Salman Rushdie on the novel’s debt to memoir, memoir’s debt to New Journalism—and why the novel is harder than either. The foment over Salman Rushdie’s new memoir led me in a roundabout way to interviews with him on YouTube. One of the best is the long talk above, recorded at Emory University, when he was in the midst of writing Joseph Anton—apparently he wrote some of it there—because he drills into memoir’s granular issues. I got the sense in this …
Joseph Anton is a splendid book, the finest new memoir to cross my desk in many a year.—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Salman Rushdie is in the news again. Not because he’s living under a new Muslim sentence of death, which sent him into hiding for a decade after the publication of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, but because he’s written a memoir about the period. With the fatwa now almost fifteen years behind him, Rushdie has perspective from which …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …