A Writer's Moment: 'Looking, Listening, Reading & Practice'

A Writer's Moment: 'Looking, Listening, Reading & Practice':   “The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking a...

'Looking, Listening, Reading & Practice'

 “The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.”  – Donna Tartt

 

Born in 1963, Tartt is a writer whose pace is something I like to point to when talking about my own – running to the “slow and steady wins the race” type.  That translates into about a book every 10 years with a few short stories and essays sprinkled in between.

Her novel The Little Friend, released in 2003, won the WH Smith Literary Award, and her 2013 book The Goldfinch won The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – not a bad track record.  On top of that, she’s twice been named to Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” list.  

       A native of Mississippi, Tartt started writing as a first-year student at Ole Miss under the tutelage of fellow Mississippi author Barry Hannah, who was serving as Writer-in-Residence at the University.  Struck by her enthusiasm and ability, he enrolled her in his Graduate writing class.   Eventually she transferred to the renowned Bennington College (Vermont) writing program.   Her experiences there, along with her vivid imagination, led to her best-selling first novel The Secret History in 1992.

 

“My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark,” she said.  “It's more 
a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long

 period of time.” 

 

 

www.writersmoment.blogspot.com

A Life 'Filled With Meaning'

 

“To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, but life without meaning is the torture of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.” – Edgar Lee Masters

 Born    in Kansas on Aug. 23, 1868, Masters, whose first served as a lawyer with Clarence Darrow, was one of America’s most prolific writers during the first half of the 20^th century.  He published 12 plays, 21 books of poetry – including his masterpiece Spoon River Anthology – 6 novels and 6 major biographies, including Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.  Among his many awards were the Mark Twain Silver Medal and the Poetry Society of America Medal.   In 2014, he was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.   For Saturday’s Poem, here is Masters’,

 

Silence

 

I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities --
We cannot speak.

A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
"How did you lose your leg?"
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, "A bear bit it off."
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.

There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.

There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d'Arc
Saying amid the flames, "Blessed Jesus" --
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.

And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.

 

 

www.writersmoment.blogspot.com

A Life 'Filled With Meaning'

A Writer's Moment: Living Life 'Filled With Meaning':   “To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, but life without meaning is the torture of restlessness and vague...

A Writer's Moment: 'Like A Genie . . . Hidden On A Page'

A Writer's Moment: 'Like A Genie . . . Hidden On A Page': “Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, fe...

'Like A Genie . . . Hidden On A Page'

“Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.” – Mary Gaitskill

 

 The author of short stories, novels and numerous essays, Gaitskill’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.  Her most recent novel This Is Pleasure was published in 2019.   Also a college writing professor, she is a frequent speaker at writing workshops and conferences. 

 

Born in Kentucky in 1954, Gaitskill said she chose to become a writer at age 18 because she was "indignant about things—it was the typical teenage sense of 'things are wrong in the world and I must say something.’”  Her fiction typically is about female characters dealing with their own inner conflicts.  Often her characters are controversial, but her writing style has won her many awards.

 

She said she’s always strived to write like the life that she’s lived and “My ambition was to live like music.”

 

www.writersmoment.blogspot.com

A Writer's Moment: Writing To Conquer His Fears

A Writer's Moment: Writing To Conquer His Fears:   “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” –   H. P. Lovecr...