Read it.
Thought-provoking.
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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone
In The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate The Books That Matter Most To Them, Dorothy Allison explains how The Bluest Eye taught her the power of words:
“The Bluest Eye made it plain. The world could be different if truth was told in such gorgeous and stark ways.
I want to do that, I thought. Not, I can do that. I could not imagine a world in which I could put voice to all the things I thought and remembered and imagined about being poor and hated and used and denied. But oh Lord, if I could, if I could make a story that would touch someone else’s heart the way this one touched mine. If I could repay a tenth of what I owed this storyteller, this brave and wonderful woman on the page, I would give anything.
I would give anything—and will. This is a debt that passes to the reader—to take up the reader—to take the story up and remake the world. It changed me utterly It changes me still. It remade my life.”
What books have had similar impacts on you? I’m thinking about this while I read this book. For me there have been many short and long, fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose. Among them are A Wrinkle In Time, Even Covwgirls Get the Blues, Leaves of Grass, the poetry of e.e. cummings, The Golden Notebook, “The Story of An Hour”, “The Art of Losing”, The Boxcar Children mysteries, James and the Giant Peach and more. You?
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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone
Here’s a great interview with Philip Lopate on literary non-fiction. Note what he has to say about our infamous James Frey. Also, what he says about “reflective nonfiction” , which I think is very wise and so necessary in a world where writers are so concerned with “the market”: “You could finesse a certain amount of technique, scenes, and dialogue, but it’s hard to finesse having or not having an interesting mind. I try to read writers who are better than I am, or who have deeper minds than I do because I need to learn.”
I read Lopate’s book Being With Children when I was studying to be a teacher. It was cool to stumble upon him again and to find in his interview unexpected wisdom in the middle of my day, this time on writing, reading and living, “One issue is the limits of our sympathy, and that we can’t always sympathize with people in need or in trouble. We wrestle with our solipsistic condition, and most people fall into a kind of self-absorption. We know that we should be open more to others, but we’re very self-pre-occupied. But, if we become friends with our minds, we will be less harsh on ourselves for not being perfect, for not being saints. We’re not saints, for the most part.
One of the things that literature does—and here I’m not just talking about essays, but about Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, the great novels of the nineteenth century—is it allows us to be more understanding about human frailty, about error, tragic flaws, and therefore, makes us more forgiving, and more self-forgiving. That’s a kind of wisdom.”
Amen.
Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone
Yesterday, I made a list of topics–all related to writing–that I’d like to cover in this blog. I was amazed at how long the list was–and inspired. As a result of this, I hope to post something for writers to muse over every day.
Today, Let’s get some historical perspective. 🙂 Paul Brians, WSU professor, wrote a rich little essay on the Romatic period of art and literature. He concludes with this assertion: “Looking back over the list of characteristics discussed above one can readily see that despite the fact that Romanticism was not nearly as coherent a movement as the Enlightenment, and lacked the sort of programmatic aims the latter professed, it was even more successful in changing history–changing the definition of what it means to be human.” Click here to read the whole darn thang.
Looking for an inventive way to fit reading one of the works mentioned by Brians into your already ridiculous reading schedule? Check out Librivox. You can download many of the works mentioned on audio and listen to them while walking the dog or cleaning the kitchen.
Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone
Emelita and I have this standing date every three weeks. Every third Sunday, she attends my yoga class and then we meet at Border’s Books to read as much of one book as we can in one sitting. We take turns picking the book. We take turns ordering tea by the pot. Last Sunday, it was her turn to pick. She picked Christopher Moore‘s A Dirty Job.
Wow! I feel the way I did when I was eleven and read the first of L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series, or at sixteen when I read my first Robbin’s novel, Still Life With Woodpecker. I read all the time, always more than one book at a time, but only occasionally do I fall this hard, I’ve-got-to-read-everything-this-person-has-in-print hard.
So, I’ve finished A Dirty Job, a book with craft about a junk dealer who loses his wife after the birth of their first child and that gets seriously zany from there. It’s a story about reconciling the beauty of the world with the inevitability, sometimes seeming cruelty, of death. Charlie Asher, our hero, discovers that having the courage to face death despite risk is how to live victorious over death, something that few souls accomplish, and certainly not in one lifetime. The opening line of the novel sets the reader up for chapter after chapter of killer opening lines: “Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as if the slightest misstep might send him plummeting through the surface to be sucked to the depths below.”
I’m reading Bloodsucking Fiends next so that in three weeks, Emelita and I can read You Suck at our iheartreading ceremony. (That’s the only book by Moore she hasn’t already read. )
Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone
I read An Enemy of the People via DailyLit.com. This is a site where you subscribe to a book and receive a bite-sized chunk of reading each day. This play arrived each day over 44 days. Though I wondered if reading in this method would hold my attention, it did. A snippet of literature in the middle of the day that did not require a long-term commitment and offered just enough to ponder.
The play itself was transparent and apparently a revenge play written by Ibsen in response to the public’s rejection of another of his plays for it’s supposed smuttiness. However, it was well worth the read for its ironic wit and for the “liberal-minded, high-minded” doctor’s impressive rhetoric.
Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone
Just finished reading The Faith of A Writer by Joyce Carol Oates. I read this little book on writing over a long period of time. I’d get caught up in other interests and set it aside for weeks, then pick it up again and read for a half hour, then set it down again. What I like most about this book is that it isn’t just about her experience as a writer, but about our experience as writers. Oates is well-read and informed about the lives of “important” authors of the literary canon and she is adept at literary analysis. Her book is filled not only with her own personal reflection on her life as a writer, but with reflections on the lives and work of other writers. She does this all to get at the important questions of the HOW and WHY of writing. Here are some of my favorite excerpts from the book with my comments.
“Most of us fall in love with works of art many times during the course of our lifetimes. Give yourself up in admiration, even in adoration, of another’s art. (How Degas worshipped Monet! How Melville loved Hawthorne! And how many young yearning, brimming-with-emotion poets has Walt Whitman sired!) If you find an exciting arresting, disturbing voice or vision, immerse yourself in it. You will learn from it.” (Oates 26)
Liz’s Comment: What writers have you immersed yourself in? I’m not just talking read a book or two and thought, wow that’s good writing, but read everything you could get your hands on– shared the lines you like best with anyone who would listen, even carried those same lines around in your book bag, fingering them between thumb and index finger like a peasant rubbing a lamp in hopes that your wish will be granted. Some of the writers I’ve fallen in love with at different points in my life include: Whitman, Dostoyevsky, Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins, Dorris Lessing, E.E. Cummings, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Madeline L’Engle.
“Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think what it might be.” (Oates 29)
Liz’s Comment: Yes! Me too. When I come home from a good run, often the first thing I do is look for pen and paper.
“Writer’s and poets are famous for loving to be in motion. If not running, hiking; if not hiking, walking.” (Oates 30)
Liz’s Comment: Me too!
“I’m a writer absolutely mesmerized by places; much of my writing is a way of assuaging homesickness, and the settings my characters inhabit are curcial to me as the characters themselves. I couldn’t write even a very short story without vividly “seeing” what it’s characters see.” (Oates 35)
Liz’s Comment: Use this as a writing prompt. Fully sketch out or describe a place. Then set some characters in that space and see what happens.
“The writer carries himself as he would carry a precarious pyramid of eggs, in danger of failing at any moment, and shattering on the floor in an ignoble mess.” (Oates 61)
Liz’s Comment: Love this simile. ☺
“That the writer labors to discover the secret of his work is perhaps the writer’s most baffling predicament, about which he cannot easily speak: for he cannot write the fiction without becoming, beforehand, the person who must write that fiction: and he cannot be that person, without first subordinating himself to the process, the labor, of creating that fiction, which is why one becomes addicted to insomnia itself, to a perpetual sense of things about to fail, the pyramid of eggs about the tumble, the house of cards about to be blown away.” (Oates 64)
Liz’s Comment: I do feel that I must write and am happiest when I’m writing or when I’ve just completed a piece. When I go too long without having written, I fall into a kind of depression that sometimes I don’t recognize at first as the withdrawal that it is. I might have been an alcoholic like my father or a food addict like my mother if I hadn’t started writing.
“It [inspiration] can be like striking a damp match again, again, again: hoping a small flame will leap out, before the match breaks.” (Oates 76)
Liz’s Comment: Right on.
“Is there any moral to be drawn from this compendium, any general proposition? If so, it’s a simple one: Read widely, read enthusiastically, be guided by instinct and not design. For if you read, you need not become a writer; but if you hope to become a writer, you much read.” (Oates 110)
Liz’s Comment: Amen!
“The story’s theme is like a bobbin upon which the thread of the narrative, or plot, is skillfully wound. Without the bobbin, the thread would fly loose.” (Oates 120)
Liz’ Comment: Right on.
“To have a reliable opinion about oneself, one must know the subject, and perhaps that isn’t possible. We know how we feel about ourselves, but only from hour to hour; our moods change, like the intensity of light outside out windows. But to feel is not to know; and strong feelings will block knowledge. I seem to have virtually no opinion of myself. I only publish work that I believe to be the best that I can do, and beyond that I can’t judge. My life, to me, is transparent, as a glass of water, and of no more interest. And my writing, which to far too various for me to contemplate, is an elusive matter, that will reside in the minds (or as Auden more forcefully says, the guts) of others, to judge.” (Oates 136).
Liz’s Comment: This struck me as a healthy perspective, especially considering the cataloguing of tortured writers that preceded this passage. I hope that if I got to the place where I spent much time obsessing over how good I was or wasn’t, I’d quit writing all together and take up something else—like scrap booking, for instance. I tirelessly revise my work, but I do not confuse the work with the woman. This is a case where the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.
Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone
Apotheosis.
I’m not sure what the importance of this word is, but it does occur once in the very beginning and then twice at the end, which hints at significance. It’s difficult to write much with certainty about Stephen Kings’ The Gunslinger knowing that it’s the first in a long series about The Dark Tower. I suspect it may have something to do with our hero (Roland), who I’m pretty sure is an allusion to the knight of the same name from the epic poem, “The Song of Roland”. King even throws out a metaphor comparing something–I forget what–to the Saragosso sea, the name of the city Charlemagne defeats. The novel ends with a line alluding to the epic hero’s legendary horn: “The gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to whihc he would someday come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.”
The ancient epic and King’s novel have some other parallels: questioning the nature of God and religion and the use of sun symbolism. The Gunslinger starts in the apotheosis of all deserts and the imagery of the harsh sun of the day, sunset, and light reflections persist throughout. In The Song of Roland it was the miracle of the sun not setting that led to Charlemagne’s victory.
Aside from this parallel between the novel and “The Song of Roland”, I also noticed a motif of bird imagery and a contrast between birds of prey and birds of other natures. It’s Roland’s ability to tame the hawk, by befriending it, that enables him to beat his teacher in battle and as a result “come of age”. There are ravens, hawks, a dove, and a gull in this story. What else did I notice?
It’s a quest story. It seems significant that Roland does not even know what it is he seeks in “The Dark Tower” and does not only not understand the nature of the universe, he does not understand even the word universe.
Finished with the book, I am left with many questions, but not so many as our hero who the man in black conceals answers from in revealing certain things:
“Or one might take the tip of a pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become leagues, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.
“If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard or rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover your entire universe is but part of one atom of a blade of grass [allusion to Whitman?] ? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?”
On a minor note, the word crotch is used too many times in this novel for my taste. 🙂
Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone
This book was an easy read. In fact, this is the easiest book on—and containing—literary analysis I’ve ever read. It was really rather refreshing. Foster makes cracking the code look easy and provides lot of tips to that end, including his most important word of advice—patterns. Pay attention, and look for patterns.
Here’s a taste of what he covers:
“What this book represents is not a database of all the cultural codes which writers create and readers understand the products of that creation, but a template, a pattern, a grammar of sorts from which you can learn to look for those codes on your own. No one could include them all, and no reader would want to plow through the resulting encyclopedia. I’m pretty sure I could have made this book, with not to much effort, twice as long. I’m also pretty sure neither of us wants that.” (281)
Some tips from Foster:
–The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.
–Whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion.
–Ghost and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.
–There’s no such thing as wholly original work of literature [and I love that he sees that as a wonderful thing! ]
–There’s only one story.
–Myth is a body of story that matters.
–It’s never just rain.
–Flight is freedom.
–Irony trumps everything.
–When writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok.
–Don’t read with your eyes.
Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone
Tayari Jones blog post, “So, You Have A Problem With Men?” is worth your time. It’s specifically about the struggle of the black woman writer between self and society, but also about the writer’s struggle in general between rules and expectations and what they need to write in spite of all that. The post prompts thinking about how the writer is influenced by her community/society. Perhaps this profound influence– sometimes destructive influence–is why so many writers seek isolation to get their best writing done. Gabriel Garcia-Marquez locked himself in a room and nearly chain-smoked himself to death to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Thoreau, of course, everyone knows about him and Walden Pond, where he went to live deliberately. The “liberate” in that word is key. This article is about liberating the self from the world in the act of writing, about writing freely.
Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone