On Writing

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
by Stephen King
2000
291 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5681-0

I had read most of this book before, at an earlier time when I was thinking about writing in kind of an abstract and distant sort of way, but coming back from last weekend's trip to the AMSA Writer's Institute, I decided that perhaps I should pick it up again. I remembered it containing some good stuff, so it seemed like not a terrible place to revisit.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I like Stephen King. I am not saying that everything that the man has ever written is brilliant (and what's clear in this book is that neither is he), but he can tell a darn good story. Perhaps interesting, (and perhaps not) is that I like him best at the extremes: his short fiction and The Dark Tower. Either way, if you feel the need to quarrel about the idea that the man has talent, I suppose we can, but that's not the point here. The point is that I think that he has enough talent to be willing to get some tips, and I find him charming enough to have actually enjoyed reading them.

This is a good book. Not for everyone to be sure, but good. He makes excellent points about the process of writing that I'm sure have helped more than a few other writers get their work off the ground, but he is also honest about the limitations of what you can get from a book. He can't make you good if you are bad (and neither can anything else), he can't give you the ideas or really tell you where they come from, and it's going to be a lot of work.

But I am fine with all of that. At a moment like this, in my life, On Writing carries with it some reminders that I needed. About the work part, and the time part, and the drafting freely first and then editing part, and the admitting that I am writing, at least in part, to Andrew, so I should let him read things some of the time.

A lot of what's here is only going to be valuable to writer's of fiction (and readers as well.) King is interesting in his approach to character development and plot. He says he doesn't plan the plot beforehand, and is sometimes surprised by what his characters do. I suppose there's nothing to do but believe him, since I am almost always surprised by what his characters do. Still, some of the ideas, especially about drafting and editing ("2nd Draft = 1st Draft -10%") will likely work across genres, and I think that his analogy of the toolbox is universal.

And his notes on commitment, on the process, on the worthwhile effort, and the joy it brings, it's enough to remind you all over again why you might want to.

Two observations, neither really about writing that I especially liked:
On purgatory, I couldn't agree more:
"If I have to spend time in purgatory before going on to one place or another, I guess I'll be all right as long as they have a lending library (if there is, it's probably stocked with nothing by novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books...)" p. 104

On really smart people, I see it all the damn time:
"No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person." p. 143

But really, it is the writing about writing that shines here. The notes on the process, on the parts of his life that contributed to becoming a writer, on taking rejection with your head held high, and on really really working at it make this a worthwhile read for those of us that want to write.

"you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up." p. 270

And so should you fellow writers. So should you.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Colvino
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
c. 1979, 1981
Harcourt, Inc.: San Diego
260 pages

First of all, I have to apologize for the length of time taken to read this one. A whole week is way too long for me both as a reader and a new blogger. Alas, I was distracted this week by several events. An unexpected and glorious visit from some friends took up Wednesday, a night that I had set aside for reading. (And I wouldn't change that for the world.) On top of that, the research that I am doing at work seems to have found the beginnings of something that might be exciting (I say this with thinly guarded optimism). Therefore, I have been reading, but reading journal articles that hopefully help me frame what we have found in the context of the other research that exists on the topic (and in all the other slightly related areas that I got sidetracked to, because I am like that, and I can get pretty much anything right here at my desk. I love the National Library of Medicine.)

Anyway, assuming that most people don't care to read all the details of my thoughts on various articles from medical journals, we'll leave that out until I actually write a book about it.

To the book. I love this book. It is a book for readers. It is a book about the art of reading, the experience of reading and how greatly it can vary. It is about attitudes that people bring to reading and the essential purity and impurity of books. Loverly.

"The book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; it's subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists in its own incompleteness." (page 171-172) Beautiful.

Chapter One of this novel (if it can really be called a novel) includes a passage that sucks me in each and every time; it is so perfect. A trip to the bookstore in which you (for the book is written in the second person, addressed to a "Reader") are assaulted by the army of books there waiting there. As a reader and a lover of bookstores, I find myself facing this challenge each time I walk into Barnes and Noble carrying both my extensive curiosity and my meager finances and time. I think that here, the challenge of leaving the bookstore with any of the money I came in with is beautifully captured. An excerpt:

"...but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First... Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up to the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You've Been Planning to Read For Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer... the Books that Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large, but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down and Really Read Them... and so on. (pages 5-6)

Really, sometimes I wonder how I ever make it out of there alive.

The structure of this novel is fascinating. In it, the "Reader" starts, and is interrupted in the reading of, 10 other novels, which are reproduced as he reads them. Alternating chapters include the narration of events between these reading, the finding and losing of the books, and his relationship with the "Other Reader" a young woman named Ludmilla. (He meets her in the bookstore, is there anyone else out there that is always hoping to meet someone new in a bookstore, it seems such a great place to meet people, and yet I never talk to anyone. blah.) The story is rounded out with an extremely complicated cast of other readers, writers and manipulators of books.

Each of the ten novels is interrupted at a moment of suspense. This creates an interesting effect, because like the character of the reader, I find myself wanting to hunt down these books and read the rest of them, just to find out what happens next. Of course, they don't exist, and the stories here are, alas, perpetually unfinished. (If you are someone who needs endings, this is not the book for you.)

More powerful however, is the commentary in the narrative chapters that talks about the nature of reading. Here I found many moments that resonated with me, explanations for why one is a reader, what one hopes to find, and does find, in books. The contrast of the hope embodied by some readers with the resignation of others, the escapeism of some readers contrasted with others who use reading as a way of being more intimately connected to the world. It really is a commentary on the diversity and humanity of the experience of reading. And also on the nature of novels as existing in some intersection between what is and what's not. I could quote passages for pages and pages here, but I think you should all just go and read the book. Because the point is made therein that reading is necessarily, in some ways at least, a solitary process, and me telling you about it will just not be equivalent.

Speaking of reading alone, this afternoon as I read the final chapters, I found myself very sincerely wishing that I was fluent in Italian so that I could read the original. This book is, among other wonderful things, filled with a variety of complex words and sentence structures. I am sure that the translator has put very real effort into finding the closest equivalents, but I am also sure that a book written by the word lover that Calvino certainly is loses more in the translation than other works might, simply because the complexity of the language suggests, at least to me, that much of the word choice was very deliberate, and therefore, impossible to really translate, since languages often provide only the most approximate or cumbersome equivalents for words that are beautiful in the original. But alas, I am not sure when I will have time to learn the Italian (or any of the other languages that would open worlds of great books in the original language...) But reading through a translator is like reading with someone else. I'm not sure I like it. Alas

Still, if you are a lover of books and the potential embodied in the act of reading, and not a lover of neat endings, go out and get this one. It's involved and fascinating, parts of it sensual somehow almost to the point of physicality. In the moments in which I was reading it, it totally owned me.

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." (page 156)

Perfect.

Walking a Literary Labyrinth

Walking a Literary Labyrinth:
A Spirituality of Reading
by Nancy M. Malone
c. 2003
Riverhead Books: New York
208 pages

This is another bargain book buy. I found this on the shelf at Barnes and Noble shortly after I got the Barnes and Noble membership card: a little plastic enabler that lives in my wallet, crying out with an innocent sounding voice, "If you don't spend at least $250 dollars at Barnes and Noble this year, you got ripped off!" (Is there anyone out there worried about my ability to spend $250 at Barnes and Noble?)

Anyway, I digress. I picked this up because I was at the time shopping for something to inform my thinking about asking God for some help in changing some of my less empowering habits (still asking). My mother frequently tells me that I need to meditate, that I move too fast and do too much. (Actually, this is not only my mother, but she is the most insistent, although Andrew is catching up.) The jacket of the book promised a discussion of how reading is like mediation, like praying, and how reading can inform us on our quest to selfhood.

As a good reader, and a very bad meditator, I decided to give it a shot.

The book was written by a Catholic nun and an avid reader, who clearly sees that both her religious and internal life have been greatly informed by the books that she has read over the course of her life. While some parts seemed to drag more than a little bit, and some of the recommended reading is probably a little too focused on the theological for my current taste, the book as a whole spoke to me at a clear and personal level. She clearly has an understanding of the reading experience that is similar to my own.

Reading is for me, as well as for the author, a deeply personal, emotional and seeking practice. The books that I have read inform my thinking about other things in life, even when the connections are far from clear. Being a reader is very much part of my humanity, and of the way that I strive to become increasingly human. Perhaps the way that I most powerfully and successfully strive for a greater understanding of the world around me.

It was reading this book today that made me think of turning this summer's reading into a conversation with whomever wanted to take part, or at least a conversation with myself. The idea is presented in the book that reading is like a conversation, and I hope that for myself, writing this continues to be like a conversation, even if there are no other participants beside myself and the texts that I encounter. I have found, over the years, that writing and reading a journal is one of the clearest ways to converse with yourself. Especially given the fact that the constant and gradual change we undergo can be hard to see from the inside and in any single moment, but the contrast in our thinking at far separated moments can be stunning. Right.

Anyway. The book talks about reading in a couple of ways that I found moving and true in a very personal way. From the beginning, the author speaks of reading as a questioning and seeking process, and not just reading non-fiction as a questing for knowledge, but also reading fiction as a questing for understanding human nature and ourselves. She speaks of reading as a method for seeking our best selves, what we are meant to be. She speaks in one chapter of the quest for authenticity and the way in which reading informs that. The endless cycle of questioning, and therefore reading, and therefore questioning, and therefore reading, that pushes me forward as someone that really, truly, deeply loves books.

"We have questions about what we should do, how we should act. And we can make decisions that are right, based on objective value, on the truly good. But we make erroneous and bad ones too. Following the powerful impulses of passion, laziness, selfishness, weakness, prejudice, we choose what we want even when it is not good for us, regardless of the good of others. In all these ways, we and the characters we read about achieve, fail at, or refuse the self-transcendence implicit in our questioning. We zigzag between the authenticity that is achieved in self-transcendence and the inauthenticity of choosing or settling for less than we can be. . . But our questioning - our questing - is unending, unrestricted. There is always more to know and more to understand, more that we can become. And so we keep on reading. And so each book, no matter how fine, impels us to yet another." (33-34)

I love this, and were the rest of the book to have been unreadable, that passage alone would have justified the trip to the bookstore. But she also claims points that I find relate very centrally to my vision of reading and my vision of God. Claiming that you find both the books and the readers that you are meant to commune with at the time that you need them (something that I have always believed about more than reading, for my life is nothing if not charmed.)

One of the things that I found interesting, is that the author, as someone who is in tune enough with the spirituality of reading, is not someone who can read anywhere. She claims to be jealous of other people who can find some measure of peace in any environment by reading. "the stillness, silence, solitude and focused attention that reading offers is to be prized; it may be the closest some of us get to a spirit of contemplation in the hurried, noisy, scattered lives we lead. A good book can create a little hermitage for some people anywhere..." (73)

And I am one of those people. Someone who can find peace in a good book in the most dire of circumstances, the most tired of days, the most beaten of emotions. Reading for me is deeper and more relaxing than any meditation. And that is why I do it with such enthusiasm. Reading is a powerful, spiritual, sensual experience. One that compels me forward to more and more. One that makes me feel more aware, more connected, and more alive. I am not sure what more I could hope for from meditation, what more my mother hopes I might find.

Sister Malone ends the book with another passage that I found particularly touching.

"Now when an author puts the first word on paper or screen, she commits an act of hope. And every time we open a book, so do we. We hope for all kinds of things from a book - pleasure, knowledge, insight, intimacy, greater understanding of others and ourselves, beauty. But reading can also, in a deeper and more inchoate fashion, give us hope." (175-176)


It is with that hope in mind that I will read my summer away. Each book I open, I hope to find something there that I have never seen before, even in those that I have already read (as my next selection If On a Winter's Night a traveler is). That's the wonderful thing about books, there is something new in them each time, because they are, each one, a conversation. A conversation between the words on the page and the person that you as the reader are at that single moment. Anyone that has a favorite book that they have read countless times, recognizes this. For me it is poignent both in the experience of rereading and finding newness in the most familiar stories written by others and in rereading and finding new perspective on my own story through my journals. The words themselves may be the same, but the context and the emotion and the background can be so different as to give the same words new meaning, new clarity, new hope.

And that, I suppose, is why I am such a reader. It is as Malone says with the closing words of her epilogue.

"You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God." (181)