April in Paris Goes Fourth

As long as I'm still in the 2010 catch-up mood, I noticed this in the queue: Number four in a series of thoughts and meditations on the words of some of my favorite writers from their interviews in The Paris Review.

Bow your heads as we read from St. Raymond's epistle...

The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world. None of my stories really happened, of course. But there's always something, some element, something said to me or that I witnessed, that may be the starting place. Here's an example: “That's the last Christmas you'll ever ruin for us!” I was drunk when I heard that, but I remembered it. And later, much later, when I was sober, using only that one line and other things I imagined, imagined so accurately that they could have happened, I made a story—“A Serious Talk.” But the fiction I'm most interested in, whether it's Tolstoy's fiction, Chekhov, Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, Hemingway, Isaac Babel, Ann Beattie, or Anne Tyler, strikes me as autobiographical to some extent.

The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 76, Raymond Carver

April in Paris, Part the Third

Number three in a series of thoughts and meditations on the words of some of my favorite writers from their interviews in The Paris Review.  Actually, this week you'll get two for the price of one.

That’s why I like short stories. You’re always trying to keep the person interested. In fiction, you don’t need to have the facts up front, but you have to have something that will grab the reader right away. It can be your voice. Some writers feel that when they write, there are people out there who just can’t wait to hear everything they have to say. But I go in with the opposite attitude, the expectation that they’re just dying to get away from me.

The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 176, Amy Hempel

April in Paris, Part the Second

Here's the second in a series of thoughts and meditations on the words of some of my favorite writers from their interviews in The Paris Review.

It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier.

The Paris Review - A Humorist at Work, Fran Lebowitz

April in Paris, Part the First

As promised, the first in a series of thoughts and meditations on the words of some of my favorite writers from their interviews in The Paris Review.

The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours.  I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being.  There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down.  Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard.  Don’t let people interfere with you.  Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done.  If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

 The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 203, Ray Bradbury

"April in Paris"*

What you're supposed to do is act like a fucking professional.

-Mr. White, Reservoir Dogs

You know how folks would get excited knowing that their favorite TV series were on, say, Hulu, in their entirety?  I felt exactly the same way when I read that The Paris Review has put all of their writer interviews online.  After years of passing up on purchasing the interview compilations, I gouged on them like a starving man.  I found--in a couple of cases, rediscovered--some real gems, which I've posted on my Tumblr.

You want to know how some real professionals get shit done?  Then you could do worse than to peer into the brains of the likes of Dorothy Parker, Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and--for us genre folks--Ray Bradbury!

So I think over the next few days I'm going to post bits of their interviews, along with some accompanying thoughts.  Meditations, I guess you could call them. 

*Sorry, I'm still on the Count Basie Orhcestra tip from a few weeks ago.

"'Cause whatever you do, oh, you've got to do your thing"

Like a lot of things in my life lately, this post is 9 days late.  Still, it's the thought that counts, right?

This was going to be my "Why I'm not doing NaNoWriMo this year" post.  But reading posts like that over the years, I've noticed that it seems difficult for me to write one without looking like a condescending jerk.

This isn't where I'm going to turn up my nose at the NaNo, or go into my rationalization of why it just doesn't fit in with my writing goals right now.  I only bring it up now because, despite my resolve to not even fool myself into thinking it was a possibility this year, I reupped my account anyway and found out that somehow, some of my peeps found and added me to their friends list. 

So, to them: You do your thing!!

Of course, the best part of reupping my account: the pep talks from famous writers in my email box.  I squeed when I saw Aimee Bender's!

OPP: Other People's Publications

This is on my goodreads "to-read" list and should be on yours, too.





I met Ben at a reading he gave here in I-town a year or so ago for his first book, Lucky Man. Nice guy whose day job is in the field I worked in back in a past life. Anyway, this promises to be a good one, and based on my experience with Lucky Man, I've got no reason to doubt it.

Out of the Woodwork

Seems my friends list on goodreads blew up today. Three folks added me, and I went ahead and added one myself, someone whose writing I always enjoy whenever I come across it.

Why not come on over and check it out? I'll add anyone, especially anyone who reads the sort of books I read. C'mon...you've tried Facebook and MySpace and last.fm. One more social network won't kill you.

Those Damn Kids

10 Reasons Jeff Vandermeer Rarely Reads YA

9 - Tired of reading about teens who turn out to be The Chosen One. (One time, just one time, why couldn’t The Chosen One be some tired single parent with four kids, just trying to catch a break.)

Now, get the hell off my yard :).

"Yeah we tease him a lot, 'cause we got him on the spot"

If you've ever asked yourself what Gabe Kaplan's been up to lately, find out in his interview on the Bat Segundo Show podcast.

Drowning in RSS

So, I've been writing so much that I've let gobs and gobs of intarwub stuff pile up in my Google Reader. I've tried to quit "starring" anything, at least until I got caught up. Yeah, right. I just piled shit into Google Bookmarks.

Anyway, here's a random sampling of stuff I've accumulated, mostly writing related.

1
From Dar Kush (Steven Barnes) on reading.

The point is that your output will be one step down from your input. You can't read comic books and write classics. Sorry. Here's a joke I always tell students: 'If you want to write comic books, read pulp fiction. If you want to write pulp fiction, read popular fiction. If you want to write popular fiction, read bestsellers. If you want to write bestsellers, read classics. And if you want to write classics..? Choose your grandparents very carefully.'

2
Steve Perry on writers workshops (part one of two)

Damon [Knight]'s personal taste is not the same as an intrinsic flaw in the piece, and you have to be able to tell the difference, else you wind up producing stories that please the workshoppers but don't sell ...

Here's part two.

3
Another POV on critique groups from Bev Vincent.

4
Sarah Monette talks about Five Things I Know About Worldbuilding

5
Paul Jessup writes about The Newbie Writer Cycle.

Jay Lake follows up with The Early Career Writer cycle

6
There is NO....number 6.

7
From Warren's Bad Signal mail a few weeks ago...

But I did note that apparently the Gene Hunt role in the
ill-advised American remake of LIFE ON MARS is going to
good old Colm Meaney. And god knows Meaney's made some
crap to pay the mortgage, but he tends to elevate a thing --
or at least let some light into it -- just by showing up. So I
might give the remake a look after all, even though it's
almost guaranteed to be a train wreck...

And there you have it. Vital bits of information that, only by the grace of God, I've managed to survive without blogging about until today.

So That's How It's Done

Elizabeth Bear writes in Storytellers Unplugged: Passion and the single blogger

And that's what makes [certain blogs] readable--compulsive, even. Because they're committed. They're there laying it on the line. This is what I do, and this is how I do it.

And that? Is interesting. And it's interesting in ways that apply to fiction writing, too. Because characterization counts. I mean, let's be honest here: Shakespeare couldn't plot his way out of a wet paper bag. And he knew it, too, which is why he lifted stories from everywhere and anywhere, with the peculiar light-fingered pickpocket's touch of his. But the man could write characters--people--better than just about anybody.

A good weblog is about character.

Stars Must've Aligned

...if I'm reading this not two weeks after discovering this person's name via the Great American Prose Poems anthology, which is yet another book added to my goodreads list before I've finished the 100 other things on it.

Charles Simic Receives Poet Laureate Post, Plus $100,000 Award
By Jeffrey Burke

Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Charles Simic, a Pulitzer Prize- winning writer, will receive two major honors today. He will be named the 15th poet laureate of the U.S. by the Librarian of Congress, succeeding Donald Hall, and he will receive a $100,000 award from the American Academy of Poets.

Fanfiction

Whatever: My Policy on Fanfic and Other Adaptations of My Work:

"First: I do retain and reserve all rights to my work. I'm not very squishy about that fact. Just so you know. If you play in my universe, you implicitly accept I have the right to come around, say 'mine!' and then stomp off with all your pretty toys. Yeah, I know. I'm a dick. What can I say.

Second: As long as you can deal with that first point, as far as I'm concerned, you may play in my universe(s) as long as the emphasis is on 'play.' This means that nothing you do in my universes may:

a) Generate any sort of economic benefit for you, in any form;
b) Generate any sort of economic benefit for any third party;
c) Cause me economic detriment of any sort."

Not that I ever expect anyone to ever write fanfic about anything I create. Nor have I ever written any fanfic of any kind (unless you count a DOCTOR WHO story I wrote back in the 7th grade as an assignment).

Ray Bradbury