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Notice how many celebrated minority writers of our time — Mr. Díaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri — tend to write inside their own communities. One explanation may well be the nature of realism, which is (for now) literary fiction’s dominant mode: the artistic need for observed detail, and the tendency of literary novelists to tweak their personal experiences into fiction. Write what you know, young writers are taught. This may well reinforce, and be reinforced by, our sense of a writer’s being an authority only on his or her own community, his or her own people. So, in a paradoxical way, the freedom to write about your own experience turns into a restriction on the subject matter permissible to you. Your selling point governs how you are perceived.
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In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn't become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we've ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education. We made this video, built around an abridged version of the original audio recording, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience who might not have otherwise been interested
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One retiree from New York state in the US has spent four years writing the entire Bible - all 788,000 words - out by hand on 2,400 pages of watercolour paper. Phillip Patterson, 63, finished the final verses this weekend before reading from his finished manuscript at his church in the village of Philmont.
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My writing draws sustenance from several sources – one of them being Hungarian folk tales – it follows the traces of memories, criss-crossing Central and Eastern Europe. In the best case my writing defines its own continent, one that cannot be easily pigeonholed. I write in German but never about Germany and even less about Switzerland where I have lived for several decades. I do not feel like a “Swiss woman writer” which is how I am classified in reference works. In practical terms, I am a woman who writes in German with eastern Central European roots. So why not call me a European woman writer in the first place? This is the designation I would prefer most, for instead of constraining it opens up a wide horizon. This is a space in which my writing and imagination can unfold so that the reader can clearly understand where my “coordinates” are located and what network they define.
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On Wednesday a formal proposal appeared for discussion: “Propose Wikipedia is periodically accused of being a boys’ club. “Around 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are men, and it shows,” New Scientist said earlier this month. Many Wikipedians agree and would like to do something about it. A large majority of commenters voted “Merge.” Some deployed the terms “ghettoization” and “back of the bus.” Then again, a few are voting for ghettoization—or as they say, “Diffuse women but not men,” diffuse being the term for sending members of a parent category out into a subcategory. At least it’s arguable that “women novelists” is a category of cultural and sociological interest. It was noted that Wikipedia features an extensive article on Women’s Writing in English, as part of Wikiproject Gender Studies and Wikiproject Women’s History.
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I’m currently writing a novel set 200 years from now and you know what? It’s hard. It occurs to me that someone writing a novel when the first steam locomotives were just appearing couldn’t possibly have imagined the chain of events that would lead to something like the Facebook phone — not even close. So how the hell can I create something convincing that far in our future? Wouldn’t it be easier to just drop an asteroid/global warming/zombie invasion/plague on everything and then write a novel about people struggling in a world gone to hell? Sure, it would be easier. Just wreck the world, throw in a few mutated monkeys, and stir. But it’s intellectually lazy. We’ve been down that road a million times and we know what it’s like: dazed survivors wandering the ruins, gnawing the thigh bones of their former neighbours. A plucky few trying to rebuild civilization again in between shooting zombies and building Thunderdomes. Enough already!
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I’m sure it has been said by many people, otherwise let me be the first: why do we call these machines readers? They are not the ones doing the reading. (Okay, some of them have a text-to-speech function, but it’s a minority and they’re all called readers regardless.) Perhaps what the reader reads is the user. Measure their reading speed. Record their reading history and apply sophisticated algorithms to their annotations. If you’re with Amazon, there may already be quite a lot of information against your profile, pertaining to all your searches and purchases on the site. Now they can add this information as well. Build a better, more accurate you. Other companies may not know as much about you to begin with, but the mechanism and the aims will be broadly similar.
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2. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.
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My departure from the language, the loss of Russian murmuring in my ears, forced me to stop, to be silent. On the rare occasions when we meet, writers from Russia are amazed. “How can you write in this boring Switzerland? Without the language, without the tension?” They are right – the atmospheric pressure in Russian letters is heightened. And the language is changing rapidly. My exit from Russian speech forced me to turn around and face it. Work on my text came to a halt. Just as there are rests in music, so are there silences in a text. Perhaps they are its most important part. What is the language I left behind? What did I take with me? Where do the words go from here? A labour of silence. If I was to go further, I had to understand where the essence of writing in Russian actually lay. Being at once creator and creature of the fatherland’s reality, the Russian language is a form of existence, the body of a totalitarian consciousness. Daily life has always muddled through without words: with bellowing, interjections, and gag lines from film comedies. It is the state and literature that require coherent words.
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Len Gutkin: You’ve said of writing The Tunnel that you had dodecaphonic principles of musical composition in mind, but in Middle C the application of 12-tone composition to writing becomes a part of the plot. Not only does Skizzen stake his claim to a faculty position on his ostensible knowledge of 12-tone composers, he delights that one of the pithiest versions of his sentence has “Twelve tones, twelve words.” Can you say something about the relationship, for you, between writing and music? Is Middle C’s overarching structure predicated on musical form? William Gass: The Tunnel is built of 12 themes. Each theme has its own section, which it dominates. But every theme is present to varying degrees in other parts. Middle C is a suite of styles. Different instrumentation to match changing moods. Some chapters are more melodious than others, light and tripping, morose and slow. Above all my stress is on voice, on the sounds language makes as it passes over and into the page. There are a few musical subjects, too — ideas rather than tunes — artists who have fled their country and changed their religions, or the way orchestras are managed, etc. I write for the ear. That makes me old-fashioned. Sometimes I also write for the eye but these appearances are meant to be operatic scenery. Middle C’s structures aren’t always musical, sometimes they are simple narrations. That’s how the book opens.
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"Writers are necessarily ambivalent about any kind of recognition—honors, prizes, simple praise—because they are ambivalent about their relationship to the present. The first audience that a writer wants to please is the past—the dead writers who led him to want to write in the first place. Forced to admit that this is impossible, he displaces his hope onto the future, the posterity whose judgment he will never know. That leaves the present as the only audible judge of his work; but the present is made up of precisely the people whom the writer cannot live among, which is why he subtracts himself from the actual world in order to deposit a version of himself in his writing. The approbation of the living is thus meaningful to a writer only insofar as he can convince himself that it is a proxy for the approbation of the past or the future—insofar as it becomes metaphorical.
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How little of ourselves we give even to the writers we love best, compared to what they asked and expected of us. Genuine admiration and gratitude for a writer’s work is very intermittent; usually, we think only about ourselves and how we can use what we’re reading. But this must be considered a legitimate technique of self-defense, since if we opened ourselves to all the just demands for attention made by the dead, we would be totally overwhelmed, placed permanently in the wrong. For dead writers are like gods who are always hungry, no matter how many sacrifices they inhale."
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AL: A new UAE publishing survey noted there is still not a great desire to read among Emirati youth. What would you do to improve the relationship between books & their potential Emirati/Arab readers? How to get books into the hands (devices, whatever) of more young readers? And to get young people more excited about them? NN: It’s funny you mentioned that, one of my 4 daughters is the hardest to convince when it comes to reading. She’s fifteen and she prefers TV to reading. Imagine my surprise a year ago when I noticed her spending long periods of time staring at her ipod, When I asked what she was doing, she said she was reading stories. Stories, I asked, what do you mean? She showed me discussion forums where teens wrote short stories or episodes and shared them with each other. They were written mostly in the vernacular. I was stunned! So the way to their hearts is through simple Arabic shared on their mobile devices. That is one obvious way, the other is through required reading added to the syllabus. But unless we know what genre they prefer we still we get them to read. They associate Arabic with school text books, and considering the haphazard way text books are created and recreated, our kids have lost all respect for Arabic. My way of getting them excited enough to deign to read Arabic is through Sci fi.
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"Before the fatwa, Salman Rushdie wrote two great books, Midnight’s Children (1980) and Shame (1983). Since the fatwa, he has not written any. Before the fatwa, Rushdie brilliantly exposed the corrupt dynasties and pathologies of two sundered societies (India and Pakistan). Since the fatwa, Rushdie has allowed flamboyant language and narrative trickery to overshadow biting political satire and acute characterization. Before the fatwa, Rushdie lived a relatively modest life in London. Now, as Joseph Anton drearily attests, Rushdie has become a New York socialite obsessed with name-dropping every celebrity he meets, lauding his own work with shameless abandon, and pointlessly denigrating his ex-wives. Joseph Anton shows both the resolve with which Rushdie confronted the threats to his life, and the sad degree to which the unhinged words of a demented ayatollah helped ruin a superb writer."
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To become a writer, you have to follow a few rules: Show, don’t tell. Avoid clichés. Be specific. Try not to repeat yourself. These rules work for me whether I’m writing an essay like this or an ad at the agency where I work as a writer and creative director. I’ve learned that people don’t love to be told things. But they don’t mind being shown things. When you demonstrate an idea for a reader or viewer, you let him participate in the process. I try to teach this to the copywriters who work for me. Find the story. Make it matter. No one wants to be lectured to. And that’s true if you’re creating a mobile app, a TV spot or even a PowerPoint. And the toughest lesson: learn to love doing the same assignment again and again. Writing, like building furniture or making jewelry, is “Groundhog Day.” How many ways can you write a headline that says, “Here’s a dollar off coupon”? The answer turns out to be almost infinite.
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...place is always a construction — a structured reality. When we talk of landscape we’re referring to subjective perceptions of the world rather than topographical actualities, as Dennis Cosgrove and others have argued. And a poetry that seeks to write (in) place might well record the mind encountering both the environmental and the imaginative; in so doing, it might expose the fictions of borders and boundaries, their secret lives as made things, drawn lines. Place as it is seen.
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Brautigan’s early Frisco experience thus amounts to a classic underdog narrative. It was difficult to stand out as the genuine article: the North Beach community was replete with literary journals, some lasting only one issue, and raucous open-mic readings, in which we glimpse the regrettable birth of slam poetry. Eventually, Brautigan felt compelled to distance himself from poets altogether, although, Hjortsberg argues, “Everything he wrote remained essentially poetic, even when labeled short stories or novels”. It was only when he made the switch from verse to prose, declaring, “I don’t want to sit at the children’s table anymore”, that his career finally gained momentum. The transition was not merely textual. Brautigan fastidiously controlled each novel’s jacket, typography, layout, and even promotional materials. Such powers, rarely bestowed on any author, resulted in the Brautigan brand, arguably more famous than anything in the books themselves. The cover photo for Trout Fishing in America is exemplary: in front of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco’s Washington Square Park, Brautigan appears like a Gold Rush prospector, his girlfriend at his side in style. For his friend Keith Abbott, the photo displays “His open, cheerful, confident expression . . . characteristic of his belief in his prospects, while his blue work shirt displays the uniform of artistic poverty”. The increasingly beautiful girlfriends, who always joined the author on his covers, were integral to his mystique.
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For the most part, Gaddis’s letters aren’t what you might call literary. They are written mainly to his mother, a few lifelong buddies, his agents and students of his work asking for information. (Those answering inquiries from the young Moore are by far the best.) A few are addressed to youthful girlfriends, many to his second wife, Judith, and to his children Sarah and Matthew. Gaddis hardly ever alludes to his current reading or writing. We learn little more than that he makes outlines, scribbles lots of notes, engages in intense but somewhat haphazard research and needs years to finish a work to his satisfaction. An only child, Gaddis corresponds regularly with his divorced mother about his experiences at Harvard (where he excelled mainly as a contributor to and editor of the Harvard Lampoon), his vagabond adventures in the American West, Central America, the Caribbean, Europe and North Africa, and his growing ambition to write an important novel, one for which he needs such scholarly works as Arnold Toynbee’s “A Study of History” and the philosophical essays of Fichte, St. Anselm and Bishop Berkeley. It will be a big book, he explains, one in which he “must get everything in. Everything.”
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Writing novels is quiet work: it can reveal astonishments but it doesn’t usually proceed from them. Maybe that is why novelists are so often attached to second art forms that wear their physicality or their beauty outwardly. Ernest Hemingway considered bullfighting an art form and, indeed, he thought writers should be more like toreadors, brave and defiant in the face of death. For Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima it was the art of the samurai – he loved the poise, the nobility, the control, tradition, all things you would say of good prose – and he died in a ritual self-killing. But most novelists take their influence seriously without letting it take over. They are emboldened by a love of opera, as were Willa Cather and the French novelist George Sand, or by modernist painters, as Gertrude Stein was, each of these brilliant women finding in the spaciousness and drama of the other art form an enlarged sense of what they themselves were setting out to deal with on the little blank page.
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When it came to creating characters on the page, Spark seems also to have taken something from Mary Shelley. Shelley, reports Spark, “was more interested in the type than in the individual, and if she did not attempt to depict the latter, her study of types of humanity is varied and sound”. This, of course, reads as a serviceable account of Spark’s own practice, which tended to steer clear of describing her characters’ interior lives in favour of reading their surfaces. Miss Brodie and the rest come to life as they barge and trip through the world, revealing their often monstrous personalities through what they do and say. In this they share more than a passing resemblance to Frankenstein’s benighted Creature.
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The notion that creative writing courses train students for professional careers as literary authors is not only cemented in the popular imagination and reproduced in course promotions, but also reflected in histories of the field written by teachers of creative writing themselves (e.g. Dawson). Regardless of the more modest and ‘generalist’ educational rationales that subtend arts faculty curriculum planning, it is the image of a special caste of literary artists with a higher mission—the nurturing of the next generation of poets and novelists, the preservation of a national literature—that has informed both the academic and popular imagination. This image originally derives from the US model of the writing program that emerged in the elite liberal arts colleges, such as Stanford and Princeton, in the early post-War period. From R. P. Blackmur’s celebration of the Modernist author in his address to Princeton students suggestively titled ‘The Undergraduate Writer as Writer’ (1941), to the Michael Douglas character in the film Wonder Boys (or perhaps David Duchovny in the recent TV series Californication), it is the image of the charismatic author before a group of literary aspirants that has been central to the popular image of the writing program. Within this promotion there has been little room to acknowledge the more modestly ‘generalist’ educational rationales that subtended the emergence of the writing course. According to Edith Mirrielees (a much neglected pioneer of creative writing in the US who taught fiction writing at Stanford from 1909), these ‘were identical with the reason for placing there any other liberal arts course. It is that attempts at writing affect the student’s habits of thought’.
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A lot of people read a book every week. A lot of writers I have met read every new novel published, seemingly. I think that’s a bad idea. But what other writers do is none of my business. But if anybody – I mean an aspiring writer, I guess – ever did ask me for advice, my advice would be to stop reading so many books, to give up reading contemporaries, to give up the English-language bias and read some books in translation, or in the original, if possible. Most importantly, do not review books. Engage in responsible criticism, but do not write book reviews. Reject the language of critical theory. Try to exercise, just a little bit, because when you get near forty you will wish you had kept in better shape. Squander your twenties, or learn a trade. Never make a change to anything you write based on the idea that it makes what you write more appealing.
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I guess a little of the excitement I used to feel starting a novel has ebbed away over the years; it’s my life, my career, my living, and I’ve got used to writing a novel more or less every year, so to some degree it’s part of a routine, not the dazzling new adventure it used to be. But that’s okay, because there are compensations, and the fact that I oscillate between mainstream and SF means that I’m always writing something different from the last book. Plus there is, anyway, invariably a point where the book I’m writing, regardless of genre, sort of takes over and energises the whole process; I get all wrapped up in it and come close to forgetting that I’ve ever written anything else. Also, if you have any sort of ambition, pride in your work or even self-respect, in a sense you always have something to prove. I’m getting to the sort of age now when I need to prove there’s life in the old dog yet, and fully intend to keep on attempting to do so until it becomes positively embarrassing for all concerned. (In this scenario, the lunch where your publisher takes you somewhere nice but then asks pointedly what your plans are for your retirement represents the equivalent of the smelly mutt’s last trip to the vet.)
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"The fact is I wanted to write long before I had anything to say. I don't find this condition at all unusual in young writers, good or bad. A sort of attuned restlessness. Often it is simply an overriding need to talk. A sort of transcribed logorrhea, worse than decent gossip. I've taught these people, forever blasting away in wretched detail, solidly in love with their own noise. I must say, I was never infatuated with my own voice. It was the ideal inner voices that took me, and they came from everywhere, especially Hemingway, Joyce, Henry Miller, and later, Flannery O'Connor."
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"The rate of library closures has increased, reveals the annual report from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy: 146 branches closed between 2010 and 2011, with the number stepping up to 201 this year. The UK now has 4,265 libraries, compared with 4,612 two years ago, and the number of closures is likely to grow. Campaigners in Newcastle are currently fighting plans to close 10 out of the city's 18 libraries, with Billy Elliot playwright Lee Hall calling on the council to protect the city's heritage last month.
"Working men and women in the north-east have fought, generation after generation, for the right to read and grow intellectually, culturally and socially – to be as 'civilised' as anyone else," Hall said. "It is a heritage that took decades and decades to come to fruition but will be wiped out in a moment. You are not only about to make philistines of yourselves, but philistines of us all.""
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“I sat around for a month or two trying to think of something else and I thought, ‘Maybe it’s over, maybe it’s over,’ ” he said. “I gave myself a dose of fictional juice by rereading writers I hadn’t read in 50 years and who had meant quite a lot when I read them. I read Dostoevsky, I read Conrad — two or three books by each. I read Turgenev, two of the greatest short stories ever written, ‘First Love’ and ‘The Torrents of Spring.’ ” He also reread Faulkner and Hemingway. “And then I decided to reread my own books,” Mr. Roth went on, “and I began from the last book forward, casting a cold eye. And I thought, ‘You did all right.’ But when I got to ‘Portnoy’ ” — “Portnoy’s Complaint,” published in 1969 — “I had lost interest, and I didn’t read the first four books.” “So I read all that great stuff,” he added, “and then I read my own and I knew I wasn’t going to get another good idea, or if I did, I’d have to slave over it.” Mr. Roth is now in excellent health, after back surgery in April, and exercises regularly. But he said: “I know I’m not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration — it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.” He went on: “I can’t face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can’t do that anymore.”
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