tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74644720435888380322024-03-12T20:29:23.986-07:00MoBettaWritingSteven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-68639045108160957212015-07-20T11:29:00.000-07:002015-07-20T12:23:50.619-07:00How I Broke Up with for Good and Then Fell Back in Love with the Short Story<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggc3xnpq-iwM68qYHFQs534goGej1LdYrv5lg5q2a61OMOKxkuFN65rJflrC-ebsOgg-pbA2XELNPjPKGZqD8r_VKrvxNB7pDhm-5BFqCpnNeHiz3Wm56IJSV2ETuDRYBePWFAR1uedKM/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggc3xnpq-iwM68qYHFQs534goGej1LdYrv5lg5q2a61OMOKxkuFN65rJflrC-ebsOgg-pbA2XELNPjPKGZqD8r_VKrvxNB7pDhm-5BFqCpnNeHiz3Wm56IJSV2ETuDRYBePWFAR1uedKM/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" /></a></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; font-family: 'Droid Serif', serif; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yes, the short story and I were through. I’d written two books of stories but decided after one previous failure at writing a novel that I’d try again at forty-two years old. And this one worked. It worked so well in fact that I came to agree with what other writers have sometimes said: stories were only an apprenticeship to writing novels. And the short story form did feel, well, limited. Any good idea or great line or irresistible incident could fit somewhere in a novel. I began to believe as Cormac McCarthy opined in his dismissal of short stories in favor of novels, “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth the doing.”</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I remembered my fellow MFA students who painstakingly spent their entire three years of graduate school working on a novel, with something akin to the faith in an afterlife. Instead of acceding to the common exhortation that they experiment with stories, try out different voices, explore a diversity of material, <em style="border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">fool around</em>, they thrashed onward, failure be damned. Maybe they had it right.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I lost interest in stories, stopped reading them except for when I had to teach them, and frankly couldn’t imagine ever writing one again. Some part of me as a writer felt I’d grown up, put on big-boy pants, and now could get on with my true calling as a novelist. Oh, sure, I still admired, nay, adored Chekhov and Munro and Carver and host of other short story writers for their mastery of and exclusive commitment to the form. And I believed the homage so many novelists paid to the short story was genuine, Faulkner among them, intoning that for a short story “every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can’t. There’s less room in it for trash.”</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I valued the story’s purity, yes, but alas I had “larger” stories to tell and found the short story form “confining” and felt novels could be “expansive” and “richer” and “weightier” dealing with issues of “time” and “history.” Not only were novels the right form for life’s multifarious issues, but they would be a true test of my own depth as a person and a writer.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Before I pass this off as a delusion, let me explain that I still believe, as Lorrie Moore has said, that “a short story is a love affair, a novel a marriage.” Nothing in my experience has equaled the sheer stamina required to write a novel, including the surfeit of false starts, dead ends, and bridges-to-nowhere tangents; the lack of sleep when the last thing on your mind before going to bed and the first thing when you wake up is the scene you can’t get right; my incredibly low threshold for being <em style="border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">disturbed</em> by loved ones asking me to do the simplest thing for them; and the horror of finding out that you have written a book entirely from the wrong character’s point of view, a character who may not even belong in the novel.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I would have gone on with it. I would have happily continued had not the powers that be decided my subsequent two novels, after the first two published ones, weren’t wanted. This is no different from many of my fellow mid-list writers, and all writers have to deal with rejection if they want to continue writing. Some go on to write new novels. Some persist in reworking the same book in the hopes that they’ll either make it irresistible or the publishing climate will change or they will take advantage of digital opportunities or the once unthinkable route of self publishing. Some decide to write only for themselves. I turned back to writing stories.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I found myself radiantly compelled. The open-ended possibilities of the novel became the disciplined limits of a ship-in-a-bottle crafted work of exactitude. Each word could be labored over and still allow one to come up for air at the end of the day. Mark Twain’s maxim that the difference between the right word and the next to the right word as the difference between lightning and the lightning bug resurfaced as guidance for how to methodically attend to a short story, rather than the worrisome fear that I was wasting too much time on any given sentence when I still had 70,000 words of the novel to write. Not that momentum isn’t important in the short story—either writing it or reading it—but I could hold the whole damn thing in my head without wondering what happened to that character on page 40 who had disappeared like a runaway.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I thought: I’m back, I’m home. I remembered that I loved the shape of a short story’s body, how it moved: a sinewy grace that paced steadily ahead to an inevitable end, often the edge of a precipice rather than the vast open meadow of a new chapter or a fin de siècle expository summary. And a form that insisted in asking with each line, have you matched the story you tell with the <em style="border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">reason</em> for telling it? A form whose subtext thrums beneath its surface and can’t abide a stalled moment as filler.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Indeed, the surest way to find out the strength of a short story is to try to turn it into a novel. What once was essential and urgent becomes repetitive and distended. And what once captured to heightened effect a fleeting moment of time, turns into dilatory postponement without the keen-edged pacing and pressurized voice of the short story. My former notion of saving everything for a novel missed a central point: the short story insists on its own standing; it borrows from and imitates no other form; in its demand for originality it takes on material suitable only for its purposes. Try to fool it with content too thin, and you wind up with a stringy, half-naked narrative; force feed it extraneous, nutrient-less stuffing, and it will erupt with undigested bloat. But care for it just right and it springs alive under your fingers.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #373737; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-top: 12px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I wrote one story then another, and let’s be honest, they came neither easily conceived nor quickly published. Yet over a ten-year period, they did come and now a book of them. Humbled by how much I’d once disowned or condescended to the form, I owed my rejuvenated writing life to the practice. For which I am not only grateful but convinced of the short story’s unassuming power and survival.</span></div>
Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-50602728836788247242014-03-26T14:46:00.001-07:002014-03-26T14:53:13.230-07:0020/20 Hindsight--What We Wish We'd Known as Younger Writers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsr9wQXfxRK4DWuoo1Vvu2PUoFqPoBMekBHns3KxjSrdzXDRjhgi8SEWVZTOHQlvRCS6D6xAG6I47gRE-tt_xLfW1uP9In5ItUSliHBwBSyw84GnMgT1uT8QsOVjdEubpQmMi_5aTOvl0/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsr9wQXfxRK4DWuoo1Vvu2PUoFqPoBMekBHns3KxjSrdzXDRjhgi8SEWVZTOHQlvRCS6D6xAG6I47gRE-tt_xLfW1uP9In5ItUSliHBwBSyw84GnMgT1uT8QsOVjdEubpQmMi_5aTOvl0/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(The following is from a talk I delivered for a literary
salon at the Denver Lighthouse Lit Fest.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b> </b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
YOUR first
public performance. Second grade. A talent show, or a show and
tell, you’re not sure which. All you remember is that you do not just
like Elvis Presley, you <i>are</i> Elvis. You go around the house singing
“Don’t be Cruel” and “Hound Dog.” It’s 1958 and your parents are busy doing
1958 things like seriously discussing the possibility of building a bomb
shelter and forbidding you to hula hoop in the house. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>You’re
convinced your version of “Hound Dog” will do Elvis proud. Forget Elvis’s
gold lame suit or pompadour with the killer stray lock down the forehead.
For your performance, you have only a starched white shirt that you wear to
Hebrew school and hair so insistently curly it would survive a nuclear bomb,
speaking of mutual assured destruction. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>You
unbutton the shirt to your breast bone, do the best you can with the curls so
they look windswept and not like the orator Cicero with a laurel wreath on his
head, and you belt it out. The crowd, you have to admit, is rockin’
Or smiling encouragingly. Or relieved not to be taking a spelling
test. No matter. You’re in the zone, and yes, your eyes become
heavy lidded like Elvis when you come to the second verse: “<i>Yeah, you ain’t
never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine.”</i> And
then. Then. It happens. You look right at Irene
Milligan. She is a rather big-boned girl for second grade, formidable and
blunt; her favorite expression is <i>Stuff it, moron</i>! None of the
boys dare tease or challenge her because she has a track record of compromising
their masculinity by twisting their arms behind their backs until they cry “Master!”
which she prefers to “Uncle.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Irene is
staring right at you; she is not entertained; she is not amused; she is <i>not</i>
rockin’ or clapping her hands and swaying her head back and forth like your best
friend, Warren, as if he is Ray Charles and blind. In fact, her eyes are
slitted, her arms crossed over her chest, her lips pursed with what you would
have to say is unmistakable dissatisfaction. You freeze; you stop right
in the middle of your unaccompanied performance. You return to your
seat. People are confused. So are you. You don’t know exactly
what has happened to you but years later you will understand. You have
met her. Or him. Or they. You have met The Critic.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What you
don’t know yet (but wish you did) is that you are not this performance, this
thing you are doing. You don’t appreciate how many hours you will waste
confusing you—whoever that is—with what you produce. You will continue to
identify with what you do, which will soon enough be writing. Hound Dog
and Elvis will be put aside when you slowly realize you actually might be tone
deaf. And behind all that pursuit will be Irene, The Critic, like
original sin, always there with her arms folded, that slightly perplexed,
slightly cranky, slightly hostile expression, what is basically—though you
don’t conceive of it as such in second grade—a WTF bubble above her head.
And you so wish someone had told you that you will never please Irene—or not
enough. And that it would be so much easier if you had just stood up there and
continued singing, your eyes skyward, belting out “Hound Dog” with evangelical
rapture not for Irene but for Elvis.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><br />
YOU'RE twenty-one and very fond of telling people you’re going to be a writer.
Such innocence is cute. Cuter still is the fact that people believe you
when you haven’t actually written a word. You’ve been afraid to write
because that would spoil the perfection of what you might actually write.
But your last semester of your senior year at the University of Colorado you
get up the guts to take a creative writing class. It’s 1973, and
everybody wants to be an artist or at least anti something or other
materialistic, so classmates and friends, especially if they’re stoned, even
your parents, despite monetarily supporting you so you can eat your one meal a
day at Furrs Cafeteria, have no trouble accepting this claim of yours.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The problem
is that you have no idea what to write about. You think you do. You
think you should write about “what you know,” because everyone has said that is
what you should do. And sure enough you do so, in this so-called creative
writing class where the professor, a man named Art Kistner, meets with the four
of you signed up for his course the first day (you have been closed out of the
“good” professor’s class) and informs you all that there will be no class
meetings, no instruction, no discussion. You are simply to go home and
write three stories. Hand them in one at a time to him; you will meet for
a conference over each for an hour. Don’t be late because you will
receive a F if you do. Goodbye. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i>Okay</i>,
you think, I guess this is the way it’s done. You write your three
stories. You hand them in. You’re terrifically excited, especially
after your professor tells you you’re one of the three best writers he’s seen
over his years of teaching (although, honestly, how many students can you have
at four a semester?). But never mind, you’ve gotten that boost of
confidence. You’re set. But wait, he also remarks that he happened
to show one of your stories to two other readers: his wife and some associate
or other. And they only made it to pages 6 and 8 respectively.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Was it that
bad? you ask. No, Arthur Kistner, tells you, the piece just wasn’t
important enough for them to keep going. Oh, you say. Important as
in boring? No, important as in meaningful, he says. Oh, you say
again and leave. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It takes
you a long time to understand that despite all the sensitivity of your writing,
the sensitive characters, the sensitive feelings, the sensitive typing you’ve
done on onion skin paper, you are missing something big. It won’t be
until years later when you’re living in Portland and your girlfriend at the
time sleeps with another man and you have to face your abysmal despair and
anger and eventually write a story about it that you understand something you
wished you’d known earlier: you have been afraid to really write about anything
that hurts. You’ve been afraid of your own material. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Your story
just <i>sits</i> there, which is to say no one wants to publish it. Until
one night, you look at it again and realize what’s wrong: the ending.
You’re afraid of the ending, that is, you’re afraid to have occur what you’ve
been afraid of in real life, abandonment—a bulls eye of a core issue for
you—and that what you fear in your life you’ve not allowed to happen in your
fiction. And then it comes to you, the final two paragraphs. You
send it out and it gets taken immediately, as if it’s an entirely different
story, as if it’s just been waiting for closure, and you finally understand
what writers, people whom you think of as real writers, have been saying: they
don’t write, they rewrite.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
ONE'S power
as a writer comes from being willing to create and destroy: you have to be both
Shiva and Vishnu, that wacky fun duo, and live with the exquisite contradiction
that both are equally necessary to the process. There are few things in
life besides writing that require so much of it to be sacrificed for the
greater good. The pushing ahead in writing and the letting go require the
same act of will. As I sit here writing this I’m aware of that process
and aware too that I still struggle with it after all these years. My ego
wants to get it done right on the first draft and tells me I may—or must—get
lucky, and who wants to waste time writing something that will only be
discarded? My experience tells me to instruct my ego to back the fuck
away from desk, put its hands behind its head and assume the perp position on
the ground. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Writing
is and always will be a mixture of excitement and dread. No matter how
much you try to eliminate the latter in favor of the former, these two will
always be inextricably linked, and necessarily so. To do dangerous work,
to take chances and risk failure, both emotions have to be present. Fear
and excitement are precisely what grab hold of an image, a family story, a word
spoken in anger or shyness at a party, a forgotten memory and snag these to
germinate the process of creation. You can waste a lot of time—and
believe me I have—trying to rid yourself of the fear part, but let me save you
the trouble and tell you not to bother. Welcome it instead.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And while
you’re at it, welcome all the misfires, that is, the abandoned drafts that work
for one or two or five pages then go dark on you. They may seem like
false starts at the time; they may make you feel stupid for thinking you could
create a story out of so small an idea or event; and they may sting in their
abandonment because you were so excited when you first began. But rest
assured that after time has passed—and I’m talking about hard time, sometimes
as much as five years or more—you may open up that file if you still have it,
and you should, that’s the point here, and find what was a dead end suddenly
becomes a glorious avenue forward. Never throw away drafts of unfinished
work out of a mood of discouragement; those moods are temporary; the promise of
the writing is not.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And let me
offer the opposite advice that comes after years of not following it myself:
don’t wait <i>too</i> long. Any source material for prospective writing
has a best-to-use-by stamp, after which content can go stale: you can be too
removed from the material or forget details or god forbid become infirm or just
lose the spirit, drive, and passion that once connected you to the
subject. It can all feel like another lifetime ago and not in the way
that it’s good to have distance on. The bell does indeed toll for thee,
or at least your once great idea for a story or poem.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
DELIGHT and
surprise. Oh, how overlooked these are in writing! At some level I
truly didn’t understand that it’s this moment of surprise that I was looking
for in my work. It’s a quality hard to describe—this surprise and delight—and
it can be realistic or strange, whimsical or poignant, oblique or
shocking—think of when we discover in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” what all
those folksy neighbors are up to on that June day, or Alice Munro’s magician’s
touch for convoluting time and memory to arrive at a moment in her story “The
Progress of Love” when a mother burns up 3000 dollars of desperately needed
money supposedly, or so we think at first, in front of her husband. These
moments are worth working for and toward because they make all the hard and
sometimes punishing effort of writing worthwhile. It was Robert Frost
after all who summed it up by saying, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise
for the reader.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
here may be the subtlest lesson of all I wish I’d known earlier: how to
look. I had some idea as a younger writer that I was supposed to write
about the big subjects, whatever they were: love, injustice, war—never mind
that I was never in one—death, success, failure, money, betrayal,
loyalty. And, well, in one way or another I <i>did</i> write about these
things, if not at all how I thought. But I didn’t understand how to
attend to that, yes, still voice inside that recognizes the unknown, that takes
a sounding on the unformed. So reading an article in the paper one day
about a Quasar farther and more powerful than any scientists had discovered
before or hearing an obscure fact that Hitler once had a plan to deport all
Jews to Madagascar or finding a V-gram that my father sent to my mother during
World War 2 about two hungry French girls to whom he had given all his
chocolate allotment I soon became aware that these are the powerful signs that
gobsmack writers and evoke the unsayable. They are the very overhead
remarks or images glimpsed or items read or photographs recovered or family
anecdotes retold that allow you to sneak up on the big idea—Emily Dickinson’s
counsel to tell it slant—and that have the sustainability to grow from their
seed entire poems, stories, novels, and trilogies. It’s good not to ask
why this and not that zaps you. It’s good not to question these notices,
for that’s what they are, notices from your creative subconscious. It was
perhaps the most significant realization of my writing life to learn to covet
these “notices,” tend to them like orchids in an underground hothouse until
they’re ready to bloom. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
IT'S hard
to say if I’m any better or worse off for not knowing what I know now.
Would I have been happier knowing how hard it was going to be to write a novel
and the trial and trail of aborted attempts, not to mention those turned down
by publishers that have been left behind? Would I be happier to know that
I discard, roughly speaking, ten or more pages for every one I keep? Or
that it doesn’t get any easier to face the blank page, just different, after
you’ve been writing for thirty years and had some decent success? That at
one time I was afraid I didn’t have anything to write about and now I’m afraid
I’ve written about it all? Or how hard it is to get back in the habit of
writing once you get out of the habit? No, these are things you shouldn’t
know at any age. Because they all come down to the same
question. One you’ve asked before. When you knock on that door,
that portal to seek the dubious arbiter of your purpose on Earth, and ask am I
really supposed to do this with my life? and no answer comes at first, and you
wait and you wait and just as you’re walking away you hear the faintest reply, <i>Stop bothering me about a question you
already know the answer to.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-37773926575798171632014-02-22T19:05:00.001-08:002014-02-22T19:05:16.800-08:00Letter From a Young Editor to a Famous Writer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTyS-26Y4YjSfNVuF8C5v2rcTsXSXrIaAZ8WO8ufFe2mJWaEan9i-9aZuCNE9S5dCfw3gQMvkl3DRKSciUsJWaXisjyrcj0-zs7dlzmbybScSSEfJfmevkRjQcmNT5X8zRMfitPKw7M_E/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTyS-26Y4YjSfNVuF8C5v2rcTsXSXrIaAZ8WO8ufFe2mJWaEan9i-9aZuCNE9S5dCfw3gQMvkl3DRKSciUsJWaXisjyrcj0-zs7dlzmbybScSSEfJfmevkRjQcmNT5X8zRMfitPKw7M_E/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
A remembrance of Raymond Carver:<br />
<br />
http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/letter-to-a-young-editor/Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-87045921773726420152012-07-15T16:07:00.000-07:002012-07-24T15:47:51.362-07:00Friend me?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0umqolG4HvaY_avu-vj3t3fUXWSVN6G9S8VUZQMPLoIcH593bexi4cTfAkN-ITKwP0IHlDZgD6CZtmCcEv8xKLClqvv5fvutP7WmA9scFplBI0XlDxR2cMwR7MqeNhlPUcvgk0qaZovk/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0umqolG4HvaY_avu-vj3t3fUXWSVN6G9S8VUZQMPLoIcH593bexi4cTfAkN-ITKwP0IHlDZgD6CZtmCcEv8xKLClqvv5fvutP7WmA9scFplBI0XlDxR2cMwR7MqeNhlPUcvgk0qaZovk/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hi, Jennillee!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First of all, I luv the ddoouubbllee spellings in your
name! So I’m applying to be your
Facebook friend! Perchance any openings?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p> </o:p>*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Jennillee! Thank YOU <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">so</i>
MUCH for actually writing back to me. I
can’t tell you how rare that is. Not
that I do this often! I’m not like a
stalker or anything (and anyway, I’m a girl, so go figure). I do understand you
have no availability. I think when you
say “At the present time, Jennillee has no available openings for friends”
that’s pretty clear. I’m just sort of
wondering if I could send you some more cool data about myself, like my SAT
scores or my haircut (a picture, I mean!).
Do you have a waiting list?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p> </o:p>*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Okay, sure, I get it, you STILL have no availability which
is totally, totally cool :-) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But look, maybe you’ll reconsider and hit the refresh button
on your automatic reply if I tell you that I’m like really important on
KLOUT. Like I even got Bill Murray to
tweet me before he passed away. TINAL! (That is not a lie!). So obviously I’m a
person of influence and will RAISE your KLOUT score! How 'bout hitting that 'confirm'? Got to luv my chutzpop!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p> </o:p>*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am attaching a list of my friends. Maybe it’s that you don’t appreciate just how
popular I am, but 3042 people can’t be wrong!
If you look at my profile, and I hope you will, consider two things:
one, I’m not a crazy person. Two . . . I
forgot two. But about being crazy, I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knew</i> Bill Murray hadn’t died but you
have to admit that he looks like he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wants</i>
to be dead in most of his movies. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m back! I hope you
won’t think I have trouble with boundary issues. I’m just a super friendly person and know it
would be really fun for both of us if you accepted my friend request. Now I don’t want you to freak, but I noticed
your friend count went down by one since last time I wrote. I didn’t want to mention anything at first
because it could just be a glitch and sometimes my number bobs up and down a
little too. Usually, I track down all
3042 friends to see who dropped me and I find the culprit (ha!), but I’m not
like saying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everybody</i> does that. Just as a favor, though, I did go through
your list and compared it with the 424 pages of your friend list two days ago that
I printed out and found the problem! It
was Royce McIntyre! He sounds sort of
Irish so maybe he has enough American friends!
I can’t imagine <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you’d</i> drop him
or any of your friends, but just in case you did (poor Royce!) that means you
have one more opening because now you’re at 4999. Color me Xcited!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I looked up “cease and desist” orders and they’re for like
crazy bill collectors and pesky time-share people who hound you until you
bleed. I don’t think you really meant to
send me that message. I just want to be
friends. Is that so bad? If you really think it’s not a good idea, and
you honestly don’t like my little challenge of asking you to guess what
emoticon I’m going to send you on the half hour, I guess I can take a
hint. I’ll just wait for your reply
because I know sometimes that in the heat of the moment I rush to conclusions too and
make rash judgments that I really regret.
:-E (this means vampire! but don’t worry because I’m not really a
vampire and going to suck your blood or anything!!!)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p> </o:p>*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> </o:p>JUST FOUND OUT YOU CAN STILL SEND TELEGRAMS -(STOP)-GOT YOUR
ADDRESS FROM A ‘FRIEND’-(STOP)-TEE HEE-(STOP)-STARTING MY OWN FRIEND SITE
–(STOP)-SIGN UP?-(STOP)-WEB ADDRESS IS–(STOP)-WWW.FRIENDMEORELSE.COM
–(STOP)-(STOP)-(STOP)-(STOP)- (STOP)-(STOP)- )-(STOP)<span style="font-family: Courier; font-size: 14pt;"> :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
:-) :-)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<o:p></o:p></div>Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-12657995113741835092012-05-12T16:35:00.000-07:002012-05-13T08:48:23.994-07:00What Republicans Mean When They Say . . .<br />
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8KyWKywJ8P7eQ1hUQgtHAPKBLKvxWRcw24wRsuJc7uqlvXbrdg6QRLnz8hYhzfis09ItjitAwQyZlyE3BFPpJ-nyjE21t7r2cwW-wv6LvoQy-3N8f7Rt4A8erqWDt0kbpnw_1UzgO2qA/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8KyWKywJ8P7eQ1hUQgtHAPKBLKvxWRcw24wRsuJc7uqlvXbrdg6QRLnz8hYhzfis09ItjitAwQyZlyE3BFPpJ-nyjE21t7r2cwW-wv6LvoQy-3N8f7Rt4A8erqWDt0kbpnw_1UzgO2qA/s200/images.jpeg" width="200" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em><br /></em><br />
<em><br /></em><br />
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Taxes</em>: see ‘stealing’</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Immigration</em>: see ‘invasion’</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Gay marriage</em>: see ‘Book of Revelations’</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Inequality</em>: see 'Where?'</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Moderate</em>: see 'wuss' (urban dictionary).</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Torture</em>: see 'Where?'</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>The Dream Act</em>: see 'Dreaming'</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Women’s Reproductive Rights</em>: see N/A</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Climate Change</em>: see Partly Cloudy With Chance of Rain.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>UN</i>: see Takeover<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Takeover</i>: see UN<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Corporate Takeover</i>: see Prosperity</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>The Right to Bear Arms</em>: see 'immigration' above.</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Budget</em>: see 'tax shelter'</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Fiscal Conservative</em>: see 'Swiss Bank Account'</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Deficit</em>: see 'Public Employees'</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<em><br /></em><br />
<em>Social Conscience</em>: see 'The Dream Act'</div>
<div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br /></div>Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-75042987216593777182011-06-09T18:51:00.000-07:002011-06-11T08:37:50.641-07:00To listen or to read?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKbNJ6R3Rm150TEG6MVoseeW0Z5E9RvO9tBzZbFlVm0ixUvKch1y934wZvjPAIiEfGGFQhLAur0fqPGrjtCKcxcAqJtj4MkT3Eu_emFpz2ZfAd1oYZUcHtBKVCp6_-NfAMeqN2J0jyL98/s1600/earhorn.bmp"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 120px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 117px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5616409025080700578" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKbNJ6R3Rm150TEG6MVoseeW0Z5E9RvO9tBzZbFlVm0ixUvKch1y934wZvjPAIiEfGGFQhLAur0fqPGrjtCKcxcAqJtj4MkT3Eu_emFpz2ZfAd1oYZUcHtBKVCp6_-NfAMeqN2J0jyL98/s320/earhorn.bmp" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div>I’ll admit it. I listen to books. But I also buy the hard copy and at some point, if I really love what I’m hearing I switch to the volume itself. I can’t help defaulting to the familiar and gratifying combination of holding what my eyes are seeing. How many times have I rested an open book against my chest and just sat there ruminating over a particularly rich or powerful passage. You can’t exactly do that with a Kindle—the hugging-the-book thing just doesn’t feel the same. As for listening, it’s not that great to keep hitting the rewind button and drifting off in a reverie while driving. Yet . . . what I’ve found by listening is the same thing that people claim who have bought Kindles or any other downloading device for books: I read (hear) far more than I would otherwise.<br /></div><br /><div>Not long ago an article appeared in <em>The Atlantic </em>(with a subsequent expansion into a book) called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The essential premise was that Google, and more generally the internet (aren’t they one in the same?), were ruining our attention spans. Fragmenting our ability to concentrate on longer tasks. For instance, those novels by George Eliot, once called “winter novels,” because they took a whole season to finish.<br /></div><br /><div>I don’t doubt the truth of this, because as the author pointed out from his own experience, he had just lost patience to devote to a massive classic. Breadth had replaced depth. Coverage not concentration had become the operable principal. In any internet reading, with all its embedded linkage, one naturally becomes a jumpy rabbit—by necessity. By checking out all those links you believe you’re actually gaining a more comprehensive view and <em>not missing anything</em>. Well, certainly sitting down and investing the time to read <em>Moby Dick </em>would make you think you’re missing something. Such dedication to a single book would drive a multi-tasker crazy. And the point is that we’ve all become more multi-taskers than concentrators. Surfing the internet—scanning—has become the means of not losing your place in the world. Quickness means you’re informed. Duration becomes a liability. Data replaces what used to be called knowledge.<br /></div><br /><div>So, given this, what hope is there for someone to spend his time reading <em>Moby D</em>ick or <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, two books that I now admit, alas, I did not read. I listened to all 25 and 35 hours respectively. Let’s put aside what this says about how much time I spend in my car. My main concern here is not whether I actually found a way to enforce my paying attention to these books that I otherwise would never have “read” (or reread), because I was too impatient or Googlized or tired and hyper to sit still without a windshield in front of me for that long. I’m interested in what is lost or gained in the transaction, just as what’s lost or gained in the transformation of any material from one medium to another: books to film or to plays, or these days from one “carrier” to another: iPod, iPad, Kindle, cellphone, PC, radio, and no doubt soon to be, hologram.<br /></div><br /><div>This all comes down to voice. I cannot, for instance, get over that despite my best efforts to be open, the reader of the audio book of Joyce’s <em>Dubliners</em> when doing Gretta’s voice in “The Dead” sounds like Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire. Perhaps if I hadn’t read the story (and taught it) at least thirty times, I could be more generous. Part of the problem is that once you hear a voice in your head, that is, the voice as translated from the page to your ear by your own perception of the syntax, rhythm, and spatial layout, it’s hard not to resist the vocalizing as a false impersonation, especially if you’ve heard that voice so distinctly (think Scout in <em>To Kill a Mockingbird </em>or Holden in <em>Catcher</em>, to site two well-known narrators). There’s probably a good reason why Salinger never wanted Holden to appear on stage or screen and refused to sell the rights to the novel. But even then, when a book is made into a film or play it’s adapted, changed, and the actors have to flesh out a director’s vision of the characters and story. In hearing someone read a work verbatim, you have no modification, just that reader’s voice, and you either take to it or not. It can and often does grow on you. But it can also grate.<br /></div><br /><div>Jennifer’s Egan’s admirable novel, <em>A Visit from the Good Squad</em>, has a female reader for its entirety and its wide cast of characters. One can’t help but be taken by the character Sasha channeled in the opening chapter. Sasha, a kleptomaniac, finds the right combination of sultriness and vulnerability in the audio reader’s rendering of her. The male characters are another story; they sound too much alike and they sound too much like slackers or dudes with issues. What gives, say, Sasha mystery, subtlety, and allure becomes a deficit when the reader speaks on behalf of another character Benny, who in his dialogue cannot escape a whiny flatness that isn’t in the well-developed character himself. And therein lies the problem: reading to yourself you hear the repository of female or male voices long accumulated in your consciousness. Hearing that same character read to you, the voice is no longer being created by you in conjunction with the author: it’s the audio reader’s interpretation alone.<br /></div><br /><div>You might get the impression from these examples above that the problem is gender: female doing male parts, or males doing female ones. But I never got used to the celebrated Flo Gibson’s reading of James’ <em>The Portrait of a Lady</em>. I know I was supposed to find it masterful—Flo, who died recently, was known as the grande dame of audio recordings—but frankly I found it overweening, or maybe that was James himself.<br /></div><br /><div>In any case, the audio reader’s voice must be wrestled with a bit at first, especially to integrate it with the author's. Try reading your own work aloud if you want to get a sense of this (and catch mistakes and lumpy prose while you’re at it). You supplant as much as echo the sound already there with a different version of the intimate words you first heard in your own mind.<br /></div><br /><div>On the other hand, when it works, it’s simply lovely. I couldn’t get enough of the perfectly matched narrator and the audio reader in Margaret Atwood’s <em>Blind Assassin.</em> Here you have power and bitterness, yearning and resignation in the reader’s presentation, the reader in tune with the darker narrative but allowing just enough light in her voice to keep breath in the tale. Likewise, the reader of Ishiguro’s <em>Never Let Me Go</em> has a bit of English propriety in her voice, mixed with a dreaminess appropriate to a story of a clone created for her consumptive value in a futuristic society. And the reader of Marilyn Robinson’s novel <em>Housekeeping</em> tells the story with such a pitch-perfect combination of composure, retrospection and keen immediacy that you can easily juxtapose the simplicity of a sentence like “Lucille turned out the lights and we sat at the kitchen table, trying to name the states of the union” with a poetic nugget such as, “Bones, bones, I thought, in a fine sheath of Sunday gloves.”<br /></div><br /><div>It’s this very elasticity of voice, as in the last example, that the author must make work on the page but the audio reader must capture without either over dramatizing or missing nuance and subtlety. Resonance itself is a different animal when read than spoken, and the delicateness of that task, which authors tirelessly work at to convey without ruining its effect by being too obscure or direct, can so easily be pummeled by poor spoken expression. Rhythm on the page, for instance, is not just choosing a speed of speaking: commas and semicolons don’t translate so easily. They are the writer’s silent markings of pacing and thought. Sound unifies a work just as much as sense, perhaps even more so in a literary work where content is an equal partner with style, and the latter not just in the service of the former. Voice for a writer is more directly—and intimately—associated with interiority than exteriority. After all, a writer hears the sound of the words in her head when she puts them down and may never speak them aloud. And even when one gives a public reading of a work, the overlay is of this original and more subterranean expression that was first heard in the composing. As one writer has said, to know the voice is to follow a whisper<br /></div><br /><div>In a novel such as <em>Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close</em> the audio can’t reproduce the explosion of graphics, illustrations, and photographs: Oskar Black’s business card (inventor, jewelery designer, jewelry fabricator and fourteen other professions); the pages of colors in opposing colored ink; the single line of “I’m sorry” followed by “I’m still sorry” on the next page surrounded by a sea of white space; the interview format or the block paragraphing or the kinetic cluster of dialogue between Oskar and his therapist Dr. Fein; all the sheer inventive funness, and often sad presentation, of a crazy quilt of visuals, the most striking being the much-noted novel's end pages that can be flipped forward to move a falling body up the World Trade Center or backward to poignantly see it dropping down. In one sense, what Foer does with <em>Extremely Loud</em> is exploit the novel’s <em>bookness</em>, stretching the use of the printed page. The audio version meanwhile has three different readers for different character parts and does a fairly good job of doing the book justice. But you can’t both read this book and listen to it and not expect to have two different encounters. The textual innovations, the graphic elements create an even greater division between reading and listening, and one must almost make the choice of which experience you desire more, unless you’re willing (and have the time) to do both.<br /></div><br /><div>I for one have resigned myself to stop fighting the changing technology of the book and just embrace all its forms, drawing the line at any abridgment of the text—that is messing with the words themselves. In their nakedness, they remain supreme. </div>Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-64738630239826123572011-04-08T16:27:00.000-07:002011-04-08T16:48:07.388-07:00How to Give a ReadingDon’t look the first row in the eye; they have been forced to sit there because they got here late. <br /><br />Don’t be disappointed by your host’s introduction, which has consisted entirely of reading from your book jacket. <br /><br />Try not to drool on the microphone like last time. <br /><br />Try not to think about that dream you had last night when you turned page after blank page of your manuscript until coming to the very last page that had the single word “minimalism.” <br /><br />Pay no attention to the man in the ski mask who is walking toward you. Surely there is a simple explanation, given that the room temperature of sixty degrees could be considered cold if you are a reptile. <br /><br /><em>Do not under any circumstances</em> engage with the girl in the first row who is an eye roller. Tell yourself things could be worse; she could be sticking a finger down her throat. <br /><br />Ignore the large man in the front row who is eating a monstrous, dripping sandwich that reeks of eye-stinging onions and that he masticates into submission until there is only a tiny bite left and that—seeing you glare at him—he gestures toward you to share. <br /><br />Tell yourself that you are a professional and that the furious texting by the entire second row is not a comment upon your performance and simply indicates that such individuals are accomplished multitaskers who no doubt are also exceptional at thumb wars. <br /><br />When you glance up do not be disappointed and lose your place because the lovely, smiling young woman in the third row, whom you were absolutely sure was your ideal listener, has gone over and stood next to the man in the ski mask and they are both writing in identical black notebooks and whispering in Russian. <br /><br />Remember not to speed up because you fear you’re losing your audience’s attention during the long section that for verisimilitude sake lists every Greek god from the first seven chapters of <em>The Iliad</em>. You knew this would test your listeners’ patience and you are glad that though several of them have clapped their hands over their ears, the majority have demonstrated their stunned appreciation by the slackness of their jaws and their lolling tongues. <br /><br />Spit out that word <em>hibernaculum</em> that gave you such trouble when you were rehearsing it. Let it roooolll off the palate with the sonorous joy that you first heard it in your head. It goes well with the fire alarm that has just sounded. <br /><br />Take a moment to relax and center yourself while your host explains that it is only a false alarm and that there is no need to leave the building despite the shouts of Hallelujah! and the wild stampede by half the audience out the door while the other half have had their exit blocked by your host who is threatening them with a fire hose if they try to leave. All in good fun you are sure. <br /><br />Remember to read the dialogue with great declamation even though it is a long scene that has no quotation marks and you cannot remember who is speaking. Do not be concerned during this operatic showmanship that your host is literally dragging one member of the audience back to his seat by his ankles. <br /><br />Pace yourself as you come to the dramatic close of your ninety-three minute reading, raising your voice with grandiloquent, rhetorical flourish to signal you are approaching the end, and then, after your final words, fix your audience with a meaningful stare before saying, “Shall I continue?”Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-64248817909578419772011-03-03T15:04:00.000-08:002011-03-03T15:35:15.455-08:00Updating Your Fiction<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYSDkz62P8vksGpXaIr0XjMtESoODqK9xjQrjVFJUTSCLwMy7EZ3pIQ7TzSM9MWtWCpkAuHMrL3BL6qYxtMfxwSmuZBQvEHIrCpP_uMbrWgyOhzdIUamGo4G04qN9PKjhUe3ZyIuM-1iI/s1600/worlds+tallest+building.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 159px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 318px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5580001207094753490" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYSDkz62P8vksGpXaIr0XjMtESoODqK9xjQrjVFJUTSCLwMy7EZ3pIQ7TzSM9MWtWCpkAuHMrL3BL6qYxtMfxwSmuZBQvEHIrCpP_uMbrWgyOhzdIUamGo4G04qN9PKjhUe3ZyIuM-1iI/s320/worlds+tallest+building.jpg" /></a><br /><div>Really, I don’t remember this being such a problem before. That is, how swiftly things become anachronistic now. I was working on putting together a collection of stories, most of which were written over the past five years. Wait. Did I say “written”? I mean, published. They actually took their sweet time getting published, so that means I wrote some of them much before that five-year period. And that’s the problem: when you’re writing a story, let alone a novel, by the time you finish and, if you’re so lucky, get it published, characters no longer use pay phones, much less call collect when long-distance is included on their cell phones. They no longer do IMing (“Instant messaging is so <em>old</em>,” writes one former user); they might not even be writing blogs, according to a recent news article that stated it’s all about tweets, Skype, and speedier and broader social networking tools now.<br /><br /><br />So what’s a writer to do? Do you go back and replace all those clunky landlines with cell phones? Somehow put that smartphone in the hands of the character who’s searching in the torrential rain for a pay phone to save his life (marriage, etc.), a frantic quest that you thought gave the scene so much expediency? Why doesn’t he just whip out the ubiquitous cell phone (or borrow one) and text his recipient?<br /><br /><br />I wish I could say the answer is as simple as ignoring the whole problem. But when I was reading over my stories, any obsolete or dated technology pulled me up short. It’s one thing if the work has already been published and the copyright dates it, but it’s another if enough time has passed to make readers wonder why the story is supposed to be set in the “present,” but markers keep popping up that identify it as the past.<br /><br /><br />This is not a new question obviously. The writer has always had to take into account such changes. If you started writing a novel before September 11, 2001 and have the World Trade Center in your story, and intend the narrative to be current, then you’re going to bump most of your readers out of the narrative. If you mention a TV show or movie, and that show or movie is long gone, do you worry about it dating the work? Not necessarily, especially if the mention has thematic significance. Or maybe they’re watching cable. Readers often will provide their own explanation for the outdated. If the usage is arbitrary, however, then why not find a more current replacement, just to keep ahead of the game. Does your character, originally conceived pre-hurricane, really need to be named Katrina?<br /><br /><br />Though fiction has to reflect that it’s “of its time,” the challenge is how long that time lasts exactly. Writers, unless they’re composing a work set in a definite period (or you’ve decided to date or arrange your work in order of publication, say, for a volume of collected stories), usually want an unspecified time period to suggest the “timeless present.” The writer, oblivious to the future, conceives of it not as a retrospective work but as a contemporaneous one with the urgency of the now. It’s when one goes back and rereads the manuscript from the beginning a couple years later that you realize some of that urgency of the intended time period—the unresolved issues of the day; the pressing cultural, social, scientific questions—has gone slack and no longer imbues the fiction with the same immediacy. The question then becomes how much you can—or should—do about it.<br /><br /><br />One has to consider that in the course of writing the story, certain decisions were made that aligned with the narrative as a whole, not just for its time period. And tinkering too much too update the work can make it self-conscious in a way that sacrifices wholeness for relevance. The greater good may be served by just accepting the story in its entirety as a product of the original forces that conceived it.<br /><br /><br />On the other hand, if no harm will be done, nothing is wrong with being flexible and performing some due diligence and going through the manuscript to revise with an eye for keeping it as current as possible. If you have teenage characters (or anyone under twenty-five), it’s more than likely they won’t exclusively be having conversations on the phone; they’ll be texting. If you have a character repeatedly asking directions, you’ll really have to wonder if they’ve heard of MapQuest or have activated that GPS app on their phone or why they’re not using an iPad-plutonium, since now, in the year 2020, when you finally get the book published after working on it for ten years, laptops have gone the way of the IBM Selectric. Of course, you can go overboard, as I said, to the point it just sounds as if all the updating is contrived, like bad product placements. You can only retrofit so much into the context of a work that just isn’t meant to accommodate the newfangled. And in that case, it’s best left alone, letting the reader just accept the work as written, proudly (or defiantly) standing up for itself in its own time.<br /><br /><br />I’m sure others have their own experiences with this issue (poets?), so comments are welcomed. </div>Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-2535297696348044252010-11-30T07:19:00.000-08:002010-11-30T08:09:42.059-08:00Nine Signs You're a Neurotic Writer<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMrIF5jnYPsiazbyz9pY0c9iOpkePzW0zLC2bdWHeVXidXkCP_FexdTxACWgFJisL65XO9RsjhLTUIFP5c9R9WcKo3kLhksGy7GF7WNr6gk8Tn0ZVy1zy3P-D6gdPCEYdsiFvpLEy0qg0/s1600/Neurotic.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 198px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545375581692712610" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMrIF5jnYPsiazbyz9pY0c9iOpkePzW0zLC2bdWHeVXidXkCP_FexdTxACWgFJisL65XO9RsjhLTUIFP5c9R9WcKo3kLhksGy7GF7WNr6gk8Tn0ZVy1zy3P-D6gdPCEYdsiFvpLEy0qg0/s320/Neurotic.jpg" /></a><br /><div align="left">You subscribe to eight journals but only read the contributor notes when they come.<br /></div><br /><div align="center">*<br /><br /></div><br /><div align="left">You are on page 50 of the first draft of your novel but have rewritten the opening sentence 60 times.<br /><br /></div><br /><div align="center">*<br /></div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="left">You write an angry letter to the editor who has held your story, essay, or poem for six months without a response. Then delete it and decide you will call instead. You decide a phone call is too uncomfortable for you, so you rewrite the e-mail. You decide to reread the story, essay, or poem before you send the e-mail. You further decide the editor is right even though you have never heard from him. It’s shit. You get up the next day, rewrite the e-mail, threaten silently to send it, and then delete it. You reread the story, essay, or poem again. You can’t admit to anybody how much time you've wasted doing this.<br /></div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="center">*</div><br /><div align="left"><br /><br /></div><br /><div align="left">Your author’s photo for the planned first novel, of which you are still stuck on page 50, is now four years old. You had it taken, well . . . in <em>anticipation </em>and just because you looked so really good that day. You spend the morning talking on the phone to your best friend about whether you should update the photo or not. “Do you think it still looks like me?”<br />“Have you finished the—“<br />“Never mind,” you say, cutting her off. And hang up.<br /></div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="center">*<br /><br /></div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="left">You send an e-mail to yourself convinced that those same editors you are mad at have failed to contact you because your server is down. When your e-mail goes through, you delete it, and then stare at the empty space.<br /></div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="center">*<br /><br /></div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="left">Your spouse, partner, child asks you, So what have you been up to today? and you answer, “What’s the point? What’s the goddamn point! Fine, you want me to quit, is that it! Okay, I quit, satisfied now? Are you goddamn satisfied? You want blood? Is that what you want? I’m fucking slicing my arm right now. Happy? <em>Happy</em>?”<br /><br /></div><br /><div align="center">*</div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="left"><br />You have an idea. You will read aloud the first fifty pages of the novel that you are stuck on and finally determine whether it’s worth ever finishing. You close your office door so no one will hear you, stand at your desk, pick up the first page, and commence reading in a strong voice. Suddenly it hits you. You <em>know </em>what’s wrong. You sit down and rewrite the opening sentence for the 61st time and never make it to page two.<br /><br /></div><br /><div align="center">*</div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="left"><br />One day, after checking your e-mail, you see a message with a subject line of your story’s title. You click hurriedly and the first word is “Congratulations.” You read on. Your story has been accepted for the next issue. They are very pleased to have it and thank you for sending it—they are thanking <em>you</em>! Proofs will be sent, and as stated they are paying forty dollars per published page. You’d given up on ever hearing from the editor after composing daily e-mails to him that you never sent. This is by far your best publication yet! The very motivation you need to get past page 50 on your novel. No one can deny the prestige of <em>this </em>publication. You go online to post your good news on Facebook. You see that someone you know from graduate school has just had a story accepted by <em>The New Yorker</em>. You cannot believe how disappointed you feel.<br /><br /></div><br /><div align="center">*</div><br /><div align="left"></div><br /><div align="left"><br />You get over your disappointment and write the editor a gushing thank you note. You tell him what it means to be published in his amazing, wonderful, venerable journal and how you never thought you’d ever have a story in such a good journal. You thank him again, promise to send your contributor note that you will spend two days writing and say once more how delighted you are. Then you add a P.S. It is only a small P.S. and will not take up much room in your otherwise grateful thrilled stunned message thanking him.<br />P.S. <em>Would you mind reading the first sentence of my novel and giving me your opinion . . .</em> </div>Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-57144789254685563592010-11-14T13:10:00.000-08:002011-03-06T13:31:17.081-08:00The Ten Most Obnoxious Comments a Writer Can MakeI have too much free time.<br /><br />I’m exhausted from my book tour.<br /><br />My agent wants me to go on <em>The Daily Show</em>. Should I?<br /><br />I wish my publicist <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-error">wouldn</span>’t call so early.<br /><br />Are stocks still the best way to go for such a large advance?<br /><br />I got a headache reading over my 23-page contract.<br /><br />My assistant handles that.<br /><br />My hand is tired. Would you mind if I use a stamp to sign your book?<br /><br />I remember what it was like to be rejected.<br /><br />I can’t remember all my titles.<br /><br />And (from <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-error">Antonya</span> Nelson) it's been so difficult after winning the Pulitzer.Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-46712193343879315172010-10-11T17:58:00.000-07:002010-10-12T17:05:58.752-07:00That's Private<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI10pMXq2p05jtEUQsEgRKqtrAd52Wxaw3x-uV9I-lroaISvo6cxA-ExznwEQlBu1tbAosueE1I1m4dc1eI9PhcrA1RmJ5WLThgX6xyGLjKTIWkZW8_2Wg62oY4WcI2Q_Iy3WNTJZnHgU/s1600/Aunt+Nancy%27s+80th+239.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI10pMXq2p05jtEUQsEgRKqtrAd52Wxaw3x-uV9I-lroaISvo6cxA-ExznwEQlBu1tbAosueE1I1m4dc1eI9PhcrA1RmJ5WLThgX6xyGLjKTIWkZW8_2Wg62oY4WcI2Q_Iy3WNTJZnHgU/s320/Aunt+Nancy%27s+80th+239.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5527315092957273474" /></a><br />A word about my father: If there’s anyone I’ve written about directly it would be him, a born salesman who sold furniture for fifty years, working since he was thirteen and taking over as head of the family when his father died. And who called me Stevie all my life, as in <em>Stevie, tell me everything</em>, and then would cut me off after the first sentence with “That reminds me of when I was in Paris!” and launch into his own tale. I remember his reading one of my stories, clearly based on him, slapping the book closed afterward, shaking his head with great mirthful incredulity and proclaiming about the main character, “Can you imagine anyone acting this way!” <br /><br />There are two kinds of families: those who see themselves in everything you write and those who never do. Fortunately, regarding my father at least, the mirror was always opaque. It affords a great freedom, especially when your material is largely drawn from your family. The other option is to say the hell with it and write about them anyway, under the threat of being disowned or, maybe worse, subjected to their hard, enduring silence, as if you were not an author but the family exhibitionist.<br /><br />Joyce Carol Oates, who’s received her share of criticism for using—some would say exploiting—the tragedies of real people in her fiction, writes in the <em>New York Times </em>that it’s a murky issue ethically and legally as to who has the right to publish private letters. Oates cites the case of Robert Lowell who included intimate letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in a book of his poems. When asked what gave him the right to do this without her permission, Lowell responded, “Why not say what happened?” Oates goes on to warn “that anyone who confides in any writer risks being transmogrified into art if he or she is sufficiently interesting. The best protection,” she advises, “is to be dull, bland, and predictable.”<br /><br />But when exactly does a private experience become a public fact? At what point does the private boundary protecting the material dissolve? <br /><br />About six months ago I gave a reading of a story that used some facts, and I mean the straight facts, about an accident that was fatal for a colleague’s wife. My colleague, Dick, and his wife had been driving to their family farm in Nebraska from Colorado when they were hit broadside by another car driven by an elderly lady. My colleague’s car overturned and in the immediate aftermath, while they were upside down, still in their seat belts, he asked his wife if she were okay and she answered, “I don’t think so.” Those were her last words. <br /><br />There was another detail I used: Because the car was totaled and their luggage along with it, Dick, who was staying in a motel across from the local hospital, had to wash the clothes he’d been wearing in the motel room sink, wring out the blood, and put them back on again. I didn’t hear these facts from Dick directly but they were well known within the department. <br /><br />At the reading I knew it wasn’t a good sign when one of my closest friends, a colleague, too, left immediately afterward and didn’t contact me until a few days later to say he was upset about my using the details of Dick’s wife’s death in the story; he felt the story didn’t rise to the appropriate level of seriousness to justify using such intimate and tragic details. It would have been easy, my colleague pointed out, to change these facts about the accident.<br /><br />But that’s the point: it would have been too easy if not right, right for me, that is.<br /><br />The fact is I was very affected by what happened to Dick and his wife. I’d known them for years and like everyone felt great affection for them. But Dick was an English professor, not a geologist as in my story; he didn’t have children as the main character does in my story; and he and Sally were not on the verge of divorce as was the situation for the husband and wife in the story I wrote. So why not change the other “real” details? <br /><br />Because they’re the very ones that made me believe in the story enough to write it in the first place, the cornerstone of its imagined existence. And of its promise. Put another way: to include those true details is a constant reminder that a person’s life is on loan to you to make use of—good use—as a character. Implicit in that agreement is that the author honors the compact by not blowing the opportunity. Have you trivialized those true details taken? Made fodder of the person’s life for gossip? Extracted only spiteful revenge without redeeming artfulness? Or just as bad, falsely glorified or sentimentalized someone by a poor treatment of the material? Yes, it’s a sort of tacit agreement with the person whose life you use, but it’s a covenant of one, and only the author knows when it’s broken. Though it might seem like stubbornness, my insistence on keeping the actual details are a footprint of the world the story came from and a lasting mark for me of its necessity to exist. <br /><br />The question arises, of course, why didn’t I show Dick the story first before I published it? Chances are he would have given his approval. Was it because I feared he wouldn’t like it? Be offended? Threaten to sue? I didn’t show him the story for the reason I don’t check with anyone before I write something: If I did, I’d be wanting preapproval. But fiction doesn’t work like that; there are no guarantees that it will be acceptable, and to seek such assurances out in advance is to deceive oneself about the difficulty of the work ahead. Writing with someone’s okay in mind places you in the position of having made a bargain with an outsider. No matter how much you try to put that person out of your mind—and your writing—he or she will become an unseen influence, a faux collaborator, a silent colluder. I have to put myself, my family, and my friends on the line every time I sit down to write. And I have to determine each time whether “it’s worth it”—those three nagging words—to those I might harm, offend, or embarrass in the process. Any writer telling you otherwise is lying to himself.<br /><br />The answer will never be easy. Some people, such as my father, no matter how much you cull directly from their lives, never will be troubled. Others never forget or forgive the invasion of their privacy. Perhaps, though, it’s not so much invasion as distortion that bothers people when it comes to fiction. With nonfiction, people often resent the sheer naked exposure of themselves. But in fiction, it’s more, So that’s what you think of me! The mousy face; the dirty, limp hair; the purple-veined nose. And my dog is not fat and he doesn’t have an overbite! In fiction perception is character and makes no attempt to be otherwise objective. So the question and challenge in fiction becomes how successful the writer is at freeing the character from the person. If there turns out to be on balance more person than character, then you’ve shortchanged both the writing and the individual whose life you’ve appropriated. <br /><br />Yes, I could have changed the specifics of the accident, not made it happen in Nebraska, not had Dick washing his bloody clothes out in the sink, substituted instead parallel facts—after all these true details amounted to only a couple hundred words at the most out of the seven thousand in the story—but these “actual” details were the very ones that gave me permission to write the story. That is, the permission to write about anything, whether it be another’s gender or race or history, your family secrets, the illness your child almost died from, any of the tender, difficult, and personal subjects, this permission comes not from the outside but from oneself. <br /><br />I’m not sure what that appropriate level of seriousness a work of fiction has to reach to justify using someone else’s tragedy. Who of course is to be a judge? You can’t worry about any of this as a writer or you’ll never write a lick of anything from another’s life that’s become personal to you. Something about <em>that </em>life holds something vital and precipitating for you as a writer, and there may be no way to excuse it other than to say Thank you, I apologize, Vaya con dios, and Please contact my lawyer. Invading one’s privacy in writing is a very complicated issue. Families are ripped asunder for such actual or perceived transgressions. But all writers committed to the process have to wrestle with the question of using the lives of others and deciding whether they can live with choices that offend more than please, risk being misunderstood more than celebrated, and justify themselves only to themselves.Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-54995374762739746162010-09-13T18:33:00.000-07:002010-10-03T08:17:10.818-07:00Pilgrimage<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGRZEHJkPSbIKy9h0BQBKVHYwlLXLkgug4Vh6Ds-P24Xn7XvtKShIiSuihIEH6QX1TKpKkk2jxawXcvdXXPgSya0gYsjumFcbBjX-JrGJldaaxLCfAFjQu56UApAuuBS4ofer7igyke1A/s1600/Hampshire+Trip+049.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGRZEHJkPSbIKy9h0BQBKVHYwlLXLkgug4Vh6Ds-P24Xn7XvtKShIiSuihIEH6QX1TKpKkk2jxawXcvdXXPgSya0gYsjumFcbBjX-JrGJldaaxLCfAFjQu56UApAuuBS4ofer7igyke1A/s320/Hampshire+Trip+049.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516608113945471202" /></a><br />After dropping our daughter off for her first year at Hampshire College, we took a buffer trip around the Berkshires before heading home to the prospect of an empty house. Unexpectedly, because I only dimly knew it was there, we stopped at Arrowhead outside Lenox, Massachusetts, Melville’s home from 1850 to 1862, where he wrote some of his most famous work, including <em>Moby Dick</em>, <em>The Confidence Man</em>, “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby.”<br /><br />Bartleby was written on the porch or piazza (see above photo) as Melville called it. The house and grounds couldn’t be further away in spirit from the deadening Wall Street of the story and its unnamed narrator’s lock-step existence. Surrounded now by fields of crisp yellow flowers and woods at the perimeter, in Melville’s time it was a working farm where all 11 family members pitched in while the author wrote from early morning to late afternoon in his study above the piazza.<br /><br />After Melville wrote <em>Moby Dick</em>, looking out his window at Mount Greylock, which indeed, as it was said to have inspired the tale, does look in silhouette like a great leviathan, he virtually stopped writing for the next forty years. He moved the family back to New York and worked at a customs house for four dollars a day.<br /><br />Melville’s troubles are fairly well known: the rebuke to his writing with the failure of <em>Moby Dick</em>. Readers found it too expensive ($1.50), profane, and, well, if you’ve read it, hard going. He never quite recovered: he drank more, endured the tragedies of three of his four children dying from illness or in one case his son’s suicide, and--the bitter fruit on top--a mother in law who disliked him second only to how much she disliked his writing<br /><br />Standing there on the porch at Arrowhead I could only imagine how hopeless he must have felt to leave this beautiful place and have to return to New York to try to make a “real” living. You’ve written a masterpiece of American literature, you’ve penned (literally, in his rocking chair on the piazza)the magnificent “Bartleby,” and you have little to show for the efforts other than a mother-in-law who harangues you about not making a decent living for your family and hates your writing.<br /><br />I went around touching all the articles--the steamer chests, the wooden toys of the children, the trundle bed--that actually belonged to Melville and his family and weren't replicas, and hoping as if by some animism I might absorb the spirit of this most prolific period of the author’s life before dissolution and failure set in.<br /><br />Any visit to a great writer’s house is a pilgrimage at which one--another writer, that is--tries not to feel too self-conscious about his own insignificance in being there. I certainly felt that way when I saw Faulkner’s home in Oxford and his very, very tiny typewriter and comprehended that he wrote those densely packed works of often opaque modernism on an instrument barely the size of a large man’s palm. No fancy software to do that magic; it instantly disabused me of thinking any auxiliary object, pen, pencil, computer, the perfect writing room, could compensate for talent. And a writer’s will to persist.<br /><br />But of course the question arises as to what happens when the will flags? And flag it will. At Arrowhead, the question cast a dizzying spell over my visit there: how bad does it have to get before one gives up (or the world causes you to give up on yourself)? If someone with Melville’s literary powers could be defeated, how can we mere mortals hope to go on in the face of rejection and doubt?<br /><br />One of my favorite quotations is by Jean Rhys:<br /><br />“Listen to me. I want to tell you something very important. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are trickles like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters.”<br /><br />Equally appealing is Flannery O’Connor’s infamous retort when asked if universities stifle writers: “My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.”<br /><br />As a teacher I tend to share Jean Rhys comment freely and hold back on O’Connor’s. But they actually make a complete set. At any given time, the writer has to be willing to subjugate the ego enough to persevere, humble oneself to accepting that you will be only a small trickle and that as such your work may never see the light of day outside the confines of your house. And that this is enough reason to go on, and indeed the only reason to go on: that you are making something of importance aside from any grand notions you might have of quenching the thirst of millions with the great river of your work. Only the lake matters, which no one owns, no one controls, no one can tell you to stop so barely trickling toward.<br /><br />On the other hand, there is O’Connor with her inimitable blunt wryness telling us to put a sock in it, stop the madness, kill all the writing programs and the wannabes, cease and desist from subjecting everyone to your neurosis, your hand-wringing failure over your career, your pus-like envy of those more successful than you. This is valid too, but not in the way of it being more truthful than Rhys. Rather these two represent the poles that writers have to live with every day, with every work begun or finished, whether there’s the glow of success or the shame of a public flogging, exultation and celebration or paralysis at trying to write a single word.<br /><br />After Melville finished <em>Moby Dick</em>, he famously wrote to Hawthorne “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb." And then began the wait for recognition that never came. So obscure was Melville by the end of his life that the obituary in the New York Times referred to him as “Henry” Melville.<br /><br />Some very fortunate few may have consistently lasting and unbreakable doses of confidence in themselves that never fail them. But for most of us, we vacillate between writing for favor and writing for ourselves, convinced that we should be praised one moment, stifled the next. Melville of course, as few will, did have his great audience, if years after he died. In the meantime, he reduced his efforts to writing a book of poetry for his wife alone. Such are the vicissitudes of the profession. You come to accept the mysterious design in all its disappointment, satisfaction, occasional glory, and guiding humility.Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-16385768855695210072010-08-10T15:03:00.000-07:002010-08-10T15:14:19.638-07:00Shape-shiftingAlways the question: what to do next? After finishing the story, essay, poem, fill-in-the-blank, where do you go from here? Back to something you started and abandoned? To a single image or line of dialogue logged in a journal? To an anecdote too good to be true and therefore confounding as to how to make it into a story (or essay)? <br /><br />The in-between time, as in “I’m between novels,” always does sound like an apology for not having any idea what “job” you’re going to get next. This becomes even more complicated when you’re trying to decide what form you want to work in: A story? A novel? A personal essay? A literary essay? A—horrors!—screenplay? And then there are those true switch hitters who write poetry as well as fiction. One often spends an inordinate amount of time trying to determine what literary mode calls out and how to decide. By mood alone? By looking through old journals and trying to assess if the material will dictate the form? By just “knowing” such and such has to be fiction or told as putative fact in an essay? <br /><br />I can more easily talk about the benefits of moving among modes than how to pick one on any given day. I’d never considered writing personal essays until a journal solicited a piece for a special issue on Jewish writing. Once I got past the hang-up of being pigeonholed or my writing being as such, I found having “an assignment” just the motivation to do something I wouldn’t have tried on my own. That solicitation, which by the way didn’t appear in the original journal (a long story) but somewhere else, started a run of such essays that helped me out of rut in writing fiction. I’d been stuck or maybe tired of my own voice in fiction or perhaps just weary of having to make up a world rather than investigate one I already knew well. Eventually I went back to writing fiction but with a renewed sense of purpose about it. And this was mainly a result of having been able to exercise my voice in a way I’d never allowed myself in fiction. I’d permitted myself to analyze more directly, indulge in introspection and in turn bring that to characters in my fiction. In short, I could have them think. This may seem like non-problem for most writers, but I had grown up during a time when minimalism reigned and telling was verboten and in general the more your characters thought, that is, had ideas, the more archaic your work was considered. <br /><br />But still the problem persists: what form best suits the subject? The biggest surprise for me when I started writing nonfiction was that I could use the same material that I thought I’d exhausted in fiction. In my mind, there was a prohibition about writing, say, about my father’s troubled relationship with his two brothers in the furniture store they ran together for 40 years. Done that, been there, etc. And why repeat myself? Hadn’t fiction done the subject more justice than I could by directly apprehending the experience in an essay? And furthermore, there was always the possibility that because I <em>hadn’t </em>written about the subject directly I could still mine it for further projects. If I wanted to keep the material alive and fruitful I’d best not tell its secrets nakedly. <br /><br />So it surprised me to find out that one can indeed reuse material not only in the same form but in other modes as well, and that the result actually can add to the overall sum of work without being seen as the definitive word on the matter. What might, for instance, be the focus of a fictional work—in my example here, stealing money from the store by my uncle—received only a passing mention in a personal essay that instead dealt with issues of money problems passed down by the generations to my brother and me. In fiction, my narrative needed a central dramatic event with the opportunity for elaboration; in nonfiction, I could take a much broader and retrospective view and assess a family history without being as bound by the demands of all the narrative requirements in fiction. <br /><br />Importantly, I think switching between forms allows the gears to unlock that may have seized up from trying to over think a particular project. Just changing the “company,” that is the implied audience and the writer’s attitude in relation to the form, often creates a shifting and fresh perspective: stale imagery in one mode becomes reworked to advantage in another; narrative dribbling becomes undammed and gathers force in a new context; characters who refuse to pop out dimensionally take on an inherent presence when inventing an identity from scratch isn’t the challenge. <br /><br />I know several writers, highly successful at prose, who have lately taken up poetry, renewed by working within its general parameters. But I don’t think you can just arbitrarily decide, oh, I’m going to write a poem today. Or a play. I think there has to be something within the material, in combination with the writer’s ambitions, unconscious as they may be, that dictates the form. One has to start with some intuitive understanding of how the imagination will interact with one's previous knowledge of the subject. It’s true, as has been said, that material is often neutral and waiting to be shaped by the writer. But that doesn’t mean that on any given day—factoring in the writer’s curiosity, past work, rustiness or flexibility, current reading and impressions, and expectations for one’s voice—that you won’t find a subject almost whispering its intentions for a suitable form.Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-67052066381267953322010-08-01T09:34:00.000-07:002010-08-01T10:15:31.606-07:00Skimming and GlancingWriting is as much movement as it is sitting still. Everyone has had the experience of their fingers literally dancing over the keys. Things are cooking, and you can barely type fast enough to keep up with making the letters match your thoughts. Granted, it’s a rare experience, but the sensation indicates just how much writing is located in the body as well as the brain, how even for someone who lives in his head as much as I do and equates exercise with the joy of cleaning out the garage, I can barely sit still when this happens. On occasion, I’m embarrassed to say, I’ve even stood up, as if I were playing an organ keyboard. Is the result any good? Never mind about that right now.<br /><br />For sure, some sort of a current courses through the body that suggests language being accessible at high speed and a nearly indestructible focus. Try disturbing the writer during such a moment: you’re blown back by the sheer force of the wild and crazed look you will get.<br /><br />When I’m going over a work at this stage of early revision, I notice that I’m often a little more physically distant from my screen, or if reading a hard copy, I’m holding it at a bit of a remove—as if to get a more objective view. I’m also, if this makes sense, “running” my eyes over it at a much faster pace than I would if, say, I were further along in the revision process. <br /><br />A writer only has so many objective readings for each given piece. They can be renewed by time passing, like getting additional minutes on a phone card, but essentially taking advantage of unfamiliarity becomes limited. The value of glancing or “skimming” one’s own writing comes into play here. For it’s in skimming that many intuitive decisions are made about the larger structural issues of a narrative. You can get a good idea of where a significant wrong turn or choice has been made for the narrative on an early reading of a draft. As I said, because we have a limited amount of objective readings in us before we turn to someone for editing, the key seems to me to be preserving that productive separation between oneself and the text, as if restricted airspace, and not violating it by losing one’s commitment to instinct at this stage. In short, don’t get too cozy with your work before you’re really ready to sleep with it. <br /><br />One of the biggest shifts in the revision process is when you decide to show the work to someone. At that point, you no longer have an exclusive relationship with the writing. Someone else’s eyes have set upon it for better or worse, and you’re now collaborating. Collusion is not a bad thing. But the trade-off is that there are two (or more) of you judging any given aspect of the work. The taut distance you’ve previously established, that “running” across it with your eyes under the auspices of your sole attention, is modified by this new cooperative relationship. <br /><br />This is the best reason to keep a piece of writing to yourself for as long as possible, so you can figure out its intention on your own. Of course this can prove especially hard with a novel, when you crave validation and encouragement, if not an outright guarantee that your <em>loooong </em>project is worth pursuing. But again, it’s a trade off. Certainly, someone can save you a lot of time if you’re immersed in an unproductive eddy (see previous post on “Bogs”), but doing so prematurely may result in abandoning the authority of your own judgment in favor of an internal debate with your readers (“But he really liked this part, though she didn’t, but her friend did, but wait that was someone who hates everything I write . . .).<br /><br />It goes without saying that writers all have their own approaches to revision. Some writers, Cynthia Ozick comes to mind, craft each sentence until they’re satisfied it’s finished if not perhaps perfect and don’t move on until they’ve done so. Others, verging on hypergraphia, write multiple drafts, slashing and burning with reckless abandon. Most of us, however, fall in between these two poles and make our way as best we can. <br /><br />My sense is that one has to keep the major parts of the work as flexible as possible before they’re fixed in place, as if moving heavy furniture around a room. Your eyes are actually doing the heavy lifting, comprehending necessary changes before your reasoning takes over (certainly important at other times in the process). But during this time sound and sense are keen prognosticators of what changes have to be made: the very glancing or skimming that you’re doing allows you to also hear the authentic voice of the piece, and make changes based on the confluence of sight and sound.Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-58524059209440967222010-07-28T12:05:00.000-07:002011-03-06T13:49:50.078-08:00What's Happening?At the recent Warren Wilson MFA residency in July, there was considerable talk about the pesky question of making something happen in fiction. And indeed this is much of the problem with early drafts of stories: the elements are all set up and then . . . the story comes to a slow halt like a tired old dog, panting away its promise and its premise.<br /><br />I've been thinking a lot about why this is, and why, in many ways, it's a natural part of the draft process and unavoidable. Part of the reason is that any story needs time for gestation. The writer's impatience for the story to work is usually greater than the time it takes to make the various elements braid together into a strong narrative cable. For instance, one character's trajectory might occur easily on a first draft, while another character might confound your best efforts to make her significant. This is more apparent in a novel than a short story, when there is more of everything, of course, and you may completely know one character's purpose in the book--and her path--but can't seem to incorporate the laggards who appear to be standing still and without a destiny.<br /><br />Only time takes care of this, trying first to see if a particular character does in fact have a role (or can be made a composite with other characters) or somehow has just not lived up to his potential.<br /><br />Which can lead to the problem of finding out "what happens" in a story. The secondary characters, often overlooked in favor of the main or viewpoint character, have not been properly developed so that the (forgive me for this dirty word) plot may proceed. The author has made great efforts to move along the story, find that "defining" or "transformative" moment when things will never be the same and then, zzzzzz, it's a dud. The whole feels less than its parts; the narrative cable that you were counting on to become a tight steel braid suddenly unwinds.<br /><br />At this stalled moment, I often look at who is missing in the story. Who has gone AWOL. That is who can make a difference and needs to step up (or return from AWOL), which character can come in to “reset” the story and create the necessary dynamic that will put the events in motion again. Yes, the story may be stalled in terms of not enough action but the key to which action that should be can become clearer by investigating the thinner parts of interaction among the characters. Rather than trying to impose a contrived event on the story, the solution often lies in reexamining what you already have going on in the fiction, frequently in terms of your secondary characters, and how you’ve kept them on too short a leash to be effective. And frequently too the author has laid down some "clues," almost unconsciously, that indicate where these thin places exist that need to be strengthened to prepare for the “something happens.”<br /><br />Recently I was working on a piece that had lost its way. I imposed an event on the story, an occurrence that had a certain degree of wackiness, ghostly implications, and head-scratching meaning. Once I started along this line, I felt it necessary to keep going, wedded to the direction, and the next thing I knew my main character had died--or had he? Never mind. The point is my understanding of "something has to happen" was in terms of forcing the story to take a turn for the sake of surprise. And surprise is not enough, or not by itself. The narrative needs something else.<br /><br />Surprise alone can produce breadth without depth, intrigue without insight. <em>Oh! </em>but no Aha. What’s missing is revelation. If you think of "something happening" as a continuum, with one end being surprise (the O. Henry twist), and the the other end revelation (e.g. Joycean epiphany, consider "The Dead") then it's easier to envision which way your narrative will lean.<br /><br />But the ideal, of course, is in combining the two, surprise and revelation. "The Dead," after all, takes us by surprise, Gretta's confession of having loved another, but also offers astonishing revelation in Gabriel's penetrating sorrow and contemplation of mortality.<br /><br />There are a great many stories where surprise is predominant: think of Tobias Wolf's much anthologized and very brief story "Bullet in the Brain." It takes us by complete surprise, but the revelation comes in what actually happens inside Anders’, the main character's, head once the bullet enters his brain: wild technical effects of language mixed with an ending of great pathos. In Robert Coover's “The Babysitter” the something happening is that it keeps happening--to the point that we can't tell what is real and what isn’t. Each time the reader believes he's discovered the actual version of events, Coover thwarts our expectations. The surprise is that you'll never know what really happened--"the truth." The revelation is that your expectations about fiction and reality are undermined to the point of frustration and embarrassment at one’s fierce desire for and dependency on objectivity, despite ample evidence to the contrary. In Susan Minot's "Lust," a story made of short vignettes that eschew chronological order and that defy us to chart neatly any so-called narrative arc, the surprise is that there is no surprise--the vignettes are glimpses or angles on the same problem--but the revelation is how deeply and emotionally the narrator's voice alone compels her story to be told and heard. In all these stories, whether realistic or experimental, linear or associative, narrative or lyrical, surprise and revelation forge a simultaneous alliance: your attention is gotten at the very moment that you realize something you didn't before. In fact you not only know it, you feel it, the two in tandem being the verifying evidence of having made “something happen.”<br /><br />How to accomplish this? As I said in a previous post, I don't see any way around trial and error. My elaborate and bizarre choice of action for my character spun out for eight pages before, while walking our beagle, I thought, of course, it's so simple—just consider what the character really needs to happen, not what you want to happen <em>to </em>him. Easier said than done of course. In the meantime, one creates placeholders to make bridges to the next draft.Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464472043588838032.post-86479151723600119312010-07-23T09:00:00.000-07:002010-07-23T16:13:32.386-07:00Bog OnA frequent question for writers: How do you know when a piece of writing is finished? One famous reply to that question: when you put back in the same periods and commas that you just took out.<br /><br />My own experience, just recently, has to do with "bogs." That is, those morasses that writers sink into when trying to make their work perfect or, let's be frank, invincible. Standing up against any anticipated criticism. So here's an example.<br /><br />I just wrote a story and one of the sentences that I kept trying to work in was "Janice could almost be alive in Las Vegas." I'll skip the story summary; in fact, I'll skip any context, and just tell you that I worked with this sentence, with some coffee and bathroom breaks in between, for 3 hours, a long time for <em>one</em> sentence. I tried rephrasing it: "Janice, Gene realized, with stinging regret, could almost be alive in Las Vegas" and "Janice, Gene realized, with stinging longing, could, in this city of might happen, almost be alive out here." But wait! It changes everything when I use an em dash: "Janice--he realized with stinging longing--could almost be alive out here."<br /><br />If that wasn't enough, I tried it in parenthesis; in a paragraph by itself; as part of another sentence; at the top of the page; at the bottom of the page . . . you're perhaps getting the point. What I wanted from this sentence wasn't possible. I wanted it to "explain" the story, that is, bring all the ideas, subtext, conflicts, themes to a head and make it the zinger that would perfect the piece.<br /><br />But of course this is impossible, and happens when the ego gets too involved in trying to make the story's meaning foolproof. So much stress is put on the revision process to make a story "fully realized" that one often pursues a quixotic search for readerly clarity at the expense of, if I may, a story's confidence. The story has to have confidence aside from the author's own intentions or wishes for it. Such confidence necessarily requires a certain degree of ambiguity that actually lends the story authority. Once you start searching for the definitive sentence or paragraph, the ultimate line of dialogue or story's final word you can be pretty certain you have lost the initial thread that allowed you to subordinate and proportion all the complicated fiction elements in their proper places. Yes, Mark Twain memorably said that the difference between the right word and the next to right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. But the right word has a spark of spontaneity and grace to it; the perfect word has a whiff of sweat and pushiness.<br /><br />In other words, you need to back off and let the narrative take its chances. This is not overwriting, for who knows when that is exactly, as much as clinging, and you'll feel it in your body as a slight revulsion. You're in a bog and struggling to get out. Stop flailing, turn off the power to your computer, take a walk, wait twenty-four hours, reread the twenty drafts of the obsessive line, word, or passage and then watch how easily it peels away like a fatty tumor. And what have you lost? Nothing. And was it necessary? Yes. You'd have no way to know otherwise.Steven Schwartzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10216260093877203458noreply@blogger.com6