From My Writing Life

Practicing English Conversation

2012-02-24T15:31:00.002-08:00

I've had an interest in Asian things and Asian people ever since I was an enlisted man in the American army in Thailand in the mid-1960's. I was glad, then, when the chance came to help a student from Korea with lessons in conversational English.

Sam Choi had an active life before he decided to study to become a pastor in the Lutheran church. Military service is compulsory for young men in Korea, Sam told me, so he spent two and a half years as a lieutenant in the Korean army. After that he worked in the investment business. He is married, with two children, a daughter Yeonsoo, fifteen, and a son Juyoung, nine. His wife Juyoen or Julie and their children have come to Canada with him, where they have lived for four years in Niagara Falls. Sam travels to Toronto most every day for a year, as part of his training, to work downtown at Trinity Lutheran Church.

He told me that conditions in South Korea have changed in recent years, with many improvements to the economy.South Korea, with a population of almost 50 million people, has built several international businesses, including Hyundai and Samsung, and now has the largest shipbuilding industry in the world. He said that in many instances Korean businesses meet the highest international standards, but he wishes that economic good fortune were spread equitably throughout the country and were not limited to a prosperous minority.

Since economic success is a new phenomenon on South Korea, many young people focus on school and work to the detriment of other sides of life. Sam is glad that his children can grow up in North America, where they can lead balanced lives and have time for friendships.

Sam and I have been meeting for an hour a week on Thursday evenings. he is an excellent student and picks up things quickly. We have been using material based on every day English conversations, in which various North Americans describe facets of their lives -- work, living, conditions, family, and so on.

I asked Sam what was the hardest part of learning English for him. He said that when it came to reading and writing, he could refer to dictionaries and resources on the Internet, but when it came to speaking, he couldn't take the time to think over what he wanted to say beforehand.

I mentioned a couple of hurdles that adult students of English frequently have to surmount. One has to do with English grammar, the number of exceptions to rules, and the peculiarities of English spelling. He didn't see these as problems for him, because he learns words and expressions as they come to and doesn't emphasize sets of rules. The same was true for his experience of the English language's large vocabulary. He said some students memorized lists of vocabulary words but they're easily forgotten. His practice is to learn words as they come to him in daily usage. Good for him. There's more than one way to learn a language.

We can also do more than one thing in an hour. After I asked him, Sam gave me lessons in the game rock, paper, scissors, which he says everyone in South Korea knows.

Does the Novel Have a Future?

2012-02-11T16:02:00.000-08:00

I've admired the novels of V. S. Naipaul for quite a while, so I was happy to discover his last two, which some critics said are weaker than his earlier work, but I found them worth reading and interesting for the post-Conradian motifs he explores. Still, the effort of writing novels prompted Naipaul to tell an interviewer that the novel is dead.

I didn't want to let that statement pass me by without examining it. For one thing, no one can predict the future with certainty, and for another our culture changes rapdily.and if it should happen that there are no more novels, that would be a symptom of a larger phenomenon.

Looking at the question another way, we can say that the novel has died many times already.The novels that Balzac and Dickens, George Eliot and the nineteenth century Russians whose name everyone knows have no successors. The works of Joyce and Mann and Proust are products of a particular time and place. It stands ot reason thaty present-day post-modern novels will give way to something else.

The way of life that surrounds us offers numerous distractions, and there may be more worry in the western world than in years past. People may not have the time and the powers of concentration to read long novels, never mind write them, but stories will always exist in some form even as technology changes and writers and their representatives will probably discover creative ways to find readers.

Novels describe people in society and the concerns of the generation that a particuclar novel exists in. It would be a particularly debased age that had no interest in imaginative interpretations of their problems and achievements.

We can turn the question around again and say instead that some of the best novels have yet to be written, stories set in communities made of many different kinds of people, stories about living in a mass society stories about the struggle to maintain spiritual values in a society that prizes money and prestige, stories about overcoming the tyranny that exists in many part of the world, stories resisting the temptation to self-seeking that can occur anywhere, and so on.

No one can predict the future, but the art of the novel fills a unique need, there are hundreds of nillions of people in North America and Europe, where the novel has flourished, and even if only one percent of those people are interested in the art of fiction, that is still a lot of people. What's more, there are bound to be writers brave and industrious enough to transform their experience of new times into creative adaptations of the novel form. They will find readers and readers will find them. That's what I think will happen.

Baudelaire and Catharsis

2012-02-08T15:36:00.000-08:00

We've had a mild winter in Toronto so far. The other evening, I walked through one of the city's busy, brightly-lit neighborhoods to Gallery 345, which I've visited several times for evening concerts.

The first time I was there, I heard a pianist named Roger Admiral, a specialist in intricate, vigorous contemporary music. More recently, I heard a rare performance of Richard Strauss's Enoch Arden, a musical melodrama based on a poem of Tennyson's.

The other night, Edward Epstein, who runs the gallery presented the soprano Stacie Dunlop and pianist Krista Vincent who performed a medley of songs set to poems of Charles Baudelaire, six by Debussy and others more recent by three Canadians, plus Elliott Carter and Jonathan Harvey that succeeded in conveying Baudelaire's unique vision.

Now, I can never say that Baudelaire and the songs I heard are natural fit for me, but I entered his world as best I could with the help of texts in English cast on the wall behind the musicians along with reproductions of paintings they chose to enhance the effect they wanted to create.

Sensuality is the most prominent feature of Baudelaire's world-view and not what anyone would call a happy of joyful sensuality, as you would find in, say, "The Song of Songs." .

"The Balcony", set to music by Debussy, was the first piece of the evening. Thanks to Shakespeare, balconies have a special place in the vocabulary of love. The work begins innocently enough, "You will recall the beauty of caresses, the sweetness of the fireplace, and evening charms." A suggestion of the sinister comes in soon enough, "I believed I breathed the perfume of your blood" and later, "(I) drank your breath, O sweetness! O poison!" Which of Shakespeare's characters would say that to his beloved? Not Juliet's balcony, for sure.

The last song of the evening was "The Ghost" set to music by the contemporary composer Tawnie Olson. Here are some sentences in case you don't know the poem: "I will give you kisses...as cold as the moon and caresses (that feel like) a snake crawling around a grave." "As others (rule) your life and your youth by tenderness, I want to rule by fear."

The other numbers had a similar tone. I jotted down some words that I thought characterized Baudelaire's viewpoint: sensuality, blood, terror, death, yearning, sadness, moments of beauty and ecstasy, but also emptiness and loss.

My experience of the evening does not end there, however. As I walked back to the subway in the darkness of a pleasant winter evening, I realized that I felt at peace. The words and music and pictures and the two musicians had had a cathartic effect. Baudelaire and his collaborators had expressed for me not only his mind but a part of my own and freed me from it and made me more capable of love.

"I Remember" -- A First Draft

2012-02-04T03:54:00.000-08:00

I went to the third meeting of a new writers' group yesterday that meets in downtown Toronto in a building that was once a church. There were four of us present, and after we discussed mansucripts we brought with us, one member set us an exercise: write something that begins with the words "I Remember...." One wrote an imaginative short story and two picked events from their early lives. Here's what I wrote. I won't change a word, because i want to show what one of my first drafts looks like.

I worked in Sudbury for 18 years and often came to Toronto for my breaks, because I like big cities. I used to visit Toronto with my father before he died in 1996. We would go to shows and concerts and out to eat.

I had been in Canada for several months before I saw Toronto for the first time and I remember how eager I was to see the city. A member of the congregation where i was serving came to Toronto for cancer treatment at St. Margaret's hospital [[should be Princess Margaret]], so I offered to drive down and visit him.

I remember visiting Ron in his room and the Bond Hotel where I stayed and where I had dinner one night and talking wth another customer who happened to be from the UK. We talked about Margaret Thatcher and the relationship between Britain & the European Union.

I don't remember much More about that trip, which took place in April 1990 -- how many nights I stayed or what I did when I wasn't visiting Ron -- I probably can find that information in my daybook. I have a very strong memory of my arrival in the city. It must have been five or six on a Sunday afternoon, since it usually took me 4 3/4 hours to drive from Sudbury to T. O. Anyhow, I remember the piece of vibrant, driving music I was listening to [[Prokofiev's third piano concerto]] as i drove down Yonge St. from the 401 for the very first time and turning my head from right to left to take in new sights. I remember thinking, "Yes, I like this city. I can feel at home here." I moved here in August, 2007, and the city I thought I'd come to know from brief visits opened itself and showed me many things I wouldn't have imagined.

I stopped there because our time was up, but I would have added something about the hospitality of the people, the multi-cultural tone of the city, and Toronto's many neighborhood's, about which I knew very little since my previous visits had mostly been downtown.

Early Charlie Chaplin

2012-01-11T17:23:00.000-08:00

When I was working in Sudbury, Ontario, I bought more movies on VHS tape than I care to count, mostly because I wanted to wind down late in the evenings, and except for news, I didn't find TV shows very interesting.

Among the videos in my collection are several films of Charlie Chaplin. I began playing one the other night, which has two half-hour comedies, "Easy Street and "One AM". My first impression was of a man with a powerful imagination sure-footed he was, an acrobat at times who moved like a ballet dancer.

As I watched, I could hear echos in my head of the laughter that must have rocked theaters in 1916 when these films first came out and the when the battles of Verdun and the Somme raged in France. Is it far-fetched to say that the whole world laughed with him?   Probably. But many millions surely did.

(He once met the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, who asked him, "When did you discover that you could get people to laugh?")

Watching these and other of Chaplin's short films, I agree with critics that some of them are ordinary, impish to the point of cliché, and hard to follow, yet I could also see the characters he played as everyday solitary human beings coping with the indifference of mass society, determined to carry on and keep their spirits up.

In "One AM" a drunken toff arrives home after a night out.  Chaplin executes a series of small failures in coordination: an inability to stay upright for very long, battles with a staircase, a revolving table, and a Murphy bed, but he does not quit.

In "The Tramp", Chaplin's character isn't very bright, but he maintains his dignity at all costs. He is a prankster, somewhat malicious, and causes mischief with a rake after he hires on to work for a farmer. He defends a woman against rougher hobos than he, loses her to a prosperous-looking man and shrugs off his defeat as he walks away down a road.

I'm beginning to get the hang of Chaplin's methods. Rapid changes of gesture and expression work together to get us to feel what his characters feel.  He shows us an exquisitely crafted look or movement that we recognize as what we would feel in the same situation and then exaggerates it.
             .
(Jean Renoir, I think it was, said that Hollywood produced two geniuses -- Chaplin and Orson Welles.)

"The Immigrants" strikes a familiar note for many North Americans. It begins on shipboard with passengers in steerage headed for the new world and moves to Chaplin's experiences in a restaurant and then, rain-soaked in front of a marriage license office with Edna Purviance, who has been his anchor throughout his journey to a new country.  He ignores her reluctance as he carries her into the office to meet with the marriage license clerk.

"Easy Street" shows Chaplin as a well-intentioned police officer who by speed and slyness gets the best of lawbreakers, including a gigantic Eric Campbell.

(Chaplin has always had his detractors. I once knew a woman who said that Eric Campbell was really the star of Chaplin's comedies.)

I now know one reason why Chaplin's films will endure. Beneath his broad gestures is the subtlety and finesse of a fine actor. He brings out our everyday fallibility and resourcefulness, the pathos inherent in our condition, and our ability to persevere: if we do not triumph on this earth, at least we come out even.

(Minnie Maddern Fiske, one of the great Broadway stars, wrote in 1915: "...Chaplin appears as a great comic artist, possessing inspirational powers...." )

His talent was universal in appeal. His performances will never wear out, for he represents the spirit of democracy, rough, vital, resilient, undefeated. His energy and unfettered humor will always encourage and lift up many folks who have a chance to see them.

Imagination -- Part One

2012-01-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

When I was a youngster, I used to watch a TV show that featured a character named Mr. I. Magination. The point was to get kids who watched it to use their inventive powers both for pleasure and problem solving.

Some of us forget from time to time that imagination is a vital quality throughout our lives. The use of imagination leads grown-ups to study nature, build skyscrapers, create cities, explore outer space, and so on. Imagination is a big factor, of course, in every artistic endeavor.

I suspect there are many definitions of imagination, especially in books that help their readers develop creativity. I find paragraphs by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on imagination in his Biographia Literaria to have enduring value, for example:

The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

I found an insightful essay on a website called "The Literature Network", in which Sana Sahid wrote that all people have a share of the primary imagination. The secondary imagination, more specialized, "reunites subject and object, the world of self and the world of nature to shape into one...to convey a new sense". Coleridge coined the word "esemplastic", which a Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines as "shaping or having the power to shape disparate things into a unified whole." or, as Sana Sahid's essay puts it: "taking images and feelings from a number of realms of human endeavor and thought, bringing them all together." In another place Coleridge says that the secondary imagination works with "hidden ideas" and "hidden meanings."

And then there is fancy, which Coleridge hints is a lesser faculty.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

Fancy comes into play in actions that are "passive," "mechanical", and "imitative".

Sana Sahid points out that a poet (it must be proper to say anyone engaged in creative work of a high order) uses both imagination and fancy and seeks a balance between both faculties, but the imagination is the only faculty that contributes to the the creative process.

So what do we do if we're involved in a creative work and imagination appears to shut down. Here are some suggestions.

Take a step back.
Work at something else for a while.
Spend time with a masterwork in a form other than the one you're working on.
Sleep can help revive confidence and creative power.
When ideas come, put them down right away, even in a helter-skelter fashion. Then revise.

A very modest example. Is the man in these lines I wrote some time ago without conscious reference to Coleridge using Imagination, Fancy, or both?

                              Dusk. A street corner.
                              A juggler's spinning balls
                              Draw a dozen onlookers
                              Who smile when they see
                              How intently he concentrates.
                              The light that shines from him
                              Also shines in everyone.

The Freedom of a Novelist

2011-12-28T17:34:00.000-08:00

If you've ever investigated the practice of novel-writing, you will know that some who've studied the subject had formulated several rules, such as the number of points of view a novel should have, how long it should be, what percentage of a text should be dialogue and how much straight narrative (someone once told me that narrative should take up no more than 10% of a story), and the distinction between showing and telling.

One literary novel novel I read recently conforms closely to the criteria for the present-day dramatic novel -- J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which is crisp and vivid, fast-moving, spare, and memorable.
But not every novel is like that, and the question of how strictly to apply rules and guidelines is a fascinating one. I suppose if you write what we now call genre fiction, you take a great risk if you ignore conventional practice. As for literary fiction, as we call it now, or mainstream fiction, writers continue to claim a great deal of latitude in presenting their vision.

The word "novel", after all, means new and original, and in fiction an author's personality, energy, and sense of commitment count more than technical skill, as impressive as that can be at times.

For example, I'm been reading a novel by Robert Graves called Count Belasarius. Along with its pagan mockery, some would also point out that it's mostly narrative, mostly story-telling, is quite long, has little variety or appeal to the senses and never stirs our feelings.  Yet it's readable and tells a story about the Byzantine empire that must be new to most westerners.

Some fiction writers adhere to guidelines more faithfully than Graves in this piece, yet not completely. Ian McEwan's  Saturday is replete with one character's reflections and Barbara Kingolver's Prodigal Summer, which I'm also reading now, likewise explores her characters' thoughts, and pages go by without much happening.  My reading is spotty but I also think of the work of Iris Murdoch and A. S. Byatt, which follow expansive 19th century models. They all create the patterns that are best for their work.

As I become more familiar with today's guidelines, I wonder if they are offspring of the visual side of our culture -- the TV and the movies, where pictures and speed and change predominate.

I'm sure we can find mainstream and literary novels that adhere strictly to the rules and guidelines that have caught my attention. If another one comes my way, I'll read it, but I won't go looking for it. I like novels that breathe with inventiveness, imagination, originality, and the conviction of the author.  Rules and guidelines are good and useful and can be studied and absorbed with profit. If we bend or break rules, it's good to know what we are doing.  The freedom of the novelist, however, is a wonderful thing.

What is Useful Criticism?

2011-12-12T09:22:00.000-08:00

I've attended writers' groups at two branches of the Toronto Library for several months, and I've seen several different ways of responding to pieces of writing-in-progress. I heard someone say that groups like the two I go to are fairly new and have been around for only fifteen years or so. They can be useful in helping to relieve the solitariness of the writer's life, offer a receptive audience of colleagues, and provide criticism and encouragement.

People come to the groups I know for different reasons. Some are beginners in search of encouragement and support, others are more practiced. I've noticed a range of styles in responding to new writing Some speak their opinions volubly, others in only a few words. Some express their views diplomatically, others use a sledgehammer. Even rough-handling can be helpful if we take it with a mind that's willing to learn. Blunt speech often has a different sound a few days later. After all, to paraphrase some well-known words of Albert Camus, whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

I identify two species of comment, however, that are less than helpful. "Oh, that was nice." and the opposite: "What trash!" Both make me wonder more about the commenter than the writer who presented his or her work.

I'm convinced that any piece of writing can work well when the writer is willing to put in the effort. If someone can write, "Andy crossed the street to meet Melanie," she or her can also find the next sentence. Did Melanie and Andy embrace or exchange harsh words?

Here are a few thoughts, then, about what makes the most useful criticism of a work in progress.

Meet the author and his or her manuscript half way. Keep yourself as far out of the picture as you can. It's hard to refine the ego, but it can be done.
The best readers enter a writers' work with an open mind to see what he or she has done.
It's not helpful to compare a work with illustrious examples from the pantheon of the great. "That sounds worthy of Hemingway to me." or: "You will never be Margaret Atwood."
Try to imagine yourself in the writer's place.
Rules are important, the creative spark is more important. Don't let the rulebook in your head govern and don't use it as a bludgeon.
Treat the manuscript under discussion as you would treat your own.
Speak forthrightly and directly, but set reasonable standards, not ones you can't meet yourself.
A concern for me is readers who adhere to strict limits with regard to genres, to say that a story or novel or poem needs to follow a set pattern. Most of my longer works of fiction are experiments in narrative, not radical or impossible to read, but attempts to express my own nature and to tap at the edges of the form. Originality and a sense of freedom count.
It's wise to forgive even the genre police.

The more I think about it,the easier it becomes to understand that the one who says "Oh, that was nice," every time a piece of writing is offered may be struggling to overcome a crisis of timidity and even those few words are a victory. And people who say "This is rot" and severely criticizes every manuscript may have made unpleasant discoveries about their own writing. A touch of cordiality and warmth might do wonders for them.

An Evening with Sculptors

2011-12-09T05:55:00.001-08:00

Three Canadian sculptors founded the Sculptor's Society of Canada in 1928 and it still thrives today. I went to the opening of their annual new members show last evening at the Canadian Sculpture Centre in downtown Toronto.

I didn't know what to expect, though I hoped to find intriguing connections between the physicality of sculpture and the realm of thought and feeling that can be hard to pin down. When I understand them, artists insights can intrigue and astonish.

The work of six sculptors was on display in the gallery, which was filled with people when I arrived. A flute and guitar duo contributed to the conviviality of the evening. I talked with Judi, the director of the gallery, and her husband David and zipped between groups of people talking happily to sample the offerings on the snack trays and also to inspect the sculptures on exhibit.

I recall three shapely works in alabaster by Jogi Makhani and four pieces by Shu-hui Lee, a versatile artist from Taiwan, who also works in painting, printmaking and photography. She told me that she works spontaneously and I saw from her website that she often shows people in motion, while two of the pieces she brought to the Sculpture Centre showed a stillness that contrasted nicely with the come and go of the visitors to the gallery.

Near the front door were three busts in plywood by Al Groen, another versatile artist, as I learned from his website. I heard him describe his work. He put strips of plywood together with screws and glue to form heads that were not realistic but to create a metaphor about human personalities, create layers to conceal our true natures.

One head has a smooth, highly polished top, rectangular and with a flat surface, that he calls "Blocked". Another is a head shaped like a vase with an open front that suggested emptiness to me. The third looks something like an inverted candle-pin in a bowling alley, called "Number 1". A person who thinks mostly about him or herself? Looking out for Number 1.

Along with showing layers that conceal and distort, Al Groen said he had another idea in mind while he worked: he shaped plywood to do what plywood is not supposed to do.

I checked the artist statement he wrote out. "My sculptures explore the inner structures and shapes of our personalities -- the unseen faces of ourselves...layers create shapes within our identity. The new identity must have a shape, structure, material, and cohesion...the busts explore longing and emptiness within ourselves that need to be seen and confronted."

So I got what I was hoping to find-- insights of artists expressed in material form that point to a dimension of truth beyond our senses.

One of the things that intrigues me about artists and musicians is that many work long and hard hours and receive little recognition or financial reward but they keep on going. It's good that organizations like the Sculptor's Society of Canada exist to offer support and a public venue for some gifted people.

Fiction and Truth -- Part Two

2011-11-30T12:51:00.001-08:00

When I was five years old, my father took me to see Laurence Olivier's film of Hamlet. A year later, after we moved to our own house, he read me Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island. I can recall imagining that I lived in the world Stevenson created even when the book was closed and my father wasn't nearby to read to me. Reading and writing fiction has been part of my life for decades. Unwittingly perhaps, my father gave me my start.

Life for adults is much more complicated than for six year olds. We have concerns that children don't have. one of them has to do with what's real and what's false. For example, someone said to me the other day that he would never try to write a novel because novels are all lies.

I mentioned this subject in an earlier blogpost dated September 11, 2011, but I thought I'd take what this man said seriously and have another look at the question of fiction and truth.

Many of us admire the truth and aspire to live by it, but untruth is a vexing part of life for everyone.  Our memories are imperfect, our dreams filled with fantasies. We twist and exaggerate in our conversations. We never see the whole of anything. Our news sources are partial and they can be biased. And what about advertising and the language of electoral politics? Untruth, it seems, is a permanent feature of our lives.

That dishonesty is widespread won't justify novel-writing for anyone, especially someone who believes that novels are lies.  That's like saying, "I'll do what everyone else is doing." We need a firmer basis. To start, I once knew a psychologist, no reader of novels, who told me that love of stories is part of our human makeup. We are wired for fiction. Every culture I know of has a tradition of made-up stories and some have value far beyond their points of origin.

Two statements come to mind then: that fiction is a permanent part of human life and it is made up of imperfect elements. W. H. Auden once used a phrase form Shakespeare's sonnets to describe the novelist's condition as "subdued to what it works in like the dyer's hand."

Surely even ardent disparagers of fiction will agree, though, that some novelists have risen above the origins of the form and given us stories that not only entertain but are works of art and help us understand our situations.  No one can predict the future, but it seems safe to say that creators who work wonders out of imperfect material will always be among us.

Still, to be fair to the man I spoke with, the notion that novels are lies has one benefit: it reminds those who write them that they are humble workpeople and will not be called on to rule our culture, though good novels will help to rescue us from failures of imagination.

Recovering the Creative Impulse

2011-11-27T16:24:00.001-08:00

During frequent breaks from his writing work, Gary Michael Dault, a very creative man, filled numerous notebooks with sketches he made using ink and acrylics. Ten of these notebooks are on exhibit at the Peak Gallery in Toronto.

I visited the gallery twice last week. As I turned the pages of the notebooks, I saw that many of the drawings are black and/or gray with white spaces between the images and vivid splashes of color. Some include words, a few are all words. Pages and pages of heads, full figures, animals, and abstract forms. A video playing in one corner of the gallery shows a hand turning the leaves of one notebook, and eleven framed single pictures hang on a wall across the room.

Along with being a visual artist, Mr. Dault works in poetry, philosophy, art criticism, and journalism. He uses his drawings as mind-refreshers. When his writing-work stalls, he takes a few minutes or less to draw a sketch, then goes back to his writing with new ideas. He overcomes creative lulls with a different form of creativity, making visual images that are accomplished and original enough to appeal to strangers. The mental processes involved with sketching help his writing and writing benefits his sketches, so his creative flow continues.

His exhibit, then, reminded me of what I've come to recognize as characteristics of creativity:

We don't create anything out of nothing. We use tools and materials that are available to us.
We create by using sounds or images or groups of words that already exist. We make new combinations, based on nature or the ideas of people who have gone before us.
We sometimes think about a project we're working on even when our conscious minds are far away from it.
We may work on a project for a long time and the flow of ideas dries up. We turn away to something else, and when we go back to the stalled project, we find that difficulties have vanished and fresh ideas come to us.
Ideas sometimes flow in surges.
Creativity can have a therapeutic effect, both for the maker and the consumer.

While he was working on them, Mr. Dault never expected anyone to see his notebooks, but Zack, the proprietor of Peak Gallery talked him into showing them. I asked Zack what he thought the notebooks might mean to an observer, now that they've become public. He said he hoped that visitors to the gallery would engage in dialogues with Mr. Dault's notebooks. Each viewer will have his or her own response to them. He supposed that some of us will notice a connection between words and visual images, since Mr. Dault is known mostly for his writings and these pictures are in the form of books.

Taking Zack's insights a step further, I say it doesn't seemed far-fetched to suppose that someone who studied Mr. Dault's methods and his output might find a way to overcome for her- or himself a hindrance to creativity.

Different Kinds of Novels

2011-11-21T16:36:00.001-08:00

There are different ways of classifying novels. I found a useful one in Edwin Muir's The Structure of the Novel. He describes four main categories, chronicles (War and Peace), novels of action and character (Vanity Fair), period novels (The Forsyte Saga), and dramatic novels (the works of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy) . He said that the chronicle novel was the prevailing form  at the time he wrote (1928).

In our day, at least by my reading, dramatic novels must be the most common.  The work of most of the novelists (Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker, John McGahern) I've read recently fits into this category -- one series of actions rising to a peak and then resolving. Surely most of what we now call genre fiction (romance, sci fi, thrillers, detective stories) emphasize plot and dramatic structure.

I've identified another common novel-type -- stories that focus on one character for two hundred pages or more. Some of our classics novels belong here: Portrait of the Artist, Catcher in the Rye, and countless other first person stories. Their appeal is easy to figure out: They offer readers a mind other than their own to inhabit for a few hours and a chance to see common situations from a new angle. In some cases, one character stands out from the community of which he or she is a member, Hamlet, say, or Emma Bovary, Huck Finn.   In other cases, a character represents the traits of a whole community, Tom Sawyer, Isabel Archer.

I won't push the notion very far because I'm not a philosopher but it may be that some of the stories that explore one consciousness are the result of our adherence to Descartes' dictum -- the fact that we think proves that we exist.

What about another kind of novel -- that tells the story of a community or an endeavor from multiple points of view.  In a way, this procedure would reflect our own lives, since most of us know various groups of people in different places and different times. We may lose track of them, we may wonder about their behavior and what they think of us, but we do not doubt their existence.

All of this palaver is shameless advocacy for some of my own attempts at novel-writing. I call one The World, the City, and the Wakemans, 99 brief chapters and three interludes about a middle class family in a large city. Here's the first paragraph:

It was a warm, late-spring evening. Most of the people coming up the stairs from the subway stop at Humboldt Square were headed for the baseball game at Crosby Field. But one member of the rough, amiable crowd, a middle-aged man with two shopping bags filled nearly to the top that were covered all over with drawings of palm trees and coconuts, mingled with the others for a few moments, then walked as fast as he could down a shadowy side street lined with lindens and elms past a row of bent, bursting, metal-hatted trash cans, and then around a rain puddle slowly drying in the evening sun. The shopping bags, whose strong twine handles he held tightly, swished against his legs.

Amos is on his way to help a crotchety old friend in need.

For me, this is a humorous story at times, partly satiric, about how the Wakemans cope with the perils and changes of present-day urban life. It also pokes gentle fun at the need each of them has to think that what they are doing is by definition good.

Joseph Conrad: "Didn't Turn Out Well"?

2011-11-12T16:22:00.001-08:00

It's often said that anyone who wants to write needs to read widely. It's also a truism that no two writers will read and love the same books.

My own reading has mostly been in North American, English, and European classics, counting Russian literature as European, and a selection of modern and contemporary writers from the same areas. A few Latin American and Asian things, too.

There are gaps in my reading. I've read nothing of Henry Miller and what little of D. H. Lawrence I've sampled hasn't inspired me to press on. I've yet to read many 20th century German classics, though Thomas Mann is a favorite. I'm only now starting to read Kafka's three celebrated novels.

No two readers will respond in exactly the same way to a particular text. As for me, I never came upon a novel in which I didn't find something to enjoy and learn from, though a few years ago I did have to struggle to get through a well-known American post-modern novel. Many novels stayed with me, though, to form the core of my reading history.

I've admired the novels of Joseph Conrad, for example, for a long time, surely in part because I spent a year and a half in Bangkok when I was an enlisted man in the American army. And for other reasons, too. I like his searching mind, his ability to express varieties and depths of experience, and the breadth and originality of mature works like Nostromo. I know he has his faults, such as a tinge of racism and two-dimensional female characters. Some point to a simple-minded approach to ethical questions and overly conservative political views.

But I have never heard anyone criticize his achievements as a writer of English until a few days ago in one of the writing groups I attend. A young person who writes very good short stories said that Conrad's work in his third language did not turn out well. A middle-aged freelance journalist who writes noir mysteries agreed.

The conversation moved on to other topics, while I wallowed for a moment in unanticipated culture shock. But what about...? Please consider this...Doesn't everyone admire Conrad? Apparently not. As I say, people read texts in different ways. Everyone knows this. What set me back was their certainty that a major part of Conrad's artistic endeavor had come to nothing. He had failed. Yikes!

Of course, their dismissal of Conrad's work could spring from a desire to cut a mountain they imagined to be in their path down to size. I've felt the same impulse countless times. What a relief to say that writer AZ's work didn't turn out well. What a useful put-down, the sort of thing that's not unknown in literary circles.  One of the most distinguished American novelists of the last fifty years once wrote that William Faulkner was an amateur and e said in another place that J. D. Salinger loved his characters more than God did.

But back to Conrad.I began listening to a tape of  The Secret Sharer last evening. Okay, the reader -- or listener -- does have to work a bit. But does that make Conrad a failure?  And what about the later Henry James or Proust or Ulysses or Virginia Woolf or Faulkner?  Are they failures, too?

Certainly not. The reputation and achievements of these novelists are not in question.  The issue is the cultural climate that surrounds us. Many people must share the views of the two I heard.or they wouldn't have expressed them with the conviction that there could be no opposing argument. The problem is that readers will feel encouraged to deprive themselves of rewarding and challenging experiences. And what about new writers, the hardy souls in our day who want to follow in the footsteps of writers who took risks and pushed themselves and brought their readers into new territory?

There may not be cause for great concern, however. Artists and writers of high calibre rise up no matter what external circumstances are like. They pass through the same conditions as the rest of us, portray them from points of view we'd never have thought of on our own, and enhance our lives.

Walking

2011-11-10T17:04:00.001-08:00

Though I've never been much of an athlete, I've always enjoyed walking. I've taken walks everywhere school or work has led me and in places I've stayed for a few days or weeks.

When I first began walking as a teenager, I hoped that ideas for stories would come to me, but not so. Once in a while, a new idea would appear and I would jot it down, but mostly my surroundings have distracted me and my everlasting inner murmurings have gone on apace.

Only once has a spell of walking yielded ideas for pieces of writing. After my first winter in Toronto, I began to take evening strolls in High Park, the city's largest and a short subway ride from where I live, a place of woodland, lakes, gardens, and hiking trails, also a zoo and tennis courts, very well-kept for a much-used urban setting. The park also has sculpture garden and a stage where a local company puts on one of Shakespeare's plays every summer.

The spring weather and thedelightufl surpise that came with renewing a friendship with a woman I used to walk back and forth to high school with put me in mind of romance and I began to imagine characters and scenes of people in various stages of love -- from the uncertainty and effervescence of early meetings to an old man grieving the death of the woman he'd been married to for 50 years. I made notes for a new sketch each time I walked through the park, stopping often to jot down a passage of dialogue or a few words to describe something I saw. In two and a half months, I  filled two pocket notebooks with ideas.   At one point, I had enough material for 24 sketches, which I, reduced to 21.  My first thought was that I'd turn my jottings into verse. As I moved along, though, I decided that the results would not repay the effort I'd have to make, so after a loty of revising, I now have a collection of prose miniatures called, at least for the moment, "Love Builds a Nest in High Park."   Here's the ending of one I call "The Biggest Love?"

They strolled between walls of darkening green, which will be bare in the fall and still with frost in January but now gleamed in the silent radiance of chlorophyll and the force of nature.

“You!” Chip exclaimed. “Our lives expand when we love someone. We’ll both come out ahead.”

A wind-blast swept through the park and moved on. A moment of fluttery calm and another gust rushed in. They were back at the old fir, which looked more crippled since it had lost a branch.

“You’ve made a good first step,” Harriet said, hoping for more than words. “I have to see results.”

“Some of us are never satisfied.” Chip wished he’d found a better way to express his thought. Was it too late to correct the situation?

Another peal of bird song suggested that life and time were both generous. After they boarded a trackless trolley that chortled by, they found a way to see their case from a new angle and tried to smooth out their circular give and take. Chip finally understood that Harriet needed to see that he would abide by his promises to her and what he said about love.

Used Book Stores -- Real and Imagined

2011-11-06T16:19:00.000-08:00

The Book Exchange on Dundas West in Toronto is a cozy store in a neighborhood that's old by Toronto standards but still lively.  The shop is about 400 square feet with somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 books on its shelves.  I stop in there fairly often because Tom Colson, the owner, carries the literary fiction I like, plus genre fiction, a back wall filled with colorful children's books, and a good supply of history and current events and other topics of general interest. I also like to talk with Tom, who has a fund of knowledge and interesting opinions. Just last week the Toronto Star published a letter he wrote to them.

The Book Exchange is one of many stores in the city that deal in used books and publishers remainders, some well-established that do a good business.

Used bookstores have been one of the interesting corners of my life.  I've usually found one to visit whenever I've stayed in a place for a stretch of time. I patronized a bookstore in the town I grew up in that had a used department. I still have books on my shelves I bought there decades ago, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, for example, and several novels of Arnold Bennett. A faded plastic bookmark has been at page 364 of The Old Wives' Tale ever since I put it there before I graduated from high school in 1960. I must read it all the way through one day.

I also used to stop in at the Brattle Book Shop in Boston, a landmark in the city when I was a teenager. I once saw an autographed copy of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and asked Mr. Gloss, the owner, if he would reduce the price from $1.25 to $1.00 so that I could buy the book and also take the subway and bus home. He agreed. I read it and gave the book away to a college classmate who, like Sinclair Lewis, came from the Midwest.

Along with my studies, I visited two used bookshops in Hyde Park in Chicago, when I was a student there. I remember the names of the owners and what they looked like, though I've forgotten whatever conversations we may have had.

All of this brings me to Guy Fletcher, the main character in a novel I work on from time to time. He runs a second hand bookstore very near a large Midwestern university.  Despite his heartaches and disappointments, he is imaginative and creative, hopeful and not cynical till the end of his life, a great admirer of Don Quixote.

Here he is in chapter seven, just after arriving for work one morning.

Guy surveyed his stock with a touch of self-satisfaction, for he’d brought in classics from almost every field of learning. He began his business career with an untested vision of wide horizons and pride in the profound ideas and great works of imagination that filled his shelves.. He liked to imagine colloquies among Aristotle, Einstein, Cervantes, and a dozen others. Fantasies enrich only a few, so he soon took on a hard-headed attitude to his trade. He added mysteries, romances, science fiction, most of which moved from his shelves quickly. Even so, inflation and rent increases concerned him. Should he sell the business?
And in chapter twelve he takes another look at his shop. In the last sentence of this paragraph, he recalls two demons who pester him from time to time.

A quiet moment in Yorick’s the day after a mid-March snowstorm. As he checked his inventory, Guy pictured in a lightning mental swoop the long tradition of reading and knowledge. Unknown scholars preserved the fragments of Heraclitus. Socrates had a better fate. He talked to Plato, who had a writer’s itch. Then came Aristotle and the forgotten thousands who carried his flame around the Mediterranean. Wars after that, a difficult empire, centuries of obscurity until monks rescued the old learning, which has been at the center of western thought ever since. Teachers. From authors to publishers to salesmen to book-dealers to readers to used book stores. He stood at the end of a chain and helped to forge new links. Yet he’d heard people say that there was another chain, another tradition, the story of faith, but he heard withering blasts from Malassandro and Malspirita whenever he tried to get near it.

I find Fletcher an interesting character to work with; his life has many shades of meaning. At the same time, I know perfectly well that Tom and other bookdealers I've known have been competent business people who haven't had the quirks and challenges and temptations that beset my brainchild. They've enjoyed their work (as people who run small businesses often do), contributed to their communities, and found much to satisfy them. May they continue to do well in the environment we live in that can be difficult for everyone.

Reasons for Celebration

2011-10-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

Along with other items in my pile of unfinished stories is a long work of fiction that I call at least for now Brief Lives. It tells about a theatre company in Botolph in the early 1950's and their preparations for the opening of a new play called Hooper!, based on imaginary characters and a made-up situation in the middle of 19th century America.

There are 49 chapters. Each one focuses on someone involved in the production of Hooper! or close to it.
I include two interludes, one a memoir that one of the characters in the play writes, the other the story of how a librettist and a composer create an opera based on the memoir in the first interlude. I've lost count but I think I'm working on the fourth draft now.

Brief Lives is a labor of love, since the theater was my first passion, which began when my parents took me to a production of the musical Can Can at the Shubert Theatre in New York City when I was 12 years old. I once considered writing plays but got no further than a few scripts and a year in a graduate program at Brandeis. The theater has remained one of my interests over the years, and I didn't want the time I spent on it go to waste. Hence, Brief Lives.

This story develops themes I've often used. I like to write about people who want to make something of their lives and often must overcome powerful opposition to reach their goals. They make mistakes sometimes and their fiercest enemies can be within themselves.

I hope that the 49 five- or six-page chapters and two interludes will call attention to the fact that life is short and filled with setbacks and temporary defeats and that even there are reasons for celebration, which the theater sometimes does well.

Sometimes, though, celebrations are postponed and muted, as is the case with the main character in the play that's at the center of Brief Lives. Bosworth Hooper, the son of a ship designer in early 19th century Botolph, quarrels with his father and leaves home to make his way in the western territories of the new country. He discovers a talent for magic tricks and story-telling and makes his living as an entertainer in carnivals and county fairs. He marries. His talent grows. His reputation spreads. He starts his own touring company and moves around the Midwest and the territories. He is not happy that he and his family live on the sidelines of respectable society and yearns for companions among the elite. As a result, he unwittingly becomes a front man for an unscrupulous gang of dealers in worthless real estate and phony mines. When their activities are exposed, the gang members head for the hills and Bosworth goes to prison. His wife labors tirelessly for his release. She succeeds after she and their teen-aged children call on President Lincoln.

Although he goes free and the gang are eventually brought to justice, Bosworth's situation is no longer simple. He gets into trouble again for attempting to avenge the death of his son and finds himself back in prison for another two years. He continues rethinking his situation. He is a more temperate man when he leaves prison a second time, and since he must make his living and has no skills but story-telling, he travels the country with songs, jokes, magic tricks, and warnings about the kinds of people who sometimes come to wealth and prominence in the new country. As well, he tells his own story -- how the different parts of his nature have come together so that he is now a strong, independent man, who can look out for himself and others.

A muted celebration, then, and delayed, no fanfares or brass bands or parades, but a reason for celebration nonetheless. In the end, Bosworth realizes that he has done more with his life than he ever thought he could during his years of disappointment and floundering and confinement.

Good Cities

2011-10-20T06:30:00.000-07:00

I used to sleep late when I had the chance, but nowadays, in retirement, I wake fairly early and drift to the computer before I do most anything else. I check the news from several sources, mostly about politics -- . U. S., Canadian, international.

Politics interests me, as it does many people, but only as a spectator. I like to say that the one time, I participated in electoral politics, aside from voting and expressing my views,  happened in the fall of 1960, when I joined a march in Chicago in support of John F. Kennedy, who was speaking in a labor hall the weekend before the presidential election. And the only reason I did that was because a female classmate of mine invited me to join her while she covered the event for our college paper.  My one foray into politics.

On the other hand, I recently heard somebody say that everything we do is political, even buying a car, and I often include political issues and personalities in the stories I write. Still, I haven't had much to do with electoral politics, and surely will not in the near future, because I live in Canada and vote in the U. S.

Nevertheless, as a private citizen, I find the current situation in electoral politics intriguing. Every day the news brings reports that many people recognize a gap between themselves and the institutions, government and private, that rule our world. The Tea Party movement has been in the news for months; the other day I walked by the park that Occupy Toronto has taken over. To an outside observer, it seems both groups have one concern in common: the economic system that underpins our way of life is trembling, and our leaders can't solve the problem. Moreover, what does it mean for future that  we live in a world of seven billion people and that networks we've built up for trade and communications and government affairs are widespread and intricate? Nobody can answer that question for sure. No wonder the large events of the day and powerful people seem removed from us.

I'm beginning to balance these concerns with increased appreciation for what goes on at the grassroots. Most grown-ups are not stupid or lazy or indifferent about the life around them. I suspect that many good things are taking place in local communities and individual lives.  An item in this morning's New York Times said that many Americans are paying down personal debt and saving for the future. Last Friday, I walked through an old Toronto neighborhood called The Junction that I hadn't visited since early in the summer and was astounded at the number of new businesses that were opening. There must be cases of individual initiative and enterprise all over the world. I can cite one example. A few months ago, I heard a journalist from Zimbabwe talk about the dreadful situation there -- thousands tortured by a tyrannical government -- and read from a book he'd just brought out. At the end of his presentation, a woman from Zimbabwe stood up and said, "Sir, your book is interesting and useful, but you left out one thing: what our people are doing on their own to help themselves independent of the government -- starting farms, businesses, building cooperative associations. Neighbor helping neighbor." Lovely, I thought.  Activity at the grassroots. That's what we need.

I found support for this idea in a brief essay I read the other day describing what Aristotle had to say about politics. He wrote about cities. He did not take into account the large empire his pupil Alexander would build, still less did he imagine the huge nations we have today or a mass society of 7 billion people and our world-wide concerns and means of communication. I don't suppose he ever foresaw, for example, that information about well-known people and troubling situations thousands of miles away from us would come to us every day and that there wouldn't be much we can do to relieve distress.

Aristotle wrote that that by nature people are suited for living in what he called a "polis" or city-state.  A city exists to promote the good life for its citizens. Citizens do not exist for the benefit of the city but the other way around. A city supports the people who live there. He said that life goes best when people have personal ties and personal possessions. Moreover, the city is complete in itself. It doesn't need to belong to a larger community to thrive.

He had in mind a world much different from ours but he understood the importance of local institutions and nearby relationships. We surely will not lose that insight ourselves, no matter what goes on in the wider world.

Chekhov and What it Means to Love

2011-10-12T15:23:00.000-07:00

Anton Chekhov (1860 - 1904) grappled with the nature of life as we all do and turned his discoveries into stories that many people admire. He must have had a quick mind that he trusted. As he grew to maturity, his wisdom about human nature must have moved him, his mastery of the art of story-writing surely delighted him.

I've been reading a collection of  his stories in English translations.  Many of his writings have been favorites of mine for a long time. During my recent reading, I've tried to identify some of his strengths as a writer. He's brief, gifted with strong powers of description, adept at conveying nuances of feeling, an expert at conveying thought and feeling.

In his maturity, he emphasized relations between adult men and women. He didn't shrink from describing relationships that have gone sour, but he never depresses or lowers his reader's spirits.  Of course writers have often shown that the bloom of romance fades, and Chekhov is no exception, but he does not judge or condemn his characters or make fun of them. He always write from sympathy, a disposition of his mind that I describe imprecisely by calling it a wide understanding of what it means to love.

He was not a sentimentalist, of course. There a veil of distance and irony about his stories. Perhaps it was his medical training that enabled him to portray harrowing moments without cringing or sorrowing over his characters' frustrations and misfortunes.

I chose a few sentences from a novella called "Three Years" to illustrate my observations: "There were gardens all along the lane, and a row of lime trees growing by the fence cast a broad patch of shadow in the moonlight, so that the gate and the fences were completely plunged in darkness on one side, from which came the sounds of women whispering, smothered laughter, and someone playing softly on a balalaika. There was a fragrance of lime flowers and of hay. This fragrance and the murmur of the unseen whispers worked upon Laptev. He was all at once overwhelmed with a passionate longing to throw his arms round his companion, to shower kisses on her face, her hands, her shoulders, to burst into sobs, to fall at her feet, and to tell her how long he had been waiting for her...And it seemed to him that, because this girl did not love him, all possibility of the happiness he had dreamed of then was lost to him forever." (Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City, New York, 1956, selected by Edmund Wilson, p. 42.)

Atmosphere, an evocation of sight, sound, touch, and smell -- four of the five senses, a hint of love, and the ache of yearning for what's out of reach. And that's just the beginning of the story.

Chekhov explored other themes as well, such as the difficulty of solving large social problems and the conditions of life in late 19th century Russia -- vast spaces, large egos, people living for themselves,  sometimes  without a compelling purpose, a struggling peasantry, burdened professionals and working people, frail themselves, who do their best to help a few.

Character rather than plot is at the center of his mature work, a gift to the world of letters for which many readers even in our hard-driving age give thanks. Some  might say that he brings in too many characters, but other writers also richly populate their stories, so I don't press this point.

Fiction is not usually a perfectionist's art. An author with a strong or unique personality can overcome many a lapse -- improbable behavior, major events brushed over lightly, loose ends, disproportion of form. I can find all these in Chekhov's stories, yet his powerful compassion and the deft way he expressed his insight into our natures outweighs his faults.

Lazy at Poetry

2011-10-06T05:28:00.000-07:00

Poetry has been part of my life since my high school days when our English teachers assigned us Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Walter Scott. I discovered a few other poets on my own. Since then, I've read poetry from many countries in translation and took some university courses in the subject. One on Victorian poetry has stayed alive in my memory.

Prose narrative has always been the main focus of my writing, but in my late 30's, in a burst of experimentation, I began to write what I hoped would turn out to be poetry, pieces I based on Biblical themes or the life around me in Boston. Here's a sample:

                                  For several mornings in a row
                                  A bird flew into the gap
                                  Between the bricks
                                  Of a building about to be demolished.
                                  It scratched and pecked
                                  And occasionally chirped.
                                  On the morning the wreckers arrive,
                                  It emits a six-note song
                                  That fills the derelict rooms
                                  With a livelier tune
                                  Than they’d ever heard before.

Short, not very daring. It could even be arranged as prose.

After I wrote two dozen or so of these pieces, I wondered what to do with them. First, I tried sending them to literary magazines. No takers. Laziness isn't the same thing as quitting on yourself, though, and I wanted to find a use for these short pieces. Over the next few years, I put together a novel about a poet and his encounter with a minor devil and included the verses I wrote, along with descriptions of dreams and letters to his late wife who died of leukemia and his version of an episode from colonial American history, all to give a picture of the life of a youngish man in extremity. I call the novel The Nightsongs of Arthur Goodbody. I hope to find readers for it one day.

Here's what another of Arthur's poems looks like.

                                           Three Refugees

                                  The confiding whispers
                                  Of a cabbie from Beirut
                                  To a youthful dark-haired friend
                                  Remind me of times I’ve
                                  Spent away from home myself
                                  And in the late-night darkness
                                  (With cold rain on the window glass),
                                  Muffled in a robe of waking dreams,
                                  I know their faith by halves or tenths.

Brief, descriptive, but some would say I was presumptuous to set it up as a poem.

I have another instance of myself as a lazy poet.  When I first moved to Toronto a little more than four years ago, I went for walks in the city's largest park and during my walks I made notes for what I thought would be a series of poems about people at various stages of romance.   After I made all the notes I wanted, I looked them over and realized that it would take more work than I cared to do to make verse out of them, so I turned them into brief prose sketches, to which I gave the title Love Builds a Nest in High Park.   One of these sketches came out this morning in a fine Toronto ezine called commuterlit (http://www.commuterlit.com/) which also printed the two other pieces I included in this post.  The editor, by the way, spotted my original intentions and refered to my latest piece as a prose-poem. I guess that's about right.

If you're interested in seeing what I'm referring to, click on the above link and scroll down the list on the right to my name: Richard French.

Do You Keep a Journal?

2011-09-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

I was walking along a city street the other day and happened to notice a sign on a utility pole: someone offered a $50.00 reward for the recovery of a lost book. Below was the drawing of a flower print cover with no words on it, a diary I presumed. I had no trouble sympathizing with the person's loss, since I started to keep a journal myself in May of 1978, with a few sentences about Walter Scott's novel Kenilworth that I was reading at the time.

As soon as I began, I saw that it wouldn't turn out to be what I'd hoped. I'd wanted to create an account of my thoughts and doings that would be replete with striking and original insights, but the entries turned out to be slight, uninspired, and most of the time I failed to give my responses to books I read or my impressions of the events I described in too few words, but I thought that a modest journal would be better than none, so I kept on and I now have 27 notebooks, with a few jottings for most every day.

Reading over pages from 1979 that I don't think I"ve looked at since just after I wrote them, I was displeased with myself for leaving names and places out and not saying much. I also felt a curious ache for days gone by when I lived in Boston, which I loved, and when I worked at a bank job and on writings that are still with me today. A record of sorts of a quiet life. then, and one that's enjoyed a wealth of mental activity.

When I began my journal, I decided to write on only one side of a page and leave the facing page blank so that I could fill in lacunae and make comments later. I haven't done that yet, but as I read pages in the first two volumes, I put in names that I left out.

Some recurring themes in my journal I've noticed so far:

brief comments on work that I abandoned or that I decided was finished or that I'm still working on.
groping among different subjects -- poetry, attempted play scripts, long works of fiction, reading philosophy and Goethe in translation, works about Christianity and other world religions, attending concerts, an acting class I took and a part I had in Shaw's Arms and the Man that eventually went to another actor, references to friends I had at the time.
occasionally a wish that I could stop floundering. It now occurs to me that lots of people my age were doing a lot better than I was at the time, but I've persisted, kept busy, and achieved a few things.

In later years, I made a point of writing somewhat longer entries and in May of this year I made another change. Because it's getting harder for me to write longhand, I now make journal entries only every two days or so and I set down only highlights.

By search and serendipity, I found comments I made about three productions of Puccini's Madama Butterfly I happened to see. In this case, the first entry was the longest:

June 8, 1982 -- (In Boston, a touring company of the Metropolitan Opera) Butterfly. Orchestra very prominent. Simple story. Impossible not to project my experience as an American soldier in the orient into the story, while to Puccini, it was just another interesting dramatic situation, and that's the way it should be. Might be easier to hear the music if the tale were about an ancient Roman and a Carthaginian. Cho-Cho-San trusts her American lover and tries to adopt what she considers a morality superior to her own. Her grief when the cruelty of Pinkerton destroys her. Pizzicato passage at the end of Act II -- worth waiting for. Puccini does not judge the characters. I had expected a lavish outpouring of melody, but it was cool and intelligent instead, not a tear-jerker. Musical themes repeated, as in Wagner.

April 10, 1994 -- Madama Butterfly at the Canadian Opera company. Presented so that Butterfly's emotions are believable, even though her judgment is questionable. A passionate person who does look for workable solutions but is sympathetic nonetheless.

October 14, 2009 -- To the Canadian Opera Company for Madama Butterfly. Very well sung, but long and somewhat thin -- lovely music -- "Un Bel Di", the humming chorus, etc Not much stage action.

I was afraid for about five minutes that I'd lost the volume for 2009, but I found it buried in the box where I keep my journal. I hope that the person who posted the notice on the telephone pole has similar good fortune in recovering her or his precious volume.

A Toronto Reading Series

2011-09-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

A reading series called Authors at Harbourfront Centre is one event that gets me out and about. Two subway rides and a fifteen minutes walk from Union Station brings me to York Quay and the recreational and artistic venues on Toronto's waterfront. I've been going to readings there for more than fifteen years.

Before moving to Toronto four years ago, I'd attend the International Festival of Authors, which Authors at Harbourfront puts on, if I happened to be in town in October. I have especially fond memories of going to the Festival with my father, who would fly to Toronto from Albany, where he lived near my sister and her family, and I would drive down from Sudbury, where I worked. I remember we saw together the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the English writer D. M. Thomas, and the Canadian Mordecai Richler.

I've seen other notable writers at the Harbourfornt series, some just starting out, and established authors I've never heard of -- all with recent books to promote.

I have particularly strong recollections of two reading/interviews with writers most authorities would place at the top of their profession -- A. S. Byatt and Orhan Pamuk. They've both created a substantial body of work that is widely appreciated. Both have had plenty of experience talking with groups of people and both had commanding presences that drew the audience into their thought-worlds.

Thinking back on those reading/interviews, I remembered a distinction the Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan made. Merely talented people often make others envious. "You can't possibly achieve all that I've done." They drive us into ourselves.

The great ones, the geniuses, open themselves and their abilities and have a way of sharing their gifts with others. They inspire ordinary people to do their best.

Just as interesting are writers new to me who for a few minutes bring the audience unfamiliar characters, situations, and locales and fresh outlooks on life.  A young English story-teller described in a quirky, humorous way a train ride she once took. Another writer based stories on flaws in well-known novels -- such as a scene near the beginning of Great Expectations:  how could Abel Magwich swim wearing a leg iron? A Canadian described traveling through Northern Ontario with his wife. A Toronto poet past the age of sixty lovingly portrayed incidents from his long and fruitful marriage.

This Wednesday, I heard Sebastian Barry read from his latest novel and answer questions put to him by Eleanor Wachtel, a well-known Canadian literary personality. Barry talked about his family in Ireland, his love for the US, where he set more than one work of fiction along with his criticisms of the country and his reflections on the war in Viet Nam. He was always interesting and rose to eloquence when he spoke of human freedom as respect for others and said that things inside us and nearby us are more important than politics and that we are all members of the same family.   I didn't agree with everything he had to say, but one remark stays with me -- that what he called "a thread of grief" runs through life. He was not a triumphalist, then, always boasting about victory and looking for another.

For anyone interested in such things, Authors at Harbourfront brings an array of opinions and talents and points of view. You can find much more about their programs at http://www.readings.org/.

Fiction and Truth

2011-09-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

"What do you do in your spare time?" someone asked me a few years ago.
  "I write fiction," I said.
  "Then you tell lies."
  "I lie through my teeth," I admitted.

Not a sparkling riposte, but the man's question stayed with me and I've wondered how to defend the art of fiction. Here are some responses that have occurred to me.

The man was working within a narrow framework. So far as I know, people have always made up stories -- to entertain, to illustrate points, to expand minds. We can think of Homer's Iliad, the Gilgamesh, the stories grown-ups have told children, and the various different kinds of stories today. I bet my friend's friend watched mystery stories on TV or the comics page in the paper.
There are degrees of untruth. A big difference exists between lies that hurt and deceive and stories that spring from the human imagination meant to charm or provoke thought. Even Plato, who criticized the methods of artists, used imaginative devices in his famous parable of the cave. A lot depends on purpose and intent. Consider the language of politics and ad writing and propaganda at their worst.
If a novel or a story is clearly labeled as fiction, what harm does it do? I don't mean pornography or malicious writings that spread hatred. I'm thinking of creative works that show our minds and our imaginations at their best and that enhance our lives. They injure no one.
On the positive side, fiction takes us to places we've never been and introduces us to people we would never know. How much poorer our experience would be without Shakespeare's vision of Denmark or what Chekhov tells us about late 19th century Russia.
Fiction can illustrate profound truths about human life. The sequence in The Brothers Karamazov called "The Grand Inquisitor", for example, or Melville's epic of the sea.
some fiction writers create massive and intricate pictures of the world. Dostoevsky, Balzac, Faulkner, Henry James, Dickens, Lady Murasaki. Someone could do a study of their procedures and their viewpoints.
The layers of meaning in Don Quixote, say, can show us value in our own lives that we may have ignored or not been able to think of on our own.

I could go no, but this is a good stopping point.

Memory, Fiction, and Healing

2011-09-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

I've never read a novel by the English writer Mark Rutherford, who lived from 1831 to 1913, but I once bought an anthology of English prose and read three paragraphs about memory from a journal he kept. I recalled the experience of reading them and thought he said that as time passes we do not remember sequences of events but isolated incidents that we can stitch together to form a narrative.

I checked the text yesterday for the first time in I don't know how long and discovered that Rutherford didn't say anything like that at all. In fact, he wrote about the injustice of our memories and gave himself as an example. He wrote about a friend he hadn't seen for a long time and that he remembered his limitations not his good points. From his own hardness of heart, Rutherford admitted, he recalled his friend as hard. He said. that unless we see a person frequently our estimates of that person "are apt to alter insensibly and to become untrue."

Rutherford didn't say that our memories come to us in isolated incidents rather than chains of events. So my experience with what he wrote -- or lack of it -- illustrates his point: that if we don't refresh our memories our recollections will become untrue.

This brought two thoughts about story-telling to my mind.

First, I suppose that many people who write fiction have had my experience. Most of my stories are complete fabrications and those that aren't come from long ago American history. I don't usually base characters on people I've known, but things from the past creep in, half-pictures, shadows from archives that no one will ever see but myself. As I work along, it often happens that words someone said or a tone of voice or a gesture and so on come to my mind, and these go into my story to give them authenticity and to bring me an "Ah-ha" minute. My faulty memory has its shining moments.

Second, a good novel, one that moves along and draws us in, does for us what imperfect memories can't do. They shows us complete situations and allows us to know people from different angles. When it comes to people we know -- at work and in communities we belong to or even our friends and members of our family, we often guess their motives and intentions, their thoughts and their feelings, usually from spotty knowledge or even prejudice. A novel by contrast brings us into a sequence of events we can assess and presents characters we can know well at least while we're reading it. After that, our tendency to forget and to alter takes over.

To put it another way, because a good novel offers a sense of fullness and completion, it can brings us healing or at least relief from the impact the jostling world and our imperfect selves have on our minds and our memories.

Charles Dickens

2011-09-08T12:54:00.000-07:00

The leader of one of the writers' groups I attend at the Toronto library asked me a question before our meeting started: "What guilty reading pleasures do you admit to?" If I'd been in the relaxed spirit of the question, I would have said something like -- news items on the Internet I check several times a day during breaks from my work. Of course, who ever said the news brings a refreshing break? That's another matter.

The longer I took to answer the question, the more serious I became. "Charles Dickens," I finally said. My reply provoked a brief discussion between two members of the group: Dickens portrayed his society at many levels...he is responsible for never-ending Christmas carols in our malls every year from some time in November to the end of December.

Searching my memory, I believe I read seven of Dickens' novels after I discovered his work. My parents kindly gave me a set of his fiction -- which I still have -- minus only the unfinished Edwin Drood. Reading half his novels was a liberating experience for me, for I saw in his work a wider point of view than most writers before or since have aimed for, not to mention his descriptive power and his gift for creating memorable characters.

I know that Dickens has numerous detractors who point out sentimentality, love for coincidence, and intellectual shallowness.

Who is perfect? I like Dickens' range, his courage and imagination, his good will, and his understanding of people in ordinary life. He didn't strive to escape the world or shrink it but present the whole of it, good and bad, from a sane, humorous, balanced point of view.

In later years, I haven't had so much time to read 500 page novels and I wanted to explore other writers, so my experience of Dickens lately has mostly been with audio abridgements and videos -- an old BBC Bleak House with Denholm Elliott and Diana Rigg is one of my favorites. I've been listening recently to tapes of Dombey and Son and Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens' power comes through even in truncated form.

Without knowing very much about his life, I ask if there is a common-sense explanation for how he did so much so well. Probably not. Still, we can figure our certain things without great knowledge. He was gifted with enormous talent. He had as much energy as he needed; he knew how to work hard and focus his attention; he could tell the difference between what's important and what's trivial; he had an instinct for what the public of his day liked; he received plenty of encouragement along the way. Most especially, he wanted to tell the stories he did. Anything that stood in his way wasn't there for long. As a result milions of readers have been pleased, and no doubt he was, too.

Surprises and Changes

2011-09-03T17:05:00.000-07:00

I spent my formative years in and around Boston, a mid-sized North American metropolitan area. After I finished my university studies in the Midwest and four years in the American army, I went back to Boston . with thoughts of writing uppermost in my mind. As I looked around me, I believed that most everything life had to offer was available in my home area and that I would have more than enough to write about where I was.

A friend of mine said that I should keep myself open to surprise, and more than one came my way. I joined a Lutheran congregation in my early forties and spent five years studying at a seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana and then served as a pastor in Sudbury, Ontario, a mining area 240 miles or 400 kilometers north of Toronto, for 17+ years.  I moved to Toronto four years ago after I retired, though I still preach most Sundays and have plenty of time for writing, I foresaw none of this when I was forty and working as a clerk in a bank, knowing that I would have to find something else, because I have no gift for figures.

I cannot calculate the influence these moves and changes have had on my writing, especially the arrival of the Christian faith in my life when I was thirty-two, but I can say some things.

When I got to Sudbury, I took a look at what I'd written so far and said, "I'm in a new country, doing a kind of work I never expected. Should I change course or keep on with what I'm doing?" It didn't take me long to decide.that I would keep on the course I'd set for myself. This meant --

      1. That my mind would be partly back in the U. S. while I lived in Canada, a situation that never stopped me from liking Canada quite a bit.
      2.   That I wouldn't know what was happening in Boston, or Botolph as I call it in my stories, after 1982 when I enrolled in the seminary. Even so, I've set scenes in Botolph or Boston many times in the late 1980's and '90's.
      3.   That the openness and tolerance and sociability of most Canadians would enliven my thinking.
      4.   That being away from the U. S., though not very far, would give me an interesting and useful outlook on the country I came from and still love.
      5.   That I would able to build up a collection of novels that I'm pleased with on the whole with more to come as I revise and receive criticism from other writers and work up the spirit to look for agents and publishers.

If you're interested, I've summarized most of my fiction in an earlier post called "Welcome to Sagadac".

The Opinionists

2011-09-01T07:24:00.000-07:00

The Opinionists is a companion piece, at least in format, to The Hills of the Tigers that I wrote about in my previous post. The two are similar as well in that they both combine art and public life.

I wrote the first drafts of both many years ago. I hope I've got them after many revisions to a state where agents and publishers will be interested in them.

The heart of The Opininonists is a theological controversy that took place in the mid-17th century and resembles one from the archives of Massachusetts history. Surrounding this story, in alternating chapters, is an account of a movie company in the early 1950's making a film based on the controversy that galvanized the small colony.

Here's a part of a scene in which the cast and crew of the film come together for the first time.

Vincent Adair assembled the best cast he could. I remember his speech to the company after we arrived in Stilton Fields. He rented a meeting room in the town hall with a high ceiling and tall windows on two sides through which we could see the bluish curves of distant dusky hills. Fans turned briskly overhead, creaking like crickets, for it was the beginning of summer. Vincent kept us waiting, fifteen minutes, half an hour, but we pardoned him when he came on stage and stood before us like a benevolent emperor about to dispense favors, an actor among actors.

“I suspect you’ve heard stories about my working methods.” Vincent didn’t need a microphone, for the range of his fabled voice could hold in thrall even the most restive gathering. “Some of the tales are true. I like to get my way. Be patient with me. We’re going to make one of the best pictures ever. Begin, please, by thinking of yourselves as a community in colonial America. You’ve known each other a long time. You’ve had many adventures together; you’ve accomplished a lot. You don’t know many people apart from each other. There are no cities near you to lose yourselves in. No highways. No electricity. You’re strict, but kind and loving; you know how to withstand hard knocks. None of you is rich, though some plan for riches. Your families, your community, and God Almighty are the biggest factors in your lives. You’re in awe of nature and the new land you live in, the vastness of which you can’t imagine. You dream about the future. You have a profound trust that life will go well for you. Now, a new element comes into this community...”

And now three paragraphs from the 17th century part in which the narrator sees the woman who is about to change the colony for good.

I stopped my work when the sun overtopped the tallest of the masts in the harbor and made two neat piles of papers I’d scattered over the table. I pushed back my chair and went to the window, stretched, and put my hands on my hips, looking, I’m sure, like a forest animal, weasel or fox, ambling out of his lair for a look at the puzzling, glorious world that surrounds him. Though we lived nearly a mile from the center of town, I could hear the new bell in the cupola atop the meeting house calling our delegates to the General Court. Two shopkeepers heading for King Street walked by on the lane below. I heard Ned Boland announcing the return home of Pastor Allerton and the death of the Protector – news that took me away from scholarly work I’ve kept up since my student days at Cambridge – to present events in Botolph and the conference downstairs in half an hour.

The melancholy cry of a seagull interrupted my expectant musing. I watched the homely bird as it perched on my window sill. When the gull flew off, calling out again, I looked down at Harbor Lane and saw, walking around the base of Berryman’s Hill, a solitary woman wearing a crimson cape and a black hood that half-hid her face. She walked rapidly, as if toward an urgent task of mercy. The gull called again in its skyward flight. Her pace slackened, she looked up. A smile brightened her face as she watched the bird’s graceful dips and turns. Her happiness delighted my furry fox self. I waved, she returned my greeting. Before long, our seagull flew off in the direction of the Mary and John, and Lydia Bowstreet went on her way.

I watched five black-cloaked men, a team of penguins, making their way toward me up the lane. I gathered papers I thought I’d need and went downstairs to join my Antarctic colleagues for the second day of our meeting.

One of the themes that interest me most as I worked on The Opinionists was how people love freedom and in North America we can usually find find freedom in parts of our lives at least.

Hills of the Tigers

2011-08-26T17:19:00.000-07:00

During many years of writing, I have found the arts both a refuge and an inspiration. I threw away a pile of stories and plays a few decades ago, but the first writing I saved was the story of an enlisted man in the American army named Carl Norberg, serving in a village in a made-up Asian country called Kulon. He spends his spare time drawing pictures of Kulonese people and their country.

Years ago, an editor suggested that the novella I wrote was incomplete, so after some thought, I had Norberg move to Botolph after he left the army, where he drives a cab and develops his work, so the story then becomes also about the contrast between urban civilian life and the military ways that influenced Carl.

Here's a paragraph where he writes about his days in Kulon.

It was my day off – a Wednesday or Thursday, I forget which – and the middle of the afternoon. The sun behind me cast a bright light over my shoulder onto a large sketch pad balanced on my knees. Unook, our houseboy, sat under a coconut palm a few feet away from me beside one of the motor pool drivers whom I had learned only the week before was his father. Despite the noise around us – laughter from the swimming pool, the voices of several sergeants talking irreverently about the events of the day, a radio that blared away in the echoing caverns of the supply room, the occasional sound of artillery fire from the training field a mile away – I was able to concentrate on what I was doing. The lines of experience in the older man’s face, Unook’s laughing, considerate eyes that didn’t show much strength, a few jagged curves to suggest the distant Hills of the Tigers, haunting, unreachable,¬ very likely dangerous – all fell smoothly onto the paper seemingly without any help from me. Although we knew little of each other, we felt at ease, like old friends. I was reminded – for some reason – of a quiet Sunday afternoon at home.

This is a few sentences about his time in Botolph. Millicent is a gallery owner who has taken an interest in his work.

His storage room had a window that faced north. The sun shone brightly that morning and the light that illuminated dust-motes also allowed Millicent to his canvases. The colors were vivid, she thought, the designs harmonious, and the details true – all expressing movement, vitality, the flow of action, and nature’s changes. She liked that he’d gone out of his way to learn his subject matter and wrestle with his craft. He was more serious than she thought.

“What happened to this village?” she asked. “I suppose it’s much different now.”
“It was bombed,” Norberg said without elaborating and showed her another sequence of paintings – of trucks, refugees, and dusty highways. “You’ll find some violence in my work. I can’t avoid it. War is a dreadful thing. I partly want to create an antidote – to celebrate the rhythms of everyday life – to heal, you see, myself and others. We aren’t kids, fond of wonder, who lack the power to fix bad situations. When things seem to be at their worst, some good is likely to break through. We need to be on the lookout for it.”

The story also concerns other members of the arts community in Botolph. Here's a paragraph that Carl's lady friend writes. She sculpts birds in clay.

We walked across New Hope Common after lunch to the university gallery to see what the Nine had to say for themselves – mostly urban scenes that looked very different from Carl’s: two dozen pictures, each a fanciful image like ones our brains make before we fall asleep. Pam explained that the Nine liked to work with geometrical shapes and color relationships. They wanted to explore what our minds do with what our eyes see and they worked with the zeal of research scientists. Their pictures were more precise than Carl’s, with careful attention to detail. I guessed their work took a lot of patience; I liked some of the combinations they came up with. Thinking of my birds, I wondered what I might take from the Nine to combine with Carl’s spirit and my own wish to work from love.

And a comment by one of Carl's detractors, after a gallery Norberg set up to show some of his pictures of Botolph burned in a fire.

Rodney Buffum made a public appearance about a new commercial development in South Cove near the site of the fire, about which the reporters kept asking him. “I don’t know anything about it; an agent handles my rentals. The wiring in the building was sound at the last inspection and I hired the best security outfit in the city. I resent allegations that I caused damage to my own property, even indirectly. The tenant must have contributed somehow.” Buffum didn’t stop there. “Norberg’s paintings are subversive. They damage the city’s reputation when we’re struggling for renewal. What will visitors say about a place that scorns itself?”

The novel is about how Carl endures and grows as an artist and as a man and communities that have shaped him and that he wishes to make better.

Welcome to Sagadac

2011-08-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

Reading and writing fiction has been a major interest of mine since I was in the 8th grade in a suburb of Boston. After serving in the American army in a noncombat role during the early years of the Vietnam War, I wondered if I could translate my experience into fiction.  While working at a bank across the street from one of Massachusetts' big schools,I found demonstrations against the war hard to absorb. So as not to flounder in confusion, I decided that the best way for me to make sense of the events of the day was to go back to the start of the experience of Europeans in North America, not a great leap for me, since my undergraduate degree was in history.

What follows is a very brief summary of fiction I've written as a result of my encounter with salient features of America's past and present. None of it has been published yet, but I keep revising these novels and working on others to add to my list.  I've also begun research into agents. .

                                                     SAGADAC AND BEYOND

                                                     Novels of Life in a Democracy

Journey into the Wilderness The story, set in the middle of the seventeenth century in an English colony called Sagadac Bay that resembles Massachusetts, where I come from, concerns an isolated case of supposed witchcraft and the successful struggle of the old governor to overcome a mass outbreak of fear and suspicion.

Nightsongs of Arthur Goodbody A young Canadian living in the US, a widower in his late twenties, drifts from the path that he and his late wife set for themselves. He meets an emissary of the devil who promises to bring him to Laura if he will join the organization he represents. Arthur reluctantly agrees and follows along in a series of disquieting adventures. Joy in life and new prospects return for Arthur at the end.

The World, the City, and the Wakemans The story is set in an imaginary city mid-sized American city called Botolph, which resembles Boston and tells about several months in the lives of various members of the Wakeman family, most of whom, privileged and eccentric, strive quixotically for places of recognition in the public eye.

Hills of the Tigers The novel tells the story of Carl Norberg, originally from Nebraska, who makes his way through various alien environments to become an artist. The story is set chiefly in two locales, Botolph and an imaginary Asian country named Kulon during the start-up of a war the United States enters with disastrous results. One purpose of the story is to encourage readers to develop their own creativity.

The Opinionists The story consists of two alternating narratives: descriptions by various participants of a film crew on location in the mid-1950's and an eye-witness account of the controversial episode in American colonial history that is the subject of their film. The story is set in Sagadac.

Here's a few sentences about the first three in a series of novels that I hope will have five in all.

In the Time of the Scythians Three parallel stories take place in the aftermaths of two American wars, several centuries apart from each other, and concern the struggles of the characters to lead decent lives and make sense of what they’ve endured and witnessed. The ambitions and criminal activities of a barbarian cult called the Scythians complicate the lives of the characters in the present-day part of the story.

The Angel of Recovery The story takes place in the early 1980's and in the next-to-last decade of the 19th century. Various narratives involve people who live in the aftermath of war. The arrival of new troubles hinders their quest for renewal, and in the 20th century part of the story, the activities of a secret society called the Scythians bring a pile of trouble. The main characters slowly deepen in strength and wisdom, and the gain in maturity moves them closer to the revival they seek.

Testimonies War. Plague. The crimes of the Scythian cult. The editor Stephanie Markham brings together stories from the past, present, and future of the United States to illustrate the relationship between ordinary citizens – plus a couple of sociopaths – and the government. Again, the stories Stephanie collects concern the campaign against the Scythians and various quests for new lives.

I have other short things, but that's the center of my fiction writing in a sumarized list form, which is okay for now.

Reviving My Blog

2011-08-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

When I began writing this blog more than a year and a half ago, I invited some people to check it out and gave them an e-mail address. After some time went by. I noticed that no one had viewed what I'd written, so I said I might as well stop since even my friends won't take the trouble to read my blog. I quit too soon.

I've been chatting recently with Zach who runs the Peak Gallery in Toronto. He's getting a new set up for his gallery's blog and website and suggested I start a blog myself as a way of making parts of my writings and comments about life and art and faith available for people who might be interested. I told him about this blog and checked it our myself yesterday afternoon (Saturday, August 20, 2011).

Much to my surprise, I found that there had been 250 views in the past year and a half and 17 in the last month. And I hadn't done a thing to promote any reader's interest. Time to start again, I thought So here goes, with a kind of summary of what I wrote in November and December of 2009, which I based on comments I presumptuously emailed to a friend who does a lot of writing herself. She never asked for my views and I'm sure i said a lot that was obvious to her. We are still friends. This is how I wrapped up my remarks.

It's good to remember that what's true for you is true for many others.
Gifts of insight come during the work of revision.
A sound structure helps both writer and reader. It's useful, too, to understand what purpose a particular passage serves in a whole work.
Variety. A long work will put readers to sleep if it's on one note. I heard a saying once about how to dress that applies here: two plains, once fancy.
Readers like down-to-earth things now and then and when they're mixed with spiritual and philosophical insights, the whole work can be a treat and a revelation. It's a question of putting things in the right place.
Persist. Don't quit.
Know yourself.

So that's the end of my beginning as a blog writer and I hope the start of a new phase.
One thing I can add is that since putting this blog on the shelf, I've found writers' groups to join at two branches of the Toronto Public Library. I've found the meetings helpful for feedback and fellowship. It's useful to know what others think of our work.

I hope to say something about my own writing in my next post.

A Novelist's Basic Concerns -- Part Two

2009-12-28T13:54:00.000-08:00

Creating characters is at the heart of fiction writing. Here's a quick survey of some concerns that always come up.

Once we have a character in mind, we collect information -- more than we will ever include in our novel. We consider issues such as these --

our character's likes and dislikes
his or her background and personal history
physical, psychological, and spiritual traits
fears, hopes, and dreams
what our character believes is true or real
the consequences of past actions and what present actions and decisions will or might lead to
our character's motives

With regard to the last, it's often helpful to imagine our character as having two motives side by side. He or she wants to reach an immeditate goal: to rescue a child from a burning building, say. Secondly, our character wants to fulfill a deeper purpose. By rescuing the child, she or he regains a sense of self-esteem.

Another useful guideline is a distinction E. M. Forster made in "Aspects of the Novel" between flat and round characters. Round characters change, their behavior can surprise us. Don Quixote is an obvious example. So is Emma Bovary. Flat characters don't change. Mr. Micawber in Dicken's "David Copperfield" comes to mind. I suspect that most characters in genre fiction are flat.

Now, after we have gave gathered information about our character, we find ways to present it to the reader.

dialogue
description
interior monologue or other ways of convying thoughts
action
interaction with other characters
the setting in which our character lives
what others think of her or him
emphasize important moments in our character's life either directly or indirectly. In short fiction, a single moment or sequence can reveal an entire lifetime.

Character and plot are intertwined. For many successful fiction writers, plot comes first. Others put character or another consideration in first place.

A Novelist's Basic Concerns -- Part One

2009-12-14T14:38:00.000-08:00

There are many kinds of novels and the form allows for a wider variety than a survey of the current crop would lead us to believe. Novels can be short, a 60,000 word minimum say, or very long like "Remembrance of Things Past" or "A Dance to the Music of Time", both of which are several volumes long.

Novels are written in plain or ornate language, close to poetry or the plain style of a newspaper column. A novel may focus on one character or several, a family or a community, it can stick to one time period or geographical area or switch among several. We can find militant novels and ones as politically indifferent as it's possible for human beings to be.

Whatever the case, certain questions come up -- you can find books written about them -- that every novelist needs to answer for her or himself. Some say that the most important decision a novelist makes has to do with point of view. Here's a basic summary of a fascinating subject.

First person point of view -- "I" -- a narrator tells his or her own story or acts as a witness to someone else's story. Sometimes we're supposed to believe everything the narrator says, sometimes not.

Second person point of view -- "you" -- the person or people addressed become characters in the story or at least involved with it,
Third person -- "she or he or they did..." -- the narration can focus on one character or a whole community. It can tell events from the outside as an observer or delve into the characters' mind and feelings.

Most novels nowadays seem to follow one character, whether from first or third person point of view, and stick to exploring and developing one consciousness. This has not always been the case. Dickens frequently shifts points of view as do other 19th Century novelists we still read today, not to mention Henry James, Faulkner, and James Joyce. This practice imparts richness and complexity -- one sign of a capacious imagination.

What's more, a novel with multiple points of view, reflects the diffuseness that characterizes life for many of us -- we belong to different groups of people, we move from place to place, contradictory ideas come our way, one person's mind contains many different people.

A novel with a single point of view can bring us an opposite benefit, however. As a result of reading two very good recent stories, I realized that a novel with a single point of view -- focusing on one mind, one life, one set of experiences, all adhering to a shapely narrative curve -- can bring us temporary protection from the fractured nature of everyday life. A feeling that we ourselves are centered, with a strong sturdy anchor that reaches to the bottom of the sea. Of course, all that goes away, except for our recollection of it, as soon as we put the book down,

Fiction and Structure

2009-12-07T09:25:00.000-08:00

From a writer's viewpoint, every work offers a basic challenge: how to present his or her interests and predilections in a way that will appeal to readers she or he doesn't know -- the public at large. The question of structure comes up at this point -- how a story is organized. What is its skeleton? Here are some things I've thought about:

The best order to present information. This can be tricky, especially if you've done a lot of background research and have a stack of notes. I put in too much in early drafts and then prune. Something like a sculptor shaping a piece of stone.
Many editors nowadays look for snappy beginnings to capture the reader's attention. This can work well, but this practice can be limiting and lead to falseness, which will deceive readers who won't realize the story is contrived and tedious until they're about fifty pages in. I prefer a work that grows naturally, like a tree.
Pacing -- fast and slow. Variety. The main characters and themes come in near the start and then I work on them. A high point comes near the middle and then the story builds to a satisfying conclusion.

Editors also have an eye out for sagging middles. This make sense to me. Keep up the pace.

I try to avoid anti-climax.
The challenge of holding a reader's attention always comes up, especially in a long work. This is where suspense, opposition, tension, come in. Readers will fade away if they encounter a steady and predictable line of successes, but they'll turn the page if there's a possibility of failure. Small setback overcome. What stands in the character's way.
Myself, I don't care for rigid, stereotyped structures (unless I'm reading a mystery story). I like a work that breathes and grows and comes across with grace. Sincerity counts, too.

Getting the structure to work in a way that pleases the writer should give him or her the confidence to put a work in the hands of readers. A good structure doesn't always come first thing. Sometimes you have to live with a piece before the right way becomes clear.

The Struggle and Joy of Revising

2009-11-30T09:32:00.001-08:00

The old saying "writing is rewriting" surely is true for me. Revising a long work takes stamina and faith, but persistence receives its reward, including gifts of insight into one's work and oneself. Here are some things I include as I rework.

Remove repetitions and anything that slows down the narrative.

I tend to natter on with insignificant or obvious reflections -- temporary, first-draft filler that I reduce, revise, and toss out.

I straighten out awkward sentences.

I remove stale comments and replace them with what seem sharper and more original observations. I often need to rework these, too.

My narratives are apt to be low-energy, so as I make my way through a story, I'm likely to add scenes for reader interest -- arson and a subsequent trial in one case, an armed skirmkish in another.

If I find myself puzzling over a passage, I ask -- what purpose does this serve? How does it function in the narrative?

If I hesitate over a sentence or a paragraph, I rely on another old maxim: "when in doubt, leave it out". I'm never ruthless, though. I proceed with a quiet mind.

Since my writing is old-fashioned by today's standards without much explicit sex, violence, or profanity, I need to keep a sharp eye out for anything that might bore the reader. Here my natural impatience helps -- probably the only thing it's ever good for.

I try to tie up loose ends, e. g. what happens to a minor character's woman friend?

How does the theme of the story -- the search for new life in the case of one novel -- tie in with what happens to the main characters? I think it through. A practice that helps me avoid limp endings.

Revising brings me deeper into a story, makes me intimate with characters, situations, and language a way of bringing both a piece of writing and myself to life.

Steps in Writing Fiction

2009-11-23T08:13:00.000-08:00

My Name is Richard French. I live in Toronto, Canada's largest city.

Some years ago -- decades really -- I decided that writing fiction would be at the center of my life. Along with interesting and worthwhile things I did to earn my living, I have created a collection of unpublished novels and stories for which I hope to find readers. Most of my fiction is set in an imaginary American state called Sagadac -- with excursions elsewhere -- that resembles Massachusetts where I come from. As I look back over years of work, I see that I've followed several steps to bring each of my novels to a state where someone else can read it. I'm setting down here the steps I go through in hopes that a few readers will find this useful or at least interesting.

Note Taking: I use pocket-sized notebooks and scraps of paper. Ideas arrive at odd times, especially if I'm busy with something else. I make sure to jot them down right away. I've even got to be pretty good at remembering ideas that come to me just before falling asleep when my brain is clear of the day's concerns.

Organizing Notes: I transcribe notes from scraps of paper to file cards or a wirebound notebook.

Writing a first draft: Using my notes as a guideline, I force myself to put down -- always longhand -- whatever comes into my head that reasonably fits in with my notes. I don't stop to read over, just write words, sentences, and paragraphs. I've sometimes regretted not having higher standards at this stage because everything I come up with needs to be changed, often many times, but at least I have something to work with and this is the point.

First rest stop: I set the piece aside and turn to another project. I've read experts on creativity who say that even when our conscious minds think about something else, the deeper processes of our brains are still busy, especially on work to which we've given our best attention. I suspect that waking up in the morning and finding a vexing problem solved is a similar experience.

Subsequent Drafts: I make no radical changes but work with what I have, horrible as it may be. I cut, add, reshape; I look for new ideas. It's sometimes slow and arduous going, but eventually the piece becomes exciting again. This stage includes a lot of ruminating, thinking, reflecting, reading the text over and over -- becoming more intimate with the material, going deeper. An esential part of writing. It often happens as I read a passage over and over that I think this is no good and can't be fixed. I berate myself for writing boring stuff, sink into despondency and say that nothing will ever come of this mess. It's a matter of keeping on, being willing to persist and being patient. Good results usually take time -- no matter what we're working on. New ideas begin to come slowly, bit by bit, like crocuses breaking through snow, first one and then another and another until I see the part I've been working on with a clear brain and a wider view. Something like hearing music after a long silence. My attitude changes. I tell myself that what finally appeals to me will also work for others.

Second rest stop: Again, I take time to work on something else. It's amazing how the brain refreshes.

Final polishing: This can take some time. I go over every sentence more than once so that nothing lags or is redundant or boring or out of place or inconsistent or awkward or just plain dumb. I revise until the demon critic in my head goes away and with the help of God I've overcome the other inner voice that encourages me to slide over passages that need fixing.

I'll have more to say about my experience of writing and re-writing in later posts.