Author: Marcie

As I mentioned in my introductory post to this volume, the following subjects are considered: Reading and Influences, Getting Started, Structure and Plot, Character and Scene, Writing, Revision, and The End.

The format presents a variety of questions within the overarching subject and not every writer who is included in the collection responds to every question. Below are some of the responses that stood out for me.

But a great novel is not the one that transforms the character but the one that transforms the reader.
-Rabih Alameddine

I want a novel that isn’t afraid to follow a story to its true end, even if what is discovered there isn’t good news. 
-Tayari Jones

On Ideas:

Heartbreak usually gets one going, heartbreak for a love that didn’t work out, for a homeland that has lost its way, for a generation that didn’t quite make it.
-Gary Shteyngart

I can’t move on from a bad sentence; it gets more and more painful, like leaving a child behind you on the road. 
-Anne Enright

A first chapter must have a web you want to fall into. 
-Rodrigo Fresán

I think of the book or story as a space. I enter it, spend time in it, arrange the furniture, paint the walls, get out, leave it to the people who will live there. 
-Aleksandar Hemon

On outlines:

I hold everything in a nice mush in my head.
-Chris Abani

On re-writing:

It’s what gives me pleasure and when I can work with more enthusiasm – with the knowledge that the story I want to tell is there in the raw material. 
-Mario Vargas Llosa

On characters:

Niceness is not compelling.
-Claire Messud

I know what I like about different endings of my favourite books. They always make me want to reread the book right away.
-Yiyun Li

Writing to me is very much about discovering the meaning of my life. 
-Amy Tan

This collection is Great Stuff for Writers.

Daniel Alarcón (Ed.) The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook (Henry Holt, 2010)

Imagine three-hour-long sessions in which a panel of writers is asked a series of questions about the writing process in front of an audience of 50.

Now imagine that bits and pieces of those sessions have been reassembled in an edited form, arranged by topic, with the responses of 54 writers.

Or, rather than imagining that, you can pick up a copy of The Secret Miracle.

Here are the writers who have appeared in sessions at 826 National (yes, proceeds from this book benefit youth literacy):

Chris Abani, Chris Adrian, Alaa al Aswany, Rabih Alameddine, Paul Auster, Tash Aw, Mario Bellatin, Michael Chabon, Susan Choi, T Cooper, Ann Cummins, Edwidge Danticat, Roddy Doyle, Jennifer Egan, Josh Emmons, Anne Enright, Aura Estrada, Rodrigo Fresán, Nell Freudenberger, Rivka Galchen, Christina Garcia, Glen David Gold, Francisco Goldman, Allegra Goodman, Andrew Sean Greer, Daniel Handler, Yael Hedaya, Aleksandar Hemon, A.M. Homes, Shelley Jackson, Tayari Jones, Stephen King, Laila Lalami, Jonathan Lethem, Yiyun Li, Adam Mansbach, Dinaw Mengestu, Claire Messud, Susan Minot, Rick Moody, Haruki Murakami, George Pelecanos, José Manuel Prieto, Santiago Roncagliolo, Akhil Sharma, Adania Shibli, Gary Shteyngart, Curtis Sittenfeld, Mehmet Murat Somer, Saša Stanišić, Amy Tan, Colm Tóibín, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alejandro Zambra

It’s quite a collection of writers, discussing the following topics:

Reading and Influences
Getting Started
Structure and Plot
Character and Scene
Writing
Revision
The End

Those who are looking for a prescriptive text will be disappointed. As the editor explains, “This book is not a how-to. No such book exists because it cannot be written.”

That’s actually one of the reasons that I so enjoyed this collection. No sooner had one writer said “Of course I write with an outline — a very detailed one, in fact — and I can’t imagine ever writing without one” than another said “Outline, schmoutline: I can’t imagine anything more stifling creatively”. It certainly emphasizes the precept that what works for one writer does not work for the next, that there is no “silver bullet” for crafting a novel. “They, like all of us, have good days, bad days, and days where it is more useful to sit quietly and read, to let the writing itself wait.”

Instead, the editor’s intent is that this volume “inspires, consoles, frightens, prods, angers, and excites many of you who pick it up.” It accomplished all of that in my books. Well, except for the anger: nothing in here made me angry. I wonder what did rouse that emotion for other readers.

Another hope of the editor is that the volume leads readers “to the work of the fine novelists who have given so generously of their time and wisdom to make this book a reality, and if not to their work, then to that of the many writers they have recommended”; I definitely added several names to my TBR list.

One thing that I found especially interesting is that I expected to find some authors’ comments particularly useful and had no expectations at all of the authors whose works were unfamiliar to me, but in fact I found that some of my favourite authors had little to say that made me want to note their passages, whereas I found myself constantly marking passages by some authors whose works I hadn’t read (say, Aleksandar Hemon, Chris Abani, Ann Cummins).

In the next post, I’ll share some of my favourite quotes from this volume.

It’s Good Stuff for Writers.

Daniel Ararcón (Ed.) The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook (Henry Holt, 2010)

Often, I’ve heard about a book from Writer’s Digest, gotten my hopes up, and been disappointed in it. I had a contrasting experience with this book; I approached it cautiously (thanks to countless photo-prompts that haven’t inspired me in the least), but I was ultimately quite pleased.

The first book that Phillip Sexton gives thanks for is Jack Heffron’s The Writer’s Idea Book, one of the few Writer’s Digest Books I’ve purchased. (Most, but not all, of the books listed in the Further Reading section are also Writer’s Digest Publications, but I suppose that’s to be expected.) Not surprisingly, the two complement each other: Heffron’s is decidedly text-based and Sexton’s clearly image-based.

Wondering what sets this volume apart from other books like it, which are also marketed to writers in search of exercises to get the pen moving or, more concretely, ideas for stories and novels if those are lacking? Not a lot. There are many similar resources and although they do date easily (particularly when image-based), the concept remains the same. So what ultimately sets this one apart is Phillip Sexton’s voice.

There’s not a lot of it, but beyond the introduction and afterword, each photograph is accompanied by a paragraph or two, which often include a snippet of another writer’s opinion on the subject but fundamentally rely upon Sexton’s exposition. And, if you like his approach, you’ll probably appreciate the commentary that accompanies each image.

Sexton is obviously a reader and instinctively recognizes storytelling inspiration in abundance (story ideas are everywhere, not just in prompt books or pet subjects). Not only does he refer to Shakespeare, Mark Haddon, Tom Robbins and Ann Hood, but also to Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dan Brown, and also to well-known scripts for film and television (inspiration also lies in other storytellers’ works, and not only works published by Writer’s Digest).

Ultimately the exercises will repeat others that you’ve seen in other similar books, but beyond Phillip Sexton’s approach, A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words has Tricia Bateman’s photographs to recommend it. Sometimes the images in similar books feel a little contrived, but these photographs are unusual; sometimes they even have blurry bits (perfect for imagining stories into those foggy bits) and there are tonnes of ideas lurking there.

Good stuff for writers.

Phillip Sexton’s A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words with Photos by Tricia Bateman (Writer’s Digest Books, 2006)

A Novel in a Year gathers together a series of articles previously published over the space of a year although I read the chapters a few at a time which worked just fine as a reader, although if I’d been reading along as a writer, I would have had to set it aside more frequently to do my homework.

Doughty’s tone is one that I warm to immediately. She offers ideas without a sense that she alone possesses a wisdom about storytelling that nobody else has. And she freely admits that although she does have some good ideas, she knows that she doesn’t always practice what she preaches.

“What advice people need in the early stages of their writing depends so much on their level of skill and experience — not to mention personality type — that I wouldn’t dream of being proscriptive. I make no larger claim than this: this book gives you an idea about how I do it, and here are a series of exercises that might help you have a go at it more or less my way.”

There is a slight cheer-leading quality, which might work well for those who endeavour to work along with the exercises: “Forget for a moment the loneliness and fear, the paranoia and financial insecurity, Being a Writer is great fun.” And given that rejection is a vital part of any writer’s life, who’s to say that some encouraging words are not only ‘nice’ but necessary. “Your only concern right now should be to write. Write your book, write it well, then rewrite it even better.”

And it’s not all encouraging chatter by any means. Doughty has some concrete advice. Some of it is very specific, which suits the premise of the book, but some of it is more general.

On reading:

“Read. Read as if your life depended on it because your life as a novelist does. Read for sheer enjoyment — what sort of books you enjoy reading provides a pretty strong clue as to what sort of book you should be writing. But also learn to read critically. If something that a particular writer is doing rings your bell or gets your goat, why? As a reader, you may favour a certain style or genre; as a critic, you should be an omnivore.”

On characters:

You should always know more about your characters than you can possibly include in your book.

On plot:

A plot is not an idea, it is a whole mass of ideas, often in conflict with each other, which are expressed by a series of events. To have enough material for a whole novel, you have to be prepared to look way beyond your original idea, beyond yourself, to give it context and development, and above all to introduce the possibility of change.

On writer’s block:

I wouldn’t dignify it with the phrase writer’s block. Writer’s sludge is more like it.

On multiple narrators:

There has to be a cast-iron reason for that kind of stuff otherwise you won’t get away with it. Readers aren’t fools.

And sometimes she’s just plain sassy: I like that.

“We could all live perfectly useful lives if we didn’t write novels. Think of the hours we could spend with our families or hoovering the stairs — I’d have awfully clean stairs if I didn’t write books.”

If you’ve seen the dust bunnies that have colonized our stairways at home, you’ll understand why I truly warmed to Doughty’s book.

Good Stuff for Writers. (Especially for writers whose stairs need hoovering.)

Louise Doughty’s A Novel in a Year 2010 (Pocket Books – Simon & Schuster 2008)

Here’s what I wanted to find between the covers of Kelly L. Stone’s book: “You have hereby been granted the equivalent of your current annual earnings in exchange for agreeing to spend the same amount of time that you currently devote to your 9-5 existence at your desk writing, just as you have always dreamed of doing.”

Well, I know, it’s ridiculous. But really, I don’t know what I could have expected from a book titled Time to Write. Although I know, now, that I was expecting something more. Which really isn’t reasonable, of course, because the simple act of reading a book on this subject does not increase the number of available hours in a given day. 

The author consulted more than 100 writers for this book, asking for the secrets behind the writing time they found. None of them had managed to find more than 24 hours in any given day either.

Here’s one such bit of advice which, appropriately, appears on the final page of the book: “The number one thing you must do is write. You have to write, write, write, and when you can’t write anymore, write some more.” 

This is courtesy of Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author (most of the writers quoted herein are bestselling authors, writers of commercial fiction who set quotas of 20 pages a day) and yes, it’s good advice to deliver as readers swallow the last page of a book about writing. Go forth, now, and write. Yes, yes. 

And there’s nothing wrong with this advice. Nothing wrong with the advice of any of the writers quoted herein. But there’s also nothing surprising in it. And certainly no magic certificate that let me off the Monday-to-Friday reality of my work-a-day life. 

What Kelly L. Stone offers is practical advice, simple suggestions to help you determine where, during your busy week, there are untapped reservoirs of time that you might be able to use for writing, and then techniques to help you make the most of that available time. It’s organization and planning: it’s simple stuff. You know: watch less TV and set your alarm an hour earlier, snatch available moments and carry a notebook, trytrytryandtryagain.

I’ve already done all this:  identified the pockets of time that can hold writing if I rearrange other responsibilities and pleasures, itemized and set my short-term goals in pursuit of my long-term goals, established my habit of writing weekly, considered how terrible and culpable I feel and am when I let myself and my craft down. There’s nothing else to be done, other than what I’m already doing. I should have struck this task from my commute and taken the time to write instead.

Good stuff for beginning-beginning writers or for those people who think they might like to write a book someday if only there weren’t so many good shows on HBO.

Kelly L. Stone Time to Write (Adams Media, 2008)

Following the trend of focussing on dip-in-and-out-able resources for these oh-so-sticky summer months, I’m looking to Torbjörn Lundmark’s quirky QWERTY: A Note on the Type today.

Like Jill Krementz’s book of photographs and Adair Lara’s sentences of evidence that you are indeed a writer if such statements are true of you, this is not necessarily a practical resource, but it is informative in a “oh, that’s neat” kind of way.

Although some might argue that point. Perhaps you travel in circles in which it is imminently useful to know that the letter ‘B’ stems “from a hieroglyph depicing a house. It was an architect’s floor-plan of a simple and unpretentious one-room place: an Egyptian bachelor flat, if you like.”

Maybe you attend parties at which other guests there would like to know that the most frequently used key on a keyboard is the space bar, or that the @ symbol first debuted on keyboards in the late 1800s but usage dwindled until 1971 when Ray Tomlinson conceived of using it to address emails to servers and addressees.

If you think you have an occasion to repeat rhymes like this, “Virgules, slashes, slants and strokes, Mean/lean the same to different folks”, or “If plus means ‘boom’, and minus ‘bust’, Then, sad to say, I’m quite non-plussed” then you should rush out for a copy of this immediately.

It’s Good Fun for Writers.

Torbjörn Lundmark’s quirky QWERTY: A Note on the Type (Penguin, 2002)

Perhaps because it’s summertime, I’m drawn to the books on my writing shelves that are not proper resources, but still distinctly writer-ish: The Writer’s Desk is lovely, completely browseable, enduring and endearing.

Although I do think the prose that accompanies Jill Krementz’s photographs offers useful bits, the purpose of the book is clearly to house her images. She’s snapped more than 1,500 writers and 55 of their photographs appear here with commentary (mostly snipped from “The Paris Review” interviews).

When I first leafed through these pages, I thought it was interesting how many of the authors therein were pictured with old-school tools. Many of the subjects sit with paper and pencil; sometimes you can tell they are working with a print-out, other times, as with Georges Simenon’s image, the sharpened pencils are outnumbered only by the pipes, so that you can’t help but recognize a tangible, long-hand world.

The typewriters clearly outnumber the computers. This fact stood out to me at the time because I was still at the stage where I desperately wanted to know if I was “doing it right”. Could I be a real writer if I sometimes wrote long-hand, sometimes pounded on my mother’s old Royale, and other times tapped away at a desktop and other times on a laptop? These photographs say “yes”.

My laptop at the time was an older-model IBM and seemed much larger and bulkier than the laptops that Krementz captured in these writers’ workspaces. But now leafing through this collection, I’m fascinated by how dated the computers in these photographs are.

Next to Ray Blount Jr.’s image is this: “Why write, when you can watch a movie on your typewriter?” It must have seemed astonishing at the time. Now, you can download films while an app writes your novel for you. Mona Simpson’s laptop was likely cutting-edge, as was Amy Tan’s. I probably lusted after Cathleen Schine’s sweet little white number pre-dating the customizable skins now available and only Veronica Chambers’ looks snazzier. Now, you can revise your working draft on your mobile when you’re waiting to cross at a traffic light.

Flipping the pages, you can see Edwidge Danticat’s fax machine, its many buttons seeming to taunt Jean Piaget’s ancient radios. And Stephen King’s touchtone phone and scanner seem to shove all the rotary telephones into another century. But the images in The Writer’s Desk still feel timeless to me. I love this book as much as I did when I first got my own copy and I think my affection will hold fast through the next decade as well.

Good fun for writers.

Jill Krementz’s The Writer’s Desk (Random House, 1996)

This is one of those delightful little books that shops keep near their counter: literary impulse buys. My husband found it in Type Books, in their literary impulse buy department, and I’m lucky that he spoiled me with it because it’s the sort of little book that I’d love to have, but I’d never have bought it for myself.

Not because it’s not delightful: it definitely is. But because there’s always a more [useful, serious, note-worthy, prize-winner-ish, world-widening] book to choose instead.

Although there are some statements that aren’t a perfect fit for me, at least some of those are a perfect fit for friends of mine, so I’m willing to adopt the premise that those few which don’t fit either category must perfectly describe a friend of Adair Lara’s.

Here’s a sample:

You are shipwrecked on a deserted island but can’t send the rescue note off in the bottle because you have no access to spell-check.

You have an opinion on the serial comma.

You’d write anything they’d let you write: horoscopes, greeting cards, catalog copy. You’ve even wondered how much fortune cookie writers make.

You think of eavesdropping as researching.

Good fun for writers.

Adair Lara’s You Know You’re a Writer When… (Chronicle Books, 2007)

Re-visiting Le Guin’s Steering the Craft inspired me to re-read some of her essays in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination .

The collection, as the subtitle suggests, draws together a wide variety of essays; I enjoy them thoroughly whether they consider islands, high heels or libraries or whether they consider the rhythm of Tolkien’s prose, the disparity between the number of Nobel Prizes offered to male recipients and female recipients, or the calculated adoption of a pseudonym. Even if you think you wouldn’t enjoy an essay collection, but if you have enjoyed Le Guin’s fiction, this collection is well worth the time. But here I will focus on the essays therein which have been filed under Writing.

Because many of these essays have been published and/or presented elsewhere and because I’ve made the mistake myself of purchasing other collections of hers only to discover overlap in their contents, I’ll list the contents of this segment of the book; this list will help you determine, if you’re a Le Guin fan, just how quickly you need to find yourself a copy of this collection. It contains:

“A Matter of Trust”,
“The Writer and the Character”,
“Unquestioned Assumptions”,
“Prides: An Essay on Writing Workshops”,
“The Question I Get Asked Most Often”,
“Old Body Not Writing”, and
“The Writer on, and at, Her Work”.

Here are some snippets from “A Matter of Trust” which is based on the following premise: “In order to write a story, you have to trust yourself, you have to trust the story, and you have to trust the reader.”

On the former, she advises that “the only way you can come to trust yourself as a writer is to write”. But then she adds a thought to this, in a footnote: “And, of course, by reading stories. Reading — reading stories other writers wrote, reading voraciously but judgmentally, reading the best there is and learning from it how well, and how differently, stories can be told — this is so essential to being a writer that I tend to forget to mention it; so here it is in a footnote.”

[Honestly, if someone writing about writing doesn’t hold this opinion, I find it hard to take their advice seriously. When a writer says s/he doesn’t read? I immediately want to go and grab a book – and not one of theirs – and start reading.]

On trusting the story, Le Guin observes that a writer’s idea of a story is always more than what’s finally written, but “it may also do more than you knew you were doing, say more than you realised you were saying. That’s the best reason of all to trust it, to let it find itself.”

And, on trusting the reader, she discusses the relationship between reader and writer and she states: “Fiction is not only illusion, but collusion.”

In conclusion, she offers one of my favourite snippets from this collection:

“The whole thing, writing a story, is a high-wire act — there you are out in midair walking on a spiderweb line of words, and down in the darkness people are watching. What can you trust but your sense of balance?”

Good stuff for writers.

Ursula K. Le Guin The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (Shambhala, 2004)

Unlike last month’s resource, The Writer’s Notebook from Tin House, a relatively new acquisition, Le Guin’s book has been on my shelves for several years. It comes from Eighth Mountain Press (in Oregon, U.S.A.), so it had to be special ordered through my favourite local (at the time) indie bookshop, but it was definitely worth extra expense and a long wait. 

I decided that I wanted a copy of my own immediately upon reading a segment in a writing magazine. It so struck me that, even now, I remember exactly where I was sitting (in “The Daily Grind”, a coffee shop on Dundas Street, in a table-for-two adjacent to the pretty Venetian-styled mural) when I came upon her description of Point of View and Voice.

This was maybe ten years ago and I was still freshly collecting books on writing; I had read a lot of the classics on the subject and many grammar handbooks and style manuals, but part of the appeal of Le Guin’s approach likely lay in her willingness to set aside some of those rules when the situation called for it. 

Even now, I still warm to her tone, although I have since read plenty of writers who adhere to the “know the rules so you can break them” philosophy of writing. I like the anecdote with which she actually concludes this volume, citing a first sentence of one of her works: “The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California.” That’s the kind of sentence that would make many editors squirm, and obviously, knowing the rules, she would have considered altering it but, ultimately, she kept it in and she’s still satisfied with her choice.

Le Guin kept this some-would-say-cumbersome sentence as the opening to Always Coming Home because it fit with her storyteller’s intentions: “It was the shortest way to say exactly what I meant.” It seems to fit with a philosophy in which each writer needs to consider the options available and then determine the “shortest way to get exactly where they and their work need to go”. 

And, so, although Steering the Craft grew out of a writing workshop, it could easily be adapted for the use of a writer who worked more independently, that she actually intended the book be used by groups and by individuals working in solitude. I was living in a city in which I hadn’t met any other writers and I was just beginning to use the internet to connect with other writers, so it was a welcome reassurance in many ways.

As a younger writer, there was an immediate and strong appeal for me in Le Guin’s approach, but even now, returning to Steering the Craft, I find it a valuable resource. 

Good stuff for writers.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew (Eighth Mountain Press, 1998)