My friend Steve is engaged in a lovely collaborative project, 100 Images, which combines a plein-air watercolor a day from the artist Carianne Mack with an original poem by Steve. I hope they turn this project into a limited-edition artist book. It's the sort of thing I'd love to have, for winter afternoons.

Labels: writing

Have just remembered one of Richard Howard's wonderful bits of advice: When a piece of literature bores you, be alert. Something important is happening there.

A point that might apply more generally, perhaps.

Labels: writing

Oooh! Mark just sent me a new notebook for my field notes. Hard not to hold this baby and think, the whole world is my field. But that will not do. Specificity! There are crops to predict (easy: 1 ear of corn, 100 zukes, a bean), landscaping and further renovation plans to make, wish lists to compile, trips to the beach, French classes, afternoons at the Ath, sweaters to dream about, and lots of new things to cook with our fresh farm-share vegetables. Oh, summer! Thank you, Mark!

Labels: hypertext, writing

"A good modern sentence proceeds evenly, loosely joined by commas, and its feel is hypothetical, approximate, unstructured, and always aiming at an impossible exactness which it knows it will not achieve." -- A. S. Byatt, "True Stories and Facts in Fiction"

Labels: commonplace book, writing

Marysue Rucci, executive editor and vice president of Simon & Schuster, says that "the next step beyond chick lit and mommy lit may very well be boomer lit." More here.

Labels: ejtop, writing

Happy day! I just learned that the Saint Ann's Review will be including one of my stories in their Spring 08 issue. And, Mark liked my post about hypertext at if:book so much that he reposted it on his blog! Oh, I'm just one big silly grin right now. Thanks!

Labels: depression, hypertext, writing

A great post by Dan Visel over at if:book: Dan learned to set type this weekend, and in the process learned a whole lot about the haptics and temporality of the most persnickety aspect of book production, getting the letters and spaces on the page in the right order. Legibility being just about the most basic condition of possibility for any book of the usual sort (leaving art books and their ilk out of it).

Visel: "There's no end of ways to go wrong with manual typesetting. With a computer, you type a word and it appears on a screen; with lead type, you add a word, and look at it to see if it appears correct in its backward state. Eventually you proof it on a press; individual pieces of type may be defective and need to be replaced. Lowercase bs are easily confused with ds when they're mirrored in lead. Type can be put in upside-down; different fonts may have been mixed in the case of type you're using. Spacing needs to be thought about: if your line of type doesn't have exactly enough lead in it to fill it, letters may be wobbly. Ink needs attention. Paper width needs attention. After only four days of instruction, I'm sure I don't know half of the other things that might go wrong. And at the end of it all, there's the clean up: returning each letter to its precise place, a menial task that takes surprisingly long."

Labels: writing

So much to do, so much brain fog to contend with. My inner coach is shouting: Come on, come on, come on, do better, do better, do better...

Labels: depression, writing

After four hours of steady work, I have a new story of 4200 hundred words. Right now, it's just a dialogue in which a story happens, and not a proper short story yet. In other words, it's a first draft with a long, long way to go. But what a pleasure, what a relief, to write like this, letting the piece simply unfold as a conversation with a kind and sympathetic person rather than writing with, say, Deborah Treisman's responses foremost in my mind.

Labels: writing

It's 7:30 AM. I'm in the middle of a pleasant dream, in which a cherished person grants me a wish.

Jane wakes me. She doesn't want to go to school. She wants to go out for breakfast, wants a pain au chocolat, wants above all for me to do this special thing with her.

Honestly, selfishly, I want to go back to my dream.

"Sure," I tell Jane, pushing myself out of bed. "Let's go."

I got a wish and gratified one. But this was not a two-party transaction. It was neither tit-for-tat, nor win-win, but something else entirely. A little like paying it forward.

Now the whole world seems wonderfully bewitched, pregnant with magic. My next book might just be possible after all, and today might be a great day to begin!

I should stop here. There's a nice aesthetic quality to this conclusion. But it's too neat. And it's untrue. The truth is, I immediately cast a rather liverish eye on my own exhilaration, telling myself that maybe it is just a fantasy of omnipotence fueled by my own grandiosity.

Or, what the heck, it could just be hope.

Labels: jane, writing

au revoir, alain robbe-grille. for the final joke, read all the way down the page ... "this obituary has been updated and revised since the obituary writer's death"

Labels: writing

In the off-hours, I'm completing a last (truly) pass through the novel, clearing up lapses in the fictional dream (as well as typos). Something's happening: the psychological texture of the book is coming out in higher relief, is more coherent and consistent.

Soon, I will have to stop: there is a point beyond which further editing of this sort risks choking off the reader's flow of association -- which, once established, is guided by the text but separate from it -- so the book becomes dull and controlling.

A delicate operation, this business of knowing when to stop.

Labels: writing

"One of the reasons I love the world of the kitchen is because so much of the work of cooking has a metaphorical component. I believe that cooking well, or striving to, is a metaphor for living well. Having good mise en place is a metaphor for being organized in your life and in your mind. Its goals are to ensure preparedness and efficiency of action." Ruhlman.

I love how this observation deepens the idea of "getting things done," makes it seem more wonderful, more meaningful, and less about the metrics inevitably attached to "what gets done".

Labels: commonplace book, cooking, writing

130,000 words. Not only that: characters, structure, plot, story. Whewwwwww....

Labels: writing

I'm revising the novel so I can submit it for my degree, at last.

Here's what I just figured out: The perspective shifted all over the place in the early drafts. I followed these shifts, correcting them where I could, and wondering how in the world I had managed to become such a crummy writer. Now I understand what was happening: In a third-person narrative, slight, subtle, almost unnoticeable shifts in perspective actually happen all the time. And that's okay. More than okay. It's how you show, rather than tell, that the characters are changing.

We do this all the time in real life, and our ordinary language captures it: And then I saw things a different way. My perspective shifted. I changed my mind.

Labels: writing

"Wrote nothing today. Doesn't matter."

-- Daniil Kharms

Labels: commonplace book, writing

A documentary about the writer (auf Deutsch).

Labels: writing

Jane's been home sick three days solid with a fever.

So I truly sympathize with The Work-Life Cha-Cha, a blog by a mom who blogs about her efforts to "balance" her work, which she does outside the house, with her "life," meaning the work she does at home. Her categories are telling and hilarious. Among them: sick kids, sick day, sick-time, working family, working breakfast, working dinners, diarrhea, ear infections, self-doubt, multitasking, memory loss.

I would add to this: not-napping, tantrums, whining, wiggling, babbling, arguing, insisting, bargaining.

Work-life balance is a bullshitfancy way of saying there aren't enough hours in the day. Let's face it: Work is work. Life is work. A good day in a family with two working parents is not a joyous one; it's not a day that makes you feel vital and alive. No. A good day is when the work gets done. The work-work, the life-work.

For the past three days, my life has been all "life" and no "work," which makes me really, really crazy. The Zoloft dose that used to work for 18 hours now works for perhaps 3. My system can only handle two doses per day; after that, I'm nauseated beyond belief and sometimes I can't sleep. So, in between my carefully titrated infusions of heavy-duty pharm, I drink water and eat dark-chocolate covered espresso beans, which at least help with the lethargy. I count to ten. I breathe slowly. I try to avoid snapping at Jane. It's not her fault she's sick.

Most of my energy is going toward being patient and keeping my mouth shut. I am throttling various urges, knowing they are not productive.

Labels: mothering, writing

Cary Tennis' columns at Salon are a reliable source of juice on dry days. And boy, was today ever a dry one.

It's way meta, but Tennis had a great response to a person who wrote to confess that all of a sudden, she just stopped working.

"Why do we suddenly stop working? Sometimes it is because some essential linkage to us has broken or worn down; the cam that was to prod us into movement no longer brushes against us, and so we come to a slow halt, and freeze, and find to our amazement that as the rest of the engine hums with admirable harmony, we sit quietly, doing nothing, untouched, unsupervised. Or it may be that rather than a physical cam or rod that no longer prods us, it was a link of information that has decayed, so that we are no longer receiving instructions. Again, in the lack of instructions, we simply stop working. Or we may be receiving instructions, but in Mandarin. We do not speak Mandarin. How odd. But we wait. We wait for better instructions. Or the instructions may be in our native language but indecipherable, written by another cog who was daydreaming.

"So we simply stop working. Those adjacent may be too busy to notice that we have grown quiet and still. In fact, because the machine was poorly designed, it may turn out that the machine works better when we do nothing..."

Tennis confesses that once he did the very same thing -- came into work faithfully every day only to sit there, shoving his mail into a cardboard box underneath his desk.

Labels: writing

She passed away in September, I wasn't watching the news...

"I see," she cried, "I got it! For just a moment, I got it. I can't possibly explain it now, but -- but there, for a second, I saw it." (The moment Meg understands the tesseract, in A Wrinkle in Time.)

Labels: commonplace book, writing

"Place your memorandums in your book more neatly you dirty blackguard -- then you may in coming time refer to them with pleasure & see that you begin overleaf or I shall stand here a witness against you..." -- Samuel Palmer, from his Sketch-book

Labels: commonplace book, writing

Oh, how I dislike the sort of writing that asks you to love it, to approve of it, while pushing you away - humorless stories about self-destruction in the service of rebellion, of telling it to the Man. The writer forgets the basic instability of the reader's position, how easy it is to go from sympathy for the narrator to identification with the very thing that oppresses her. I do not understand why people bang on about, for instance, Baudelaire, who whines quite a bit about being -- get this! -- unlucky in love. Which happens to everyone, and certainly is not a cause for whining.

Often, when reading Baudelaire, part of me wishes I had lived in nineteenth-century Paris & had the opportunity to dump him. Imp of the perverse and all that.

When this happens, I reject everything, hating to be made complicit in a story that I came to all opened up and vulnerable and ready to listen.

This post is not meaningfully linked, it accuses without pointing a finger, it whines and complains. Fittingly, I suppose.

Labels: writing

"Writing a thesis is a lonely obsessive activity. You live inside your head, nowhere else. University libraries are like madhouses, full of people pursuing wraiths, hunches, obsessions. The person with whom you spend most of your time is the person you're writing about." -- Hallucinating Foucault, Patricia Drucker

Labels: commonplace book, writing

In Silences, Tillie Olson lists a bunch of books by women writers, many of whom I hadn't heard of before. I decided to make a project of reading the whole list, starting with Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and, with Jane, the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder (which I had read before, many times, in my childhood). I'm going to blog about this reading now and then, and I've created a rather prosaic tag to keep track of those entries. The point, originally at least, was to read with an eye toward figuring out just what causes periods of silence (sometimes prolonged, sometimes permanent) in women writers especially. But I think I already know the answer -- childrearing, domestic responsibilities. There is more to it, though. I'm interested in articulating this "more" and fleshing it out, putting words and images to this vague feeling of foreboding that I have when it comes to sitting down with my own writing, especially lately. The other point is to expose Jane to these writers as early and often as possible, to normalize (if not erase?) the category of "woman writer," & eliminate the residual peculiarity that's still associated with it. My thoughts on this subject are irritatingly vague and unformed, though. All I can say is, bear with me. Maybe all this reading will change that somehow.

Labels: jane, tillie olson's reading list, writing

I am writing in my notebook at the kitchen table. Jane climbs into my lap.

"I like to watch you write," she says. "I catch the spirit of writing from it. I get the spirit of writing other things."

Labels: jane, writing

i'm tired of capitalization today. still hanging onto punctuation, though. barely

the difference between here and every other place where I've lived: nothing is referential, nothing reminds me of anywhere else.

but this existential flatness is merely a surface effect (what else could it be?) - like being in a raymond carver world, where it is surpassingly tempting to scrape away at the clear lacquered surface of things, not to get at what's underneath (there is nothing underneath) but only to rough things up, create a texture.

(fifteen minutes of staring into space, and it comes to me that this is a critique of realism)

Labels: writing

Would like to capture, in a series of signs that come one after another in time, e.g., writing, the following:

1. Morning light outside Smithfield Market, London, the slightly foggy way the light reflects off the plastic awnings, on a cloudy day in June. How cool that light is, how thoroughly unsaturated. Later, the sky turns clear blue. Perhaps call this: British Summer Time.

2. The few days I spent with my mother after she was diagnosed with Pick's disease. The evenings I sat outside, on the back step, after she fell asleep. The blackness of the trees in full leaf against the night sky, not quite so black, in the backyard of the house I grew up in. The leaves rustling. A different June.

3. A certain quality of my relationship with Jane. Things pass between us so fast, without words. How wonderful this is, how occasionally it is also useful, how it is also scary, to be so close. How she is not scared.

4. Falling into a painting. Finding oneself alive in it. Waking up in it. Smell of turpentine, linseed oil. Suspicion that this is a dream belonging to my mother. Explore relationship of this idea to painting as problem solving (Lee Krasner). Louise Bourgeois' journals.

5. The experience of being in thrall to an idea. The moral ambiguity of this. Compared to being in thrall to a person, perhaps. (Even more morally ambiguous.) Thomas Mann wrote a short story about this - "Mario und der Zauberer," I think. Also Iris Murdoch -- all her books are about this, in one way or another.

Labels: writing

I am one-third of the way through my first cup of coffee when Jane announces: "Cinderella isn't real."

"No. She's just a story."

"When I turn five, I want to visit Cinderella's castle."

When I hear "I want," I think: Run Default Child Deferral Module #244: "We'll see."

I don't think anymore. I just reflexively "parent." Jane calls this "mommying."

"But she's not real."

"Who's not real?" The coffee is slow to kick in this morning.

"Cinderella!"

"Oh! Of course. I guess if she's not real, her castle isn't either."

"No." Jane twirls her hair. "That gives me an idea."

"Yes?"

"It starts with Once upon a time..."

Labels: fantasy, jane, writing

Jane is flipping through my latest purchase, Roger Chartier's The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries.

She points to a page on which the book's previous owner underlined a sentence in pencil. "There's writing in it."

"It's a used book," I tell her. "That's part of the charm."

"Used books are nice," she says after a moment. "They remind you of other people."

Labels: books, jane, writing

Could also be the diagram of an academic Q&A. In any case, a sad vision of the online so-called life of the mind. So-called.

Labels: writing

I dreamed I was looking through my notebooks, the ones from when I worked in the archives at Goettingen. Carl Friedrich Gauss, 1837: I am so tired I can hardly open a can of figs. It's not CFG whose tired, of course. It's me. The "can" refers to my ongoing problem with our new electric can opener, which is only slightly easier to use than our old hand-cranked one. Life, after all, is full of petty disappointments. But still: figs? Anecdotal evidence that notebooks have a life in dreams.

Labels: writing

"'Bring on the lions!' I cried.

"But there were no lions. I spent every day in the company of one dog and one cat whose every gesture emphasized that this was a day throughout whose duration intelligent creatures intended to sleep. I would have to crank myself up.

"To crank myself up, I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise clamp and wound the handle until the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgement of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.

"I pointed myself, I walked to the water. I played the hateful recorder, washed dishes, drank coffee, stood on a beach log, watched a bird. That was the first part; it could take all morning, or all month. Only the coffee counted, and I knew it. It was boiled Columbian coffee: raw grounds brought just to boiling in cold water and stirred. Now I smoked a cigarette or two and read what I wrote yesterday. What I wrote yesterday needed to be slowed down. I inserted words in one sentence and hazarded a new sentence. At once I noticed that I was writing -- which, as the novelist Friedrich Buechner noted, called for a break, if not a celebration."

-- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Labels: coffee, commonplace book, writing

Either I'm moving ahead too fast & forgetting myself; or I'm stuck on the past, wondering what the heck happened.

Labels: writing

Sometimes now the New Yorker comes weeks late, well thumbed, with bits torn out.

Labels: house, writing

Reading same 100 pages for what must be the fifteenth time. Still finding mistakes, too. Yeech.

Labels: writing

Someone recently gave me a tip: Whenever you make a character do something, you should ask, Is this the first time? For the writer, it is always the first time -- with this character, in these words. But that's not the character's problem.

Labels: writing

From a review of new and recent children's books in the NYT:

"Wordless books, it turns out, have their own tyrannies. Take Good Dog, Carl, the realist Rottweiler version of The Cat in the Hat. It is a book of few words: 'Look after the baby, Carl. I'll be back shortly' at the start, and 'Good dog, Carl!' at the end. Liberating? No. The tale can be read only one way, and you have to fill in the narration yourself: Mommy is leaving the house. Oh, that dog and baby are making a huge mess. Uh-oh, Mommy will be home soon. Better clean up, Carl. There's Mommy!

"At one point Carl pushes the baby down a laundry chute. He has no choice. He must push the baby so that the plot can survive. As Roland Barthes wrote of another plot and another character in his book S/Z, 'the character's freedom is dominated by the discourse's instinct for preservation.' In other words, the show must go on..."

[Well, this reading is funny but it may not give enough credit to readers, especially those who aren't overly impressed by the forward motion of a strong narrative. Jane routinely makes all sorts of interventions in her books, interrupting the storyteller, inserting new words or making major editorial changes, e.g., all male characters must be changed to female. And she has lately discovered post-its, which have plenty of interesting possibilities... Later: MJ reminds me that Jane also has inserted her foot into an open book and insisted that the characters adapt to the change in the story ("What is this giant foot doing here?")]

Labels: jane, writing

A few pointers to work on little-known, -recognized, and/or -understood aspects of whatever we're doing when we're not necessarily reading but -- for lack of a better way to say it -- just generally doing things with stories that whose endings might come sooner or later than we want them to (but never, it seems, right on time):

Carl W. Scarborough, Godine's book designer, on The Haptics of Reading. File under general problematique of What you read affects how you read it, AKA all reading is not the same activity (which opens the possibility that some it may not in fact be reading at all). A snippet: "There is a dramatic difference between the sensations inherent in reading a novella—necessarily a small, intimate book—and studying an overscaled art book, where the size of the illustrations plays an important role in the satisfaction we find in reading. [...] Another aspect of this haptic issue is the question of suitability of materials. I have beautiful twentieth-century books printed letterpress on exquisite eighteenth-century papers. Reading them is a special pleasure, but it is very different from reading an art monograph where a satiny, coated white sheet makes the illustrations leap off the page."

Rubin, D.C. (1995). Memory in oral traditions: The cognitive psychology of epic, ballads, and counting-out rhymes. New York: Oxford University Press. May suggest an answer to the question, why are so many epics so similar in outline, but not in detail? From OUP's blurbage: "Focusing in particular on their three major forms of organization--theme, imagery, and sound pattern--Rubin proposes a model of recall, and uses it to uncover the mechanisms of memory that underlie genres such as counting-out rhymes, ballads, and epics. The book concludes with an engaging discussion of how conversions from oral to written communication modes can predict how cutting-edge computer technologies will affect the conventions of future transmissions."

Rubin, Ciobanu, et. al., "Children's Memory for Counting-Rhymes," Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1997: A suggestive study of children's rhymes like "eenie meeny miney mo," which have to end a certain way, in a certain time-frame, but still support intra-rhyme variations. The rhymes are like games in their playful purposiveness, in being directed toward a goal. But they are also "oral traditions" & so share affinities with more exalted traditional oral forms, like epic.

A post at Obscene Jester arguing that "Lost" is pernicious narrative dreck because it flatters the viewer's (idea of) her own cleverness. If this person is correct, then people who like the show must be getting their satisfactions from somewhere besides the neat narrative closure we are all conditioned to expect from popular media forms. Sometimes the complaint "it goes on too long" (and its other variant, "this story is plotless," or even occasionally "it is too much like a hypertext") is shorthand for "this media makes me feel like a moron [so therefore I hate it]." Commandment Numero Uno: Thou shalt not trample upon thy audience's self-regard!

Recent updates on these topics from Mark, J Nathan Matias & Jill.

Labels: writing

Exploring World of Warcraft, a game, Jill makes an interesting comparison between the game and long-running TV shows: Both could go on forever. There are few, if any, endings built in. As Jill says, they "simply pose puzzles and defer closure for as long as they can."

I worry about this "simply." Setting up a framework in which the same, or similar, interactions can happen over and over, with enough differentiation to keep participants interested, isn't simple; and I wonder what the opposite of mere puzzle-posing might be, what Jill has in mind here. A recent complaint about Lost from New York Mag opposes quick puzzle-solving (good) to slow puzzle-posing (bad): "Puzzles are meant to be solved, not prolonged. You can only tease viewers so long before they feel like they're being mocked." Slowness, waiting -- if these things make bad TV, can they do anything good for games?

Well, maybe they don't make such bad TV. Soap operas are like this -- they go on for years and years. Epics -- Roland, the Kalevala, the Mahabharata, to name just three -- are like this too. The Thousand and One Nights. Et cetera. Jill mentions Arthurian legends. All I take from this is that certain stories are epics by virtue of their scope. Not all stories are epics, however. Not all stories have that open-endedness, that support for generating other stories within a single overarching framework.

Jill mentions an idea, from the Peter Brooks playbook, about what stories look like: the end should be fully contained in the beginning, every outcome should be prefigured in some way from the start, which should contain only these seeds of the narrative and nothing else. A story, in this case, is a machine for unfolding consequences from initial conditions. This is also a game. (Think of chess. Of Nabokov.) This is not, to my mind, an epic, though an epic might contain a story of this sort, as perhaps a kind of set-piece, so long as the manner of its unfolding does not break the larger framework of the epic (does not, in other words, break the rules of the world imagined in the epic).

Brooks thinks the end of a story should make sense of its beginning. That this feeling of understanding is what signals "the end" of the story. Aha! That's the moment, the end. Tout comprende. A perhaps wishful idea. I can see how it might be comforting. But other comforts are also available: repetition, perhaps mastery. Onyxia, as Jill points out, always comes back. She's playing Freud's game, fort/da; and so are we. You may lose, or she might, but nothing is ever really lost -- a point ironically underscored by the title, in Jill's post, of the TV series that never ends, in which the loss represented by an actual ending is precisely what is not on the menu.

Perhaps medium and genre not especially powerful categories of analysis in any case.

It may not be a good idea to ask this question, but I will anyway: What is the nature of the relationship between the world of World of Warcraft and the lives of those who play it? The game seems like a kind of supplement, as if those lives would, in important ways, not be the same without it.

WoW already has a place in an academic economy where it is just like books and films and other artifacts of popular culture insofar as it gives people who talk for a living something to talk about. There is an extraordinary video of a recent conference on WoW, in which the conference-goers (Jill's there, too) were filmed looking distinctly uncomfortable as they sat around a table full of rifles, presumably loaded, which they were about to learn to use. (A fascinating curriculum for these mild-mannered educators!) It would be interesting to read this footage through a Derridean lens; it seems like a trace of an experience that constituted a sort of supplement to the conference, and it certainly stands in some relationship (but, what?) to the supplementarity of WoW to the academic discourse around it. Or, perhaps, vice-versa. (Of course.)

Labels: web, writing

to the opening paragraph of Madame Bovary were, well, quite extensive. Courtesy of the University of Rouen, here are some early drafts, the final draft, the copyedited draft (which Flaubert was apparently still editing, no doubt to his publisher's dismay, at press time), and the published version of 1873, here:

"Nous étions à l'Étude, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d'un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d'un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre. Ceux qui dormaient se réveillèrent, et chacun se leva comme surpris dans son travail."

This opening moment -- the arrival of the Proviseur, the studied busyness of the students who greet him, and the stage business with the grand pupitre -- persists mostly unchanged. But in the earliest draft, the new student does not appear immediately; Flaubert seems to want to signal his appearance through the appearance of the desk alone. But when the student finally arrives, the book takes off. He's unnamed, a mystery, and already causing trouble. (Why does he need such a large desk, anyway?) In drafts, Flaubert adds details only to take them away later, summarizing when he needs to pick up the pace. In the copyediting stage, Flaubert cut the first clause, which rather delightfully located the reader precisely in time using the schoolbell, all the way down to the more direct and immediate "We were in class when..."

I can easily imagine the scene: the proofs on the desk, the pen poised over them. He's never really liked the first line but nothing else worked any better. But it's the first line, it has to be good. He should cut it, down to the essentials. Oh, but the schoolbell started everything off so audily... But no, again - it still won't do. All at once he sees a different way in. A breath, another, cut cut cut...

Labels: web, writing

This year's Booker prizewinner Kiran Desai reports that her mother, the novelist Anita Desai, helped her write the novel that won the Booker, and I do not doubt it. One of my treasured possessions is a copy of the very first short story I published, marked up with Anita Desai's handwritten notes, in delicate purple pen; she was indeed a wonderful teacher. My own mother -- also a writer, also a teacher, also my teacher -- broke her knee last week, a problem that required major surgery under general anesthesia to correct. She is recovering in a hospital not far from her old house, where I, too, spent a portion of my childhood. The place figures in my novel the way it figures in my dreams -- crabgrass, poison oak, swing shifts, linoleum. I am tempted to say, dismissively, You get the picture, but I don't because it isn't true. In Joyce Carol Oates' new collection, High Lonesome, Oates does get the picture -- she has her finger on something important that otherwise resists lyric description, & fits better into the more familiar and more distanced and antiseptic discourses about jobs, economic insecurity, mandatory overtime, minimum wage. A place where reading novels (let alone writing them) is suspect and barely tolerated when there is so much else to do. I read Oates' stories with a tight chest, thinking about Oates' childhood (she was no stranger, I bet, to linoleum), her hunger for books, and about the books she has written, the sheer quantity of them, as if, finding the world lacking the books she wanted to read, she simply made them herself, as you might make furniture to suit an odd-shaped room. Also thinking about the fact of Oates' childlessness. Kiran Desai says she won't have children because then she would have to break her writerly solitude and "be sweet" , which gets in the way of her writing. Her mother, I want to remind her, wrote wonderful books with four children underfoot, along with teaching duties and office hours, including one session in which she gently insisted that yes, I had talent and yes, it was not only worth developing but probably the most important thing I could do -- and her encouragement made all the difference.

Labels: mom, writing

Working on two books, I'm a novelist by day and a historian by night. The projects have almost nothing to do with one another, except that first, I could not have returned to history except through the particular novel I have written, which began as a historical meditation on why it is currently impossible to do truly interesting and novel work in today's academe; and, second, the return to history as a mode of inquiry consoles the novelist in me because when I'm with the old books whose spines were last cracked a century ago, it reminds me that some things really are written not (or not only) for a contemporary audience, but for the ages.

Labels: ejtop, writing

After translating Grégoire Bouilliere's novel L'Invité Mystère, Lorin Stein created a web site that presents the messy story behind the seamless and apparently quite wonderful translation. (FWIW, here's a quick synopsis: A guy gets a call from his longtime ex, who disappeared without a trace five years earlier; she invites him to a birthday party for a woman he has never met.) The hypertextual presentation of the translator's notes is clunky and nonintuitive. You have to click each blog entry (though there is no obvious prompt or link marker) to get the window that contains all the good stuff. Despite the flawed presentation, it's exactly the sort of meta-book spin-off project that publishers should do more of. Strictly from a book marketing point of view, the site is useful. I wouldn't have known about Bouillier otherwise, and my next stop will be Amazon, where I may well buy the book.

There's something else, too -- a web site like Translator's Notes is a simple way to take some of the "shine" or commodity aura off books, making it less tempting to undervalue them because the labor of writing (not to mention publishing, marketing and distributing) is apparent. What if every book looked like a handmade craft item you might find at Zanisa or Sweet Thunder or Nest...?

Labels: writing

Holy cow. Every word rings true, but I wouldn't have really understood Bowen's points, I think, until I hit this latest phase of revision.

Labels: writing

The NYT has published snippets of Susan Sontag's diaries, which are fascinating. Had an AHA moment this morning while reading her observation that "the writer must be four people" -- nut, moron, stylist, critic.

The nut is the source of the material and the moron is the one who "lets it come out."

Yup.

Labels: writing

1. In a late draft, do NOT move chapters around without getting a second, and possibly even a third, opinion. Rewrite if necessary. Add more information earlier, or take out information that should come later. But do not cut and paste, thinking only minor sutures will be necessary, because you are wrong.

2. Do not revise "out of character." For instance, if the protagonist doesn't talk about his or her feelings, describing this character's inner life only glorifies the writer's emotional intelligence. Like any other writerly narcissism, this glorification happens at the expense of both the story and the reader. I find that when I do this, I can't bear to read my own writing because I'm insulting my own intelligence, and that's when I feel really stuck and unable to move forward.

It's much better to let the character's inner life come through gesture and speech (and through observation and reflection if those things are true to character as well).

It's partly a matter of "show, don't tell," but also partly a matter of humility, of listening more than talking. There's a difference between truly and usefully giving voice to something, and the annoying, patronizing practice of "speaking for" another person or group.

Labels: writing

One weirdly frustrating aspect -- for me, and for my students -- of teaching writing has been how to answer the question, "What is biased writing?" Exposure to biased writing often makes me too angry to coolly dissect the bias and explain it.

Thanks to today's piece in the NYT about how companies fail to provide working women with sufficient support for continuing to breastfeed their children at work, I now have a great example. Take a look at this assertion, and the evidence on which it's based:

Pumping breast milk has one benefit that cannot be quantified: it makes working mothers feel less guilt-ridden about leaving their children. 'There is a lot of satisfaction in knowing I am doing right by him,' Ms. Wurster said of her son, James.

We may infer from this that Mrs. Wurster is having a good time pumping her milk at work. She believes breast is best, and she is happy to be able to choose her infant's diet in accordance with her values. But can we really conclude, from what she has said, that she "feels less guilt-ridden about leaving" her son in order to go back to work? No, we can't. Her statement implies only that she is pleased with her infant feeding arrangement. She expresses no dissatisfaction at all about going back to work.

By framing the quote in this way, the author of the article implies that when a mother goes to work, she is abandoning her child. This position is patently sexist -- after all, fathers who work are good providers, and no one accuses them of abandonment.

Later: Had a couple more thoughts on 'bias'. Students tend to see it only when they read something based on beliefs with which they disagree. They don't take the next step, which is to generalize this insight to eliminate their own bias. Maybe here's a good rule of thumb: A biased article is based on or contains beliefs that -- whether one agrees with them or not -- are not supported by sound reasoning and evidence.

Labels: mothering, writing

I will now stop futzing with the first five pages. After all, there another three hundred and ninety five that urgently need my immediate attention! So. Futzing concluded. End of futz. Now. Stop. Stop. Stop.

Labels: writing