Category Archives: fiction

My younger fellow novelists are greatly preoccupied with technique. They seem to think a good novel ought to follow certain rules imposed from outside.

16 May 2012

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I want to lace together snippets of François Mauriac’s 1953 interview in the Paris Review, specifically where he’s talking about the novel. I lived unaware of Mauriac until I read Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World. His best books I can’t even buy at Powell’s. He was highly influential for many of America’s esteemed writers.

My opinion hasn’t changed. I believe that my younger fellow novelists are greatly preoccupied with technique. They seem to think a good novel ought to follow certain rules imposed from outside. In fact, however, this preoccupation hampers them and embarrasses them in their creation. The great novelist doesn’t depend on anyone but himself. Proust resembled none of his predecessors and he did not have, he could not have, any successors. The great novelist breaks his mold; he alone can use it. Balzac created the “Balzacian” novel; its style was suitable only for Balzac.

There is a close tie between a novelist’s originality in general and the personal quality of his style. A borrowed style is a bad style. American novelists from Faulkner to Hemingway invented a style to express what they wanted to say—and it is a style that can’t be passed on to their followers…

I believe that the crisis of the novel, if it exists, is right there, essentially, in the domain of technique. The novel has lost its purpose. That is the most serious difficulty, and it is from there that we must begin. The younger generation believes, after Joyce and Proust, that it has discovered the “purpose” of the old novel to have been prefabricated and unrelated to reality…

The crisis of the novel, then, is metaphysical. The generation that preceded ours was no longer Christian, but it believed in the individual, which comes to the same thing as believing in the soul. What each of us understands by the word soul is different; but in any case it is the fixed point around which the individual is constructed.

Faith in God was lost for many, but not the values this faith postulates. The good was not bad, and the bad was not good. The collapse of the novel is due to the destruction of this fundamental concept: the awareness of good and evil. The language itself has been devalued and emptied of its meaning by this attack on conscience.

Observe that for the novelist who has remained Christian, like myself, man is someone creating himself or destroying himself. He is not an immobile being, fixed, cast in a mold once and for all. This is what makes the traditional psychological novel so different from what I did or thought I was doing. The human being as I conceive him in the novel is a being caught up in the drama of salvation, even if he doesn’t know it.

My life as a writer began with motherhood

7 May 2012

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Still, and yet, my life as a writer began with motherhood.

Motherhood isn’t trivial; its activities may be trivial, but they put you in touch, deeply and immediately and daily, with the great issues of Life: heavy duty things like Love and Loss, Growth and Tolerance and Dignity, Control and Conflict and Power—which are the issues, incidentally, that make serious novels. I might have become a writer eventually without first having become a mother, but it’s hard for me to imagine it.

–Molly Gloss author of “The Hearts of Horses“

The next time you find yourself resisting time spent with your creative passion, draw on the wisdom of monks

3 May 2012

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From “The Artist Begins Again and Again” by Christine Valters Painter:

There will be days when we don’t feel like coming to blank page or canvas or the meditation cushion. There will be days when life seems to conspire actively against this, and we begin to believe that the creative life just isn’t possible for us or that our lives are too full to cultivate this kind of free expression. This is acedia talking, a kind of dialogue with the inner critic that haunts most artists and sabotages our sincerest efforts. When this happens—and it will happen—our invitation is to gently notice this and begin yet again.

The next time you find yourself resisting time spent with your creative passion, draw on the wisdom of monks and make a commitment to start anew right now. Hold yourself lightly, perhaps even seeing humor in your patterns. Humor is rooted in the word humus, which means earthiness and is also the root of the word humility.  Acknowledge that you are human and to be human means to forget sometimes our deeper desires. Embrace your imperfections as the landscape of your journey.

Each morning ask where you need to begin and start there with humility, compassion, and with holy anticipation. Everything else follows this.

Who Wrote The World’s Shortest Short Story?

2 May 2012

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Augusto Monterroso is a Guatemalan short story writer best known for his 8-word story titled “El Dinosaurio”:

When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

You might imagine a young girl who wakes in the morning to find her pet Dino faithfully at her bedside.

Or you might imagine a lost traveller who’s become a T-Rex lunch, passed out because his legs are torn to shreds, and then wakes up to find the T-Rex picking the meat from his finger bones.

Is it subversive or just a pleasant little story?

What’s your 8-word story?

There’s a myth that Hemingway wrote a shorter and more powerful story.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

But after some research it looks like this story was not written by Hemingway. It was most likely an actual ad in a newspaper, except selling a baby carriage. Go here to learn more about that (also here).

The function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different – Italo Calvino

1 May 2012

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On September 18th, 1985, an Italian writer named Italo Calvino was preparing to fly to Massachusetts to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard University. He’d worked obsessively on the lectures and struggled with what to title them. As his wife tells the story, “Calvino was delighted by the word “memos,” after having thought of and dismissed titles such as “Some Literary Values,” “A Choice of Literary Values,” “Six Literary Legacies,”–all of them ending with “Sei Proposte Per Il Prossimo Millennio” (Six Memos for the Next  Millennium).”

Instead of departing for the US, he was admitted to a hospital in Siena where he died during the night of a brain hemorrhage. His lectures were published posthumously.

Since in each of my lectures I have set myself the task of recommending to the next millennium a particular value close to my heart, the value I want to recommend today is precisely this: In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language…

My work as a writer has from the beginning aimed at tracing the lightning flashes of the mental circuits that capture and link points distant from each other in space and time…Just as it is from the poet writing verse, so it is for the prose writer: success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search for the mot juste, for the sentence in which every word is inalterable, the most effective marriage of sounds and concepts…one that is concise, concentrated, and memorable.

Teenagers who read books are saving the world

30 April 2012

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From ”A Generation of True Writers” by Lili Wilkinson:

Every time Nadia reads or writes or watches or hears a story, it deepens her understanding of the way narrative works. And this understanding of story, of the mechanics of story, makes her love stories even more. It’s like breathing in. And when she writes a story, or a blog post, or draws a comic, or tells someone a vivid anecdote about that thing her little brother did with the cat and the jar of peanut butter, then she’s breathing out. Everyone who loves stories does this.

The Wealth-Fantasy Lies About the Reality of Justice

26 April 2012

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Popular movies take pleasure in portraying wealthy characters.

The movie The Big Year, which I viewed with my wife last night, reminded me of this. Jack Black plays a 36-year-old divorced bird watcher with a full-time job. He relies on his parents to fund his year of breaking a bird watching record. He’s befriended by Steve Martin’s character, who plays a successful businessman desiring to retire with his wife to a Colorado cabin she designed. He spends most of his time bird watching. Although Steve Martin’s character flies coach and sleeps in the cheap hotels, without him and his wealth (he does have a jet), the two character’s would be unable to view some of the rare birds on their list. One such bird they view in the mountains only by flying on a helicopter. Without his money the story faces an insurmountable obstacle and the reality of failure. Money provides more opportunities for success.

Stories (and movies) can do whatever they want. I’m not here to critique them or their characters or the income levels displayed. (The Big Year is a good movie.) But realistic poor people stories don’t offer wormholes with money because there isn’t any money (I’m not talking about rags to riches stories which are success based on materialism).

I wonder what kind of characters Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne become without a garage full of expensive sports cars and superhuman hero suits. I’m comparing realism to a form of wealth-fantasy (an entertaining-sometimes-dramatic-sometimes-comedic form of fantasy that is sometimes super fun to watch) that robs characters of humanity. It’s a subtle robbery, but one which sets us in a garage full of Lamborghinis rather than a meth-addict’s kitchen. Our humanity and immortality are implied in the meth-addict’s kitchen (maybe even amplified), while being softly nudged aside in the warehouse of state-of-the-art weaponry.

The societal status and income level of our characters matter. I’m of course using movie-character’s for the purpose of analyzing our fictional characters. What can we buy with fictional money? What new/exciting experience can be conjured through a thick wallet? Stories steeped in realism will have to ask these questions. What kind of scenes can we create in the absence of wealth? What’s unique when illuminating the poor?

Working with low-income characters might feel like a constraint after viewing so many Hollywood films. But it’s also an opportunity to return the reader to the concreteness of our earthy reality. While the pangs of hunger and unpaid bills feel can be made into a Goodwill-suit-type-cliche, it also offers a rich world of feeling and subtlety and unseen particularity pregnant with tension on the very basis of its poverty.

We fantasize about the luxuries of a billionaire’s jet and avoid the meth-addict’s kitchen. While both provide a glimpse into an unseen world the former is more inclusive than the latter. It’s easier to economically move down than it is to move up. It’s easier to simply walk into a meth addict’s kitchen (not recommended) than it is to wander into a billionaire’s jet (if you do send me pics).

Here’s a scene that requires little money, just some chemicals, a barrel, and some fancy know how. This is unique and easily accessible:

This is unique and exclusive:

The jet scene will serve its purpose, but only with the access of money (unless the jet is stolen). But anyone, rich or poor can walk across an open field and view barrels shooting into the air.

If Cinderella feeds young girls the lie of the prince who sweeps you off your feet and saves you, then the wealth-fantasy lies about the reality of justice. Justice does not come from a microchip-kevlar-caped suit, but rather through interpersonal conflict based and set (and needed) among the least of us, the neediest of us, the most vulnerable of us.

The real example of justice in Batman, The Dark Knight, is of the prisoner who chooses not to detonate the bomb on the other ferry in order to save himself. Batman can’t be Batman without Bruce Wayne’s wealth, but a prisoner can fight for justice with only lint in his pockets and a jumpsuit on his back. The scene, however, was used as a side-note to Bruce Wayne’s belief in the goodness of common people.

This is the allure of the movie Winter’s Bone, where Ree Dolly, a young girl providing for and protecting her poor family in the Ozark Mountain community, is neither glitzed nor glammed nor monetarily able to reach her end goal of finding her father to save the foreclosure of her family’s home.

Her bravery is real, deeper felt, accessible.

Materialism used for good entertains us, but I’ll put stock into the bravery of the poor man or woman fighting for justice. That’s a story needing to be told. Super heroes, not in capes and suits and money-bought protection, but heroes in open fields and meth-addict’s kitchens, penniless and persevering.

Stories of barreling justice.

We live in a society that doesn’t offer any support or approval for ventures that aren’t clearly articulated and aligned for a goal

25 April 2012

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From Ron Carlson Writes a Story:

A couple of summer’s ago I taught at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference up on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The conference is held at Fort Warden, a former military installation made famous because the movie An Officer and a Gentleman was filmed there. What is amazing about the place are the huge bunkers that at one time housed sixty-ton guns and all the men necessary to guard the Strait of Juan de Fuca from foreign aggressors. These monstrous stone ruins are overgrown like Mayan temples and imbedded throughout the hilltop like some sort of vast archeological puzzle.

My son Colin was nine at the time, and we tramped back and forth through these haunting structures. For a nine-year-old, it was perfect: the lost city. At one point in the fence bushes, Colin literally found an old door. We explored its chambers and many, many more. Colin led me through dark corridors and across parapets and through tunnels in the brush; he was intoxicated with happiness. At one point two small deer met us head-on as we crawled through the thicket. Later Colin took my hand as we approached another stone battlement, and he said something I will never forget. “Dad,” he said, his voice rich with joy. “Don’t you love it when you don’t know where you’re going?” I mean it sat me down right on the ancient battlements. It was a fine moment in a great day for us that summer, but he seemed to have enunciated my credo as a writer. Those moments when you are beyond your map, past your plan, without instruments, and you continue to venture further and further into the story loving not knowing where you are going.

We live in a society that doesn’t offer any support or approval for ventures that aren’t clearly articulated and aligned for a goal. A writer gets past this. It’s going to be a mess before you’re finished, and you may not have a name for the mess or understand its utilitarian purposes. There aren’t words for everything. For now, we’ll call it the draft of a story.

What Does Young Adult Fiction Mean? How Was It Invented?

23 April 2012

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What exactly is “Y.A.”? What does it mean? Why did it begin in the first place, and when was that? What has it become since? We conferred with librarians, agents, publishing world executives, and the experts of the Internet to put together a primer of sorts. They don’t all agree, either—nor is this current-day definition one that will remain so forever. As author Michael Cart, writing for YALSA, the Young Adult Library Services Association, for which he is a former president, explains, “The term ‘young adult literature’ is inherently amorphous, for its constituent terms ‘young adult’ and ‘literature’ are dynamic, changing as culture and society — which provide their context — change.” [...]

Marcus points to World War II as another impetus in the creation of Y.A. literature. Teens were put through the very grownup experience of war, and came back as veterans old beyond their years, while their younger brothers “felt they’d missed the experience of a lifetime.” This, says Marcus, had a huge impact on society, setting the stage for things like rock-and-roll, and more grown-up literature for “kids.” But there’s also clearly a marketing element at work here: The creation of Y.A. as a category makes “good business sense,” says Marcus. “All along since the beginning of the 20th century, specialized publishing departments were being formed, with the underlying idea to create a parallel world to the world of the institutional book buyers.”

From “What Does Young Adult Mean?” The word and the concept for “adolescent” and consequently “teenager” and “young adult” are fairly new. So the idea of books just for those types of kids/adults/pre-peoples is also a new enterprise. YA fiction is still a young adult.