In one of Flannery O’Connor’s most famous short stories ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find,’ the grandmother doesn’t want to go to Florida on vacation. This is the era of the Great Depression in America. She rattles on about this fellow that’s escaped from the State Pen, ‘The Misfit’. She doesn’t want to go anywhere with such a fellow ‘aloose’.
Dreamland has Alison Wells (Margot Robbie) aloose with a $10 000 reward on her pretty head. She’s Bonnie and Clyde rolled into two silk stockings. But her last bank job has left her bust with a bullet in her leg. She ends hiding up in an outhouse beside a Texan farm whose topsoil has blown somewhere over Washington.
Eugene Evans (Finn Cole) is the boy with big dreams. He talks about the reward money in the same way the grandmother in O’Connor’s story talks about the Misfit. But the Misfit here turns out to be MILF. I went along for the ride. But I guess it’s one of those films shooting blanks. Not bad. Can there be any more damning praise?
George Saunders, A Mastercraft in Writing and life in conversation with Max Porter.
Chop a Chekov story into pieces.
Echo of class at Syracuse. Break up a story, a page at a time. Forces us to ask that question, why do I keep reading?
If I read a paragraph I’m in a different place than before, where is it?
Granular level. More irritating if the story is really good (cf, working with a shit story).
Forcing the pause.
Sit there for a few minutes asking, where am I now? What bowling pins are up in the air?
Why do I want to stop? Why do I want to keep going?
Noting emotion, I’m irritated. Wondering why?
Setting the baseline. For the rest of the year, that’s the kind of way we’ll be reading.
Read something, react to it, and try to articulate it.
There’s an intuitive noting we’re always doing, even if we don’t articulate it.
At a very basic level, we like it or we don’t.
Success in creating digressions, emotions into something worthwhile?
Second kind of noting. Rather that yes/no, remembering those reactions. And articulating them.
You can’t go into a class and say, shut up and listen. You can say I’m bringing you an object I think is worthy of consideration. Let’s see what sparks fly.
Put them in the path things that can show them the writers they were meant to be.
Touch on the obstructions they may be having. Or they dynamic they’re trying to figure out between being funny and being serious.
The job is to put explosive devices in front of them.
You’re going to get a lot of pushback.
Students ask questions. One of the things about getting older is your intellectual sphincter tighten up and you’re already sure you already know everything. You’re reminded talent springs eternal.
For many years as a working class person I have a reaction and I stifle it, because it can’t be right. (I can’t be right).
You try to override your initial reaction with another reaction. Something you’ve heard by somebody smarter than you.
Intellectual falsification and it can make you a crazy person.
It’s like walking into a party. It seems like a good party. There must be something wrong with you. Do you acknowledge that unease? [Ignoring it is one way of coping].
You can go astray. You can read something with too much defensiveness for example. [I’m not going to like this].
At first teaching was just something I had to do to go on writing my books. When you’re faced with a roomful of strangers you have some choices.
You’re involved in an active projection about those people. Do they hate you and find you stupid? Or are they a bunch of friends willing to be converted.
Connecting across age, gender and class, one of the best ways is looking at a made-up story.
What can happen in a room when the person at the front, trusts them.
In the US there’s been a steady devaluing of certain areas of the intellectual life. Reading and writing. Literature is this gauzy, cute, accessory. Nothing to do with the work of the real world.
Master and Man by Tolstoy.
Editing and re-drafting not the story, but yourself.
The Snowstorm
40 years pass and Tolstoy writes another story set in a snowstorm, Master and Man.
Indebted to the first story, but nothing like it.
Read them back to back. The difference is in what Tolstoy learned in those 40 years.
The latter is a more highly organized system.
What we’re trying to accomplish. We’re trying to take our first thing (draft) and trying to make it more highly organized.
Eg. Causality is tighter. Less waste. The thing is more universal. More itself. Framing greater truths.
Something weird about revising and the way I’ve come to understand it is you’re giving yourself chances, thousands of chances, to re-decide things at the phrase level.
Read every day with a pen in hand, and deciding whether I like it or not. And change it. Be a little bolder.
That process causes the work to be more elevated. Smarter. Have more causation. Weirdly, it causes it to ask better questions. And to ask those questions more precisely.
What I try to do in my work is recognise micro-opinions, do I recognize them in my work, do I recognize them when they appear?
Am I fearless in honouring them? Am I playful?
Commit to micro-decisions and the thing will become more like you.
Reconsideration machines. Ghosts, but literary ghosts. Peering over your shoulder. Your previous versions are haunted by your past versions.
Dialogue with previous selves.
Something close to intuition and iteration.
The great thing is you have to go with your intuition, but you have to come back to it. You’re letting a bunch of different yous act on the text.
It’s not your job to decide what kind of writer you are. It’s your job to write. I don’t have to be committed to theme, for example. I just have to be committed to making those choices again and again. Style will come out.
I’d a particular way of thinking that I thought that was me. Sarcastic way of seeing the world. You can step out of it. And that can happen at this late-stage revision. Literature become more than literature.
Milan Kundera, Super-personal wisdom finding its way in. Something we don’t have access in our daily life somehow find their way in during the cracks during revision.
Editing and writing gives me ideas how my mind works. My baseline idea is the ruminant part of your mind goes quieter. Monkey mind gets quieter. And in that quiet something else comes up.
There’s a little part of me that says, ‘Ooh, the New Yorker will love that paragraph’.
I need to say to myself. OK, step aside, back to the story.
To be aware of those micro-fluctuations in your mind. Like a smiling uncle saying, yeh, yeh, yeh, but you can’t deny it, because you need all of your energy to do this work.
Different minds and martial of this grand parade in your head. The mind is always in flux.
Principal of fiction, if you can get your stories to ask a valid question.
Our first draft is mostly projection and to revise it is a useful thing.
Mood boarding, the changing of the atmospheric lights.
Ben: I wonder if being in proximity to the mystery is useful. Being in proximity.
What I’d say to my younger writer self? Keep going. Whatever I’d have told him, he’d have rejected. The magic of time. We create these problems with our minds. And we solve them with our minds. The 10 000 hours of practice Malcolm Gladwell talks about. Yeh, you’re on the right track, but you’re ego is out of control.
The brain-dead megaphone essay. We should always consider the source and the motivation. He wanted you to buy, but mostly the agenda is to do something lovely.
Social media. The agenda is to be liked. Somebody’s popping something out of their butt. Encourages you to project incorrectly about people.
Short stories change your perceptions.
Revising, like Buddhist meditation. Opening the door to it being no good. Asking the question how can it be better (how can I be better)?
Accept what is. A saner base for being what may be.
Teaching is the kids will get it- eventually- they might not get it at first.
Trick of teaching. Try to imagine those beautiful 19 year olds as being the 40 year old they will become.
That person needs those stories. You’re doing them a favour be seeding in…a love for this work.
The gentleness of Russian writer in dealing with silly people.
First draft, slighty cartoonish, then as you re-draft that slightly low character comes up a bit.
Chekov, taking somebody you may have overlooked and take them to a higher level.
Is your story responding honestly to the things you put in motion? Are your characters?
Kindness (of character) requires exactitude.
Flannery O’Connor always fierce in her exactitude. The way people are.
It seems a bit stupid to call reading an art. I was going to write counterintuitive, but that’s a kind of wanky word. Reading is just something I do. We can stick art as descriptive tag before most words and phrases and somehow make it seem erudite. Try it at home. The Art of the Blowsy Blonde. The Art of the Bicycle. The Art of the Mug. The Art of the Article.
But as Damon Young shows reading, if done properly, really is an art form. And if you are interested in The Art of Writing this is a great place to start. The Art of Writing, of course, starts with The Art of Reading. Both are in constant flux. You are what you read. You are what you write.
Young has split his book into easy to read sections. All are readable. Liberating Pages looks are why we read. There are as many reasons as there are books. I quite like this explanation which combines two factors in a dance.
In classical Greek, the word for virtue was arête, excellence. As Aristotle argued, an excellence is not a state of mind, since these change—it as for life’s striving, not a single moment…Each excellence…is a hexis. So literary arête is not innate, but nor is it artificial. Like reading itself, a good hexis is a potential we are born with, but have to realise with regular toil.
I guess many of us might recognise ourselves here (guilty as charged).
…the art of reading often takes place to the fantasy of publication.
That old cliché you’ve got a book in you.
One survey reported that in the United States, eight out of ten people wanted to write a book—a startling figure even if only half right.
Contrast this with The Pew Research Centre found that a quarter of Americans had not read a book in the previous year.
Or in the President of the United States case the previous life time.
As Flannery O’Connor notes ‘They are interested in being a writer. Not in writing.’
‘The reader’s potencies are denied, along with a chance to exercise them more artfully.
Curiosity and The Infinite Library. In Jorge Luis Borges short story the ‘Library of Babel’, the rooms go on forever, rather like pages in the World Wide Web. Curiosity, in one reading of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature is ‘the love of truth’. If a book is not true it is not worth wasting your time reading. A book must also be necessary. A plenum of possibility.
‘There is a joy in getting someone to hand us their butterfly,’ quipped novelist Zadie Smith, ‘so we can spend twenty pages making the case for it being our giraffe.’
Patience, Courage, Pride, Temperance and Justice follow Curiosity. I’m sure you get the gist of it. Reading is an art. Our tastes change. We change. But that love. That first love of reading makes your life better and you more empathetic. Those that don’t read are dullards. They have my pity. Read on.
odonnellgrunting 