Tag Archives: writer

“Come in, Sit down . . .

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cafe at night

(photo: wikimedia commons)

. . . Let me tell you a story.”

Like the author of this recent Gawker post about novels with compelling opening sentences, which includes many relatively recent books, I was inspired by Joe Fassler’s 2013 Atlantic interview with Stephen King, in which King talked about the first lines of his books and why those first words are so important. His all-time favorite opener, from Needful Things: “You’ve been here before.” King says he spends weeks, months—years sometimes—getting them exactly right, so remembers them well: “They were a doorway I went through.”

Analyzing King’s Approach
The opening line of King’s 11/22/63 is “I’ve never been what you’d call a crying man,” and the reader immediately and correctly anticipates a fair amount of crying before the last page is turned. The opening line of It: “The terror that would not end for another 28 years, if it ever did, began so far as I can know or tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

Fassler’s interview made me think, “He’s a big success, right? Maybe I can learn something here.”

So I visited my library and pulled all the King books they had on hand—18 different novels. I sat at a table and wrote out the first few sentences of each. (If you’ve never done this, try handwriting passages from a book you admire. For some reason, possibly in sync with research on how people learn, the act of hand-copying a text puts you—well, me, anyway—in the author’s mindframe much more directly and powerfully than reading the same words or typing them out.)

What the First Lines Contain
What I found out by doing this is that the opening sentences of many Stephen King novels have certain characteristics in common. They:

  1. Put the reader in a precise location and time
  2. Identify the protagonist, usually by name
  3. Address the reader directly – “you”
  4. Use simple language and quotidian details, which create an easy tone (nice rhythm, too)
  5. Include something to provoke a vague anxiety
  6. Put the protagonist’s experience in a larger context
  7. In some way invite the reader to “sit and listen to a story.”

Three Examples
Recently I read King’s Mr. Mercedes (2014), which does 2, 4, 5, 6 and to some extent 1—at least he gets the reader into the geographic and temporal ballpark:
“Augie Odenkirk (2) had a 1997 Datsun that still ran well in spite of high mileage (1-ish), but gas was expensive, especially for a man with no job (4, 6), and City Center was on the far side of town (1-ish), so he decided to take the last bus of the night (5).”

And, another example, from The Tommyknockers (1987):
“For want of a nail the kingdom was lost, that’s how the catechism goes when you boil it down (5). In the end, you can boil everything down to something similar—or so Roberta Anderson thought much later on (2, 3). It’s either all an accident . . . or all fate (6). Anderson literally stumbled over her destiny in the small town of Haven, Maine, on June 21, 1988(1, 4). That stumble was the root of the matter; all the rest was nothing but history (7).”

A look back at King’s very first novel, Carrie (1974) shows he used these methods from the start, though his technique has grown in subtlety and creativity over time. Carrie begins:
“News item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966 (1):
“Rain of Stones Reported
“It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th (4). The stones fell principally on the home of Mrs. Margaret White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $25 (4). Mrs. White, a widow, lives with her three-year-old daughter, Carietta (2).
“Mrs. White could not be reached for comment (5).”

These examples invite the reader in like a cafe’s bright lights as dark is coming on. They say, “Sit down, listen, let me tell you about this.” I wouldn’t describe King’s approach as a “formula,” because his books begin in such different ways, but rather a discipline. Early on, he gives readers a clear sense of “who, what, when, and where,” and the rest of the book provides the “why.”

In My Own Writing

So what did I learn from this exercise? I rewrote the beginning scenes of my two novels with these thoughts in mind, making several tries of it, and was sure to name the books’ protagonists and place them precisely in time and location, use simple language, and forecast the larger context of the action. And I’m happier with the result. We’ll see what comes of it.

If you have some King sitting on your bookshelf and look for these 7 points, I’d be interested to know what you find.

Famous First Lines

  • A list emphasizing the classics, starting with Herman Melville’s “Call me Ishmael.”
  • Writers reveal their favorite first lines in this list.

Comfortable Ambiguity

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keyhole, shoes, Cristian Iohan Ștefănescu

(photo: Cristian Iohan Ștefănescu, Creative Commons license)

A novel should leave “a little room for the reader to interpret, to bring in his or her own perceptions and conceptions,” says Celeste Ng in a recent Glimmer Train essay. Ng’s novel, Everything I Never Told You is one of NPR’s “Great Reads” for 2014 and has been selected by the Amazon editors as the #1 book of the year. Ng’s essay suggests we can look through the keyhole, we can see the pink velvet shoes, but we may never know everything about them, so we fill in the rest of the story to our own pasts, preconceptions, and predilections.

In her “literary thriller,” Ng artfully leaves room for interpretation of the events leading to the disappearance of a family’s daughter. A familiar premise, but “If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now,” says Alexander Chee in the New York Times, as she turns “the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of the secrets the family members won’t share.”

There’s a difference between the deliberate ambiguity Ng advocates—“a space, however small, for the reader to fit into the piece”—and simple confusion. The challenge is to walk the tightrope between answering every question and leaving out important information about character, motivation, or even plot that the reader needs in order to arrive at a reasonable conclusion. As a writer of mystery and thriller stories myself, I am constantly aware of that tightrope and the expectations of readers in this genre.

Discomfort with ambiguity leads to such devices as the flash-forward epilogue “that tells you exactly where everyone ends up and what everything means.” This was my one quibble with the otherwise lovely novel All the Light We Cannot See. Movies do this, too. In general, I find this trick disappointing, because by the time I reach the end of a book or compelling movie, I have a rich array of ideas about the potential future lives of the characters, and the novelist/moviemaker can pick only one of these.

Rorschach

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Preoccupation with, you could say, “closure,” may not be simply a response to ambiguity per se, Ng proposes, “but to ambiguity done badly.” If ambiguity results from the writer’s own indecision, she says, then it often doesn’t work. If the writer is relying on readers to sort out the evidence and arrive at a conclusion, “the reader senses that crucial pieces are missing and ends up confused.” When the writer knows how the situation resolves, but simply chooses not to say, like Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, “a modest monument to the bold pursuit of ambiguity,” said poet Brad Leithauser. The ambiguity in that novel has sparked 116 years of speculation, a level of interest that likely wouldn’t have occurred, had James made it perfectly clear whether the governess was delusional.

In the batch of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine stories I reviewed 12/12/14 was one by Joyce Carol Oates (“Equatorial”) in which the timid wife of a much-married man grows to believe he’s trying to kill her. Evidence mounts that he might want to be rid of her. He seems, a time or two, to try. But then he injures himself and the imbalance in physical strength between them tips slightly in her direction. She takes a risk to further even the odds. The story ends as the two sides of this interpersonal equation teeter on the brink. Will he succeed, or will she? The ending is classically ambiguous, and Oates has given sufficient information for readers to plausibly choose either ending.

Everything I Never Told You ends without telling exactly what happens to its characters outside the bounds of the book, and readers ask Ng about them. At first such questions made her worry she’d left out some key bit of information, but then she realized that readers believe they know the characters and are firmly convinced about what happens to them. What they wanted from Ng was “to confirm what ‘really’ happened—because they wanted to be right!—but all of them were already positive that they knew.”

It is these readers’ “intense and comfortable certainty” that shows she left sufficient ambiguity for readers to take hold and give the story their own meaning. “The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.”

See how she does it!

Joyce Carol Oates: “Not in a Car!”

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Tracy, Hepburn, Adam's Rib

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib (photo: wikimedia.org)

The most specific piece of writing advice I gleaned at the Princeton University event celebrating Joyce Carol Oates’s teaching career last week was this: Never let your characters have a conversation while riding in a car. Her former students laughed in a way that suggested they’d heard this one—and other cliché-avoidance tips—before, more than once.

The event included two panels involving 10 of Oates’s former students—all successfully published writers today—who offered wide-ranging reminiscences about their experiences with their teacher and mentor. In last week’s First Draft blog post, I collected their thoughts on what she taught them about “being a writer.” They also let the audience glimpse a bit of what they learned from her about the craft of writing.

Julie Sarkissian, author of the novel Dear Lucy, long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, recounted how she grounded some of her early writing in her own experiences and how Oates wanted her to separate this work from the lived reality, to make the fiction whole and entire in itself. Apparently the teacher wasn’t swayed at all by Sarkissian’s argument that what she’d written was “true.” Sarkissian learned right then that “the fact that something is true is a pretty pathetic defense when it comes to fiction.”

Is it going too far, then, to say fiction is about lying? Deftly? Another of Oates’s students present was Pinckney Benedict, author of the collection Miracle Boy and Other Stories (my review), and apparently Oates once said something like, “Pinckney seems like the kind of person who would lie to an interviewer.” A startled Benedict found this a revelation: “You can LIE to an interviewer?!” and swore he’s included two or three whoppers in every interview since.

Now I wonder what lies lurk in his excellent Glimmer Train interview from Winter 2013, which has him saying, “I am not trying in my own work to demonstrate that my heart is in the right place because, quite frankly, it is not.” [Is that one?] Trying to establish a common ground with readers—“we’re all well-meaning people together”—he says, “is the antithesis of a powerful or worthwhile literature.” That statement underscores the “don’t pull your punches” approach to writing Oates encouraged in her students.

Former Oates student Jonathan Safran Foer recounted how he’d once turned in a set of pages on which Oates wrote: “Confusing, but uninteresting,” with the latter charge the more piercing. Even unpleasant and essentially boring characters have to be made interesting, she said, in the context of fiction. They become interesting through their uniqueness. (Paradoxically, “The more unlike anyone else you make a character, the more universal that character becomes,” says Donald Maass’s in Writing 21st Century Fiction.) Benedict, originally from rural West Virginia, sets his stories in an Appalachian region so vividly portrayed the reader can reach out and touch the surrounding mountains and smell the barns and fresh-turned earth. In commenting on his skill in this, Oates echoed Maass’s counterintuitive statement, “The regional, if it’s intensely felt, is the universal.”

A conversational thread I especially related to was Oates’s dictum that “Writing is about solving problems.” How do you get this character from here to there (believably)? If you need a character out of the picture a while, where does she go? Why? How to get from here to there is what Oates taught her students. Despite having written more than a hundred books, when she has to identify her profession, “If I have to put it down on some form,” she said, “I write ‘teacher.’”

Bad Ideas Don’t Become Good Books

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kindle, book, ereader

(photo: www.wired.com)

Helping writers become published seems like as big a big business as writing itself. And writing, we know, is huge. People will help writers write, help them self-publish, and help with the endless baffling tasks—finding an agent, managing a self-publishing path, and promoting their product. As a book nears completion, a writer’s anxiety grows, and the whole process of sending that precious baby out into the marketing void fills authors with not unreasonable qualms.

That some of these purveyors are unscrupulous goes with the territory. (See links below.) That some of them serve ideas that are cold potatoes, ditto. But every once in a while, amid the cacophony of advice available to writers, comes a message that may not be exactly new but really resonates.

Jane Friedman is a consistently reliable, forward-thinking writing-and-publishing commentator and pulls in mostly helpful guest posters on her blog. Recently she invited Laurie Scheer, “a seasoned development exec and writing mentor,” to talk about a topic most authors (me included!) would rather not examine: What if the fundamental idea for your book is, well, mediocre?

Scheer started off with three questions, then presented what I found the most helpful part of her post: an example.

The Three Questions

question, graffiti

(photo: farm4.static.flickr.com)

Every writer, she says, needs to have persuasive answers to these three questions on the tip of the tongue—for dealing with potential editors, agents, publishers, and the (eventual) marketing team and even the public. Why make this? Why make it now? and Who cares?

The answer to “why make this,” needs to describe what about a novel (or screenplay, for that matter) makes it unique, compelling, and authentic. For people who write in genre fiction—mystery, romance, science fiction, horror, and their permutations—this can be especially hard. A police procedural with a flawed detective? Divorced and drinks too much, perhaps? In truth, most plots have been done and done again—because they work—but something about them needs to be unique, compelling, and authentic. This is a flaw with many memoirs. Nothing new or insightful. That’s a hard message for writers delving into their own personal—and very likely painful—history.

Why make this now? Recognizing trends in the marketplace and when they’ve peaked suggests something about timing. In crime novels, the trend has been for ever-more inventive and grisly threats. This has upping the violence ante to the point of unbelievability, in my opinion. In one I read last year, a victim would awake standing up, with the lower half of his body encased in a block of ice. Nowhere did the text mention the amount of time it would take to freeze that much water, the noise of the generators producing sufficient cooling, how the equipment to do it was transported from one locale to another, in other words, a big “huh?”

And, the third question, who really cares? Who will pay good money to read this book? Herein is the flaw in the new Kindle Scout program—“reader-powered publishing for new, never-before-published books.” Potential readers help decide which books the program publishes and receive the book free if it’s selected. In other words, some of the people most interested in the book don’t have to pay to get it. (Thanks to Build Book Buzz’s marketing maven Sandra Beckwith for pointing this out.)

Here’s the Pitch

biological clock

(photo: fc05.deviantart.net)

Scheer gives this example of the kind of ideas writers often pitch in answer to the above questions:

A story about a 43-year-old unmarried woman who has had a successful career in advertising or law or pharmaceuticals or whatever, and decides at the last minute that her biological clock’s ticking and she wants to have a child.

Scheer says, “I will wait for the writer to tell me the rest of the story. And there is no rest of the story, because in their mind, that is the story.” A story that has been done many, many times. Some new element needs to be interjected to create new and unique conflicts (why now?). That new element might be one that would capture attention of some larger audience (who cares?). Perhaps the baby’s father should be a divorced police detective who drinks too much. Just kidding. Half.

So I’m going back to reexamine my pitch letters and make sure I’m not cutting short my three-sentence description of what my books are about before I get to “why now” and “who cares”!

Writer Resources

  • Preditors and Editors – this widely recommended website rates agents, editors, publishers, and many other businesses for writers. Though encyclopedic, it could use a makeover. Especially helpful would be dates added to its one-line reviews.
  • Writer Beware! – highly recommend website and blog maintained by Victoria Strauss for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, but applicable to all writers. Especially helpful information on contracts, I’ve noticed. (Her take on Kindle Scout is here.)
  • Laurie Scheer’s new book—The Writer’s Advantage: A Toolkit (Amazon says Tookit) for Mastering your Genre. I ordered this book, and will review it here.

Ravel-Edged Storytelling

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forest poetry

(photo: as0.geograph.org.uk)

A walk in the woods of poetry and prose and pleasantly lost in thickets of words.

The current (subscription only) newsletter from AGNI—Boston University’s well-regarded literary magazine—includes an interview with prize-winning poet and nonfiction writer Rosalie Moffett about “Ravel-Edged Storytelling.”

A Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Moffett says she mostly considers herself a poet, but believes that the two genres—poetry and nonfiction—“share a border, and sometimes I look up to find I’ve crossed it.” A work that started out to be one thing takes an unexpected and serendipitous turn to become the other. In reading this month’s submissions to the writer’s workshop I attend, I encountered one 1200-word short story excerpt that seemed to want to become a poem and might have become one, by just changing the line lengths.

Answering Questions

Moffett says she writes prose and poetry for the same reason: to answer questions and, most of the time, poems “end up being the best arena for my mind to answer them.” This suggests a mind that ranges freely through a forest of possible answers, where the ambiguity of words can be pulled into service of meaning and intent. Strung together in a particular way, they can be the perfect example of the whole being more than the sum of the parts. That phenomenon is is one function of subtext.

dinner table, family

(photo: creative commons generic license)

AGNI online offers Moffett’s essay Sidney, whose story she says absolutely required “the ravel-edged” kind of telling offered by prose. Prose also provided a more valid recreation of how she originally heard—or overheard—the family stories, and the stories about Sidney himself, with all their half-bits of information, inferences, and unanswered questions like loose threads in a bag of knitting ravaged by moths or kittens. Prose “puts our stories together in a way they never had the chance to be before people died, got bitter, or went off their rockers.” I urge you to link to it and start reading; you won’t be able to stop!

And Telling Stories

In the essay about Sidney, she talks about how as a child younger than six visiting her grandparents, she got up late in the evening feigning hunger, so she could camp out in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal and overhearing the adults’ conversation in the next room: “I remember the music of the stories more than their substance. I sensed their pull and power. I wanted, suddenly, nothing more than to have stories to tell, and to sit at that table and tell them.” “Sidney” shows she absolutely got her wish.

I think I resonated with her responses in the interview largely because of the process in the last two weeks, of writing my blog posts, The Rouge Shadow and Coming to Amerika, based on a longer essay about my father’s immigrant parents. So different from Moffett, who can draw on a deep well of family detail—conversations, rooms she’s spent time in—I know next-to-nothing about my father’s parents. Yet, even from the few stray threads I have, many stories could be woven. To write these essays, I pieced together the backdrop for a plausible narrative from minute clues. Moffett says writing an essay “feels like the hunt for an answer.” And sometimes the answer is that there is none.

Further Reading

Rosalie Moffett’s website includes links to some of her poems, including this one, “Gifts from the 7-11.”

Agni is the ancient Vedic god of fire and guardian of humankind, a messenger to the other gods. You can find out more about this aptly named literary magazine here. And about the god of fire here.

The Art of Subtext, by Charles Baxter– The most eloquent and approachable group of essays on subtext that I’ve found. For only $3.88 used to $10.28 new, you can awaken to new possibilities. Reading it was like seeing, after not seeing.

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*** Three Ellery Queens

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jaguar

“Spotted Ghost” by Lou Hedge

Finished three issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine recently—August 2014, September/October 2014, and, embarrassingly, August 2012. Some items in my reading pile are truly “aging in place”! For variety of locale and time, the monthly collections in this deliciously pulpy magazine can’t be beat. These three issues contain stories from Colonial America, to 1890s San Francisco, to modern Taiwan, to Belize City, where tourists hunt the elusive jaguar.

One of the scariest involved the escalating war of nerves between an adolescent boy and his new neighbor, written by popular short story writer David Dean, author of the novel The Thirteenth Child. A funny tale about a couple who owns a dry cleaners’ shop also appeared in the 8/14 issue, by British author Belinda Bauer, known for the “blackly funny” style of some of her books.

The most recent issue departs from longstanding EQMM tradition by including some stories with paranormal elements. Despite its title, “Ghost Town,” by Terence Faherty, does not. It refers to the near-abandoned Ocean City, New Jersey, in February, plagued by a series of mysterious break-ins. One of the shorter stories—“The Hard Type” by Carl Robinette—packed the most emotional punch. In it a young boy questions his actions when he sees a couple terrorized by a motorcycle gang.

I also enjoyed “Jaguar,” about a young girl brought to New York as part of a human trafficking ring. Short stories by its author, Joseph Wallace, have appeared in several anthologies, including the Best American Mystery Stories. His most recent novel, Invasive Species, is a science fiction thriller.

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Creativity and the Brain

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brain, creativity

fMRI brain images (photo: en.wikipedia)

Lots of articles about creativity in the current issue of The Atlantic, including a fascinating long report by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen who studies the origins of creativity in the brain and its association with mental illness. She started out in the 1960’s studying people involved with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Among them was Kurt Vonnegut, who had a multigenerational family history of mental disorders and suffered from depression. (Moving interviews with Vonnegut’s son Mark were included in PBS News Hour’s coverage of Andreasen’s research.) Indeed, for many of the writers she studied, “mental illness and creativity went hand in hand.” Suicide was not uncommon. We think Hemingway, Plath, now Williams. Philip Seymour Hoffman was also far down that self-destructive path.

Andreasen began her academic career clutching a doctorate in literature, taught in the University of Iowa’s English Department, and published a book about the poet John Donne. But she chose to return to school in the sciences, hoping that study of the brain would lead her to understand why authors she admired had gone off the rails—and maybe even to help future writers.

She’s worked on two vital questions: “What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted?” As in many areas of neuroscience, the development of scanning technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has enabled her to watch the brains of creative people “at work,” and these scans reveal tantalizing clues to her hitherto unanswerable questions.

Earlier work has shown that high IQ is not particularly linked to creativity—“above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity,” she says. If she couldn’t predict creativity from IQ measurement (with all its flaws), she had to find other ways to find subjects for research. She looked for external recognition, which led her to the distinguished faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Interviews rather quickly revealed that mood disorders (depression, mostly) were common among the writers and often ran in families. In fact, about 80 percent of the writers she interviewed had such a mental health history, compared with about 30 percent in her control group and in the population at large.

But how to measure creativity in the brain? After years of pondering this difficulty, Andreasen finally arrived at this insight: “Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”

She has expanded her study to include creative individuals from the sciences as well as the arts. This inclusion has brought her George Lucas, mathematician William Thurston, and six Nobel laureates from the sciences, in addition to novelist Jane Smiley and a group of young creative achievers. Despite their diverse fields, all these individuals show similar brain processes, revealed in the scans, that differ from the workings of control group members’ brains.

Wearing her psychiatrist’s hat, Andreasen talks with her subjects (creatives and controls) about their growing up, family life, relationships, and creative activities. From these interviews, she’s learned that “Creative people work much harder than the average person—and usually that’s because they love their work.” She’s studied 26 people so far—13 creative geniuses and 13 controls—and validated the link between mental illness and creativity as well as the evidence that creativity tends to run in families, though it may not confine itself to a single field.

Other traits of the creatives include a personality style that leads them to take risks, confront rejection, and persist. Of course, she says, “Persisting in the face of doubt or rejection, for artists or for scientists, can be a lonely path,” and may in itself contribute to mental illness. Many creative people are autididacts—they love to teach themselves—and polymaths, with a wide variety of diverse interests. This holds true despite out education system’s persistent separation of the arts and the sciences. “If we wish to nurture creative students,” Andreasen says, “this may be a serious error.”

She closes by referring to the case of John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician who has schizophrenia (and who lives around the corner from me), profiled in the book and movie A Beautiful Mind. “Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.”

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Put the Cat Out

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Siamese cat, Grant

Shut out again. (photo: author)

Steven King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft focuses on how he became a writer and the process of becoming and many of his observations about being a writer ring true to me. Like most people who dispense advice to the novice, he emphasizes the virtue of “ass-in-the-chair”—writing every day, which is a groove serious writers finally work their way into, despite the distractions of kids, jobs, and grocery-shopping. Right now, for example, my lawn is shaggy as a pony’s winter coat.

He says if he doesn’t write daily, “the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people . . . the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade.” Like many other writers, I hit the keyboard early in the morning, and the excitement King talks about is what gets me out of bed at five to grab a cup of coffee and dive into the work.

He also insists that you shut the office door, “your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business.” Certainly, I shut mine, mostly to keep out Grant, a Siamese cat who thinks sitting in my lap and watching the cursor move across the screen has limited entertainment value and is something to complain about. (I created a monster when I played YouTube cat videos for him.) Eliminate distractions—phones, beeping email alerts, insistent cats—anything that takes you away from the page.

King tries to write 10 pages a day—about 2000 words. That’s his goal, and he thinks every writer should have one, every day. I’m a fan of getting a draft on paper, powering through and getting the story down and fixing all the inevitable issues and lapses and problems in rewrite. After that, I revise, a chapter a day.

Room, door (and the determination to shut it), goal. Adhering to these basics, he believes, makes writing easier over time. The more you do it, the easier it gets. “Don’t wait for the muse to come,” he says, and it’s astonishing how many would-be writers talk to me about their lack of or need for “inspiration,” as if it sprinkles down from the clouds rather than up from the mind’s carefully plowed field. King says, “Your job is make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day.”

Everyone who aspires to write has likely read a lot, too. We’ve listened to lots of TV and movie scripts. Lots of other people’s words, many not very good, have passed into our brains, and our subconscious is filled with the stuff. It’s in there. It wants out. When a phrase or scene comes too easily, almost unconsciously, I’ve learned there’s a problem. It’s canned, it’s derivative, it’s not a genuine product.

So now King gets to the hard part. You have to tell the truth. Your story’s truth. The writer cannot just be a pass-through for others’ words, ideas, conversations. “The job of fiction,” he says, “is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies.” Even when we love the characters in a book and we really, really don’t want it to end, if the book has told the truth, we can feel satisfied when we turn that last page. If not, a squeaky voice starts up somewhere in our brain, Madeline’s Miss Clavel saying, “Something is not right.” As stunning as most of Gone Girl was—a web of lies if ever there was one—I thought the ending fell unexpectedly flat, and King has put his finger on the reason. In working out her denouement, author Gillian Flynn somehow strayed from the truth of her characters.

By contrast, truth-telling pervades the Pinckney Benedict stories I reviewed this week (on the home page for now; eventually the review will end up in “Reading . . .”). One of the best quotes describing the struggle to find the truth nugget is a favorite of my writing coach, Lauren Davis, and it’s from sports columnist Red Smith, who once said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

While that’s true, King also says that even the worst three hours he ever spent writing “were still pretty damned good.”

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Mapping the Literary Irish

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Ireland

(photo: wikimedia)

A clever new infographic from BuyBooks appeals to both the literary impulse and the traveler’s grail—both central to this website—and maps a notable clutch of Irish literary icons. It’s tough to quarrel with any list of Emerald Isle literary figures that includes Cecil Day-Lewis, father of the incomparable Daniel, but where are G. B. Shaw (“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance”) and Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde? I waited in vain to find Beckett on the list and progenitor of today’s vampire obsession, Bram Stoker.

More currently, the McCorts, Malachy and Frank? Man Booker winner Roddy Doyle? Where’s Thomas Flanagan and The Year of the French—“a masterwork of historical fiction,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer? (Despite its merits, this book did not survive a run through the washing machine that I cannot explain.) For more modern history, where’s Adrian McKinty and his cop’s dilemmas during the Maze prison hunger strikes? Where, or where, is Gerry Conlon?

Wandering a bit into the peat fields here, for riveting Netflix picks, the movie based on Conlon’s book, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson, In the Name of the Father (trailer), is super, as is the biopic, Michael Collins (trailer), with Liam Neeson and an amazing cast—Stephen Rea, Alan Rickman, et al. My weakness for political thrillers is showing.

Possibly Ireland is too full of literary masters to include them all on one map, but BuyBooks could have been braver and more contemporary in its picks. Which favorite authors/books of yours were left out? And here’s a more complete map.

****On Writing

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typewriter, writing

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

By Stephen King – Too snooty to read Stephen King for a long time, I was finally won over when a friend wouldn’t stop talking about 11-22-63, the audio version of which mesmerized me. Now I’ve taken the advice of a writing buddy and read this volume. It’s less a handbook of “how to” write a book—that is, put words on the page—and more “how to be” a writer, the habits of mind and body that are needed. The first section is a short autobiography, exploring the path King took to becoming a writer and some of the experiences that shaped his particular sensibility.

The second section discusses the writer’s toolbox (more on that another time), and a third section discusses the terrible 1999 accident that nearly killed him, when a van struck him as he took his daily four-mile walk. That section is called “On Living.” At the time of the accident, this book was only about half-finished, and the accident and long healing process naturally caused him to reconsider what he had written and what he meant by it. In the end, he says, the best part of the book, perhaps, “is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.” It’s a good read, and creative people—writers, especially—will, I think, find it engaging and helpful in many ways.

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