The Rabbit Room artists are holding a creativity conference in August. They are calling it Hutchmoot, and Walter Wangerin, Jr. is coming. Wow. I need to pray about attending this.
Category Archives: Authors
Kindle: Not worth the candle?
Joseph Bottum at First Things doesn’t like the Kindle.
Why is the text on Kindle so awful—hundreds of years of lessons about typesetting, lost in an instant? Bad line breaks, bad hyphens, bad page composition, bad times.
Much of the column is devoted to his affection for Terry Pratchett.
I’ve never gotten Terry Pratchett. I suppose I didn’t give him enough chance. People told me how great he was, so I picked up the first Discworld book, The Color of Magic, to start at the beginning. Didn’t get very far. I couldn’t see what everybody was so enthusiastic about.
I don’t even get the point of most of the citations Bottum includes. I can only assume there’s something very wrong with me.
Besides the passive-aggressive fishing for reassurance, I mean.
Photo credit: Getty Images.
Overstreet Interviews and Reviews
Rachel Starr Thomson has a good interview with Jeffrey Overstreet in connection with a blog tour on his book, Raven’s Ladder. Here’s a portion:
Rachel: You’ve pointed out before that there are some amazing writers working in fantasy, some real depth and artistic merit. Why does the genre still get such a bad rap?
Jeffrey: Well, trashy book covers don’t help. And in a consumer-driven society, people will exploit their audiences by fashioning their work to appeal to our baser appetites. Thus, most fantasy takes from Tolkien the violence, the epic battles, the grotesque monsters, but they don’t carry on the grand and glorious ideals that stand in such stark contrast to the darkness.
Our imaginations are more easily dazzled by perversion, by what is lurid and twisted and shocking, than by what is true and beautiful. Beauty requires us to do some work to comprehend it. In our busy culture, where so much is competing for our attention, whatever is loud and shocking will win out. So a lot of fantasy writers and illustrators, as in any genre, exaggerate whatever will grab people’s attention.
But I also think that as people get older, they feel threatened by the mystery of fairy tales. They grow to prefer portrayals of a world that they can understand and control. So they write off fairy tales as childish, because their ego has a desire to feel very grown up, sophisticated, and in control. Not me. I like Madeleine L’Engle’s perspective: I’m 39, but I’m also 5, and 7, and 14, and 21.
Read the interview in part one, part two, and part three.
Links to the many reviews are here. And the same blog tour has coordinated other reviews of books I’m interested in. Andrew Peterson’s book North or Be Eaten! was reviewed by the blogger squad here. Athol Dickson’s book Lost Mission was reviewed here.
Gina Holmes' Debut Novel
The popular blogger Gina Holmes has her first book out this month, Crossing Oceans.
Genius & Diligence
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 . . .
Dostoevsky interviews Dickens
This from Dale Nelson, of Mayville State University:
According to Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (2009, p. 502), Dostoevsky talked with Dickens in London at the office of All the Year Round in summer 1862. Dostoevsky wrote about the meeting to Stepan Dimitriyevich Yanovsky in a letter dated 18 July 1878, so 16 years after the event. The letter was translated by Stephanie Harvey in Dickens’s Villains: A Confession and a Suggestion, published in The Dickensian vol. 98 (2002): 233-5.
The Dostoevsky passage, as quoted by Slater:
—He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge [!?], are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.—
I would be happier if Dostoevsky had written the letter right after the interview. I figure, though, that, at the least, these two did actually meet. That seems wonderful.
Update: The story of the Dostoevsky-Dickens meeting is a hoax. See the Comments for more details.
Tatjana Soli on Story Types
Tatjana Soli has her first novel in The Lotus Eaters
What interested me about Vietnam was the impact that it had on lives — the lives of my characters, but also in a general way on the country as a whole. Life keeps on being lived — people fall in love — during and after war. It’s one of the ways we preserve our sanity as human beings during difficult times. A number of American soldiers stayed behind after their tour of duty was over. Many fell in love with Vietnamese women and had families. Many wanted to help a country that was being devastated by war. Is this a man’s or a woman’s story?
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.
Dickinson: Poetic Leadership
Roger Lundin, the Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College, talks about the poetic language of leadership.
“Q: You describe Emily Dickinson’s work as part of a stereotypically Protestant move away from talking about God with regard to external things toward focusing on internal things. Do you think the move toward looking for God internally is related to a modern distrust for institutions?”
Lundin replies:
It has to do with something that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote almost 200 years ago in “Democracy in America.” He said that the American is either occupied with a very puny and insignificant thing, i.e. himself, or with some vast subject: nature, society, God, the universe. He said the space between that small thing and that vast other is empty. Democracy drives people to an intensely inward focus. It looks at the outside world as this vast, indifferent other. That space between [the insignificant and the vast subjects] is mediating life: it’s churches, schools, politics and social communities.
People who lead well are often people who have done that intense interior work, but you’re never effective in public leadership if you’re constantly reflecting and constantly, in a sense, absenting yourself. Thoreau said in “Walden,” “I’m aware of myself in a double sense.” He said, “I am both an actor in the human drama, and the one who stands back and observes myself and others in action, so that I’m both in the stream of life and standing outside of the stream of life.”