Posts Tagged ‘writers’

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Friday, August 28th, 2009

August 28, 2009
Washington, DC

 

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“A place for soulful conversation” by ktylerconk from Flickr

Playwright Edward Albee met Carson McCullers in the early 1960s. They became life-long friends, and Albee adapted McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe for the stage. From an interview with the NEA, Albee talks about what he and McCullers discussed during their regular visits.

Well, you know, writers don’t sit around talking about their craft very much.  They don’t sit around talking about great writers of the past and our own work, and each other’s.  Most writers sit around and talk about food, money, sex, and politics, you know, the way everybody else does.  So, we didn’t talk about craft much.  If I read something of hers that I liked, I’d tell her, and we’d talk about it a little bit but [Carson] didn’t want to sit around and be bored and boring either.

Hear more from Albee and others on Carson McCullers and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter on The Big Read audio guide.

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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Monday, August 24th, 2009

August 24, 2009
Washington, DC

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“Typewriter” by aprillynn77 from Flickr

The work of the very best writers is deceptive in that, if the writer does her job well, the reader is aware only of a sense of effortlessness and ease to the text. In truth, every writer struggles with the best way to write, and in most cases revise, the work.  Some writers proceed one sentence at a time and can’t go on until the sentence at hand is absolutely buffed and polished. Other writers prefer to pour as much as possible onto the page at one go, and then go back and start paring and cutting away until the story or poem emerges. From an interview with the NEA, here’s Marilynne Robinson on her approach to writing and revising.

I write when I can.  I write very much when I have the impulse to write. And so I can write five days a week, you know, continuously. And then, if I come to the end and I have to think about things for a while, I don’t write at all for a while. I’m not at all a work ethic sort of writer. Either I have persuaded myself of the illusion or I’m outside of the illusion, and those are my two states, as far as writing is concerned.

I don’t really revise very much.  It seems to me that [if] you have something written the way it ought to be written, then you’ve preserved the integrity of the dream, you know.  That if you make a mistake you’re, in a sense, rupturing this dream. And you cannot go on from a mistake very successfully.  You really have to try to preserve the integrity of the fiction at every point, and that’s what I try to do.

Check out the Housekeeping Reader’s Guide for more on Marilynne Robinson and her Big Read novel.

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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Friday, August 14th, 2009

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Photo by Alan Zale courtesty of  Caldwell Public Library’s (New Jersey) Big Read of The Shawl

For the month of July, I set myself the challenge of writing a poem a day. While I didn’t manage to write each and every day, I did manage to at least start quite a few poems. There’s the old saying that writing is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. But there were a couple of times during my writing vigil when my pen seemed to be functioning on 100 percent inspiration, a feeling Cynthia Ozick describes rather fluently in this excerpt from an NEA interview in which she talks about beginning The Shawl.

We read now and again that a person sits down to write and there’s a sense that some mystical hand is guiding you and you’re not writing out of youself. I think reasonably, if you’re a rational person, you can’t accept that. But I did have the sense—I did this one time in my life—that I was extraordinarly fluent, and I’m never fluent. I wrote those five pages as if I heard a voice.

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