Born this day in 1757.
Here is his poem “Infant Joy”:
“I have no name: I am but two days old.” What shall I call thee? “I happy am, Joy is my name.” Sweet joy befall thee! Pretty joy! Sweet joy, but two days old. Sweet Joy I call thee: Thou dost smile, I sing the while; Sweet joy befall thee!
I’m a big fan of Randall Munroe and his xkcd strip. I’m also a big fan of Up Goer 5. So it was really nice of him to write a whole book called Thing Explainer in Up Goer 5, which is coming out next Tuesday.
If you can’t wait, he has an excerpt in the New Yorker. Here’s how it starts:
There once was a doctor with cool white hair. He was well known because he came up with some important ideas. He didn’t grow the cool hair until after he was done figuring that stuff out, but by the time everyone realized how good his ideas were, he had grown the hair, so that’s how everyone pictures him. He was so good at coming up with ideas that we use his name to mean “someone who’s good at thinking.”
I was listening to an interview with the prolific British historical novelist Bernard Cornwell (who, oddly, lives on Cape Cod, not that far from my little South Shore town). In it, he said that he doesn’t plot out his books ahead of time, although he wished he could. He recalled that he recently had to finish his latest novel before catching a plane the next day (presumably because of a deadline), but he had no idea how it was supposed to end. So he got up at three in the morning, the ending came to him, and he finished the book by noon, in time for him to catch his flight.
This is odd, but somehow that’s the way it often works. I have been noodling about a plot problem in my latest novel for a while now. Something hadn’t worked in the first draft, but I didn’t know how to fix it. Earlier this week I reached the point in the second draft where I had to figure this out. I had non-writing stuff to do for a few days, and my next writing session was going to be Saturday at noon. So I sat down on Saturday, mulled things over for a while, and the new plot-line came to me. Right on schedule.
Writing fiction doesn’t always work that way, but life is much more pleasant when it does.
But I don’t know how long we can stay in business offering these crazy low prices! Here it is on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Every one of the main characters in the HBO series “Girls” is so irritating that you want to shake them–or worse. (My wife said she just wanted to stab Hannah Horvath after one episode.) But all the characters feel real to me. And none feels more real than Lena Dunham’s aspiring writer, Hannah Horvath.
Hannah desperately wants to think of herself as a writer, but she hasn’t done anything yet to convince the world (or herself) that that’s what she really is. She “inks” an e-book deal, but the deal falls apart when the publisher drops dead. She gets a job writing advertorial pieces
for a magazine and tries to feel superior to her co-workers, only to find out that they are already more successful than she is. And, finally, she gets accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she has to participate in the dreaded writing group.
The rules for a writing group are apparently universal (and maybe they originated at Iowa). The rest of the group reads your submission, and then each person gets to comment on it in turn. You’re not allowed to respond until everyone has finished. So you have to sit there and listen to a bunch of people criticize something you have put your heart and soul into. In the “Girls” episode at Iowa, a black guy is first up, and everyone raves about his authentic voice and whatnot. When it’s finally Hannah’s turn, they savage her. And she just can’t cope. Of course they don’t understand her piece, and of course she has to explain it to them. But that’s not the way the writing group works. She asks the teacher if she can say five words, but the teacher won’t let her. So she slips in the single word “History,” as if that will explain everything and silence all her critics.
It’s a poignant scene–at least for a writer. My first experience with a writing group was during my senior year at Harvard. It took place in the living room of a professor’s house on Brattle Street in Cambridge. The professor did his best to keep everything low key and civil, but it was pretty traumatic, at least for me. I wrote nothing but science fiction in those days, and I just knew the other students weren’t going to like what I produced. But I was desperate for their approval–for anyone’s approval, really. I was the last one to have my story critiqued, and it was . . . not bad. At least, I don’t remember feeling the necessity to explain myself like Hannah. Whatever criticisms people had, I was able to listen to the them and survive. The story, as I recall, wasn’t terrible, but like everything I wrote in those days, it was all surface; it wasn’t a story about real life. It certainly wasn’t publishable; publication (and becoming a real writer) was years away.
Anyway, I felt for Hannah in that episode–and every episode, even when we want to stab her. She’s a narcissistic jerk, but that just means she’s one of us. It’s tough being a writer.
You can find it here. Notice the exciting Follow button beneath my photo. Click it, and apparently Amazon keeps you updated on my new releases and maybe other cool stuff.
(For those keeping track, I’m about halfway through the second draft of the sequel to The Portal. I was hoping to get it out this year, but I have a feeling it’s going to leak into 2016.)
I was attending a memorial service at Mount Auburn Cemetery the other day, and I was asked to say a few words about my wonderful cousin Bob, who died recently from the effects of Alzheimer’s. I said my piece and took my seat.
And then I remembered a beautiful anecdote that summed up Bob perfectly. Three years ago he had sent me a lovely email remembering my father (who died many years ago) on my father’s birthday. Fighting the wreckage of his mind, Bob still managed to send me a thoughtful email (complete with a Dickens reference). When I recalled this I wanted to jump up from my seat and say, “Wait a minute! I’m not done yet!” But I had missed my chance.
This is a somewhat morbid example of l’esprit de l’escalier — the wit of the staircase — where you think of the perfect rejoinder to an argument at a dinner party only as you are on the way out.
This happened to me before, after I spoke at my mother’s funeral. In the last months of her life something happened to her brain, and she had a perpetual low-grade random fear. It was heartbreaking. A couple of weeks later I was driving to work and listening to a tape of John Gielgud declaiming Shakespeare. And suddenly I heard him recite the famous song from Cymbeline, which starts like this:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,Nor the furious winter’s rages;Thou thy worldly task hast done,Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:Golden lads and girls all must,As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
It’s not exactly Christian theology, but it spoke to me. I almost crashed my car on Route 128 when I heard it. That’s what I should have said to my mother as I said goodbye to her. Fear no more.
Oh well.
Because I’m in the mood, here is Brahms’ German Requiem. This piece will always remind me of sitting with Cousin Bob and his wife Lesley in a darkened room in a Vermont hospice, listening to this great music as Bob’s father’s life ebbed away. Here is the English text of part one:
Blessed are they that mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
They who sow in tears,
shall reap in joy.
Go forth and cry,
bearing precious seed,
and come with joy
bearing their sheaves
Another in a random series.
A Walk in the Woods, a film based on Bill Bryson’s travel book about hiking the Appalachian Trail, seems to be a small-scale hit. At the showing we went to, the median age was about 70, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. The reviews have not been kind, though, and the reviews are correct. The scenery is great, but the movie tries too hard to be zany and wacky and crazy, and the result is disjointed and just not very funny. Also, what’s up with casting Emma Thompson as the wife of a guy in his seventies?
The main character, of course, is a writer. In real life, Bryson was a middle-aged guy who took on the Appalachian Trail mainly because he had a book contract. That’s motivation enough! In the movie, he’s an old man who is taking on this challenge because he’s facing the reality of sickness and death. And the movie actually has a motif of Nick Nolte saying something like “Don’t put that in your book!” whenever something embarrassing happens, and Redford responding “I’m not writing a book!” He has a notebook, but the only thing we seem hi put into it is a note to his wife when they’re in a bit of trouble. Only at the very end, when Nolte seems to tacitly give him permission to write about their adventures, do we see Redford start the book.
In other words, because this is mild middle-of-the-road entertainment (and it stars Robert Redford!), they chose to downplay the fact that the main character is supposed to be a working professional writer, in favor of a vague Everyman schtick. The result is amiable but empty. And Emma Thompson needs better roles!
Stephen King has always struck me as being a humane and generous writer. In today’s New York Times he has a piece entitled “Can a Novelist Be Too Productive?” He points out:
No one in his or her right mind would argue that quantity guarantees quality, but to suggest that quantity never produces quality strikes me as snobbish, inane and demonstrably untrue.
And he points out that some writers (himself included) are just meant to be prolific–they can’t help themselves:
As a young man, my head was like a crowded movie theater where someone has just yelled “Fire!” and everyone scrambles for the exits at once. I had a thousand ideas but only 10 fingers and one typewriter. There were days — I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating — when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane. Back then, in my 20s and early 30s, I thought often of the John Keats poem that begins, “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain …”
But he never quite answers the question in his title (the title, of course, may not be his). This comes to mind as I read Elin Hilderbrand’s novel The Rumor. She is no dummy: She went to Johns Hopkins and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has created her own wildly popular genre–the Nantucket beach novel. But clearly her publisher wants her to write a book, maybe two books, a year. Could her novels be better if she took more time writing them, if she aimed higher? Is she being too productive? Beats me, but I think maybe so. The Rumor seems OK, but it is very slight.
On a related topic, I have so little time to read that I tend to avoid prolific novelists, because I fear that they are sacrificing quality for quantity. But, of course, I could be wrong. Here is Shakespeare’s output for 1599, as chronicled in the wonderful book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599:: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. I don’t think any of us would have wanted Shakespeare to slow down in 1599.
That’s the thesis of this New York Times op-ed — the last, we are told, in its “Drafts” series about the craft of writing. Not a great ending for the series. It’s not that there aren’t parallels between the two activities. It’s that the parallels are trivial. Sometimes it’s hard to get started solving a crossword puzzle. Hey, same for novels!
The equivalent blank period in novel writing can, unfortunately, last months or even years, but the principles at work are just the same. There will be stretches in which the only characters you’re able to summon arrive faceless or, worse, voiceless. There will be whole seasons in which every plot idea you come up with collapses the moment it appears on your screen. These are the times when you’d start Googling law school application deadlines if it weren’t for the memory of that Saturday puzzle: Even a granite wall, studied with sufficient patience, reveals its cracks.
Well, okay. The principle at work is: both activities can be hard, especially when you’re getting started. This is news? What the author doesn’t discuss is the crucial difference between puzzles and novels: puzzles, by definition, have a single correct solution. Novels? Not so much. And that’s why novels are a bit harder than the Saturday Times puzzle.
Fairly deep into the second draft of my novel, I have decided to make a fundamental change in a major character’s back story. Was this the correct solution to my narrative problem? Has the novel gained more than it’s lost? I have no idea. And I can’t look in tomorrow’s Times to find out. Because I’m the only one who can say whether the solution is correct. And I may never be totally sure.
Richard Bowker 