Grant Faulkner

A Creative Manifesto

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Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” How can we be creative every day? It’s an important question, right?

I know you feel story ideas beckoning you to give them voice. You’ve felt the wondrous, magical rushes of creativity. You know how being creative can change the way you wake up, how you approach your work, how you connect with other people. Approaching the world with a creative mindset is wildly transforming—because suddenly you’re not accepting the world as it’s delivered to you, but living through your vision of life.

That’s the gift I see each November during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I witness thousands of people break down the barricades that prevent them from writing the novel of their dreams and take on the Herculean task of writing a novel of 50,000 words in just 30 days. Writing suddenly leaps up from the cluttered basement of their daily tasks to stand tall on the pedestal of life for an entire month. An audacious goal and deadline serve as creative midwives (and an occasional bullwhip), and writers are propelled by the scintillating rushes of their imagination and the galvanizing force of the huzzahs coming from what can seem like the entire world writing with them.

It seems like such a rollicking novel-writing party is never going to end, but then on December 1, the roars of rapacious novelists start to quiet. Suddenly, people are doing things like shopping for Christmas presents, studying for finals, or cleaning the mayhem their house has become. (Creativity gives the world many things, but it rarely provides a tidy house.)
The thing I hear most often after National Novel Writing Month is “I loved writing during NaNoWriMo, but I have trouble writing the rest of the year.”

It’s challenging to muster such energy each day. The galloping pace of NaNoWriMo is over, and it can be difficult to get up on the proverbial writing horse again. Urgent items on your to-do lists clamor for attention, and tackling those items is important, necessary work—buying groceries, washing dishes, fixing that squeaky door that has bugged you the last three years—so, really, how could you keep doing something so trivial as write? Suddenly, you start to feel creativity falling down on your to-do list. You know the joy it gives you, the life meaning, yet those slithering, pernicious beasts called “the demands of life” loudly yell what you should be doing (and I won’t even mention the siren calls of social media).

No one assigns us to be creative. And, what’s more, society usually doesn’t reward creativity, at least not unless your work makes it to the shelves of a bookstore, the walls of a gallery, or the stage of a theater. You might not think you’re a creative type, but to be human is to be a creative type, so one of the shoulds in your life should be to make sure creativity is not only at the top of your to-do list, but that you put your creativity into action every day. If you put off your dreams today, you create the momentum to put them off all the way to your deathbed.

We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to step out into the world looking for new solutions to old problems, if not new worlds altogether. We need to tap into our vulnerabilities, seek to understand our fears, look at life through others’ eyes, ask questions, and open up our awareness of the wonders of the universe. Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others in this crazy, crazy world. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life. Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.

Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means. “Only art penetrates . . . the seeming realities of this world,” said Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech. Leslie Marmon Silko says that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.” Jacqueline Woodson says writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.”

For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of a story. If you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. If you don’t create, you hurt yourself. The signature of your self is formed by the work you put into your story. Making art tells you who you are. Making art in turn makes you.

So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in your story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning—your meaning. Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.

It’s not easy, though. The efforts of creativity carry angst and psychological obstacles that must be overcome. The important thing is to keep your creative life at the forefront of your thoughts and actions.

We become the things we do, and I can promise you, if you excavate your life to make room for your imagination, if you open up time to keep writing, you won’t just finish your novel, pen the poem in your head, or submit a short story you’ve worked so hard on, you’ll change, because once you realize yourself as a creator, you create worlds on and off the page.

If you hear the whispers of a novel coming from the other room, or ideas for other stories caterwauling for their day in the sun, dive in. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.

Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo

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Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” How can we be creative every day? That’s the question Pep Talks for Writers sets out to answer. And it’s an important one, right? I know you feel story ideas beckoning you to give them voice. You’ve felt the wondrous, magical rushes of creativity. You know how being creative can change the way you wake up, how you approach your work, how you connect with other people. Approaching the world with a creative mindset is wildly transforming—because suddenly you’re not accepting the world as it’s delivered to you, but living through your vision of life.

That’s the gift I see each November during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I witness thousands of people break down the barricades that prevent them from writing the novel of their dreams and take on the Herculean task of writing a novel of 50,000 words in just 30 days. Writing suddenly leaps up from the cluttered basement of their daily tasks to stand tall on the pedestal of life for an entire month. An audacious goal and deadline serve as creative midwives (and an occasional bullwhip), and writers are propelled by the scintillating rushes of their imagination and the galvanizing force of the huzzahs coming from what can seem like the entire world writing with them.

It seems like such a rollicking novel-writing party is never going to end, but then on December 1, the roars of rapacious novelists start to quiet. Suddenly, people are doing things like shopping for Christmas presents, studying for finals, or cleaning the mayhem their house has become. (Creativity gives the world many things, but it rarely provides a tidy house.)

The thing I hear most often after National Novel Writing Month is “I loved writing during NaNoWriMo, but I have trouble writing the rest of the year.”

It’s challenging to muster such energy each day. The galloping pace of NaNoWriMo is over, and it can be difficult to get up on the proverbial writing horse again. Urgent items on your to-do lists clamor for attention, and tackling those items is important, necessary work—buying groceries, washing dishes, fixing that squeaky door that has bugged you the last three years—so, really, how could you keep doing something so trivial as write? Suddenly, you start to feel creativity falling down on your to-do list. You know the joy it gives you, the life meaning, yet those slithering, pernicious beasts called “the demands of life” loudly yell what you should be doing (and I won’t even mention the siren calls of social media).

No one assigns us to be creative. And, what’s more, society usually doesn’t reward creativity, at least not unless your work makes it to the shelves of a bookstore, the walls of a gallery, or the stage of a theater. You might not think you’re a creative type, but to be human is to be a creative type, so one of the shoulds in your life should be to make sure creativity is not only at the top of your to-do list, but that you put your creativity into action every day. If you put off your dreams today, you create the momentum to put them off all the way to your deathbed.

We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to step out into the world looking for new solutions to old problems, if not new worlds altogether. We need to tap into our vulnerabilities, seek to understand our fears, look at life through others’ eyes, ask questions, and open up our awareness of the wonders of the universe.

Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others in this crazy, crazy world. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life. Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.

Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means. “Only art penetrates . . . the seeming realities of this world,” said Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech. Leslie Marmon Silko says that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.” Jacqueline Woodson says writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.”

For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of a story. If you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. If you don’t create, you hurt yourself. The signature of your self is formed by the work you put into your story. Making art tells you who you are. Making art in turn makes you.

So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in your story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning—your meaning. Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.

It’s not easy, though. The efforts of creativity carry angst and psychological obstacles that must be overcome. In this book, we’ll explore 52 different approaches to being creative every day. Each pep talk will include ways for you to explore your creative notions and angles, because life and writing are really ongoing creative experiments. Some pep talks may sing out to where you are now, while others might become relevant later in your writing process. The important thing is to keep your creative life at the forefront of your thoughts and actions.

We become the things we do, and I can promise you, if you excavate your life to make room for your imagination, if you open up time to keep writing, you won’t just finish your novel, pen the poem in your head, or submit a short story you’ve worked so hard on, you’ll change, because once you realize yourself as a creator, you create worlds on and off the page.

If you hear the whispers of a novel coming from the other room, or ideas for other stories caterwauling for their day in the sun, dive in. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.

Buy Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo.

Serialization as Writing Process

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One of the biggest challenges a writer faces is moving forward. Sounds simple, but it’s all too easy to get caught in a condition I’ll call “the endless loop of perfection.”

I have suffered from such a malady. The part of writing I like best is the shaping, shaving, and sculpting involved in revision. I can tweak a sentence or a first chapter endlessly, looping back, and then looping back again, caught in a state of near aesthetic paralysis until I have everything just right. I tend to get so ensnared (and outright dizzy) in the loop that I endanger “the next”—the second chapter, not to mention the rest of the book.

Now there’s a place for such perfectionist tendencies, and I don’t want to belittle them because obsessive fine-tuning is necessary to write subtle subtext, riveting dialogue, and surprising character development. But there’s also a lot to be said for moving a story forward with an urgent, fevered pace, and even showing it to readers chapter-by-chapter. That’s why I’m intrigued by the comeback of serialized fiction.

Comeback? Yes, there was a time when serialized novels actually dominated the publication of novels. A serial is a work that the author writes in progress—sometimes without a preconceived middle and ending—and publishes on a regular schedule, much like TV shows. In the Victorian era, a rise in literacy, technological advances in printing, and improved economics of distribution ushered in the serialization of novels in magazines and newspapers, not dissimilar from the growth of mobile- and tablet-based reading that is sparking serialization today. In the Victorian era, serialization wasn’t just a way to publish, it was the primary mode for novel publication. Think Charles Dickens, who published most of his novels in monthly or weekly installments. Think The Count of Monte Cristo, which included 139 installments. Among American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote and published Uncle Tom’s Cabin over a 40-week period, and Henry James published several novels in serial form, including The Americans, The Turn of the Screw, and The Bostonians, which he then revised for publication as books.

Like most writers, I like to reflect on my writing process and enjoy experimenting with it (hence my love of NaNoWriMo’s “writing with abandon” approach and all of the creative moxie it spawns), so I’m intrigued by how serialization might enhance writers’ creative processes. One benefit is the built-in reader expectation of more, which puts the writer to a test that involves improvisation, derring-go, and stamina. In Victorian days, many writers made writing an extreme sport of sorts. Alexandre Dumas wrote twelve to fourteen hours a day, working on several novels for serialized publication at once. The main point was to keep the story moving forward—to tease out the plot in titillating episodes to meet reader demand. As Ray Bradbury said, “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him [or her]!” Serialization is all about that wild pursuit—the writer existing in a state of creative incipience.

The chase, though, doesn’t occur in a lonely writer’s office, but with readers practically looking over the writer’s shoulder. Because regular installments of stories created a nearly real-time environment of writing and reading, serial authors in the Victorian era heard immediate reader feedback and altered their tales to more deeply engage their audience. Dickens was especially known to keenly listen to reader reactions and then modify his story based on the feedback he heard. Writers and readers became collaborators, in effect.

The Internet obviously provides tools to amplify that sort of writer/reader “discussion” is many ways, making it the kind of give and take an author might hear from a writing group, or even an editor. Such reader input and demand can prod an author onward. Consider Hugh Howey, who on the eve of National Novel Writing Month in 2009, heard so much demand for his 12,000-word story Wool that he decided to add more segments to it over the next months. It became an informal serialized novel, with each installment building an avid discussion among a growing audience of readers clamoring for more. That “more” turned into a self-publishing phenomenon.

With an engaged audience and such immediate feedback, I think serialization can be an amazing tool to overcome writers’ no. 1 enemy: self-doubt. As Erica Jong said, “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged. I had pieces that were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.”

I wonder how many writers get trapped in the finishing instead of the giving of one’s story to the world? Deciding when a work is done will always be a tough decision, but serialization offers a pathway out of “the endless loop of perfection”—and perhaps toward a better novel, sparked by regular deadlines and constant reader feedback that can be used in not only story creation, but revision.

We write to move readers, but the story must move forward to do so.

This is a repost of an essay I wrote for JukePop a while back on serialization and how it can affect one’s writing process.

Elmore Leornard’s writing tips

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I just stumbled across this article of Elmore Leonard’s “10 tricks for good writing.” As fun and interesting as the series of Paris Review author interviews is, I don’t think one needs to go much further than this, at least for starters.

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two
or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

On the other hand, here’s an excerpt from a Paris Review interview with Philip Roth, so the interviews do deepen a list of tips–just a bit:

“Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it—that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. OK, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play comes the crises, turning against your material and hating the book”

I’m sure Elmore Leonard might have a snappy retort for Roth, like, never open a book with weather, which is a sort of literary koan if you think about it.

How to Write? The Definition of an Author

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I’m reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works. It’s a somewhat masochistic task. No fault to James Wood, who, after 25 mildly interesting pages, provides a perfectly adept and writerly dissection of the free indirect style–the kind of analysis I literally ate up in my 20s, when I was trying to figure out how to write.

Except that I can’t imagine that anyone can truly learn to write while reading such stuff. It’s good undergraduate fare for understanding exactly what his title posits–How Fiction Works–but to write the damn stuff, I don’t think any author thinks of sentences the way Wood thinks about them.

Wood gets out his scalpel and shaves the words out of sentences to show which words are authorial, omniscient, and which close in on a character’s lingo or point of view. He’s a good surgeon, but, to get just a bit mystical, I think writers feel their way through a story more than they diagram it in a blueprint (to mix metaphors, of course, because the world is a bunch of mixed metaphors–I’ve never understood why a mixed metaphor is a bad thing).

In other words, I think James Joyce or Jane Austen could write the sentences he deconstructs without giving a second thought to the labels of style he’s obsessed with. Free indirect? Even Joyce, our author of all, is primarily absorbed in just telling the story, like a hunter pulling the trigger, largely by sight and reflex and experience. He just has more mechanisms at hand than some authors do.

I think of Richard Poirier, who was recently profiled in the Times, who said that the most powerful works of literature (to revere the word “literature”) become “rather strange and imponderable” over time. The best authors elude readers, take them away from the roads of a story than can be easily charted, rather than mastering something like the free indirect style.

Poirier’s definition of “great writers” is those who are tormented and thrilled by “what words were doing to them and what they might do in return.” It’s a game, a love affair, a war, a religion, a pilgrimage. And then something more.

He said that the act of writing is an assertion of individual power. What an interesting take on this troubling, often debilitating obsession some of us have. To think of it in such a way is such a fresh, and, well, empowering way to think of what is so often marginalized, trivialized, disdained.

Gosh, writing as an assertion of power. Take that. My truth. Like a sword.

I guess this is all to say that one might learn a bit from a book like Wood’s, but writers might learn more by thinking about their assertiveness, the keen angles of their perception. That crazy intuitive sense of truth that’s so difficult to trust in the din of voices that always militate against a writer’s wishes: to write, always, with delusions within arm’s reach, hopes in the cupboard.

Think of this sentence. “Struggling for his identity within the materials at hand,” they “show us, in the mere turning of a sentence this way or that, how to keep from being smothered by the inherited structure of things.”

Who needs the free indirect style? Or rather, who needs to be so conscious of how it works when there’s something so much more urgent to wrestle with? (Yes, I sometimes like to see this all as a mythological battle of sorts. Why not?)

Life, after all, is about contradiction, messiness, far more than it is about technique.

Denis Johnson–All the Writing Advice You Need

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Denis Johnson says it all in this brief interview after being nominated for the National Book Award.

What a lovely way to describe his process–“I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not.” If only more writers wrote with such disregard toward their audience, and such regard for the truth of the material.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview….

BAJ: Were there moments in your writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on?

DJ: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not.

BAJ: If there is a common thread among this year’s fiction finalists, it might be that all of the books employ interesting narrative structures and scopes. Although Tree of Smoke moves, for the most part, chronologically through its storylines, you’ve given the reader a sweeping, multifaceted, and expansive narrative. Did you conceive of such scope before beginning the book, or did the symbiotic relationship between the subject and structure emerge more intuitively?

DJ: I’m fond of quoting T.S. Eliot, who somewhere said he was concerned, while writing, mainly “with decisions of a quasi-musical nature.”

BAJ: Finally, when you were writing Tree of Smoke, did you have an audience or ideal reader in mind? If so, who?

DJ: I write for my wife, my agent, and my editor.

Malcolm Lowry—Death by Misadventure

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Since The Voyage That Never Ends, a collection of Malcolm Lowry’s writing just came out, I have to pause to pay a tribute to one of the best writers ever, and certainly the best alcoholic writer ever (Lowry’s drinking makes Fitzgerald or Hemingway seem like weekend party boys at best).

Here’s Lowry on alcoholism and writing: “With a bad hangover your thoughts are often incredibly brilliant but you can’t put them down because you cannot believe yourself capable in such a state of doing a single constructive thing, least of all what your higher self wants to do. … When you start putting your thoughts down again, that means you are getting over your hangover. But by this time the thoughts are no good.”

That’s a far cry from Fitzgerald’s insistence that he never wrote while drinking (he protested a bit too much to be believable, however).

Lowry’s quote is essentially a riff on Rimbaud’s belief that poets become seers by undergoing a complete derangement of the senses. I’ve placed a bit of belief in Lowry’s theory, or at least I did when I was younger. A hangover can be a wonderful place to write from because it can combine the elation—or the acute embarrassment—of the previous night with the abject pain and/or nervous excitement of the present. Two contradictory states exist simultaneously, which can be the perfect place to write a tragedy or comedy. A hangover jars you out of the mundane, and if conditions are perfect, you can indulge in your woozy, jabbing thoughts and make great art, full of nuance and complexity and counterpoint.

If conditions are right…I wouldn’t aspire to such a state now for anything. I prefer to write with a clear head and a good night’s sleep. Perhaps Lowry should have realized as much when he hit middle-age, but he stubbornly clung to alcohol in the most stubborn, self-destructive ways possible (read his biography for the sordid details of one of his treatments, locked into solitary confinement in a room with an endless supply of liquor and nothing else–most people beggeed to get out after a week or two, but Lowry lasted until the doctor’s forced him out). Lowry’s method of writing probably limited him to one great book, but then few have more than one great book in them.

It’s so poetically perfect that Lowry’s death was ruled a “death by misadventure” by the coroner since he was unable to determine whether the lethal combination of alcohol and sleeping pills had been taken intentionally. I think Lowry would have appreciated the phrase. It has a grandiosity about it, a romanticism that he lived by and dispelled at the same time.

Consider this quote from one of his stories:

“I had been looking forward to something anxiously and I called this China, yet when I reached China I was still looking forward to it from exactly the same position. […] Haven’t you felt this too, that you know yourself so well that the ground you tread on is your ground: it is never China or Siberia or England or anywhere else … It is always you.”

Lowry was so skillful in many ways, but since the subject is Lowry’s alcoholism, I’ll note his playful, alcoholic brilliance, as when he calls delirium tremens, “delowryum tremens.”

Steal This Plot

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There are so many basic plots—ready to simply snatch as I’ve recently learned—but I’ll be damned if I can write a good one.

I’m not sure why I try. It’s a pity we’re not living in a more nouvelle roman era—since I specialize in what might be called the meandering existential novel, sans epiphany, sans much of anything but a lot of moping about—but we’re living in the age of increasingly short attention spans, data smog, and well, the overwhelming popularity of new narratives, such as video games, that are much more viscerally arresting. Let’s be honest.

I should ask, “Who needs plot, not to mention text?” and be done with it. But I like plot. And I like text.

Despite the slipping and sloping and pausing, the attempted dipsy-do’s and dipsy-don’ts, the outright boring and embarrassing maudlin pitches of my writerly sensibilities, I relish a good plot. I envy writers who can write good plots like I envied guys who could get dates in high school (is there a connection between the two?).

I also hate writers who can write good plots, just as…yes, of course.

So, after all of these years of reading relatively serious fare (Roland Barthes anyone?) I picked up Steal This Plot, by June and William Noble, in a dog-eared, nearly bankrupt used book store, and it turned out to be one of the better “how-to-write” books I’ve read.

The caveat is that very few in the literary how-to genre have done me much good. Steal This Plot at the very least offers some archetypal plot structures to consider when writing any story. You don’t have to steal the plot so much as you can think about the tendencies of your own storyline and consider the trajectory of other stories. If you’re an undisciplined writer, and one who prefers to write without an outline, then Steal This Plot will surely help bring discipline to your storyline, and perhaps tame any wild tangents.

With its distinctions between plot spicers and plot motivators, it offers even experimental writers something to think about when constructing a narrative. I have to say that I think this book if more helpful than Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer.

Here are the plot motivators:

  • vengeance
  • catastrophe
  • love and hate
  • the chase
  • grief and loss
  • rebellion
  • betrayal
  • persecution
  • self-sacrifice
  • survival
  • rivalry
  • quest
  • ambition.

Here are the plot spicers (sub-plots of a sort):

  • mistaken identity
  • criminal actions
  • deception, honor
  • increase or decrease in material well-being
  • authority
  • making amends
  • conspiracy
  • rescue
  • unnatural affection
  • suspicion
  • suicide
  • searching.

Good plots can be told repeatedly in endless variations, I hear.

Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose

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“Can creative writing be taught?” That’s the question Francine Prose starts with in her recent book, Reading Like a Writer.

The question, which is so often a taunt–a menace to the hundreds (thousands?) of creative writing programs across the nation–often looms in my mind. I suspect the answer is no. Talent can at best be refined and nurtured, but the true creative numen, that which startles, is revered or reviled, is ineffable, such a force unto itself that it can’t be explained or constructed by a classroom curriculum or any sort of regimen.

Still, some of us, the stubborn or the dumb, persist, hoping that we can teach ourselves something.

Prose’s recommendation is that we read more carefully, diagramming stories as we take pleasure in reading them, for only those who notice the techniques of the masters can possibly carry them off.

Reading Like a Writer is a solid book, if not particularly enlightening. I read it to attune my awareness more keenly to the finer narrative details, to shake myself up a bit, and the book delivered on that level. One would think that I’d pause more with age, carefully consider each book I read, but I find that as my hours for free reading get squeezed by what can only be called adulthood, I read with greater haste and sloppiness, deceiving myself that I can keep up the volume of reading I used to take for granted.

So now I remind myself to slow down, pay attention to the details. Here are a couple snippets I enjoyed from Prose’s book, and will try to teach myself:

On paragraphs:
“The breaking up into paragraphs and the punctuation have to be done properly but only for the effect on the reader. A set of dead rules is no good. A new paragraph is a wonderful thing. It lets you quietly change the rhythm, and it can be like a flash of lightning that shows the same landscape from a different aspect.” –Isaac Babel

Prose comments that paragraphs can be understood “as a sort of literary respiration, with each paragraph as an extended–in some cases, very extended–breath. Inhale at the beginning of the paragraph, exhale at the end. Inhale again at the start of the next.”

On dialogue:
“When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal. And sometimes we are hoping to prevent the listener from noticing what we are not saying, which is often not merely distracting but, we fear, as audible as what we are saying. As a result, dialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext than it does text. More is going on under the surface than on it. One mark of bad written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once.”

Like good actors, who don’t just act their part, but react to the actors and scene around them, Prose says, “a good writer understands that characters not only speak differently depending on whom they are speaking to, but also listen differently depending on who is speaking.”

For more, read the New York Times fine review of the book.

Ian McEwan’s Supposed Plagiarism

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Hurray for Charles Isherwood’s astute piece in the New York Times on all of the fuss about Ian McEwan “plagiarizing” bits of Atonement from a memoir he’d used in his research.

With each plagiarism scandal, I’ve wondered what constitutes plagiarism, especially with a novel. Should a novel include footnotes? My, that would ruin the reading experience–make it much harder to suspend disbelief, as all novels require. So many other arts are granted the liberties and joys of appropriation, of riffing on someone else’s melody at the very least, whether it’s painting, rap, or jazz. Even movies can mirror past scenes, and steal plots unabashedly. But not writing. There’s something too sacred about crafting a sentence, it seems.

Of course, McEwan wasn’t appropriating to make any sort of artistic commentary. More accurately, he failed to pick up a thesaurus to mix in a few synonyms for several descriptions from this World War II nurse’s memoir. The descriptions have nothing to do with the construction of his characters, dialogue, narrative design, or authorial voice–nothing to do with any of the crucial things that make a novel good. It’s interesting to me that so many are willing to parse through such small matters, as if McEwan deserves no credit for his achievement because of this small lapse, if it’s that.

It’s so difficult and rare for an author to write a great book. So many things go into it. Why even bring up a few borrowed words–yes, borrowed, not plagiarized? I’m sure McEwan’s transgressions could have gone much further before I’d ask for a trial. Even if he borrowed all of the words in the book from a 100 different sources, it would be quite an achievement to stitch it all together into such a fine book.

For more, read McEwan’s defense of himself.