Writers Advise: Pynchon, Wallace, Amis, Leonard; Showing With Ross MacDonald

 I read two of Martin Amis's novels, but I know he had the reputation as a bad boy of English writers. Seeing him paired with Elmore Leonard lit the fuse of my curiosity mixed with fear. It is a little shocking to hear Amis's respect for Leonard. A very good discussion of writing that raised my opinion of Amis.

 

 Why Martin Amis Hated David Foster Wallace & Thomas Pynchon - Write Conscious

 

I think I have made it clear here what I think of David Foster Wallace, but if I heard the presenter correctly, he ranks Wallace a better writer than Amis. He also gets down Zadie Smith, who I adore.

Show, Don't Tell: Donna Leon's Timeless Lessons for Well-Crafted Books surprised me:

 One pedagogical tactic that desperate teachers might employ is to direct the attention of their students to the novels of Ross Macdonald, for there are few better, more concrete examples of a writer who went quietly and artfully about the business of showing his readers the souls of his characters. Even more artfully, Macdonald kept authorial comment to a minimum while allowing the characters in his novels to strip themselves—or one another—bare with the words they hurled or simply let drop inattentively.

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Show the location, show the location, the huddled students are told. Well, how’s this for showing? ‘We trekked to the far side of a big central room.’ Then there is Mrs Biemeyer’s explanation for her delay in noticing the absence of the painting: ‘I don’t come into this room every day.’ Just in case Archer hasn’t grasped the wealth of the people who are going to hire him, Biemeyer laments that ‘There ought to be some place in a four-hundred-thousand-dollar building where a man can sit down in peace.’ This in 1976, when that sum bought a lot more house than it does today. And notice that Biemeyer refers to his own home as a ‘building’. 

Write Conscious again with Harold Bloom on Gravity's Rainbow

 

I remain a Pynchon skeptic, but I will let you make up your own mind. It may be that I do not get his sense of humor.

 

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sch 8/29 

Writing Resources: Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury (Writing Forward)

The theme that ties all essays in this book together is creativity and the act of keeping a healthy fountain of ideas flowing. Bradbury shares his wisdom on this topic not by preaching to aspiring writers about what they should be doing but by explaining what he did. He explains that he started writing a thousand words a day every day at the age of twelve. My personal daily goal as a writer is also a thousand words per day, although I didn’t start when I was twelve, and I often don’t hit my goal, especially when a project moves into editing, publishing, and marketing.

sch 9/6