Category Archives: Writing
Overstreet on Paying Attention
Jeffrey Overstreet talks art all of the time. Find him at a coffee bar, and you’ll hear him talking art. He doesn’t give directions to his dry cleaners without literary allusion. Here’s a quote from an interview with Heather Goodman:
If an artist focuses on the idea, the compulsion, the inspiration, then questions about how to engage the audience will probably find their answers along the way. I think a great deal of contemporary art is compromised and weakened by too much concern about who’s out there paying attention, and what they want to see. An artist’s first responsibility is to listen, and then to engage whatever questions or ideas or mysteries they’re encountering.
My favorite stories and movies don’t give me a sense that an artist is eager to please. They give me the feeling that I’ve stumbled onto a project that has the full attention of its artist. . . .
The Auralia Thread is being criticized by some readers of Christian fiction because it contains things that readers of Christian fiction don’t like to read. And it doesn’t have feel-good conclusions or obvious allegories, which readers of Christian fiction sometimes want. Well, perhaps that’s because I was just writing the story that seemed best to me . . .
Creating Toward a Goal
Andrew Peterson has a beautiful post from his writing retreat. “What I do when I build roads isn’t that much different from what you do,” an old logger told him. “I have to figure out how to get from here to there. I look at a place and imagine a road. Takes a fair bit of creativity.” He goes on.
J. Mark Bertrand Interviewed by Octopus
J. Mark Bertrand has a two-part interview on writing and shifting genres on Boxing the Octopus, which looks like a blog I should follow. Here are a couple quotes:
I don’t believe in “writing what you know,” but I do think it’s sound advice to write what you’re good at. For me, that’s turned out to be crime. The art of storytelling doesn’t change from genre to genre, and I’m more interested in telling a good story than a good genre story, if you see what I mean. The conventions are there, and for the most part I respect them, but at the end of the day I’m making use of the genre to tell a certain kind of tale about the detective as existential seeker and skeptic.
From the second part, Kathryn Paterson notes, “I find your suggestion of writing a 50-paged treatment prior to drafting to be daunting, but fascinating.” Mark replies:
In the film industry, a treatment is a summary–more detailed than a quick synopsis, but not yet a fully realized, scene-by-scene script–that communicates the rough contours of the story. Some are more detailed than others, but since Dan was convinced the problem with most of us young novelists was that we didn’t know our stories well enough, he recommended writing a fairly detailed treatment before starting. For writers who don’t like to stick with an outline, this advice can be liberating. Writing the treatment helps you to discover the story.
"If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Badly"
“You have to allow yourself the liberty of writing poorly.” Loren Eaton talks about writing through the mess of initial drafts.
Hacks! All of Them!
Sherry reposted a collection of authors commenting on other authors, like these:
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a man to a dictionary.”
Ernest Hemingway, in reply: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think emotions come from big words?”
I wonder what the living authors are saying about each other.
Stephen King said: “The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”
Mr. King also said: “Somebody who’s a terrific writer who’s been very, very successful is Jodi Picoult. You’ve got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he’s just awful. It varies.”
It’s going to take me a while to find more of these, so I’ll have to leave it for now.
Some Things Can't Be Summarized
I heard Ken Myers talk to a guest about time and experience in what I believe was one of last year’s issues of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. He referred to the creation account in Genesis, saying that regardless of one’s interpretation of the days and events, we can’t deny that God took time to create everything. That must mean time has value, and the time it takes to do some things is good, even God-honoring. Music, for example, takes time to perform and enjoy. Solitude soaks in slowly over an afternoon. The love and loyalty of friends takes years to mature.
When we talk about an artwork, we often ask people who experienced it to summarize it for us. We ask them, or even ask ourselves, what the music or poetry or movie was about and what it meant. We ask what its point was. Sometimes understanding that point is a natural part of the work, but perhaps more often than not, summarizing an artwork down to its gist is impossible. To attempt to do so is to completely miss the value of the work.
Who asks for the point of Dvorak’s “New World” symphony? That’s ridiculous, because the music itself, all 40 minutes of it, is the point. Maybe a theme can be verbalized for it, but saying it’s about the wild beauty of America doesn’t capture anything of the music. This goes for good poetry too. A poem may be about the pain of betrayal or the wonder of a bird in flight, but if someone were to ask us for the gist of the poem, our best answer may be to encourage them to read it themselves.
A good work of art isn’t a vehicle for its gist. It is a man walking on his own feet. It may have plenty of themes or meanings which can be summarized and plenty of quotes with stand-alone value, but the work itself is something to experience over time.
Continue reading Some Things Can't Be SummarizedNew University Center for Writing Named for Walker Percy
Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana, will open the Walker Percy Center for Writing and Publishing next Wednesday, March 10. The center intends “to foster literary talent and achievement, to highlight the art of writing as essential to a good education, and to serve the makers, teachers, students, and readers of contemporary writing by providing educational and vocational opportunities in writing and publishing.”
Percy taught at Loyola and had a heart for new and struggling writers.
Reader Advice to Writers: Start with Story
Laura Miller does not plan to write a novel, but she reads plenty of them. “More to the point, I’ve started 10 times the number of books that I’ve finished,” she says, and in this post on Salon.com, she offers pointers on what readers look for. Here’s a good point: “Remember that nobody agrees on what a beautiful prose style is and most readers either can’t recognize “good writing” or don’t value it that much. Believe me, I wish this were otherwise, and I do urge all readers to polish their prose and avoid clichés. However, I’ve seen as many books ruined by too much emphasis on style as by too little.”
Thor, loser
Phil used to post a Friday Fight every week in this space, so I was amused when Floyd at Threedonia posted a “Friday Night Fight” this afternoon. Even more amusing, it’s this clip from a TV movie, “Hulk vs. Thor.”
Marvel Comics’ Thor was always a dilemma for me. I only saw a few issues as a kid, and I was grateful that they paid some lip service to actual Norse mythology. But they made Thor a blonde, and shaved off his beard. (A friend told me that he understood that the artist had determined from the first that he wanted Thor to wear a red cloak, and red hair would have tended to bleed into that. I say that if you prioritize wardrobe over authenticity, you must be gay.)
Aside from the aforementioned cosmetic problems, the big change Marvel made was to make Thor bright. The Thor we meet in the Norse myths does not have what you’d call an analytical mind. He solves problems by a) hitting things with his hammer, or b) getting help from a smarter friend.
Historically, this may be a residue of class prejudice. The myths as we have them come from Viking Age poems. These poems were written by poets (skalds) who congregated around royal courts and made their fortunes by their language skills. They were intellectuals. Odin, being a god of poetry, attracted their worship, and they gave him credit for high intelligence. Thor, on the other hand, was the popular god of the common people, and the skalds portrayed him as a country rube. I suspect the farmers had other myths which portrayed Thor in a more positive light, but they didn’t get into poems that have come down to us.
The Norse gods have been something of a challenge for me in my fantasy novels, and Thor in particular. I try to follow orthodox Christian theology in my presentation of the supernatural. Christianity has generally considered heathen gods to be either a) a delusion, or b) demons (“No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God….” 1 Corinthians 10:20). It works best for fantasy purposes to treat the old gods as existent beings.
Odin’s easy. He’s smart, crafty, a liar, and it’s no stretch to imagine him as completely evil.
Thor is harder. It’s hard to envision a dumb demon.
So when I gave him a scene in The Year of the Warrior, I pretty much played him as what he is in the myths—sort of a force of nature, powerful and dumb. I cast him in a comic scene, which I think was just as corrosive to his worship as demonization.