Putting 'anxiousness' aside

“I think that there must be a point of self-immersion in a story that is a point of no return. You get far enough in that the story has really touched you to the core and deeply troubled you and made you unhappy and fearful, and then how do you get out of that? I'm a writer, so my way of getting out of that is to write.” – Helen Garner

Born in Australia on this date in 1942, Garner is known for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences into her fiction, something that has brought her both praise and criticism, particularly with her novels, Monkey Grip and The Spare Room. 

Award-winning for both her fiction and nonfiction (she also has won acclaim for her screenwriting), she said “I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually."

While some critics have been disdainful of                         

her work, others have heaped praise like this late 1980s comment by Don Anderson.  “There are four perfect short novels in the English language,” he said.  “They are, in chronological order, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Garner's The Children's Bach.”

This year her non-fiction book Everywhere I Look came onto the market almost simultaneously with her receiving the prestigious Windham-Campbell Literary Prize (from the U.S.) for her lifetime achievement in non-fiction.  The prize is one of the richest in the world and should soothe some of Garner’s well-known angst about her writing skills.

“Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves,” she once said.  “I think writers are very anxious.”

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Bringing her readers on the journey

“I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!” – Berlie Doherty

Doherty, who celebrates her 73^rd birthday today, is a British novelist, poet, playwright and screenwriter.  Best known for her children's books, for which she has twice won the Carnegie Medal, she has also written many plays for theatre, and radio and television series.   “I love writing plays,” she said,  “because they are living, fluid things that are energized by the producer, designers, musicians, actors and audience.”

Her books encompass multiple genres, some drawing on her experiences as a social worker and others on social issues.   The award-winning Dear Nobody focuses on teen pregnancy, while The Snake-Stone is about adoption.  Her recent books tackle maladies like child trafficking (Abela: The Girl Who Saw Lions) and homelessness 

 (Far from Home: The Sisters of Street Child).

And a major focus of many of her works are                   

settings along rivers, lakes and seas.    “I love to watch the movement of light on water, and I love to play in rivers and lakes, swimming or canoeing,” Doherty said.  “I am fascinated by people who work with water - fishermen, boatmen - and by a way of life that is dominated by water.”

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A song for your 'self'

“When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.” – C. K. Williams (1939-2015)

A native of New Jersey, Williams came comparatively late to the writing of poetry, though he was encouraged by his father from an early age to read poems and learn them by heart. It was in penning a love poem at the age of 19 that Williams discovered a sense of vocation and from that moment on "knew that that was what I was going to do.”

His poetic style involved long flexible lines and                      

while he wrote on many topics, children, marriage and the ties of family were often his significant themes.   Among his many awards were the National Book Award for The Singing and a Pulitzer Prize for Repair.

For Saturday’s Poem, here is Williams’ 

The Singing

I was walking home down a hill near our house  

 on a balmy afternoon

under the blossoms

Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here  

 every spring

with their burgeoning forth

When a young man

 turned in from a corner singing  

no it was more of a cadenced shouting

Most of which I couldn't catch

I thought because  

 the young man was

black speaking black

t didn't matter I could tell he was making his  

 song up which pleased me

he was nice-looking

Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously  

 full of himself

hence his lyrical flowing over

We went along in the same direction then he noticed

 me there almost

beside him and "Big"

He shouted-sang "Big" and I thought how droll  

 to have my height

incorporated in his song

So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing  

 he looked

in fact pointedly away

And his song changed "I'm not a nice person" 

 he chanted "I'm not,

I'm not a nice person"

No menace was meant I gathered no particular threat 

 but he did want

to be certain I knew

That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord

between us I should forget it

That's all nothing else happened his song became  

 indecipherable to me

again he arrived

Where he was going a house where a girl in braids  

 waited for him on

the porch that was all

No one saw no one heard all the unasked and  

 unanswered questions

were left where they were

It occurred to me

 to sing back "I'm not a nice  

person either" but I

couldn't come up with a tune

Besides I wouldn't have meant it nor he have believed  

 it both of us

knew just where we were

In the duet we composed the equation we made  

 the conventions to

which we were condemned

Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that  

 someone something

is watching and listening

Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though  

 no one saw nor

heard no one was there

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Craftsmanship grows out of 'scraps and pieces'

 “Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.” – Charles Frazier

As a “deliberate” writer myself – especially when I’m working on fiction – I can commiserate with Frazier and long ago decided that getting it done right, regardless of how long it takes to finish is the best route to follow.   Frazier agrees, noting, “Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.” 

  

Celebrating his 65^th birthday today, Frazier is mostly lauded for his first novel, the terrific Cold Mountain – both an award-winning book and the movie that won Renee Zellweger her first Academy Award.  But I’m equally enamored with his novel Thirteen Moons and highly recommend it to all.   It is a story of both struggle and triumph against the emerging U.S. government's plan to remove native Cherokee people to Oklahoma. 

His writing is a study in how to draw upon the                      

culture and history of a region – in this case both his home state of North Carolina and Appalachia.   And, he said he loves both the music of the region and working to incorporate it into his writings.

“It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to.”

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Catching up on great quotes

I was tempted today to focus on a politician or two, just to join in all the noise from the current campaign season.  But, better sense came over me and I decided, instead, to just “catch up” on some of the quotes that I’ve accumulated during the past few months and not had time to present.

Here are some comments by writers and other famous folks who also had some writing successes during their lifetimes, starting with a couple from “The Wizard of Westwood,” longtime Hall of Fame basketball coach John Wooden, who had 13 national championships at UCLA.

“If you don't have time to do it right,” Wooden once asked, “when do you think you’ll have time to do it over?”   A great reader and author of several inspirational books, Wooden also noted that “The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.  I love re-reading the classics and old favorites.”

***

From French author Andre Malraux, who was born on this day in 1901:  “Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not that one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage to bet on one's ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.”  In other words, to be bold!

***

From longtime radio and television personality Art Linkletter:  “My philosophy is to do the best you can for somebody. Help. It's not just what do you for yourself. It's how you treat people decently. The golden rule; there isn't big anything better than the golden rule. It's in every major religion in one language or another.”

***

And, finally, from one of my all-time favorite writers, Ernest Hemingway:  “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.  After you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you:  the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and places and how the weather was.”

As the political season winds down, immerse yourself in a “favorite read.”  And, happy writing as you uncover or discover your next “Writer’s Moments.”

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'Immersed' in the story

“I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about.  Read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.” – Thomas Mallon

An award-winning Novelist, essayist, and critic, Mallon (whose 65^th birthday is today) is known for historical novels that are renowned for attention to detail and context as they provide their readers into a “fly on the wall" view of the historical events swirling around them.

The author of 9 novels, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, and Watergate, he also has written one of the definitive works on plagiarism, Stolen Words, and two volumes of his insightful essays.  All told, he has written 16 books and hundreds of news stories, features and essays in his long career as journalist and creative writer.

As a journalist who is fairly well versed about Watergate, I really enjoyed Mallon’s terrific crafting of his 2013 novel Watergate, a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.  The colorful retelling of the Watergate scandal from the perspective of 7 characters is a truly great read.

 

Historical fiction, he said, is the genre in which he is most interested. “I think the main thing that has led me to write historical fiction is that it is a relief from the self,” he said.                                                                                                                                            

As for advice to writers of historical fiction, he offered this system that has worked so well for him.  “For almost every novel I've written, I've read the daily newspaper of the time almost as if it were my current subscription. For Two Moons, which was set in 1877, I think I read just about every day of the Washington Evening Star for that year. For Henry and Clara, I read the Albany Evening Journal of the time.”

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One of our best 'small town' writers

“I think as the world changes, we have to keep up. We have to note what is happening, and I think writing has always had a powerful corrective influence and possibility. We have to write about what's good, and we also have to write about parts of our culture that are not good, that are not working out. I think it takes a new eye.” – Lee Smith

American fiction author Smith, who celebrates her 72^nd birthday today, typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. She has received writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and, in April 2013, was the first recipient of Mercer University's Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature.

I really enjoy her work because it not only is well written, it resonates with my own background of coming from a rural area and small town America.  “I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities,” Smith said.  “My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.”  Imagine that!

Smith published her first novel 45 years ago, and                      

 in the intervening years, she’s published 12 more novels and four short story collections. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.

Her advice for young writers is not to use up all their own story in their very first efforts.  “I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.”

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