The Quote Board, Vol. 3: Writing as Compulsion

Nabokov's Tree Test

There is a famous account, perhaps apocryphal, of a visit made by a student to Vladimir Nabokov’s office at Cornell. The student declares to the writer his  great desire to be a writer, too, at which point:

Nabokov looks up from his reading he points to a tree outside his office window.

'What kind of tree is that?' he asks the student.

'What?'

'What is the name of that tree?' asks Nabokov. 'The one outside my window.'

'I don't know,'says the student.

'You'll never be a writer.' says Nabokov.

The Nabokov test was born. This conversation, whether or not it actually took place, came to mind the other night as I read this passage from Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety :

“A dirt road, the road I walked this morning, burrows along the hillside under overhanging trees—sugar maple and red maple, hemlock, white birch and yellow birch and gray birch, beech, black spruce and red spruce, balsam fir, wild cherry, white ash, basswood, ironwood, tamarack, elm, poplar, here and there a young white pine.”

It would appear that, despite any other failings he has as a writer, Mr. Stegner passes the Nabokov test with flying colors.

What Bugs Me Wednesday: The War on Style

Elmore Leonard: "My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

Jonathan Franzen: "Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting."

Esther Freud: "Cut out the metaphors and similes."

David Hare: "Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it."

Stephen King: "The road to hell is paved with adjectives"

You know what really bugs me? The War on Style.

Look, I get these arguments. I really do. Yesterday’s post was all about simplicity. I get as bothered as the next guy by purple, florid prose (see the Henry James passage in this post for an example. Shudder.) But when was it decided that every great piece of fiction has to read like a USA Today article? I mean, come on, if the whole point of great writing is for the writer to take themselves out of the final product, then why am I reading these authors in the first place? Why not spend my time reading the hundreds of thousands of computer-generated books out there instead? I guess I’m in the camp that says the author should bring more to the table than a compelling plot line.

Let’s look at the world of painting for an example. Can you imagine if visual artists followed an Elmore Leonard-like rule that “if it looks like painting, I repaint it?” Every art museum on earth would be chock-full of realistic, tromp l’oeil paintings that look little different from photographs. That’s cool, I guess… for a while anyway. 

But sometimes you get tired of admiring technical skill. Sometimes you want to see the artist’s imagination at work, you want to see their innermost feelings splayed across the canvas. You want to see things in a way you never could have imagined them yourself. In short, you want to see some style.

Here are some visuals to help you see what I'm talking about. What if I mentioned the names Picasso, Dali, Monet, Matisse and Van Gogh, and the only styles of painting that came to mind were the ones on the left below?

Picasso, before and after:

Dali, before and after:

Monet, before and after:

Matisse, before and after:

Van Gogh, before and after:

I won’t call any of those early, left-side paintings bad or boring. I'd give my proverbial left-nut to be able to paint like that. But isn’t the world a little richer because those same artists moved on from the technical proficiency displayed on the left to blaze the new schools of painting displayed on the right? Isn't it great that they made it okay for others like Chagall or Lichtenstein or Warhol to bypass a realistic, technically proficient phase, and head straight for their own revolution of artistic styles?

Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism may not be your cup of tea, but there's no denying they exhibit an entirely different pull on the human spirit than paintings done in a photographic mimicry of real-world images can. Style matters. And the fact that styles differ, matters.

So back to literature. You want to pass out writing advice? Great. The more the merrier. But let's not pretend we're not losing something significant when the drumbeat to eliminate all adverbs, adjectives, metaphors, similes and complex verbs crowds out those who were born to take a slightly (or vastly) different path. Those parts of speech may just be the otherworldly color and heavy brushstrokes that will define a new kind of literature.

Write like Kerouac in just 5 Easy Steps

1) Start with any sentence:

I took a big swig.

2) Now add a whimsical phrase to give it some unexpected flavor.

I took a big swig in the air.

3) Now insert about three (but no fewer than two) adjectives in front of your direct object or the object of your prepositional phrase:

I took a big swig in the wild, blowing, drizzling  air.

4) Now replace at least one of those adjectives with a word not normally associated with the object it describes. Proper place names work well, but really it can be anything.

I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air.

5) If you chose not to use a proper place name in the previous step, tack it on to the end of the sentence in its own prepositional phrase:

I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air of Nebraska.

See? Kerouac! It’s easy. Now let’s try it with a more complex sentence:

1) Start with any sentence of your choosing:

I heard a laugh, and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

2) Embellish your direct object:

I heard a great  laugh, and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

3) Do it again, and don’t shy away from hyperbole:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world,  and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

4) Now insert your adjectives:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer wheat  farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

5) Now swap out one of your adjectives as before:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer Nebraska  farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

Piece of cake. Now you try.

So you wanna be a writer?

Then park yourself in post-war Paris. 

Pshaw, you say. We can’t go back. We’ll never be able to recreate the magic of Paris in the '20s. Lightning simply doesn’t strike the same spot twice.

Ah, but here’s where I have to disagree with you. The Paris of the Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce already was the second strike of lightening. A similar cultural flowering preceded it by thirty some-odd years, and another one followed thirty years later. And what was the common thread? In all cases, Paris was recovering from war.

After the siege and fall of their fair city at the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the bloody months of the Paris Commune, Parisians played host to a cultural and artistic awakening that laid the groundwork for our modern era. Victor Hugo had returned from a self-imposed exile, Gustave Flaubert once again held court, and Emile Zola, Anatole France and Guy de Maupassant rose to prominence. Russian writers like Turgenev and Tolstoy made extended stays in Paris. Artists like Monet, Manet, Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Rodin blazed new trails in the world of art. (And let's not forget that under a big red windmill, Ewan McGregor sang songs to Nicole Kidman that would inspire pop stars 70 years in the future.) It was the undisputed cultural center of the western world, and the Paris of the 1890s was bookended by two World Expositions, the first of which saw the erection of its new civic symbol, the Eiffel Tower. But it would all be brought to a halt when the world went to war again in 1914.

While Paris never fell during World War I, the front was close enough (just 15 miles away) that it was the city’s own taxi drivers who became the key to mobilizing the French troops to victory at the First Battle of the Marne. And the hopeless nightmare of the western front was never far from the French capitol. But after the Armistice? Good times rolled again in Paris just as they did elsewhere. The memory of La Belle Epoque drew scores of writers, artists and bon vivants to the Left Bank and Montmartre. Hem and Hadley, Scott and Zelda, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Dos Passos. These writers mixed and mingled with artists like Picasso, Dali, Modigliani, Matisse, and Rivera until again things eventually fizzled out and Paris was once again threatened by war.

World War II again put Paris in the hands of foreign occupiers, and the age of total war took a terrible toll on the populace. But less than a decade after being liberated, the city once again played host to an expat community in search of their proper muse: Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Greg Corso flocked to the Left Bank. Local luminaries like Samuel Becket gained world fame. African American writers like Richard Wright, Chester Himes and James Baldwin made names for themselves. George Whitman reincarnated Silvia Beach’s illustrious Shakespeare & Company bookstore, the famed Olympia Press came into being, and George Plimpton founded the Paris Review, which is still going strong to this day.

Who can deny it? Post-war Paris is a proven, sure-fire catalyst for aspiring writers of all stripes. But the further we get from WWII, the further into the background that magic seems to fade.

So, when will Paris midwife its next generation of literary greats into existence? It’s hard to say. But don’t pack your bags just yet. The artistic inspiration and nostalgia for the past are still as strong as ever along the Seine, but I’m afraid that’s only half the equation. The other, missing half is a rock-bottom currency exchange that will allow expats to live comfortably enough while pretending to live out the ideal of the poor, starving artist. Short of an all-out war or utter economic collapse, I just don’t see that second ingredient materializing for today’s Paris daydreamers. (This is why Woody Allen wrote Gil Pender as a very successful screenwriter- otherwise he couldn’t even entertain the dream of living as a Parisian expat.)

Now, as someone who has himself fallen under the charms of the City of Light, I’d be the last one to wish the ravages of war upon it. But if, heaven forbid, Paris does ever find itself in the wrong news headlines, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep your passport up to date- because those post-war years can be magnificent.

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So You Wanna Be a Writer? Grab the Wheel...

… of your nearest war-zone ambulance.

 

Many an important war-time novel was dreamed up by the men who freighted the dead and dying from the terrible din of the battlefield. Men whose bad eyes, small stature, age or nationality were obstacles in the way of their heart-felt war-time duty, found they could make valuable contributions to the cause with their “hands at 10 and 2.” In his classic war-time novel A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway gives us a taste of what it was like to take the wheel of a converted Fiat truck on the Isonzo Front…

“Two caribinieri held the car up. A shell had fallen and while we waited three others fell up the road. They were seventy-sevens and came with a whishing rush of air, a hard bright burst and flash and then gray smoke that blew across the road. The caribinieri waved us to go on. Passing where the shells had landed I avoided the small broken places and smelled the high explosive and the smell of blasted clay and stone and freshly shattered flint.”

…and, a little later on in the story, he has the unfortunate opportunity to describe what it was like to be a passenger:

“I felt the engine start, felt him climb into the front seat, felt the brake come off and the clutch go in, then we started. I lay still and let the pain ride.

As the ambulance climbed along the road, it was slow in the traffic, sometimes it stopped, sometimes it backed on a turn, then finally it climbed quite fast. I felt something dripping. At first it dropped slowly and regularly, then it patterned into a strem. I shouted to the driver. He stopped the car and looked in through the hole in his seat.

‘What is it?’

‘The man on the stretcher over me has a hemorrhage.’

‘We’re not far from the top. I wouldn’t be able to get the stretcher out alone.’ He started the car. The stream kept on. In the dark I could not see where it came from the canvas overhead. I tried to move sideways so that it did not fall on me. Where it had run down under my shirt it was warm and sticky. I was cold and my leg hurt so that it made me sick. After a while the stream from the stretcher above lessened and started to drip again and I hear and felt the canvas above me as the man on the stretcher settled more comfortably.

‘How is he?’ the Englishman called back. ‘We’re almost up.’

‘He’s dead I think,’ I said.

The drops fell very slowly, as they fall from an icicle after the sun has gone. It was cold in the car in the night as the road climbed. At the post on the top they took the stretcher out and put another in and we went on.”

Now, you can catch the flavor of the ambulance driver’s life in books like the one just quoted or in John Dos Passos’ 1919, but the literary magic of the experience seems to have permeated even the authors’ peace-time subject matter and was by no means limited to superstars like Hemingway, Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings or Somerset Maugham. A war-time stint in the ambulance corps quickened the talents of writers far and wide:

C. Leroy Baldridge, Louis Bromfield, William Slater Brown, Samuel Chamberlain, Malcolm Cowley, Harry Crosby, E. E. Cummings, Kati Dadeshkeliani, Russell Davenport, John Dos Passos, Helen Gleason, Julien Green, Dashiell Hammett, Sidney Howard, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Hillyer, Sidney Howard, Jerome K. Jerome, John Howard Lawson, Desmond MacCarthy, Archibald MacLeish, John Masefield, F. Van Wyck Mason, Somerset Maugham, Charles Nordhoff, William Seabrook, Robert W. Service, Olaf Stapledon, Sir Hugh Walpole, Edward Weeks and Amos Niven Wilder

Just look at that list. I’m not ready to say that the path of the war-time ambulance driver is a surefire path to literary greatness- but it definitely doesn’t hurt. And the resulting eminence doesn’t necessarily have to come in the world of letters. The French composer Maurice Ravel and American artist Waldo Pierce both spent formative years in the cab of a war-zone ambulance. Ray Kroc and Walt Disney were two others who drove ambulances in the Great War. Can you imagine a world without Kroc’s golden arches or Disney’s mouse ears? At some point the evidence crosses the threshold from anecdotal and coincidental to downright empirical. There’s something to all of this.

But maybe being a war-zone ambulance jockey just isn’t your thing. No problem. There’s still some literary magic to be found far behind the front lines. Gertrude Stein was a driver for French hospitals. National Book Award winner AJ Cronin was a Royal Navy surgeon. Famous critic Edmund Wilson was a stretcher-bearer. And both Walt Whitman and E.M Forster made a practice of sitting with the wounded during the Civil War, and World War I, respectively.

So, you wanna be a writer? Be a war-time ambulance driver. Grab your driver’s license and get your passport handy. Literary greatness awaits you.

 -photo by Barry Armer

So You Wanna Be A Writer? Join the Merchant Marines!

Who among us hasn’t felt the urge to chip paint, swab the poop deck, or keep the midnight watch over a commercial shipping vessel at one time or another? Who can honestly say he’s never heard the call of the sea?

One thing’s for sure, many a great author has been groomed on the high seas. The literary world is replete with writers who have tackled a stint in the merchant marines: Joseph Conrad, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Alex Haley, Saul Bellow, Langston Hughes, Louis L’Amour, Eugene O’Neill, there are simply too many to name… One could throw in Jack London, who worked a sealing vessel, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a ship's surgeon, or Ernest Hemingway, who hunted U-boats in the Caribbean. They probably all dreamed, like Conrad’s Lord Jim, of a life filled with adventure:

“He could see the big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his feet with the hazy splendor of the sea in the distance and the hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure.

“On the lower deck, in the Babel of two-hundred voices, he would forget himself and beforehand live in his mind the sea life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line, or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half-naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men. Always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.”

What’s not to love about any of that? Sign me up! But Conrad quickly follows that passage with this dampening dose of reality:

“After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the region so well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure. He made many voyages. He knew the magical monotony of existence between sky and water. He had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread, but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded him. Yet, he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting and enslaving than the life at sea.”

So, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. So what? It still sounds like a nice gig, if you can get it. And the literary merits have been proven time and time again. Like the great authors named above, you could pluck your ideas and experiences from exotic foreign ports and use the long hours at sea to let your material marinate and develop for our benefit. 

So go ahead. Set sail for literary distinction. Be a writer, be a merchant marine.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-up: Interview with Natalie Field

This is the fourth of four interviews we conducted with 2011 NaNoWriMo winners:

Hi Natalie, what's your idea of great literary fiction?

A good example of what I think is good literary fiction is S.E. Hinton's book The Outsiders. I don't know how many people would classify The Outsiders as LitFic, but I do. In my opinion, in order for something to be literary fiction, it must be a novel that points something out about humans. It has to have a message. Often that's why you'll hear writers who are attempting literary fiction say that their antagonist is society. The Outsider's plot is purely character driven, and the book says something about people, as all LitFic should. It is probably my favourite book I've read in a long time.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-up: Interview with Jason Black

This is the third of four interviews we conducted with 2011 NaNoWriMo winners:

Hey Jason, if you would, tell us a little bit about yourself:

I'm an ex-techie guy who has fled the software industry for a life of fiction, which happened when I discovered that writing novels was a heck of a lot more fun than writing software documentation. These days, I spend most of my time as a "book doctor," a freelance editor who does literary analysis for a living. Basically, I do for independent and aspiring authors what a good agent or publishing house editor does for authors under contract: help them bring the core of their story into its truest possible form.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-up: Interview with Mike Kroll

This is the second of four interviews we conducted with 2011 NaNoWriMo winners.

Hi Mike. Why don't you start off by telling us what your idea of great literary fiction is:

Great literary fiction, in my opinion, is a work that tells both a story, as well as draws the reader into a way of thinking that enlightens their own lives. Some fantastic examples of this would be Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr. Y. It incorporates both quantum physics, classic literature, and the power of the mind into an original and engaging plot.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-Up: Interview with Fiona Webster

This is the first of four interviews we conducted with 2011 NaNoWriMo winners.

Hi Fiona, tell us a just little bit about yourself:

I'm a 56-year-old retired physician—originally from Houston but now living In Greenbelt, Maryland, just outside of DC. I've been married to the same guy, a ponytailed botanist, for 33 years. We have no kids, by choice; our current feline companion is a black oriental shorthair named Annabel Lee. I've been on the Internet for 22 years, always with the same two letters (fi) before my @ sign. My longtime ruling passions are the music/art/writing of Patti Smith, horror literature, splatter cinema, fish (especially sharks), sailing, and science. I spend my time, when not writing, doing mail art: mostly collage postcards, but also decorated envelopes containing long letters written with a fountain pen or typed on a World War II correspondent's portable, all mailed with vintage postage.

NaNoWriMo Wrap-Up

While those of us here at ShelfActualization.com spent the month of November getting this wonderful site off the ground, thousands of other intrepid, book-minded souls were busy throwing their blood, sweat and tears into a different kind of literary endeavor: National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, for short.

Their goal? To write a 50,000 word novel in the thirty days between October and December.

"What?" You ask. "An entire novel in 30 days or less? It can’t be done."

Oh, but it has. Lots of times.

Even some great works of literature have been mid-wifed into existence in less time than NaNoWriMo gives its eager participants. Jack Kerouac famously hammered out On the Road on a 120-foot scroll of teletype paper in just three weeks’ time. Dostoevsky’s The Gambler was completed in just 26 days, and though its’ a short work, it happens to have been tackled as a side project while the author was busy writing Crime and Punishment. Not too shabby.

And Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was scratched off in just 6 days! Yeah, you’ll tell me, but the thing’s only about 100 pages long. That’s true, but at Stevenson’s pace, an entire month's work would have yielded a 500 page book of roughly 125,000 words. So, it is definitely doable.

Last year, 30,000 NaNoWriMo participants crossed the 50K word mark. This year’s writers banged out over 3 Billion words in their mad dash to the finish line. And it’s not all crap, either. Some notable recent winners, such as Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants) and Erin Morgestern (The Night Circus) have gone on to successful publication.

So, as the month drew to a close I wandered over to the literary fiction section of the NaNoWriMo forums to see if anyone would be interested in telling us about their experiences. I’m happy to report that volunteers were not lacking. So for the rest of the day, I’ll be posting our quick interviews with four of them. Stay tuned…

Don't Quit Your Day Job

Lapham's Quarterly recently ran an interesting chart detailing the day jobs enjoyed (or endured) by a few famous authors. It's worth a look:

It's a pretty odd assortment, to be sure. But it got me thinking about day jobs in general. There are a handful of professions that seem to creep up in the bios of a lot of famous authors. I think I may just do a series on some of the most common ones. Stay tuned...

In the meantime, what's the craziest day job you've ever held? Shelf Actualizer Orlando and I once served as hot-dog, nacho and churro mongers in a municipal swimming pool snack shop. Yep. I have lived the dream.