E.L. Doctorow on the challenge of clear, concise writing

In a Paris Review interview conducted by George Plimpton, novelist E.L. Doctorow discusses some of his writing challenges — including trying to write an absence note for his grammar-school-aged daughter.

INTERVIEWER: You once told me that the most difficult thing for a writer to write was a simple household note to someone coming to collect the laundry, or instructions to a cook.

E. L. DOCTOROW: What I was thinking of was a note I had to write to the teacher when one of my children missed a day of school. It was my daughter, Caroline, who was then in the second or third grade. I was having my breakfast one morning when she appeared with her lunch box, her rain slicker, and everything, and she said, “I need an absence note for the teacher and the bus is coming in a few minutes.” She gave me a pad and a pencil; even as a child she was very thoughtful. So I wrote down the date and I started, Dear Mrs. So-and-so, my daughter Caroline . . . and then I thought, No, that’s not right, obviously it’s my daughter Caroline. I tore that sheet off, and started again. Yesterday, my child . . . No, that wasn’t right either. Too much like a deposition. This went on until I heard a horn blowing outside. The child was in a state of panic. There was a pile of crumpled pages on the floor, and my wife was saying, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this.” She took the pad and pencil and dashed something off. I had been trying to write the perfect absence note. It was a very illuminating experience. Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

Photo: Skobrik, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Ray Bradbury and Rejection

RAY BRADBURY TALKS REJECTION…

(from Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life)

…starting when I was fifteen I began to send short stories to magazines like Esquire, and they, very promptly, sent them back two days before they got them! I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn’t realize what a strong person I was; I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn.

Then, during the late forties, I actually began to sell short stories and accomplished some sort of deliverance from snowstorms [of rejection slips] in my fourth decade. But even today, my latest books of short stories contain at least seven stories that were rejected by every magazine in the United States and also in Sweden! …The blizzard doesn’t last forever; it just seems so.

Photo: Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)  at home in Los Angeles

Short stories are like soft shadows, quote by Haruki Murakami

“My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart…”  HARUKI MURAKAMI

Michael C. Keith Interview in The Penman Review

An interview with Michael C. Keith, author of the Silver Birch Press release EVERYTHING IS EPIC: Stories, appears in the latest edition of The Penman Review, where he discusses his fiction and nonfiction books, including his acclaimed memoir THE NEXT BETTER PLACE. Find the interview at penmanreview.com.

Evening Star, Poem by Edgar Allan Poe, Read by Robert De Niro

EVENING STAR
by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

‘Twas noontide of summer,

And mid-time of night;

And stars, in their orbits,

Shone pale, thro’ the light

Of the brighter, cold moon,

‘Mid planets her slaves,

Herself in the Heavens,

Her beam on the waves.

I gazed awhile

On her cold smile;

Too cold- too cold for me-

There pass’d, as a shroud,

A fleecy cloud,

And I turned away to thee,

Proud Evening Star,

In thy glory afar,

And dearer thy beam shall be;

For joy to my heart

Is the proud part

Thou bearest in Heaven at night,

And more I admire

Thy distant fire,

Than that colder, lowly light.

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In the photo above, Robert De Niro reads from GREAT TALES AND POEMS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE, a 432-page mass market paperback edition released by Simon & Schuster in 2007. The book is available at bargain prices at Amazon.com.

If you’re in the mood for Poe (and I won’t ask why — but it’s always a good time to read a great writer), you can find a treasure trove of his prose and poetry for free in a variety of formats at Gutenberg.org.

Penguin Science Fiction #1638, Read by Jimi Hendrix

In this mid-1960s photo, we see Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) engrossed in Penguin Science Fiction (#1638) Edited by Brian Aldiss. With a little research, I learned that this anthology (originally published in 1961 and reissued in 1965) included stories by Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, and an author most people wouldn’t associate with sci-fi — John Steinbeck, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. Yes, just one year after Steinbeck appeared in a pulp sci-fi anthology, he won literature’s highest award! You gotta love it.

Steinbeck’s contribution to PENGUIN SCIENCE FICTION #1638 was entitled “The Short-Short Story of Mankind: A Fable.” An excerpt is included below.

The Short-Short Story of Mankind: A Fable (Excerpt)
by John Steinbeck

It was pretty draughty in the cave in the middle of the afternoon. There wasn’t any fire, the last spark had gone out six months ago and the family wouldn’t have any more fire until lightning struck another tree.

Joe came into the cave all scratched up and some hunks of hair torn out and he flopped down on the wet ground and bled . Old William was arguing away with Old Bert… 

“Where’s Al?” one of them asked and the other said, “You forgot to roll the rock in front of the door.”

Joe didn’t even look up and the two old men agreed that kids were going to the devil. “I tell you it was different in my day,” Old William said. “They had some respect for their elders or they got what for.”

After a while Joe stopped bleeding and he caked some mud on his cuts. “Al’s gone,” he said.

Old Bert asked brightly, “Sabre tooth?”

“No, it’s that new bunch that moved into the copse down the draw. They ate Al.”

“Savages,” said Old William. “Still live in trees. They aren’t civilized. We don’t hardly ever eat people.”

Joe said, “We got hardly anybody to eat except relatives and we’re getting low on relatives.”

…Read the rest of the story here.

Book cover: “Memory of the Future” by Oscar Dominguez (1938)

Happy Birthday, Flannery O’Connor

Today we celebrate the birth of one of the all-time greatest of the great writers — Flannery O’Connor, born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925. Author of two novels — Wise Blood (1952), which she holds on her lap in the photo at right, and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) — and 32 short stories, O’Connor created a lasting body of work in her short life (she died in 1964 at age 39).

Kurt Vonnegut said of her, “The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor. She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.” (For the record, Vonnegut’s first rule of writing is: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” Read the complete list at this link.)

Here’s one of our favorite Flannery O’Connor quotes: “I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both time and eternity.”

Happy Birthday, Haruki Murakami

January 12 marks the 64th birthday of Haruki Murakami, a novelist whose work I enjoy because it’s original, funny, surreal, and surprising.

Who else could write a detective story featuring an elderly (and rather simpleminded) private investigator that people pay a per diem to locate their lost cats? How does the detective get his clues? By interviewing cats! (That’s his special skill.)

Read an excerpt from the brilliant, charming, funny “Heigh Ho” at The Paris Review here.

To give you a feel for the story, here’s a passage from “Heigh Ho” by Haruki Murakami:

Being able to converse with cats was Nakata’s little secret. Only he and the cats knew about it. People would think he was crazy if he mentioned it, so he never did. Everybody knew he wasn’t very bright, but being dumb and being crazy were different matters altogether.

It wasn’t so unusual, after all, to see old folks talking to animals as if they were people. But if anyone did happen to comment on his abilities with cats and say something like, “Mr. Nakata, how are you able to know cats’ habits so well?” he’d just smile and let it pass. 

“Heigh Ho” by Haruki Murakami is also found in his novel Kafka on the Shore, available at Amazon.com.

Wishing you many more happy birthdays, Mr. Murakami! 

Thoughts About the Short Story Form

QUOTES FROM SELECTED WRITERS ABOUT THE SHORT STORY…

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” EDGAR ALLAN POE

“My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart…”  HARUKI MURAKAMI

“With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed–he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov’s story, ‘The Lady with the Dog.’” GRAHAM GREENE

“When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.” ANN PATCHETT

A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Story by Dylan Thomas

A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES (Excerpt)

by Dylan Thomas

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. 

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen. 

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero’s garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared. 

We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows – eternal, ever since Wednesday – that we never heard Mrs. Prothero’s first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor’s polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder. 

“Fire!” cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.

And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.

Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, “A fine Christmas!” and smacking at the smoke with a slipper… 

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Read the rest of the story here.