“Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.” HENRY MILLER, American writer (1891-1980)
Painting: Henry Miller portrait, watercolor by Fabrizio Cassetta. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.
The most useful thing about art is its uselessness…My point is that there’s a place–an important place, as a matter of fact–in our all too pragmatic world for the impractical and the non-essential, and that art occupies that place more gloriously than does just about anything else: occupies it with such authority and with such inspirational if quixotic results that we find ourselves in the contradictory position of having to concede that the non-essential can be very essential, indeed, if for no other reason than that an environment reduced to essentials is a subhuman environment in which only drones will thrive.”
TOM ROBBINS, excerpted from “What Is Art and If We Know What Art Is, What Is Politics?” found in Wild Ducks Flying Backward: Short Writings of Tom Robbins (Bantam, 2005)
Photo: Tom Robbins
“…in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original…” C.S. LEWIS
Narnia fans might enjoy spending 2014 with A Year with Aslan: Daily Reflections on the Chronicles of Narnia. The book offers 365 of the most thought-provoking passages from all seven Narnia books, paired with questions that promote reflection on particular topics.
The 480-page A Year with Aslan is available at Amazon.com.
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been.” RAINER MARIA RILKE
Photo: Ben Hur
“I have never started a novel — I mean, except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel — I’ve never written one without rereading Victory [byJoseph Conrad]. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.”JOAN DIDION
Note: VICTORY by Joseph Conrad is available free in a variety of versions (including Kindle) at Project Gutenberg. Find it here. Conrad scholar Debra Romanick called the book, originally published in 1916, “…a highly complex allegorical work whose psychological landscape and narrative structure set the groundwork for the modern novel…”
Happy belated birthday to one of our writing heroes, Joan Didion, who turned 79 on December 5, 2013.
“Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words,’When you are going good, stop writing.’ …if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next…” ROALD DAHL, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Photo: Roald Dahl (left) and Ernest Hemingway (right) in London during 1944.
NOTES ON THE PHOTO: As far as I’ve been able to learn, no one knows why Dahl and Hemingway were together in London during WWII. Dahl, a member of the British Royal Air Force, worked as something of a spy during the early war years—when Britain was fighting Germany and hoping the U.S. would enter the conflict. In this period (1939-1941), Dahl was stationed in Washington D.C., and attended social functions with politicians and other dignitaries, hoping to learn useful information about U.S. plans vis-a-vis the war.
At the time of the above photo, Dahl was 28 and Hemingway was 45 (though he looks much older). At first, I was puzzled when I looked at this photograph — thinking it couldn’t be Hemingway because “Papa” wasn’t that short. Then I realized that Roald Dahl must have been well above average in height to make Hemingway appear diminutive. Further research revealed that Dahl was 6’6″—while Hemingway was 6 feet tall.
At this point in his career, Hemingway was a world-famous author and had written three of his most important books — The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls – while Dahl had not yet written anything of note (Random House had published his children’s book entitled The Gremlins in 1943). Perhaps the young intelligence officer and aspiring author (Dahl) wangled a meeting with the old lion (Hemingway), hoping to gain some writing advice or just bask in the presence of the great author.
While Hemingway at some point (I’m not sure when) wrote about his method of stopping before you’re written out for the day, perhaps he gave this advice to Dahl first-hand when they were chumming around London in 1944. (For the record, Hemingway was in Europe from June-December 1944 and became involved in a number of allied initiatives while acting as a journalist.)
The Art of Fiction (Excerpt)
by John Gardner
In the writing state—the state of inspiration—the fictive dream springs up fully alive: the writer forgets the words he has written on the page and sees, instead, his characters moving around their rooms, hunting through cupboards, glancing irritably through their mail, setting mousetraps, loading pistols.
The dream is as alive and compelling as one’s dreams at night, and when the writer writes down on paper what he has imagined, the words, however inadequate, do not distract his mind from the fictive dream but provide him with a fix on it, so that when the dream flags he can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again.
This and nothing else is the desperately sought and tragically fragile writer’s process: in his imagination, he sees made-up people doing things—sees them clearly—and in the act of wondering what they will do next he sees what they will do next, and all this he writes down in the best, most accurate words he can find, understanding even as he writes that he may have to find better words later, and that a change in the words may mean a sharpening or deepening of the vision, the fictive dream or vision becoming more and more lucid…
The Art of Fiction is available at Amazon.com
In a 1956 PARIS REVIEW interview, interviewer Jean Stein asked William Faulkner about the difficulty some readers experienced trying to read his work. Here is the excerpt — priceless!
INTERVIEWER: Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?
FAULKNER: Read it four times.
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Find Faulkner’s PARIS REVIEW interview here.
PHOTO: Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and friend Joy (Laura Ramsey) ponder William Faulkner‘s novel THE SOUND AND THE FURY (1929) in “The Jet Set” (Mad Men, Season 2, Episode 11).
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
“I think lines of poetry come to you whenever they come. You could be waiting for the dentist and suddenly you’ll get an image or a line and you write it down. I write on the backs of envelopes, parking tickets—whatever I have at hand because you cannot lasso the muse.
I really believe you can’t force a lot of this. Now, I passionately believe in revision, and that you have to try to write in a disciplined way as much as you can. But I do think there are moments that you suddenly get something, given to you as a gift from the imagination, and you have to honor those moments as well.”
CAROL MUSKE-DUKES, former California Poet Laureate and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California
Silver Birch Press 