The stuff of fiction

Settings for novels take place … well, literally everywhere.  And, as P.D. James once noted, all fiction is largely autobiographical for the writer, and much autobiography is, of course, the stuff of fiction. 

Someone, like you or me, sits down and starts thinking about where and how to “set” a book or a short story or even to tell the story of his or her own life – and pretty soon we have something new to read.  It usually doesn’t happen overnight and it often is a messy process, but regardless of who is doing the writing, it’s yet another completion of a creative process that has led to everything from our neighbor’s “memoirs” to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

 “(Writing) is undoubtedly a lonely career,” James said.   “But I suspect that people who find it lonely are not writers.  I think if you are a writer you realize how valuable the time is when you are absolutely alone with your characters in complete peace.”

Wise words from a wise writer who followed the same process that is followed by each and every one who has a writer’s moment, and then follows through.  Happy writing.

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Attached to life's corners

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.” – Virginia Woolf

Born this day in 1882, English writer Virginia Woolf has often been credited with stream of consciousness writing alongside her modernist contemporaries James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.  Her writing had (and has) many admirers and probably an equal number of haters and in her own time was banned by some countries, including Adolf Hitler's Germany.    Her most well-known works are To The Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.  

  

Virginia Woolf

A great essayist as well as novelist, she once noted “A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.” 

But it was fiction writing where Woolf made her lasting mark and for which she is still studied today.  She said she found herself intrigued by and drawn into writing fiction because of how it so keenly wove together thoughts and reality.  “Fiction,” she said,  “is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.  Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”

I am ... I said

 
“There’s a mystery to writing, and you don’t really know where most of it comes from.”—Neil Diamond

Today is the birthday of one of songwriting’s and the entertainment world’s greats, Neil Leslie Diamond, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, but a gift to America and the world.  And, this great musician almost took his talents in a different direction.

A terrific athlete, he attended New York University on a fencing scholarship and was a member of the 1960 NCAA championship team.  But his life ambition was to be a laboratory biologist “and find a cure for cancer  (his grandmother died of the disease); I sincerely thought I could  discover the cure,” he said.  But during his senior year, a music publishing company made him a dream offer he couldn’t refuse – writing songs at $50 each, a huge amount in those days.

  

His singing and songwriting have been lucrative beyond even those lofty early days.  He’s written hundreds of songs for himself and others and had 11 number one hits.  To date he’s sold $140 million worth of them around the globe – the third highest grossing solo performer in history.  His secret?

“The main objective in any song I write has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I’m finished with it; that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what it’s saying.  Songs are life – in 80 words or less.”

A member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a Kennedy Center honoree, his 11 Number One songs include Heartlight, perhaps the only song ever written for an Extraterrestrial (It celebrated filmdom's E.T.), and Sweet Caroline, which has become a standard for almost every sporting venue – even though Boston Red Sox fans say it was their idea first.  The “bah, bah, bah” refrain may be the most sung phrase in the world, next to Happy Birthday, of course.

   

Neil Diamond

So, Happy Birthday … bah, bah, bah!
  

Here’s a link to another of Diamond’s number ones, the terrific and poignant I am … I said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxDyXK93o6g

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Wish I'd said that

One more post about Ralph Keyes, often cited as THE key resource person by writers trying to build up their courage or stamina to write.  If you ever find yourself struggling to put words on paper, his fine book The Courage To Write is the guidebook to turn to.

Keyes also may be THE leading resource person for those looking for information about the hows, whys and wheres on famous quotes.  Many times, in fact, he’s shown that the way we “remember” or “use” a quote isn’t always the way it first appeared.

His book on the topic – Nice Guys Finish Seventh – has often been called “the best book on the origin of quotations ever researched and compiled.”  As the title implies, the old saying “Nice Guys Finish Last” never started out that way at all.   As Keyes immutable "Law of the Misquotation" implies, the original quote often is quite a bit off our common usage.  Nice Guys Finish Seventh is a fascinating, eye-opening book.

 

A couple of other examples from its pages: 

 

  “Any man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad,” was said about W.C. Fields, not by him.

“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” was actually a slogan of UCLA coach Red Sanders, not the Green Bay Packers’ Coach Vince Lombardi, who simply adapted for himself.

“The opera ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings,” grew from an older saying: “Church ain’t out ’til the fat lady sings.”

Keyes says he enjoys researching for books as much as writing them. "The longer I write," he said, “the simpler I'd like my writing to be: a well cleaned piece of glass through which the reader can see clearly to the content inside. The ideal would be prose so transparent that readers wouldn't even be aware of my fingers at the keyboard. The hardest work of writing, I find, is concealing how much effort it takes, and beating down the urge to show off."

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Afraid, who me?

“Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.” – Ralph Keyes 

Ralph Keyes is an author and lecturer who has written 16 books including Is There Life After High School?, which was adapted as a musical that opened on Broadway in 1982 and is still produced by theater groups across the United States. His 1995 book The Courage to Write has become a standard work among aspiring writers.  He graduated from Antioch College and still makes his home near there in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

In The Courage to Write, Keyes wrote, “I’m often asked why I write so often about ‘negative’ subjects: tensions between fathers and sons, adolescent angst, time pressure. My answer is that exploring such topics on paper helps me get rid of them. Writing can be wonderful therapy, and cheap at the price. At the very least, you eventually get bored by thinking about anxious topics and want to move on.”

Ralph Keyes

Plus, it’s a great way to handle some of those kinds of “Writers’ Moments.”  So, toss out the fear, and happy writing!

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A long, slow process

For each writer, as I mentioned yesterday, there’s a different answer to the question: Where do you get your characters?   I recently read this note in Time from the fine author Meg Wolitzer and thought it was an excellent take on how the process occurs.

“My best, though incredibly vague, answer is that ideas about characters come about through the long, slow process of living.  Even if a character’s experiences aren’t your own, you are citizens of the same world, and you’ve had your experiences and witnessed other people’s too.  While all that has been going on, empathy has quietly been forming; it’s a chemical process.”

It’s probably safe to say that Wolitzer’s life has been permeated by writing.  The author of 10 novels, including The Wife, and The Ten-Year Nap, she grew up the daughter of a novelist (Hilma Wolitzer) and married another novelist (Richard Panek).  And the legacy is continuing.  Both of her sons, still teenagers, already have had works published.   The beat goes on, and we – the readers – are the lucky beneficiaries.

 
Meg Wolitzer

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