Saturday, November 19, 2022

Keeping a Journal, by William Stafford

At night it was easy for me with my little candle
to sit late recording what happened that day. Sometimes
rain breathing in from the dark would begin softly
across the roof and then drum wildly for attention.
The candle flame would hunger after each wafting 
of air. My pen inscribed thin shadows that leaned
forward and hurried their lines along the wall. 

More important than what was recorded, these evenings
deepened my life: they framed every event
or thought and placed it with care by the others.
As time went on, that scribbled wall -- even if 
it stayed blank -- became where everything 
recognized itself and passed into meaning.

Sunday, November 13, 2022

Kurt Vonnegut: How to Write with Style

1.     Find a Subject You Care About.


Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.


I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.


2.     Do Not Ramble, Though.


I won’t ramble on about that.


3.     Keep It Simple.


As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. ‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story ‘Eveline’ is just this one: ‘She was tired.’ At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.


Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and earth.


4.     Have the Guts to Cut.


It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.


5.     Sound Like Yourself.


The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.


[…]


I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.


6.     Say What You Mean to Say.


I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledly-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.


Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.


7.     Pity the Readers.


Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.


So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify, whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.


That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.


8.     For Really Detailed Advice


For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, a more technical sense, I commend to your attention The Elements of Style, by Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. E. B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced. You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.



Sunday, December 5, 2021

Point no point

Point No Point, BC
There are many things that must be locked away from the room where we write. ... [C]hief among them is a point to be made -- even when that point has kept us up all night, fired our emotions, made us both angry and sad, indignant and afraid.

"Remember," Flannery O'Connor said, 

that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character. ... When you have a character he will create his own situation and his situation will suggest some kind of resolution as you get into it. Wouldn't it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning, because the meaning is in you.

"Writing fiction," Eudora Welty wrote,

places the novelist and the crusader on opposite sides. ... We cannot in fiction set people to acting mechanically or carrying placards to make their sentiments plain. People are not Right and Wrong, Good and Bad, Black and White personified; flesh and blood and the sense of comedy object.

-- Alice McDermott, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction 

 

Monday, May 17, 2021

The heart of the story

 So, one way to approach a story -- to evaluate how good it is, how graceful and efficient -- is to ask, "What is the heart of you, dear story?" (Or, channeling Dr. Seuss, "Why are you bothering telling me this?")

That is: "When all is said and done, what do you claim to live by, story? I need to know this so that I can see how well your non-normative aspects are serving the heart of you."

-- George Saunders, "The Heart of the Story," from A Swim in the Pond in the Rain

Thursday, June 25, 2020

Suspense isn't just for suspense writers.

To build suspense, create obstacles and develop them vertically, not horizontally. -- Nora Gaskin, author, editor, publisher

Philippe Petit, 1974

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

You are not behind.

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren't you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don't let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don't know exactly where you're going, so feeling behind doesn't help. Instead, start planning experiments. As Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a century ago, "All life is an experiment."

-- David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

The Color Inside by James Turrell. Photo by Sara Belknap.

Thursday, October 18, 2018

Rhythm

Lori Kennedy on the PBS show Sewing with Nancy demonstrates free motion machine quilting: "I'm not a fast sewer. But listening to your sewing machine can help you develop a good rhythm." (Photo: Nancy Zieman.)