Draft No. 4

Writing by the think-system

August 18, 2012 | 15 Comments

Veryln Klinkenborg on creating sentences—on the page & before. Your job as a writer is making sentences. Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head. In your head. Did no one ever tell you this? —Several Short Sentences About Writing In his intense little essay August 13 in The New York Times promoting his new book, Several Short Sentences About Writing, Veryln Klinkenborg clears his throat for three paragraphs, takes a swipe at composition teachers, and unveils …

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Balancing honesty and artifice

August 13, 2012 | 17 Comments

John Casey on that “low vaudeville cunning” necessary in writing. Once I asked for advice about my idea of adding a fourth act to my memoir. I’d seen how it would break up the long second act, give readers a fresh resting place. And the more I’d lived with the notion the more I’d liked it: adding an act also would emphasize a new phase in the story’s arc. My mentor at the time was really offended, however. The reason …

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How stories make us human

August 7, 2012 | 10 Comments

It’s not easy to infect the brain of another person with an idea; it can be accomplished only by hitting the small exposed hole in the system. For the brain, that hole is story-shaped.—David Eagleman Eagleman’s lines appear in his review of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, by Jonathan Gottschall, in this week’s New York Times Book Review. Narratives that we heed are inherently and intensely moralistic—as a group-level adaptation, they encourage pro-social behavior and are “as …

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Noted: Jonah Lehrer’s downfall

July 31, 2012 | 12 Comments

Yesterday I got around to reading the New York Times Book Review’s full-page massacre of Imagine: How Creativity Works, by Jonah Lehrer, and wished I’d been even more grudging in my own piece touching on the bestseller. Then later in the day the news broke that Lehrer had invented quotes he attributed to Bob Dylan, and I wished I’d mentioned my own reservations about the Dylan material, which appears early in the book. They were these: • Dylan’s use seemed gratuitous in …

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On hating a memoirist

July 28, 2012 | 43 Comments

Another nonfiction issue: judging a book by its author?  I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.—William Gass As my previous three posts indicate, I admire Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. I devoured it as a reader and also loved how I could raid her techniques for my own memoir. So …

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Cheryl Strayed’s back pages

July 24, 2012 | 7 Comments

How Cheryl Strayed feathers her compelling backstory into Wild. . . . I spun the backstory. I dole it out. The trail is a chronological report of my hike; what came before the trail is not chronological. I give you a scene from when I was seven and then another the year before [the hike]. I worked that pretty hard.—Cheryl Strayed in an interview  The second time through Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, …

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Studying ‘Wild’ for its structure

July 20, 2012 | 18 Comments

Cheryl Strayed’s memoir is narrative-driven but reflective.  Every book has its inherent impossibility. For Wild it was about me walking alone through the wilderness for 94 days; it could have been really boring. The challenge there was to convey what was happening inside of me. The trail was always there, that was the great constant, but I was always different on the trail.—Cheryl Strayed in an interview I threw out the first act of my memoir in June—it was too …

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