Tag: writing
Umberto Eco on “How I Write”
This year, Emory University’s Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature are delivered by Umberto Eco. I didn’t know much about him before, but he kind of blew my mind. This afternoon I stopped by to hear him talk about “How I Write”. I was *really* impressed with how much he plans out his worlds beforehand, even making maps, blueprints, and sketches of his characters. I would love to see some of his doodles. These are mine:
Here are some notes deciphered from my handwriting:
- He describes himself at age 76 as “a young and promising novelist”—he’s only been doing novels for 30 years or so.
- When he was a kid, he would start with an image. He drew his stories from end to end, only later going back to put the text in juvenile block letters.
- “At 16 I started to write poems like everybody else.”
- Most of his fictional works start with an image: “I wanted to poison a monk in his study,” a pendulum, a trumpet, Constantinople in flames.
- When he first does research he starts with collecting documents, travel, drawing maps, and even sketching the faces of his characters. When doing the travel research, he walks around with a recorder to describe everything he sees, hears, smells, street names, etc.
- “The structure of the world is fundamental to the writing.” Though the writer may choose to withhold information about the fictional world and bamboozle the reader, “You have to take account of the reaction and collaboration of the reader.”
- One *very* cool anecdote: a movie director loved the dialogue Eco wrote in The Name of the Rose, saying that it was the perfect length. Eco knew it was the perfect length because he had mapped out the monastery so completely that he knew the length of time it would take his characters to walk from one place to another. (!!!)
- Connected with this idea of world-building is the ancient practice of ecphrasis. Ecphrasis is the genre of “complete description”—retelling another work so vividly that the audience can know it without directly experiencing it. Eco says it’s a good tool for writers because it “gives us more ideas than actually witnessing the thing itself.”
- Some “postmodern” characteristics of his writing: intertextual irony (e.g. quoting real-life works in works of fiction), metanarrative (commentary on the tale in progress) and double-coding (speaking to multiple audiences, like a Pixar movie). It “establishes a smart complicity with some readers, and also provokes other readers to read twice.”
- These postmodern intricacies “are not an aristocratic tic, but a way of respecting the brightness and curiosity of the audience.”
And some aphorisms:
- “Constraints are fundamental to any artistic endeavor.”
- “For novels, stick to the subject, and the words will follow. For poetry, stick to the words, and the subject will follow.”
- He has an interesting take on making engaging academic work: “Literary research must be narrated. Scientific papers should be written like a whodunit.” (Scott McCloud made a parallel comment when I heard him a couple weeks ago. His statement was about the shared challenge of teaching and writing non-fiction: “After you explain it, is it still interesting?”)
The event was followed by a reception with wine and cookies (and some other things, but I had my priorities).
George Carlin’s last interview is really good. He talks about language, writing, drugs, religion, life, the whole deal.
Pocket Poem
If this comes creased and creased again and soiledas if I’d opened it a thousand times
to see if what I’d written here was right,
it’s all because I looked too long for you
to put in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me
That’s from Ted Kooser‘s book Valentines, which I flipped through the other day. The book collects the annual poems he’s been sending out for the past 20-odd years. Kooser read some of the valentines on NPR earlier this year. Most are a bit too ponderous for my taste but there’s some good images and quirky personification in some of them.
Is it harder to write a sonnet than a great hip-hop verse?
The literal rules for writing sonnets, tankas, haikus etc. aren’t particularly hard to follow. It’s following the rules and actually saying something that’s hard. You can write a sonnet that makes no sense, and has no real power in the words. Likewise, you could write a rhyme that’s technically on beat and say nothing at all.
Nice sample at the end. Puff is much, much worse than Biggie.
Something to shoot for:
What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services:
1. Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
3. Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
4. Give a ÄúreadingÄù of a work which increases my understanding of it.
5. Throw light upon the process of artistic Äúmaking.Äù
6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.
This reminds me of Auden’s Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict that was featured at Harper’s recently, wherein he dissects whodunits and argues for why they’re escape and not art… “The most curious fact about the detective story is that it makes its greatest appeal precisely to those classes of people who are most immune to other forms of daydream literature.”
Hamlet, the Facebook News Feed Edition. My favorite part: “Hamlet became a fan of daggers.” [via funkaoshi]
George Orwell has a blog, or will starting on August 9, when each entry of the Orwell diaries will be put online 70 years later to the day. I think this will be awesome. [via maud newton]
Robert Frost on creative growth
I’ve been flipping through The Collected Prose of Robert Frost and came across this marvelous bit:
No one given to looking under-ground in spring can have failed to notice how a bean starts its growth from the seed. Now the manner of a poet’s germination is less like that of a bean in the ground than of a waterspout at sea. He has to begin as a cloud of all the other poets he ever read. That can’t be helped. And first the cloud reaches down toward the water from above and then the water reaches up toward the cloud from below and finally cloud and water join together to roll as one pillar between heaven and earth. The base of water he picks up from below is of course all the life he ever lived outside of books.
Frost speaks elsewhere of “the person who writes out of the eddy in his mind.” Great images.
As an aside, not only is this a really great metaphor, but it also strikes me as a killer opening paragraph. It starts with a kind of odd idea, but not too uncomfortable (I mean, I know what a bean is, but I haven’t looked at one in the ground in decades). Then the contrast of beans with what he really wants to talk about, poets. And waterspouts. What? Then a couple short prep sentences. Then the rolling polysyndetonic waterspout of a sentence to flesh out the metaphor and to be a sort of pillar in itself connecting the odd ideas at the opening with real-world experience down at the bottom of the paragraph. The language here mirrors the concepts in a very cool way.
Classical and pop reviews 2, Greg Sandow’s follow-up to his previous post on the topic:
Certainly we’re not immersed in classical music because we want to check whether the latest pianist to come along really knows what to do with Beethoven — whether her tempo in the slow movement of some sonata really is correct or not. And probably we’re not so deeply tied to this art because some work can be called “magnificent,” or because we identify a particular emotion inside some classical piece. We can go to the movies and get emotional. I think we’d say that the rewards we get from classical music go pretty deep. But I’m not sure we could say that reviews of classical concerts normally convey how deep and powerful those rewards can be. Whereas pop reviews pretty accurately convey what we get from pop, which among other things might mean — I think it does mean this, actually — that pop reviewing is easier. My own experience, writing both pop and classical reviews, is that I’ve had to work much harder to say what’s powerful in classical music.
Selections from a few personal ads in the New York Review of Books.
How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, by Philip K. Dick:
The strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title “science fiction” is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star system, as depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of that film never intended for us to believe it. Or did they?
And, more important, if they did intend to state this, is it actually true? That is the issue: not, Does the author or producer believe it, butÄîIs it true? Because, quite by accident, in the pursuit of a good yarn, a science fiction author or producer or scriptwriter might stumble onto the truth… and only later on realize it.
Men Made Out of Words
What should we be without the sexual myth,The human revery or poem of death?
Castratos of moon-mash—Life consists
Of propositions about life. The humanRevery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.
The New Kings of Nonfiction (review: 3/5)
Ira Glass curated this collection of nonfiction. The New Kings of Nonfiction is a selection of favorites that he’s had filed away for a while, articles that he keeps passing along to others. The focus is on good storytelling found in original reporting:
I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For one thing it would’ve made titling this collection a lot easier. Sometimes people use the phrase “literary nonfictioni” for work like this, but I’m a snob when it comes to that phrase. I think it’s for losers. It’s pretentious, for one thing, and it’s a bore. Which is to say, it’s exactly the opposite of the writing it’s trying to describe. Calling a piece of writing “literary nonfiction” is like daring you to read it.
Not only is it a pretty good collection, but almost all of them are available online, in their entirety. Someone is listening to my prayers. My comments on each, roughly listed from Must Read to Don’t Bother…
“Losing the War” is easily my favorite work in the book (made obvious by the dog-ears). And I tend to have severe World War II nausea, so I was surprised to like it so much. Lee Sandlin explores the “collective anxiety attack” of the war, the impressions of the war that Americans got through the weak, cheerful reporting from the frontlines, and how we remember and how we forget. Highly recommended.
In one of the better tales in the book, Michael Lewis wrote about “Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities.” Lebed, at 15 years old, was called out by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock market manipulation and doesn’t seem very much phased by it. Fun story.
Jack Hitt‘s “Toxic Dreams: A California Town Finds Meaning in an Acid Pit” is another good one that covers ballooning litigation over the Stringfellow Acid Pit, a local dumping ground made to spur business. Naturally, with a name like that, you’re going to end up with a lawsuit. This one has 4,000 plaintiffs and doesn’t look to end anytime soon. Recommended.
Susan Orlean profiles a ten-year-old in “The American Man, Age Ten.” Interesting voice in this one.
Michael Pollan bought a cow and writes about its journey from birth to beef in “Power Steer.” And he touches on how our food chain all interconnects and the twin scourges of oil and cheap corn.
Though I’m not much for card games, I did like James McManus‘ story in “Fortune’s Smile.” McManus learns the ins and outs of no-limit hold’em and enters the World Series of Poker, and walks out with $250,000. A lot of the lingo flew over my head, but the spirit is right and the story is good.
“Tales of the Tyrant” is Mark Bowden‘s profile of Saddam Hussein. The scale of the vanity and self-delusion are incredible. It makes the guy a lot more human and a lot more disgusting. Pretty good read.
“Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy” is Chuck Klosterman‘s profile of Val Kilmer. I’d recommend it, keeping in mind what Ira Glass says about Klosterman in the introduction: When Klosterman does reporting, the superstructure of ideas and the aggressiveness with which he states those ideas are a big part of what makes the stories stand out.”
“Shapinsky’s Karma” [excerpt] by Lawrence Weschler follows an improbably cheerful, persistent Indian man who has found his calling in promoting the artwork of Harold Shapinksy, an undiscovered peer of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others, who is in his 80s at the time.
Bill Buford reports on hanging out with a bunch of rowdy Manchester United loyalists in “Among the Thugs.” It takes a while to warm up, but the later bits about group psychology and inevitable soccer mob violence are good (and downright scary).
“Host,” by David Foster Wallace, is the longest in the book (surprise!). It’s a profile of a conservative radio personality in California. I couldn’t get much into it, but I do like this bit from one of the many sidebars:
It’s hard to understand Fox News tags like “Fair and Balanced,” “No-Spin Zone,” and “We Report, You Decide” as anything but dark jokes, ones that delight the channel’s conservative audience precisely because their claims to objectivity so totally enrage liberals, whose own literal interpretation of the tag lines makes the left seems dim, humorless, and stodgy.
Dan Savage‘s “My Republican Journey” is about being homosexual and infiltrating a local Republican group. Eh.
“Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg” is Malcolm Gladwell’s exploration of one woman’s social network. Not recommended.
“The Hostess Diaries: My Year at a Hot Spot” by Coco Henson Scales is okay, but feels out of place here and doesn’t measure up to the other writing in the book.
“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
George Orwell’s essay Poetry and the Microphone talks about broadcasting verse over the radio, but I think there are some internet parallels here, another way to cross distances. People who are interested can find and enjoy just as easily as those who aren’t interested can move along. That combination of distance and intimacy affects how you perceive your own work:
It is reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone who is bored can promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably sympathetic, the audience has no power over you. It is just here that a broadcast differs from a speech or a lecture. On the platform, as anyone used to public speaking knows, it is almost impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is always obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what they will not, and in practice you are almost compelled to speak for the benefit of what you estimate as the stupidest person present, and also to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo known as ÄúpersonalityÄù. If you donÄôt do so, the result is always an atmosphere of frigid embarrassment. That grisly thing, a Äúpoetry readingÄù, is what it is because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who canÄôt remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob…
The poet feels that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as sound rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already exists at the poetÄôs end of the ether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.
Writers really do die young, especially poets, based on research in The Cost of the Muse [$, or use your library’s access]. [via maud newton]
I tracked down John Haines’ poem, Return to Richardson, Spring 1981, which I first came across in the recent profile of composer John Luther Adams.
Mark Larson 