Writing Advice From Margaret Atwood

 The writer's groups here at Ft. Dix FIC that I have been involved with read their stores to one another. Before this I was never one for reading my stories out loud. My sister Melissa did and I recall throwing a pillow at her. I did not like the sound of my own voice or feel any confidence towards what I wrote. That changed in prison. Reading aloud became important when Dad went blind and there was a possibility of someone else reading to him. I Have now found reading to someone else helps me edit whatever I am writing. And reading aloud also has proven to me all too often I tend to sentences that look good on the page that make my ears cringe.

And to Margaret Atwood:

Perhaps by abolishing the Victorian practice of family reading and removing from our school curricula those old standbys, the set memory piece and the recitation, we've deprived both writer's and readers of something essential to stories. We've led them to believe that prose comes in visual blocks, not in rhythms and cadences; that its texture should be flat because a page is flat; that written emotion should not be immediate, like a drumbeat, but more remote, like a painted landscape, something be contemplated. but understatement can be overdone, plainsong can get too plain. When I asked a group of young writers, earlier this year, how many of them ever read their own work aloud, not one one of them said she did.

I'm not arguing for abolition of the eye, merely for the reinstatement of the voice, and for an appreciation of the way it carries the listener along with it at the pace of the story...

P. 71; "Reading Blind The Best American Short Stories 1989";  Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983 - 2005 (Carroll & Graf, 2005)

Also give "Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behavior in the Creation of Literature" at pages 128 -29 a look for its discussion of the novel's purpose. Female writers might are probably the audience of "Introduction: Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews" but guys don't limit yourselves.

sch 

2/12/20