Grant Faulkner

The Ways Poetry Can Improve Your Prose

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A few years ago, while plodding through a revision of my novel (revisions require the writer’s equivalent of heavy-duty hiking boots), I got bored by my writing. It was too literal, too realistic, too earnest, and too flat.

Most writers are all too familiar with this feeling after a red-eyed reading of a draft. I needed a way to literally jar my narrative sensibility. I needed jazz, punk rock, Jackson Pollock, Merce Cunningham, something.

Around this time, I read a quote by Emily Dickinson that remains among my favorite writing advice: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

I started reading poetry avidly and discovered that by focusing on the exquisite “slant” poetry offers, the “truth” I was trying to capture became more piquant, surprising, nuanced, playful, and meaningful to me.

So, in honor of National Poetry Month and Poem In Your Pocket Day, here are my 10 reasons prose writers should read—and hopefully write—poetry.

Mood: Many poems are almost incantations or prayers in the way they use techniques such as repetition and alliteration to establish atmosphere. Of the fiction writers who best use such techniques, I think most immediately of William Faulkner (who started out as a poet, and no, there’s no relation).

Mystery: In general, poetry is more focused on nuance, on the elusive gaps of life rather than on the objective connections that much prose is dedicated to. It’s easy for a prose writer to write toward linkages instead of writing toward the interludes where a different kind of tension resides.

Personification: Poetry gives life to inanimate objects in a way that fiction all too often doesn’t. Animating objects is a good exercise for any writer, but I think the applications for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism are endless.

Detail: Poets delight in specificity—in fact, you might say some poems’ narrative tension is formed around the drama of minutiae, forcing the reader to parse phrases as if reading with a microscope. As a writer who lacks Nabokov’s or Updike’s obsession with detail, poetry helps me pause and notice.

Sensory engagement: Poems are so often awash in sensory details, and details captured by all five senses, not just sight, which so many writers (including me!) can privilege. I cherish a good dose of synesthesia.

Brevity: Poetry is a craft of compression. Poems don’t have many pages to make a point, so their narratives tend to move through fragments rather than exposition. I love reading Kay Ryan’s miniatures or Basho’s haikus. Brevity inspires suspense.

Intensity: I think poems usually hit higher pitches than most prose, so fiction writers can benefit by studying how such intensity is created. I think of Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath. What words, line breaks, rhythms, etc., produced a poem’s steeped moment? How can such intensity be captured in prose?

Exploration: I’ve never heard of a poet who uses an outline. I imagine poets to be more like jazz musicians, who wend their way through riffs to create, taking risks in their word choice and line breaks, and conceiving in the moment (like many Wrimos!). Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara write as if following their pen on a playful romp.

The art of play: Poetry, especially free verse, can be more playful than prose, which finds itself hemmed in by paragraphs and sentence structure. If you want outright surreal wackiness—to the point that every word in a poem surprises—check out Dean Young’s Elegy on a Toy Piano (the title tells it all).

Attention to language: It’s a cliché to say that poets paint with words, but they do. Poets strive to write against cliché—scrutinizing and challenging each word—and perhaps even creating new words, a la E. E. Cummings.

Writing Residencies: A Chance to Write in One’s Best Hours

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One of the worst things about aging is the inevitable accumulation of responsibilities. That’s particularly bad for a writer, who’s inclined to not want any responsibilities at all, other than drifting through the vagaries of a tale that must be told.

It’s in such a state that I live. I used to structure my life so that I wrote in my best hours, but now I tend to write in my worst hours, after the kids have gone to bed, after I’ve paid bills, after a couple of glasses of wine, when most sane people are reclining on a couch and watching Downton Abbey.

I try to crowd in my writing, but life tends to crowd out the imagination with muscular, pugnacious insistence. Which is why I started to dream about going to a writers residency in order to truly dream.

I just published an article in the March/April 2012 issue of Poets & Writers to guide writers seeking the idylls of simple peace and quiet: Applying to a Writers Residency: An Expert Breakdown of the Requirements.

I’m too busy to attend a residency this year, but I have hopes for next year. At least now I know the in’s and out’s of it all.

Laura Albert and JT LeRoy: Mask as Muse

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When I came across the Greek maxim “Know thyself” in my college freshman humanities class, I thought it was the key to life.

Then a couple of years later, I decided to become a fiction writer and discovered Hemingway’s dictum to “write what you know.”

Such a thing seemed simple, but it took me another 20 years or so to realize just how difficult it is to “know thyself” or “write what you know”—we’re elusive creatures by design, always changing, seeking, and fleeing.  Writing what you know becomes something like a pilgrimage, a chase scene, a dreamscape, a meditation, and a scientific experiment all in one.

In fact, according to the Suda, a 10th Century encyclopedia of Greek Knowledge, “Know thyself” has contradictory meanings. On one hand, the proverb is applied to those whose boasts exceed what they are, but on the other, it is a warning to pay no attention to the opinion of the multitudes.

I’m traipsing through such thoughts because I’ve been revisiting that crazy, fantastic, compelling “hoax” of JT LeRoy since Laura Albert (aka JT) contacted me when she stumbled on a blog piece (Finally, the Great American Novel) I wrote when the whole scandal went down five years ago.

In case you missed it, JT LeRoy was a young truck-stop prostitute who had escaped rural West Virginia for the life of a homeless San Francisco drug addict. Laura Albert and her boyfriend Geoffrey Knoop rescued JT and helped him get treatment by a psychologist. Then, with the help of literary luminaries such as Mary Gaitskill and Dennis Cooper and others, JT wrote critically acclaimed works of fiction noted for their stark portrayal of child prostitution and drug use.

Shy, wounded, reclusive, yet riveting, JT attracted a swirling flock of celebrities like Winona Ryder and Courtney Love—except it turned out that JT was Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey Knoop’s half sister, who wore a wig, sunglasses, and a hat in “his” few public appearances. And Laura Albert penned all of JT’s books.

Looking at the photos again, it wasn’t as if JT was disguised with any CIA type of sophistication. Yet people believed that JT was JT, perhaps against their better judgment, for reasons that might tell a larger story (what did they see in JT that they needed to see?).

When New York Magazine and The New York Times uncovered the true story of JT LeRoy, the story turned into a scathing public drama that was the literary world’s equivalent of the press chasing O.J. as he tried to escape in his SUV (except without any blood), with many of JT’s one-time supporters caterwauling, “Shame, shame!” in outrage.

I don’t truly know Laura Albert, but from our recent correspondence I like her as a risk taker who is genuinely trying to represent a “truth” in the world—the task every serious writer takes on. She pursues such a truth more in the vein of Werner Herzog’s notion of “ecstatic truth”—a truth that is the enemy of factual truth in its aim of capturing something more sublime. Herzog says that “to acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.” And much of our narrow-minded, prudish literary establishment.

I’m not so concerned about the rich and powerful being scammed for what is the equivalent of loose change to them, or whether they had their feelings hurt. What interests me is the nature of writing with such a mask on, and I appreciate the moxie it took to put on such a performance.

“Performance” is the key word here. I like to think of JT’s novels not as just novels, but as part of a larger performance piece—one that put a wispy, vulnerable figure who looked like one part Andy Warhol, one part Michael Jackson, and one part blank slate on stage.

Instead of viewing it all as a swindle, I view it as an act of creation that grew in wild and unexpected ways and became far bigger than could have been imagined. I say “act of creation” because creation seemed to be at the root of it—a rollicking, gleeful, daring, probing, and carnivalesque exploration that in the end reflected our culture in a way that few acts have (I’d trade several National Book Award winners for it all).

And in the end, the fundamental question remains: If you liked the novels when they were written by JT LeRoy, why should you esteem them less when you find out they were written by Laura Albert? Perhaps the work should even grow in stature.

Just read the blurbs for the novel Sarah—blurbs that aren’t your ordinary blurbs churned out for marketing purposes. The authors who blurbed the book—Chuck Palahniuk, Jerry Stahl, Suzanne Vega, etc.—wrote truly imaginative, energetic assessments. They loved JT.

“JT LeRoy’s Sarah is a revelation,” writes Dennis Cooper. “It makes you realize how overused words like original and inspired have become. LeRoy’s writing has a passion, economy, emotional depth, and lyric beauty so authentic that it seems to bypass every shopworn standard we’ve learned to expect of contemporary fiction. This is a novel gripped by an intense, gorgeous, yet strangely refined imagination, and its experience is unforgettable.”

Laura—who might still be one part JT despite the obvious forcefulness of her personality—sent me a video of her recent appearance at The Moth (see below), where she gives her side of the story. It’s interesting to hear how her path to becoming JT wasn’t full of the calculation the press seared into its headlines, but was a mask that opened up a path to a story—a mask created from her own past as an abused child and the tales of others she took in.

Most, if not all, good writers write via a mask of some sort, whether named or unnamed, acknowledged or not. The notion of a single, pure self is antiquated (even the Greeks knew as much in their aphorism). We know ourselves principally through the eyes of others and the ways we seek to be seen. So writers put on guises, code switch, mimic, and dramatize themselves to find the story—and then the reader does the same in seeking to see himself/herself in the text.

Knowledge is a game of storytelling, as akin to fiction as nonfiction. Tell yourself you’re a victim, and you’ll get one storyline and one set of “facts”; tell yourself you’re a hero, and you’ll get another. 

I’ve always been a solitary writer, to my disadvantage. Recently, though, in the act of sharing my writing and writing with readers in mind, I’ve discovered how the context of writing (the cloak of self-mythology you write in, who you want to be seen as) informs and changes the text.

I think of Roland Barthes and his concept of the jouissance, the play, the erotics that occurs between writer and reader. “The text you write must prove to me that it desires me,” he writes in The Pleasure of the Text, claiming that writing is “the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra.”

The writer seeks a reader, seeks ways to reveal and touch, and will put on any guise available to accomplish those ends, like a good lover. There are many different ways to tell a story (“various blisses of language”), which makes the notion of “write what you know” quite complicated. We write through the “anxieties of influence” of past authors, as Harold Bloom has famously noted, but we also write through the masks we create in pursuit of self.

An outlaw’s attitude is essential. “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies,” William Faulkner said.

So I invite you to watch the video below and ask yourself whether Laura Albert is a “fake fiction writer,” as she has been called? Is she an outlaw? A charlatan? Does it matter who JT LeRoy is? Who are you when you write? Who do you want to be?

The Notion of a Reader: Poet Jack Spicer

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After an odd, misguided lifetime of writing mainly in solitude, I’ve started to share my writing with others. Sometimes just for the hell of it, sometimes to have another simply witness my writing, sometimes with the idea of receiving useful, intelligent feedback—and sometimes for all of the above. The whole experience has given rise to thoughts about what it means to think of writing with actual flesh and blood readers in mind.

I’m more and more convinced that great art and great creations in general (yes, I believe in greatness, at least unless it includes me) are in essence collaborations, even if unwittingly. Would there be a Patti Smith without a Robert Mapplethorpe? A Jack Kerouac without an Allen Ginsburg? A Sartre without a de Beauvoir? A Brad Pitt without an Angelina Jolie (kidding)? And vice versa in all cases.

Life at its best is a constant riff, one idea arising from another in a wild, jazzy ping-pong match where you lose track of whose idea is whom’s. That’s art for me, even if you have to shuffle back to your hovel to record it all in mildewed solitude.

Such chemistry is rare, almost divine I’ll venture, whether it’s in the form of a true artistic collaboration or simply the good fortune of finding a trusted reader. But just what makes for a good reader is worth pondering.

Despite going to grad school for creative writing, I’ve had many more bad readers than good ones (hence the years of writing in solitude, I suppose). When John Updike was asked who his ideal reader was, he once spoke of a teenage boy in a library, walking the aisles and pulling books off the shelves, more or less randomly, looking for literary adventure.

But I challenge Updike. His teenage boy is a nice notion, but I don’t want such an abstraction—it seems useless to be so removed from a real person who can receive one’s words.

Likewise, Harold Bloom posits that great writers feel an “anxiety of influence,” that they’re writing in a spirited competition to outdo their literary heroes, dead or alive (yes, a very male competitive notion of creativity).

Again, while I certainly write with influences and voices in my head, they’re more friends than competitors (could this be why I’m not a great writer?).

If love is a desire to reveal and relinquish at the same time that it’s a desire to possess and understand, then a writer wants to find a reader in the same mold. A writer wants to hold another with his or her words, to have a sense that words flow into feelings, that a pause is struck upon another’s gaze of life, if not a transformation.

You might say that the writer’s audience is always a fiction, a projection—as most of life is, certainly—but that’s not to say it doesn’t exist. Again, to pick up the metaphor of the writer as lover, a writer writes for effect, to give pleasure and meaning, to pique interest. It’s only with a loving or inviting recipient in mind that such effects can be achieved.

So what do I want from a reader? I used to think that I wanted a biting critique, a certain regimen for self-improvement, but I don’t think that’s necessarily so valuable. In the end, I want someone who’s fundamentally interested, who I feel wants to read me in that pure energetic and curious way that one person wants to know another.

If I feel that, then I can write to move another. I’ll scrutinize each word, make sure I’ve challenged each scene. I’ll know whether I’ve succeeded just by the enthusiasm of the response, not through any workshop critique (most of which end up as, “I want to know more about….” and more and more and more—sorry to all who’ve received such bad reading from me, which I’ll call “stuck in the workshop rut of response”).

I’ll leave the teenage boys looking for books in libraries and the writerly workshop folks to others. The ideal reader is not someone who adores without question, but one who wants to love and be loved, which as anyone who has loved knows, can be a quite complicated scenario. I’d expect nothing less than complexity from any reader. I’d never want a lover who didn’t challenge, scrutinize, dare, and sometimes ignore.

So reader as friend, lover, source of generosity, curiosity, yet intelligent and critical and biting if necessary, or something along those lines. But a real person.

This is all a lead-in to a piece the Bay Area poet Jack Spicer wrote on audience—in the form of a letter to Lorca (an essay on audience with a dead poet in mind, you might say—but an audience nevertheless).

Dear Lorca,

When you had finished a poem what did it want you to do with it? Was it happy enough to merely exist or did it demand imperiously that you share it with somebody like the beauty of a beautiful person forces him to search the world for someone that can declare that beauty? And where did your poems find people?

Some poems are easily laid. They will give themselves to anybody and anybody physically capable can receive them. They may be beautiful (we have both written some that were) but they are meretricious. From the moment of their conception they inform us in a dulcet voice that, thank you, they can take care of themselves. I swear that if one of them were hidden beneath my carpet, it would shout out and seduce somebody. The quiet poems are what I worry about—the ones that must be seduced. They could travel about with me for years and no one would notice them. And yet, properly wed, they are more beautiful than their whorish cousins.

But I am speaking of the first night, when I leave my apartment almost breathless, searching for someone to show the poem to. Often now there is no one. My fellow poets (those I showed poetry to ten years ago) are as little interested in my poetry as I am in theirs. We both compare the poems shown (unfavorably, of course) with the poems we were writing ten years ago when we could learn from each other. We are polite but it is as if we were trading snapshots of our children—old acquaintances who disapprove of each other’s wives. Or were you more generous, Garcia Lorca?

There are the young, of course. I have been reduced to them (or my poems have) lately. The advantage in them is that they haven’t yet decided what kind of poetry they are going to write tomorrow and are always looking for some device of yours to use. Yours, that’s the trouble. Yours and not the poem’s. They read the poem once to catch the marks of your style and then again, if they are at all pretty, to see if there is any reference to them in the poem. That’s all. I know. I used to do it myself.

When you are in love there is no real problem. The person you love is always interested because he knows that the poems are always about him. If only because each poem will someday be said to belong to the Miss X or Mr. Y period of the poet’s life. I may not be a better poet when I am in love, but I am a far less frustrated one. My poems have an audience.

Finally there are friends. There have only been two of them in my life who could read my poems and one of that two really prefers to put them in print so he can see them better. The other is far away.

All this is to explain why I dedicate each of my poems to someone.

Love,
Jack.

Reading as Pausing: James Salter

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One exercise I’m doing in order to pause is to identify passages I like and write them down. It’s a good thing to do–especially by hand–in order to pay attention to each word and consider the author’s approach.

Here’s a selection from James Salter’s story Dusk, which I’m rereading after discovering the book and Salter in 1988.

“The small neon sign was very bright in the greyness, there was the cemetery across the street and her own car, a foreign one, kept very clean, parked near the door, facing in the wrong direction. She always did that. She was a woman who lived a certain life. She knew how to give dinner parties, take care of dogs, enter restaurants. She had her way of answering invitations, of dressing, of being herself. Incomparable habits, you might call them. She was a woman who had read books, played golf, gone to weddings, whose legs were good, who had weathered storms, a fine woman whom no one now wanted.”

This passage is a typical way that Salter characterizes people–in one simple paragraph at the beginning of a story or novel–and it includes nearly everything I like about Salter’s way of writing. It’s a list of sorts, and you feel like you’re getting the particulars of a person’s life, except it’s actually without precise details. It’s more about the flow, the accents of a person’s life, as if he’s skating over life’s essences. He seems to be saying that the flow is what matters more than the specifics to understand who a person is.

She knows how to give dinner parties, enter restaurants–what mystery those phrases have. I have to stop and imagine a person who knows how to enter a restaurant. Is she someone who knows how to command attention when she enters a room, or just someone acquainted with the finer things and at ease with herself, or both? She’s confident, refined, knows beauty, in herself and probably in others. Incomparable habits. We know that she’s unique, perhaps even special, but other than knowing that she parks her car in the wrong direction, Salter won’t provide specifics.

Despite the lack of anything that would qualify as a fine detail in our era of fulsome and microscopic writerly details (many contemporary writers would end up laboriously telling how she gives a dog a bath to show just how she knew how to take care of dogs, a “fetishization of detail,” as James Wood calls it), each phrase is evocative, surprising. I see the arc of her life, this tragic patrician woman who’s been abandoned to a memory and knowledge of beauty more than the practice of beauty.

I still find few men who can write about women, but Salter is among the few, I think because he adores them so much, is obsessed by the ways they do things (like Fitzgerald in this regard). As a result, he’s able to capture something deeper and more fundamental with many of his female characters.

Interestingly enough, I read the story imagining this woman in her 60s or so, only to find out that she’s 46 in the end. I wonder if that was intentional on his part–to throw the last bits of her “youth” into the stark relief of an older age, place her there prematurely. I don’t think Salter is a feminist in this regard. He just understands the tragedy of how age can treat a woman unfairly, leave her at loose ends and alone in the dusk of her life.

As with many writers who have influenced me, I’ve tried to imitate Salter and failed. He writes with a simple elegance, sensual and erotic even when he’s not writing about sex, that’s difficult to match. This excerpt is not an easy thing to write.

For more, read James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime and James Salter: Burning the Days. For more of my diatribes on the “fetishization of detail,” read Writerliness gone mad, the fetishization of detail.

Writerliness Gone Mad, the Fetishization of Detail

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I don’t like to bash writers (oh, there are plenty others who deserve bashing, but not poor writers making such noble, unheralded attempts to articulate this crazy world).

That said (sorry), one of my peeves with contemporary fiction (especially that of the critically esteemed ilk) is its tendency to use overly detailed description, description further crippled by forced lyricism, to assert what I call “writerliness”–a way of writing that seems akin to conversational bragging, the sort of unsubtle one upmanship that guarantees annoyance rather than accolades–and works against simple connection (which is what stories of any sort are for, right?).

Take this first paragraph from American Idol by Robert Baird, featured in the current edition of Narrative Magazine.

“On the far side of the footbridge, the sun threw stretched shadows across the mudflats. Karen lowered her backpack and sat down on the damp planks to wait for the bus back to Rio Canto. The breeze at her back fluttered the tongue of the handkerchief that held down her hair. She dropped her head, closed her eyes, and let her legs swing gently from the knees. As the blood worked its way back into her calves and heels she felt the stirrings of a valedictory ache. When she opened her eyes again they fell to a gray mutt who nosed among the pilings at her feet. She watched him chew several rotten banana peels down to the fibers before his attention turned to the sodden waste washed up under the bridgehead.”

I’m fine with the sun throwing shadows, but the dribblings of excessive words begin with the breeze fluttering the tongue of the handkerchief that held down her hair (the tongue?). It culminates in the blood working its way back into her calves and heels and something called “the stirrings of a valedictory ache,” which I assume happens in her capillaries.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I rarely feel my blood working its way through my calves. Perhaps I’m sensorily deprived.

The first of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Tricks for Good Writing is to never open a book with the weather. I think Baird’s first paragraph–and so many others–is akin to opening a book with the weather. Over description, the assertion of writerliness, doesn’t draw one into a story but toward the author and his or her dubious skills with high falutin’ language.

It reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s warning about vocabulary. As a writer, be careful of the vocabulary you learn because you’ll end up using all of the words you know, and those words might ironically do the story a disservice.

It’s what James Wood calls the “fetishization of detail” in How Fiction Works. “Nabokov and Updike at times freeze detail into a cult of itself. Aestheticism is the great risk here, and also an exaggeration of the noticing eye (There is so much detail in life that is not purely visual),” Wood writes.

I hope that contemporary fiction will start to fetishize dialogue, existential dilemmas, playfulness, anomalies, something else. I’d blame this tendency on MFA writing programs, but that just seems too easy.

Writing Tip No. 647: Never Try to Please the Boss

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I guess one can consult the Greek oracle on this one. Know thyself. Sounds easy, but most of us spend a lifetime reaching and dodging and jumping through hoops and doing deep breath exercises and throwing the occasional punch (if not tantrum) in pursuit of such solid ground.

Becoming a good writer is akin to becoming a good human being in so many ways, after all. So here’s a good quote from Chuck Palahnuik, he of The Fight Club (because it’s all a fight).

As a writer, I felt compelled to toe the publishing line until I realized I was flushing away all my free time. I was starting to really hate writing. It looked like just another f—ing job where I was trying to please some boss. There had to be a way for writing to be fun.

So he wrote The Fight Club.

It sounds so simple, huh? Be playful. Know thyself. Don’t answer to anyone. Write like a kid, a madman, a dancer, a clown. Search for meaning on your own terms.

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing Moby Dick, Waiting for Godot, or Jack and Jill. It’s the same tip. Never try to please the boss. Kick the boss out of the house.

Put up your dukes.

Click here to find out more!

Writing tips. And more writing tips…

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A while back I wrote a post about Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. I also wrote a piece on How Not to Write About Sex.

For those still looking for more rules (how to and how not to), here are some more splendid writing tips from the Guardian from the likes of Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Anne Enright and more–because, seriously, who can get enough rules for writing?

Especially if one is avoiding writing by studying the rules for writing–and neglecting the first rule: just do it (apologies for the Nike tie-in).

Margaret Atwood on plot

Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

Anne Enright on persistence

The first 12 years are the worst.

Richard Ford on the writing life

Don’t have children.

Jonathan Franzen on the Web

It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Zadie Smith on revision

When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

Jeannette Winterson on ambition

Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.

Neil Gaman on readers’ critiques

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

These aren’t the best excerpts. In fact, Anne Enright’s are worth executing in their entirety. “Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.”

And, as a final tip, be assured that you’ll be able to return to this blog for more wrting tips. And even more tips after those.

Writing tip no. 3,046: Sam Shepherd and voices and cowboy mouths

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Voice. How to hear it, how to speak it, how to write it?

Some are lucky in that voice or voices seem to possess them in such an overwhelming (yet perhaps unforgiving) way. Think Rimbaud, Kerouac, Virginia Wolf, William Faulkner, Malcolm Lowry—all of the mad caps of literature.

But whether voice possessed them like a poltergeist or not, they had to honor the voice, listen to it, give it form. The voice didn’t just speak itself.

This is all to say that I don’t think writers should be too mystical about voice. I don’t think Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses” is the path, just a path. One might seize upon voice through prayer, or, I don’t know, jogging, crocheting, sipping tea.

Voice is a commitment. To hear it you simply have to privilege listening to it over the din of the other noises in your life.

I’m thinking about voice because I just read the profile of Sam Shepherd in the Feb. 8 New Yorker. It’s always interesting when someone like Shepherd emerges out of nowhere, literally stepping off a bus in New York City in 1963, unread, unschooled, unconnected, and then he writes such a tangle of compelling stories, seemingly without the tortured ambition and wrangling with revisions that others muscle through.

He’s one of those blessed (or cursed) naturals. Because he listened.

“I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced,” he said.

Is there any better definition of the first powerful impulse to be a writer?

“There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer….There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.”

Shepherd’s plays grow out of a certain beat tradition, the words, characters, and structures spawning from his trust in the more intuitive forces of creation.

“You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come,” he says.

Such a raw trust in voice seems absent in most of the stuff I read these days (with the exception of Roberto Bolano). I suppose the easy answer is that we’re living in the age of MFA programs and social networking and email. Authors are well-read and schooled and connected. Our age of writing is very practiced, very intentioned. Stories tend to be neat, not messy. It takes a very brave writer to trust in the voice more than the structure, the sale, the marketing, etc.

I don’t know if that’s right or wrong.

The article includes so many of Shepherds voices as he chronicles “the whacked out corridors of broken-off America.”

People want a street angel. They want a saint with a cowboy mouth.”

Shepherd also provides a nice angle on characterization: “I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable.”

An author shouldn’t answer for a character’s behavior, in other words, or at least not entirely. These are the people we’re compelled by in real life—the ones that don’t fit into our expectations. The ones who trouble us.

It fits with a quote I remember reading from Shepherd over 20 years ago: “Always write within a contradiction.”

Voices colliding…

How Fiction Works by James Wood

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I’m a sucker for each new, hyped book about how to write fiction. You’d think I was in my twenties, not my forties.

Several years ago it was Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. Then James Wood’s How Fiction Works came along.

Yesterday I wrote about the death of fiction (at least for literary journals). Conversely, the one thing that isn’t dying—and is thriving—is the publishing industry’s slew of how-to’s on the craft of writing fiction (perhaps this also explains the 822 MFA programs in the country).

Which all means that it’s difficult to differentiate yourself, either as how-to writer or a fiction writer. Even if you’re fancy pants James Wood who writes for the New Yorker and is married to the esteemed Claire Messud.

A lot of critics disparaged Wood’s book, but I won’t get into that because I thought it was a decent read. At this point, I don’t read these types of books for the originality of their tips, but for the reminders they include—and for the quotes from other authors, who always say things perfectly (Wood has a great penchant for Henry James).

So here are the eloquent reminders (tips) on the craft of writing fiction that Wood provided for me.

On Description—Or Becoming the Whole of Boredom



As a resister of the contemporary forces of description (or over-description), I appreciate Wood’s take on description in narratives:

“Auden frames the general problem well in his poem ‘The Novelist’: the poet can dash forward like a hussar, he writes, but the novelist must slow down, learn how to be ‘plain and awkward,’ and must ‘become the whole boredom.’”

It’s this notion of the “descriptive pause,” a phrase Wood takes from Gerard Genette, when “fiction slows down to draw our attention to a potentially neglected surface or texture.”

If there’s a modern master of the descriptive pause, I think it’s Ian McEwan—simply because he pauses in perfect balance to delve into the intricacies of the mundane while balancing that with the driving suspense of the overall narrative. Saturday might be the perfect example of this, and his thoughts on suspense certainly inform this approach.

It’s a tricky balance, the descriptive pause. Too much description tips into a “fetishization” of detail—a tendency that can cripple contemporary fiction according to Wood (and me—I even accuse his wife of such criminal acts, just as he takes on Nabokov and Updike).

“Nabokov and Updike at times freeze detail into a cult of itself. Aestheticism is the great risk here, and also an exaggeration of the noticing eye (There is so much detail in life that is not purely visual),” Wood writes.

To take on Nabokov is a risky endeavor for even the most erudite, but Wood bravely proceeds: “…Nabokov wants to tell us how important it is to notice. Nabokov’s fiction is always becoming propaganda on behalf of good noticing, hence on behalf of itself.”

What an efficient take on at least one aspect of Nabokov.

Characterization



Most writers blind spot is the area they think is their strength: characterization. I think it’s because we often think that because we love people, indulge in observing them, have friends and lovers and family, etc., that we inherently bring an assorted cast to life on the page.

Wood quotes Iris Murdoch on this point: “How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other people,’ this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself.”

Writers tend to compensate by providing a lot of God awful character background, answering all of those questions they hear in their writing workshops.

No.

It’s about mystery. Wood quotes from Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis of Shakespeare, how he minimized causal explanations and psychological rationales and “took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principal that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity.”

In other words, E.M. Forrester’s notions of “flat” and “round” characters don’t matter as much as the intrinsic intrigue of a character.

As Virginia Wolf writes after reading Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, “These are characters without any features at all. We go into them as we descend into some enormous cavern.”

There’s much more, of course, but in the end these things come down to an author’s quote. For this one, I’ll conclude with Wood’s selection for his opening quote.

“There is only one recipe—to care a great deal for the cookery.” –Henry James

What more do you need to know?