Cool piece on writing processes of a range of writers, including Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Richard Powers, Margaret Atwood, at Wall Street Journal [via Rozalia Jovanovic]
Most days, Nicholson Baker rises at 4 a.m. to write at his home in South Berwick, Maine. Leaving the lights off, he sets his laptop screen to black and the text to gray, so that the darkness is uninterrupted. After a couple of hours of writing in what he calls a dreamlike state, he goes back to bed, then rises at 8:30 to edit his work.
Do you still try to write or find your brain still stuck on writing during holidays? Have you ever sent out a submission on a holiday? Does food (or family) eliminate your drive, or the reverse?
Thanksgiving 2009
(thanks Justin Sirois)
Food for Thought With Sasha Grey
Sasha Grey at the First Thanksgiving
DD: Do you think it can be a really positive thing to do so much so young because you learn so much.
SG: Yeah, over the past few years my learning curve has been huge and sometimes people say, ‘Don’t you just want to be a normal 21-year-old and go party and have fun?’ No, I mean why do you think great artists of our time have always said youth is wasted on the young? I don’t want to be an old a person in regret and think I should have done this but I was off being lazy. There are enough mistakes we make as human beings anyway, so let the mistakes be real mistakes not chosen mistakes.
You know what? I think this is great advice. The rest of the interview isn’t bad either. (via Jezebel.)
Q & A #1
Question 1:
I interned for a literary agency for a while. Do you think that agents are necessary for all kinds of writing, or that in some cases you can go straight to the publisher? (With fiction, I think it’s pretty well established that you need an agent no matter what.)
This is kind of amazing: some kid is suing World of Warcraft, partially, he claims, because it has contributed to his sense of alienation, and he has subpoenaed one of the dudes from Depeche Mode, “since he himself has been known to be sad, lonely, and alienated, as can be seen in the songs he writes.” He’s also called on Wynona Ryder because of her sometime talking about how she loved The Catcher in the Rye, and “how alienation in the book can tie to alienation in real live [sic] / video games such as World of Warcraft.” Makes sense to me…
On Violence
Dostoyevski, Orwell, Žižek n’ crew have written far more compelling meditations on violence, but I figure I’d have a go at it (being an asian-canadian near-sighted pacifist and all), and this all in time for Thanksgiving.
To draw parallel’s between our Father’s pilgrimage and their genocide of Native Americans would be didactic and predictable. Any person, as I do, who enjoys the opulent grounds of American soil best not critique the ways in which such grounds were brought forth. War equals land, and we have landed. If the Native Americans had their way, we’d all be in England right now; I hear the gin is okay, but that Queen is a bitch. So, we won’t talk about war.
Writing/Editing Prompt: Kidnapping
Step one: search through your files for two stories that don’t work. Find one that has a character you really like, but is otherwise uninteresting. Find another that works on a lot of levels, but is nonetheless dull.
Step two: take the interesting character and place her/him in the other story in some awkward way. Force her/him into a confrontation with the characters in the well crafted but otherwise dull story. Let the character be aware that she/he is in some way out of place, but not necessarily in a meta “I’m a character in a story, but I think this is the wrong story” sort of way. Unless that is what you want to do.
Step three: watch as the character attempts to escape. Watch as the dull story attempts to hold the character in the story because the story prefers this new, interesting element to its original, dull cast.
Rudy Wilson’s The Red Truck
Very excited last night by an email from Peter Markus, who mentioned that the long-difficult-to-drum-up novel The Red Truck by Rudy Wilson has just been reprinted by Ravenna Press, along with another new book by Mr. Wilson. I seriously almost paid a heftier tag a week or two ago when I was about to buy the original version on Amazon used, but now the always excellent Ravenna has solved that problem.
If you haven’t read Rudy Wilson before, via this novel or in issues of Unsaid or elsewhere, here’s Peter on why this means you should be excited too:
The Red Truck is one of those late-80s Knopf books edited by Lish that I found remaindered one day in some TV appliance-warehouse-turned-bookshop that is now a place that sells tires. I took it home and immediately could feel the sensation of something new running through my hands. I think it’s a brilliant book, a one of a kind book, a book that wouldn’t have been made into a book had it not found its way into Gordon’s hands. I think the story goes behind it that Lish cut the manuscript in half (sort of what he did to Barry Hannah’s revved up Ray). I suspect what Lish did was find the core of Rudy’s Red Truck and cut away much of what a much younger Wilson thought was needed to hold the story together. For me it’s a novel that is pure hallucination and is the kind of book that I return to again and again in order to recapture that initial rush that language in its purest, most musical form can offer to us. Each time that I do Rudy’s sentences unglue me and then put me back together in new ways. I let my sister read The Red Truck, some years ago, and when she did she ended up having a major seizure. The effect that the book had on my sis is what we all want from our work: sentences that take hold of the brain and seize it up, unhinge us from the world around us, and make the body of us do some fucked-up sort of pogo to a music that Wilson’s song makes us hear inside our own heads. The Red Truck by Rudy Wilson is the realest of deals. You can get it now from Ravenna Press along with a brand new book of short fiction by Wilson called Sonja’s Blues. And while you’re loitering around at the Ravenna website, do yourself a third favor and nab Norman Lock’s The Long Rowing Unto Morning, an equally dreamy and necessary book. Thanks for listening.
You can pick up the book, also available in a package deal with Wilson’s Sonja’s Blue, now from Ravenna Press.
Now we just need all those other Knopf gems to get the same treatment…