Writers: A Grab Bag For You

 What’s Happened to Modern Storytelling? (+ 6 Ways Storytelling Can Find Its Soul Again)

 1. Subtext, Metaphor, and Allegory

2. Mythic Structure and Archetypal Resonance 

3. Emotional Sincerity, Vulnerability, and Earnestness

4. Moral Clarity (With Nuance)

5. Joy and Wonder

6. Goodheartedness 

I have come to see necessity of #3 in my stories, and I have been working on this. I never thought of #5 and #6, but having seen them, I can see their importance. Sound and Fury had Dilsie and Benjy to bring joy, wonder and goodheartedness into the novel. 

 Why No One Cares About Your Writing (just scrape his politics off of his message):

 If you want people to care about your writing - you have to commit to being a literary writer. He says what I wish I knew in 1982 - the writers we admire put thousands of hours into their work. When you understand this amount of time is needed, I hope you are younger than I was!

How good of a writer are you? Some good answers here:

 A practical advice site that I found again today while looking for publishers of novellas: Writing Tips Oasis.  

I ran across a reference to The struggle to define cinematic writing (Constance Hale, 2020), and the title intrigued me. I doubted whether I had more of an interest after reading:

I've been struggling to find the right term for the nonfiction writing I most admire. Whether written by Joan Didion, David Grann, Susan Orlean, Héctor Tobar, Isabel Wilkerson, or Gene Weingarten, these are articles, essays, and books that combine suspenseful storytelling with literary style. They tackle true stories in a way that makes me feel, when I put them down, that I have learned something about the human experience but also something about writing.

There has no shortage of names for this genre through the years: literary journalism, narrative journalism, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, and the literature of fact.

For me, it was interesting without giving me much to think until I came to this.

 This all starts with a narrator who acts like an observing camera — we see landscapes, we watch people, we are carried along with the action. (Journalists call one classic technique “a ride-along,” following a subject so closely that the reader feels put into the car; I tried this in a recent profile of a street photographer in Oakland.) It might entail shifting points of view, or deftly changing perspectives between different characters. (Take a look at David Grann’s “Trial by Fire.”) It might be suspenseful as a thriller. (Journalist-historian Adam Hochschild is a master of slow-release structure.) It might mean thinking of film editing when you are devising a structure, creating a tense rhythm by cutting rapidly from one character to another — or in a scene, changing from a bird’s eye view to a close-up. (Watch old Perry Mason TV episodes for inspiration in black and white.)

It left me thinking about John Dos Passos and his USA Trilogy with its movie eye. Here might be a way to improve on Dos Passos.

 

There is also a reading list that looks good, it starts with John Hershey's Hiroshima.

 

sch 8/26

Sometimes writing feels like dropping a pebble in the ocean (Nathan Bransford)

The meaning you’re going to find in your book is not going to reveal itself at some point in the distant future. That meaning is also not subject to the whims of gatekeepers. It doesn’t really even matter whether your book gets published, though it probably doesn’t feel that way to you right now.

The meaning is already here, if you can stay attuned to it.

Because writing changes us for the better. Because we’re creating meaning out of that void. Because we’re leaving something behind that might make others feel less alone. Because we’re taking pain and turning it into light.

So yes. Sometimes it can feel like you’re dropping a pebble in a grand expanse of sea. It barely makes a ripple. That’s one way of looking at it.

But think about the pebble. Who knows what it’s going to encounter as it plunges into the watery depths?

sch 9/6