail of slime; the snail bequeaths to the world an elaborately convoluted shell. The writer is a snail in the midst of slugs…Snails make excellent fossils; slugs tend to disappear without leaving a trace. Literary fame is a function of fossilizability. Unlike his biological counterpart, the writer-snail can become a fossil, even a series of fossils, while his is still alive. For the aging writer this fact is often a source of considerable embarrassment and annoyance."

Aldous Huxley in the Foreword to Eschelbach and Shober’s Aldous Huxley A Bibliopgraphy 1916-1959
 

 

Who Cares How You Write a Great Novel…

Posted in On Writing on November 9th, 2009
I was going to write a great post berating this Wall Street Journal article as completely annoying; a self congratulatory waste-of-time. With characteristic aplomb, Bookninja George Murray saves me the trouble:

The WSJ asks a bunch of bigtime authors how to write a great novel. I think we all know the answer to that. Be a man. Or don’t. But be something. Or don’t. Sit with your hand up in the air. Bend paperclips into talismans from demonic cults. Use notecards, computers, typewriters, biros. Write in the early morning, late at night, in the basement, garret, at the kitchen table. Use folders, dividers, colour-coded pencils. Eat burritos before you write and then hold it in to create a sense of urgency. Get out the scissors, glue and paste. What the fuck? How about this one: stop fetishizing the process and get ‘er done.

 

Thomas Bernhard and NPRs Three Minute Fiction

Posted in On Writing on September 28th, 2009
http://www.thomasbernhard.org/

My former classmate who emigrated to Australia eleven years ago and returned to his Styrian homeland two years ago emigrated to Australia again six months ago, although he knows he will return to Styria again and will continue to emigrate to Australia and return to Styria as often as it takes him to find peace either in Australia or Styria. His father before him, a journeyman baker from the Molltal who went to school with my father,emigrated from Carinthia to Styria at least twenty times and each time returned to Carinthia from Styria until he finally found peace in Carinthia, in Arndorf near St. Veit-on-the-Glan, where in the old smithy – his final lodgings- he hanged himelf on an iron hook because he was homesick for Styria, without, and he was reproached for this at the time and long after his death, thinking of his wife and children.

I choose this story for how it illustrates, how it humourously exaggerates, Bernhard’s tendencies toward repetition, precision, morbidity, parenthetical comment, and sonnet-like endings.

 

Enter The Walrus’s writing contest: Deadline July 31, 2009

Posted in On Writing on July 30th, 2009

Hurry, Hurry: To celebrate The Walruss annual summer reading issue—featuring stories by Lee Henderson, Rivka Galchen (listen to our conversation here), Stephen Marche & 2008 Giller Prize winner Joseph Boyden (ditto here) — the mag is pleased to announce The Walrus Guilty Pleasures Writing Contest!

To enter, write the first paragraph of a novel in one of the following genres: Science Fiction, Romance, Western, Ghost Story/Gothic.

"Make it the most gripping, titilating, and action-packed read of the summer!" Send submissions to guiltypleasures@walrusmagazine.com by July 31, and you could win a prize package from Fairmont Hotels & Resorts or a Walrus prize package, and have your work published at walrusmagazine.com!

 

Mitchelmore’s Fear of reading

Posted in On Writing on July 29th, 2009

Steve Mitchelmore delivers a post worthy of Beckett, about epiphany, and impossibility, during recovery from a serious bicycling accident. From which:

"Akhenaten had ordered that the capital city be moved from Thebes into the desert 200 miles away. The documentary featured new archeological discoveries that revealed the disastrous consequences for his subjects. What stirred me was not these human facts but the glorious and terrifying absurdity of Akhenaten’s project. It demonstrates the same impressive or horrendous folly as those in fictional works: William Golding’s The Spire for example, and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and, more familiar to me, those of the many characters created by Bernhard: Roithamer who builds a cone-shaped house in the middle of a forest, Reger who studies every masterpiece in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna until he finds a flaw, even Bernhard himself aged eight deciding to cycle to his aunt’s house in Salzburg, twenty-two miles away. A creative writer may respond by sketching a novel idea based on the crazy plans of an individual – perhaps Naguib Mahfouz’s Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth is it as far as the pharaoh is concerned – but, in my sedated condition, I imagined a writing project that would itself be the absurdity, something itself animated by impossibility."

Read and relish the rest here.

Hail, Haul or Hale? Common Errors in English

Posted in On Writing on July 28th, 2009
"One old meaning of the word “hale” is “to drag,” especially by force. In modern usage it has been replaced with “haul” except in the standard phrase “hale into court.” People who can’t make sense of this form often misspell the phrase as “hail into court.” To be hailed is to be greeted enthusiastically, with praise. People haled into court normally go reluctantly, not expecting any such warm reception."

Check out this fun site for more corrections to common errors in English. More? Go here. And/or here.

 

Virginia Woolf on Writing and Architecting

Posted in On Writing on July 24th, 2009

Diary entry for April 28, 1935:

"All desire to practice the art of a writer has completely left me. I cannot imagine what it would be like: that is, more accurately, I cannot curve my mind to the line of a book: no, nor of an article. Its not the writing but the architecting that strains. If I write this paragraph, then there is the next & then the next. But after a months holiday I shall be as tough & springy as – say heather root; & the arches and the domes will spring into the air as firm as steel & light as cloud – but all these words miss the mark. ‘

from The Faber Book of Diaries, edited by Simon Bret. (1987)

The only thing appealing about the L.A. Times’ Postmodern list is its cute little icons

Posted in On Writing on July 19th, 2009
Sure. As mentioned many and more times, lists are a fun and easy way to attract and rile up readership, and, if you’re lucky create a bit of caustic banter. Jacket Copy’s succeeds because it is so… irritating, in large part because so too is the term Postmodern literature. 

As Mr. Wikipedia, in quite a extensive summary, tells us:

The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. However, unifying features often coincide with Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the "meta-narrative" and "little narrative," Jacques Derrida’s concept of "play," and Jean Baudrillard’s "simulacra." For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest. This distrust of totalizing mechanisms extends even to the author; thus postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author’s "univocal" control (the control of only one voice). The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. A list of postmodern authors often varies; the following are some names of authors often so classified, most of them belonging to the generation born in the interwar period: William Burroughs (1914-1997), Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), John Barth (b. 1930), Donald Barthelme (1931-1989), E. L. Doctorow (b. 1931), Robert Coover (1932), Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) Don DeLillo (b. 1936), Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), Ishmael Reed (1938), Kathy Acker (1947-1997), Paul Auster (b. 1947)[1], Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952).

Considering however thatas is pointed out in comments stirred by the LATlist – Don Quixote, often cited as the first, and by many, the best, novel (post-modern or otherwise) ever written, doesn’t even appear, despite preempting virtually all claims by list-making parvenus to any kind of originality, one really can’t take this journalistic foolishness seriously. Don Quixote nailed the playful-innovative-absurdist-self-referential-commentary-on-fiction-life-its (non) meaning-and/or-depiction genre more than five hundred years ago, and it is yet to have been bettered.
 
This list exercise comes off as just…irritating, especially when you consider that in addition to Cervantes, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett aren’t even included as ‘progenitors’. After Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Woolf’s Orlando, Beckett’s Plays and Novels, Calvino’s "If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler" perhaps, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire (I’m kinda partial to Conrad’s unreliable Heart of Darkness narrator too)…you’d be hard pressed to find anything significantly ‘new’ that anyone on the lalalist has contributed…unless you consider responding to changing technology or science or current events, significant…Plato, for instance, couldn’t write about the Internet, or Michael Jackson’s death, whereas Philip Roth of course, could, if he were so inclined.
 
No. The best, the only thing appealing about this list is that it is accompanied by cute little icons.
 

Beautiful Sentences, Conscientiousness and Good Fortune

Posted in On Writing on July 16th, 2009

This from The Elegant Variation’s Interview with Joseph O’Neill:

TEV: …It’s interesting that you have brought up Zadie Smith because I was going to ask about her next. I think that a lot of people draw the wrong kind of conclusions with a piece like the one that she wrote. I think that it sets up some false oppositions. I feel like this form of the novel is capacious enough to accommodate all different styles

Joseph O’Neill: Yes.

TEV: And the notion that one has to chose between Netherland or Remainder just seems silly. I liked Remainder a great deal, as well. I don’t feel that they’re mutually exclusive, that one must declare an allegiance.

Joseph O’Neill: I’d actually read and liked Remainder before that piece. And I thought it was a perfectly good piece of writing. I’m not sure I would describe it as unconventional, not least because that description, as I’ve said, would not mean very much.

TEV: Yes. But I think that some of the sentiments that she expresses hold sway among this younger generation of writers, whether it’s people coming out of the McSweeney’s School or the purveyors of the uber-ironic, the tendency toward a hip nihilism or something like that that. That they mistrust, in essence, the idea of a beautiful sentence. Some people find that corny, the notion of a beautiful sentence.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, it depends on how you define them as beautiful. I mean, you know, Foster Wallace wrote many beautiful sentences. I mean, there’s nothing but beautiful sentences in his work. Even though he had a particular way of doing it. What makes a sentence beautiful, for me, is its conscientiousness. A hip, ironic sensibility is not necessarily conscientious. Neither is a sensibility that latches on to dusks and dawns and roses."

Which of course begs the question: what is a sentence’s conscientiousness? Its painstakingly, careful, thoroughly organized structure? I suppose if what O’Neill means is that time and thought have been put into its construction, I might agree with him, but really, what makes a sentence beautiful is the creative instinct, flare, fire, good fortune that visits itself upon the author, empowering him or her to put words together in ways that perfectly express what demands expression at that very time and place in the text; in ways that few others can or have; in ways that make readers sigh with delight; shake their heads in awe; grit their teeth with envy. For some this entails a lot of hard work, crafting; trial and error. For others it comes like a gift, a wave, a visitation.

As for DFW…his work may have been conscientious, but beautiful? Perhaps at times, but mostly: boredom undermines beauty.

3-Day Novel Contest this September

Posted in On Writing on June 11th, 2009
Last month, during ‘North America ’s largest annual interdisciplinary academic conference‘ I ran into Melissa Edwards who handed me a copy of In the Garden of Men by Ottawa’s own John Kupferschmidt. It won the 30th Annual International 3-Day Novel Contest, one which, as the Globe and Mail puts it  ‘forces instinct to the fore…the writerly subconscious drives things on.’

 It’s open to everyone, globally. "The contest has run every Labour Day Weekend since 1977 and now attracts writers from all over the world. It has been responsible for dozens of published novels, thousands of first drafts, countless good ideas and even a reality TV series. It’s a thrill, a grind, a trial-by-deadline and an awesome creative experience." This year’s contest is set to run from 12:01 Saturday Sept. 5 to 11.59pm, Monday Sept. 7, 2009.

So, go ahead. Sweat a bit. Visit 3daynovel.com for rules and details.