Taking It Home to Jerome

In Baton Rouge, there was a DJ on the soul station who was
always urging his listeners to ‘‘take it on home to Jerome.’’

No one knew who Jerome was. And nobody cared. So it
didn’t matter. I was, what, ten, twelve? I didn’t have anything

to take home to anyone. Parents and teachers told us that all
we needed to do in this world were three things: be happy,

do good, and find work that fulfills you. But I also wanted
to learn that trick where you grab your left ankle in your

right hand and then jump through with your other leg.
Everything else was to come, everything about love:

the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,
all hearts are broken. Sometimes when I’m writing a poem,

I feel as though I’m operating that crusher that turns
a full-sized car into a metal cube the size of a suitcase.

At other times, I’m just a secretary: the world has so much
to say, and I’m writing it down. This great tenderness.

-- David Kirby

Eudora Welty on listening

From One Writer's Beginnings:

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers -- to read as listeners -- and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.

---

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

It was taken entirely for granted that there wasn't any lying in our family, and I was advanced in adolescence before I realized that in plenty of homes where I played with schoolmates and went to their parties, children lied to their parents and parents lied to their children and to each other. It took me a long time to realize that these very same everyday lies, and the stratagems and jokes and tricks and dares that went with them, were in fact the basis of the scenes I so well loved to hear about and hoped for and treasured in the conversation of adults.

My instinct -- the dramatic instinct -- was to lead me, eventually, on the right track for a storyteller: the scene was full of hints, pointers, suggestions, and promises of things to find out and know about human beings. I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken -- and to know a truth, I also had to recognize a lie.

Lucy Barton learns to write

"Sarah Payne said, If there is a weakness in your story, address it head-on, take it in your teeth and address it, before the reader really knows. This is where you will get your authority, she said, during one of those classes when her face was filled with fatigue from teaching."

"Now I think of something else Sarah Payne said. 'You will have only one story,' she said. 'You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.'”

-- Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elmore Leonard's 10 rules for writing fiction

1. Never open with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the word "said."
5. Keep your exclamation marks under control.
6. Never use the word "suddenly."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly if at all.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Ditto, places and things.
10. Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.

James Salter opening sentences

"Barcelona at dawn."

"This happened near Carbondale to a woman named Jane."

"It's hard now to think of all the places and nights, Nicola's like a railway car, deep and gleaming, the crowd at the Un, Deux, Trois, Billy's."

"Mrs. Pence and her white shoes were gone."

"At ten-thirty then, she arrived."

"All afternoon the cars, many with out-of-state plates, were coming along the road."

"It was late August."

"Mrs. Chandler stood alone near the window in a tailored suit, almost in front of the neon sign that said in small, red letters PRIME MEATS."

"There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel."

"In the garden, standing alone, he found the young woman who was a friend of the writer William Hedges, then unknown but even Kafka had lived in obscurity, she said, and so moreover had Mendel, perhaps she meant Mendeleev."

"Billy was under the house."

Forgiveness

"Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book … that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper, … I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself."

-- Ann Patchett, “The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life” in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

"Everybody needs a little forgiveness." -- Patty Griffin, "Living with Ghosts"

A writer's library

Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
Madison Smartt Bell, Narrative Design
Bernays & Painter, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers
Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer
Renni Browne & Dave King, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers
Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction
Julia Cameron, Letters to a Young Artist
Raymond Carver, Fires
John Gardner, The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist
Philip Gerard, Creative Nonfiction
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind, and Old Friend from Far Away
Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The New Well-Tempered Sentence
Ariel Gore, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers
Ted Kooser & Steve Cox, Writing Brave and Free
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist
Ron Padgett, ed., Handbook of Poetic Forms
Ann Patchett, "The Getaway Car" in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
Nancy Peacock, A Broom of One’s Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning and Life
George Singleton, Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds
William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl
William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White, The Elements of Style
Abigail Thomas, Thinking about Memoir
Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write


Strunk & White: The Elements of Style, illus. by Maira Kalman