Here’s a series of articles on writing, by the two-time Hugo Award-winning author, Robert J. Sawyer.
The columns focus on practical advice, solutions and problems faced by beginning science fiction writers–and most of it is applicable for writing in any genre. Good stuff.
Michael Chabon speculates on why we’re suspicious of entertainment, whether it’s deserved, and how things got this way.
Entertainment has a bad name. [...] The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a “Street Fighter” machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. [...] Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you — bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.
But maybe… the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.
What’s amazing about Chabon is his ability to evoke Street Fighter in one breath and the Lacanian parole in the next, without coming off as a poseur or a slumming intellectual. He’s telling us to demand smart junk!
Smart Junk! That oughta be a magazine. I’d subscribe.
I went to see David Albahari last night with some of the other litfarmers. He talked about his writing in a way that managed to be both intellectual and down-to-earth at the same time. He began by reading a conversation between himself and his wife (who he described as his favorite character both in fiction and real life). In what I expect is normal Albahari post-modern trickery, the couple bickered while scheming to escape from the story, which took on the shape of a cage, trapping them between sentences without bread, kajmak or a suitable definition of love.
He has some interesting and serious ideas about memory, nostalgia and identity, but through it all is an unstoppable sense of humor and humanity that made the lecture feel more like a private conversation over strong coffee and a few dozen cigarettes. I’m extremely curious to read Snowman, the first novel he wrote in Canada.
Many thanks to SFU, Geist and Canada Council for inviting Mr Albahari to speak, and inviting us to listen.
John Irving takes another look at sentimentality in an ancient article from the NY Times that’s been kicking around the litfarm for a while (so long that I don’t remember who pointed it out to me originally). As someone who is still working out the line between drama and melodrama, emotion and sentimentality in my own work, it’s helpful to think about the subject in a generous light.
It is surprising, however, how many readers reserve Dickens–and hopefulness in general–for Christmas; it seems that what we applaud in Dickens–his kindness, his generosity, his belief in our dignity–is also what we condemn him for (under another name) in the off-Christmas season.
The other name is sentimentality–and, to the modern reader, too often when a writer risks being sentimental, the writer is already guilty… A short story about a four-course meal from the point of view of a fork will never be sentimental; it may never matter very much to us, either. A fear of contamination by soap opera haunts the educated writer… [although] “Madame Bovary” would have been perfect material for daytime television and a contemporary treatment of “The Brothers Karamazov” could be stuck with a campus setting.
I’d love to see Karamozov set in the OC. Genius, right?
Mary Schendlinger, the Senior editor of Geist Magazine, cartoonist, instructor at UBC, The Writer’s Studio and editor, talks with Kootenay Co-operative Radio (scroll down to show #35) about types of editing, the sort of writing Geist buys, how to find an editor, and the term “creative non-fiction.”
Mary teaches Getting Published at TWS, which is a fantastic class that really can’t recommend highly enough as an introduction to editing, literary agents, Canadian and American publishing and a lot more.
While you’re at it, check out The Writer’s Toolbox on the Geist site.
The Guardian has a good article on creating characters, although as usual with the Guardian, I’m left with the sinking feeling that I’m not at all well read, that I never will be well read, and furthermore that literacy is completely wasted on me. Luckily, there are some excellent and contradictory ideas about what makes a good character, along with examples for philistines like me. Here’s the bit that I want to focus on:
“There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs. You know the style: ‘My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable…’
The unpractised novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile: it is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilised in a scene that is hard…”
I’ve read a lot of essays and manuals on writing that advocate for a sort of ‘twenty questions’ approach, but is it really effective?
Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running – what he calls “getting a character in”. Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: ‘He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.’ Ford comments: “that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once.”
The article goes on to examine the different ways that various writers prove and disprove various rules of characterization, the nature of characters, the limitations of fiction, the strengths of same–it’s well worth the read. I’ll leave you with a final quote that speaks to the ‘getting in’ of characters and just about everything else that can be said aesthetically about fiction:
I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or “deep” enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions.
Litfarm assignment: what are your novel’s (or short story’s, or novella’s) conventions?
, the first novel he wrote in Canada.