The Mechanic & the Muse

Words to Write By

Quotes about writing are like diamonds: they reflect so many different facets of the craft. So it was fun yesterday to type up quotes that came my way last spring at a National Writers Workshop in Portland, Ore. (Scroll halfway down to find sites and dates for 2007.)

I hope you'll check them out and either leave a favorite quote as a comment to my "Chip on Your Shoulder" column or on this blog.

Happy New Year. May all your successes be wild!

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #3

On literary devices. Continuing from "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

"The third device was the so-called “third person point of view," (emphasis added) the technique of presenting every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene as he experiences it.

"Journalists had often used the first-person point of view—“I was there”—just as autobiographers, memoirists and novelists had. This is very limiting for the journalist, however, since he can bring the reader inside the mind of only one character—himself—a point of view that often proves irrelevant to the story and irritating to the reader. Yet how could a journalist, writing nonfiction, accurately penetrating the thoughts of another person?

"The answer proved to be marvelously simple: interview him about his thoughts and emotions along with everyone else. This is what I had done in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, what John Sack did in M and what Gay Talese did in Honor Thy Father."

Next: Status details

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #4

The last of the four literary devices cited by Tom Wolfe from "The New Journalism," by Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

"The fourth device has always been the least understood. This is the recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving towards children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene. Symbolic of what? Symbolic, generally, of people's status life, using that term in the broad sense of the entire pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be. The recording of such details is not mere embroidery in prose. It lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature.

"It is the very essence of the “absorbing” power of Balzac, for example. Balzac barely used point of view at all in the refined sense that Henry James used it later on. And yet the reader comes away feeling that he has been even more completely “inside” Balzac’s characters than James’s. Why? Here is the sort of thing Balzac does over and over. Before introducing you to Monsieur and Madame Marneffe personally (in “Cousin Bette”) he brings you into their drawing room and conducts a social autopsy: “The furniture covered in faded cotton velvet, the plaster statuettes masquerading as Florentine bronzes, the clumsily carved painted chandelier with its candle rings of molded glass, the carpet, a bargain whose low price was explained too late by the quantity of cotton in it, which was now visible to the naked eye—everything in the room, to the very curtains, which would have taught you that the handsome appearance of wool damask lasts for only three years)”—everything in the room begins to absorb one into the lives of a pair of down-at-the-heel social climbers, Monsieur and Madame Marneffe. Balzac piles up these details so relentlessly and at the same time so meticulously—there is scarcely a detail in the later Balzac that doesn’t illuminate some point of status—that he triggers the reader’s memories of his own status life, his own ambitions, insecurities, delights, disasters, plus the thousands and one small humiliations and the status coups of everyday life, and triggers them over and over until he creates an atmosphere as rich and involving as the Joycean use of point of view."

 

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #1

Dick Cheney, hunter extraordinaire, was the ostensible subject of my recent post, "Ready, Aim, Oops." But reader Harris Salat was eager to learn the source of the final paragraph when I described a tool of 19th century literary realists that Tom Wolfe and other so-called "New Journalists" relied on in their nonfiction.

I replied that it's from a long introduction by Wolfe in "The New Journalism," an anthology edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, published in 1973. There are used copies on Amazon.com

But that seemed a stingy response, and so I copied out the seven paragraphs Wolfe used to define status details and three other device the New Journalists borrowed from their literary ancestors. I'll dole them out one by one over the next four days. The source is my hardcover edition of "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, pp. 31-32. Wolfe writes:

"If you follow the progress of the New Journalism closely through the 1960s, you see an interesting thing happening. You see journalists learning the techniques of realism—particularly of the sort found in Fielding, Smollett, Balzac, Dickens and Gogol—from scratch. By trial and error, by “instinct” rather than theory, journalists began to discover the devices that gave the realistic novel its unique power, variously known as its “immediacy,” its concrete reality,” its emotional involvement,” “its gripping” or “absorbing quality."

"This extraordinary power was derived mainly from just four devices, they discovered. The basic one was scene-by-scene construction,(emphasis added) telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative. Hence the sometimes extraordinary feats of reporting that the new journalists undertook: so that they could actually witness the scenes in other people’s lives as they took place…"

Next: Dialogue

Jealousy as Inspiration

I've always had two litmus tests for gauging the excellence of someone else's writing.

One is is when I read a story and think to myself, "I wish I'd written that."

But a second, and more dismaying outcome is when I read and then groan, "God, I wish I could have written that."

Stories that meet that second criteria I am most likely to study; not just read, but sometimes copy out, word for word. I learned to write Wall Street Journal nut grafs that way. I got onto the cover of the Washington Post Magazine that way by copying the leads of other writers' centerpieces. I learned some of what I know about fiction that way, by typing out an entire short story, "The Beginning of Grief," by Larry Woiwode, a North Dakota poet and novelist whose attention to emotional detail takes you deep inside another's world.

I consider these exercises "modeling lessons." and not, a case of "you imitate the best and the rest you memorize," as Joni Mitchell scornfully describes an emotionally challenged lover in her song "A Woman of Heart and Mind."

Literary modeling has a long and distinguished lineage, not unlike the way visual artists copy the Masters. But I've always felt a bit self-conscious about it. Write your own stuff, buddy!

So it was with great excitement I heard Billy Collins, the former U.S. poet laureate, discussing the role of imitation in an interview on my local NPR station. He took it one emotional step further:

It came in this exchange with interviewer Susan Giles Wantuck who asked Collins:

"Who inspires you?"

Collins replied:

"Because I’ve been teaching so long it’s really hard to tease out the influences. But when I first read John Donne, the English metaphysical poet, I read a poem of his called “The Flea” when I was in college. Prior to that I had experiences of literary appreciation and I was even impressed by some of the literature I was reading.

"But this was the first time that I felt a feeling of jealousy for this poem. I didn’t want to be me anymore; I wanted to be John Donne. I felt really inadequate. I thought I could never, ever write a poem like that but if I could, having written that one poem I could just check out having done that.

"I think jealousy is a kind of emotional inspiration because then you begin learning from -- if you don’t just get completely paralyzed with despair and frustration -- the next step is to start imitating the people who make you jealous."

Wow! So our muses may, in part, be jealous creatures who revel in our feelings of inadequacy, and feed our desire to replace ours creative selves with someone better or smarter or more gifted.

Strangely, I find it comforting, the notion that this gnawing desire to be someone else can fuel devotion to our work, and with may come greater skill.

In the interview, Collins also vividly describes a more powerful motivation to write than envy:

"The real thrill is composition," Collins said. "To be kind of down on your hands and knees with the language at really close range in the midst of a poem that is carrying you in some direction that you can't foresee... It's that sense of ongoing discovery that makes composition really thrilling and that's the pleasure and that's why I write. "

I recommend listening to the entire interview, which features Collins readng a poem, "The day after my death," and discussing its composition).

Collins is in Florida this week to keynote at the Florida Suncoast Writers' Conference. My wife and writing partner, Kathy Fair, and I are also scheduled to appear at the conference. I hope I get close enough to thank him for teaching me the the creative power of jealousy.