Review of a fine little book on how to sit there and get work done. When people ask me the personal-experience question, my response is that I write from my personal experiences, whether I’ve had them or not. At first, this sounds like a joke and people laugh, but I’m not joking. Regardless of where I got the experience (or the story “idea”), I treat it personally; if it’s not personal, I don’t want to be involved. . . . …
Sven Birkerts views “double vantage point” as genre’s signature. Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.—Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts. Graywolf. 194 pages What’s the difference between a novel and a memoir? The question isn’t as dumb as it may appear. A novel can be autobiographical, drawn completely from life remembered; a memoir is of course made of memory …
Learn to use the semicolon. Master it. And then never use it again.—Verlyn Klinkenborg, in a lecture to MFA students at Goucher College Kurt Vonnegut also hated the semicolon. Virginia Woolf was at the other end of the scale, of course, but when reading her I really want to replace some semicolons with colons or even dashes. (The Great Gatsby uses both semicolons and dashes beautifully; I’m not sure if it employs a colon.) Years ago, after leaving newspapers, where …
This blog turns two, I ramble on about my sheep & ponder change A friend from the sheep world was in town last weekend and we visited a farm north of here. The grassy hills were lovely, the shepherds hospitable, and they showed me one of my ewes I’d sold them three years ago. She still wore a blue ear-tag with my handwriting on it. But I had only a vague memory of her—she was young when we dispersed the …
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book. Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem, too—the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. That’s from Annie Dillard’s 1989 New York Times essay “Write Till You Drop,” quarried from her book The Writing Life. Yet she promises: At its best, the …
Annie Dillard first published Living By Fiction in 1982. She might have called it Living by Literature because although it’s about her love affair with reading fiction in particular, she says more about nonfiction in a few asides and by implication than some books entirely on the topic.
Her categories of “traditional” and “contemporary modernist” approaches, of “fine” prose and “plain” prose styles, cross genres as well. In fact, Living by Fiction enabled me better to appreciate and to understand David Shields’s less coherent and useful Reality Hunger for what it is: a modernist’s aesthetic.
Dillard prefers “contemporary modernist” work herself (in her lexicon, that’s postmodernism), but she’s knowing in her explanation of the forces—human, societal, economic—that drive writers into the middle ground. She observes that most writers are working there, including excellent ones, somewhere on the bell curve between traditional and modernist approaches, between fine prose and plain. Most people “write largely traditional fiction.”
We are all so assimilated. Last Saturday, Hope was watching the evening news and the newscaster instead of Tom Brokaw was a perfectly stunning young woman, light topaz eyes as far apart as a kitten’s, sharp-cornered wide mouth pronouncing everything with a perfect rapid inflection, more American than American, crisper, a touch of that rapid barking voice of the thirties gangster films and romantic comedies, and when she signed off her name wasn’t even Greek, it was more like Turkish, …