Grab Bag For Writers

 Processing: How Brandon Taylor Wrote Minor Black Figures (Counter Craft) - two quotes out of a quotable interview:

I’m getting sidetracked again. I don’t know that I have a strategy for writing embodiment because I am a writer for whom embodiment is a subject, theme, and natural interest. I think partly because I don’t experience my body in the mediated way that many writers seem to. I am acutely aware of my body at all times. Soreness. A sniffle. The tension in my arches. The pain in my lower back. The grit in my eyes. My body is very present to me, and so it never occurs to me that there are people for whom their body is…invisible? Nonexistent? That is a totally alien human experience to me. But I do think that maybe that’s an area of experience worth exploring. But to the degree that it has been explored in American literature??? It feels like a pathology.

But if we’re talking tips. I don’t know. Think about your character’s physical existence. And after every three beautiful thoughts or observations, describe how they feel in response to something that’s happened in the moment. That’s what I always do when things start to get heady. I come back to the physical world.

***

But in 2021, I started to read literary criticism and political theory, and I gained a more robust understanding of the world and my own experience of that world. I had a language I could use to understand things better, more clearly, and importantly, with that language, I could begin to express that understanding. All of this allowed me to articulate political and ideological questions, moral questions, in my work. The challenge was how to marry that with my Jamesian dramatic conception of fiction. Because for me, fiction is drama. It is action and rhythm and scene and dialogue to express the interior state. I am a Chekhovian and a Jamesian by nature. I am not, like, a super heady guy. That is not my disposition.

So it was a hard road, frankly. I am still on it, I think. But Minor Black Figures comes out of an intense period of self-study and self-reflection down in the criticism mines. It is particularly influenced by the critic Georg Lukacs, for whom “ideology” is the highest form of characterization. And for him, a novel’s function is to demonstrate the social process, in large part through the conflict of ideology among the characters in that novel. I wanted to a write a book that followed his principles—as much as I could. And I think the book is more vivid and more alive for it. The characters really argue the way that I argue with my friends about the things that matter to us.

And I think if we are going to write a robust, rich, living literature, we have to be able to capture that aspect of life—people arguing, debating, fighting, protesting, striving to bring about a world that reflects their values. It blows my mind that 2020 saw one of the greatest uprisings in modern history, and our novelists and short story writers are acting as though…we were all just inside talking about fruit ninja. Solely because they are afraid of being called didactic. Preachy, etc. At this point, the reality proffered by mainstream literary fiction is so much less politicized and so much less alive than the reality one encounters just walking to a bodega and listening to the guys argue about tariffs.

 The A24 Writing Formula: How You Can Use It to Write Unique Stories gives me one problem:

A24 films don't explain themselves. Take Civil War. Audiences are dropped into the action, and we don't get a full picture of how we got here. We're just along for the action and figure out the details as we go. Same for Under the Skin.

Where conventional studios provide exposition and hand-holding, A24 expects you to keep up.

"Hollywood thinks audiences are stupid. A24 thinks audiences are detectives," he says.

Learn more about showing, not telling.

I think this works better with films, but I am having trouble getting it across with short stories. There is a problem with pacing that keeps recurring in them.  

 Okay, some of this was repetitive, doesn't mean it does not need to be repeated:

 Q&A with the author of LINGERING INLAND is more literary than about writing; I bought the book after seeing some of the contributors and the editor at a conference that was part of Proof: A Midwest Lit Fest. See my Finally, My Post on Proof: A Midwest Literary Festival; A Call To Action.

Q: What myths do you hope your book will dispel or what do you hope your book will help readers unlearn?

Lingering Inland isn’t alone in this work, but it is a great example of how the Midwest is a dynamic, diverse place. There’s a wide range of backgrounds and life experiences among the contributors as well as their author subjects, and the variety of places they visited and wrote about certainly puts the lie to common, simplistic labels like “flyover country” or “the breadbasket of America.” It’s important that Midwestern writers and scholars acknowledge and articulate the region’s multiplicity, because the allegation of homogeneity—whether delivered in dismissive or laudatory tones—is a pretty unproductive way to look at an entire region, not to mention awfully boring.

 sch 12/22