December 8, 2009
At the end of a satisfying week of Advanced Novel workshopping at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival last week, our instructor gave some final recommendations to the class. One of them was to buy this little book, “The Artful Edit,” by Susan Bell. That gave me the excuse I was looking for to rush right out to Prairie Lights, one of the best independent book stores in the world, and on one of my favorite places to hang out in Iowa City. They only had one copy, and it was mine.
Published in 2007 by W. W. Norton, this book is destined to be a classic, right up there with Annie Lamott’s “Bird by Bird,” which is one of my all-time favorite books on writing. Bell has been a professional editor for over 20 years, for Random House books and Conjuctions magazine. But even better, she is a great story-teller.
My favorite writing books provide a combination of technical advice, and anecdotes about famous writers (and some not-so famous ones as well.) Technique is useful, but how do I know a specific technique really works? By seeing how it worked for someone else – preferably someone whose writing I admire. As Bell states in Chapter IV, Master Class, “I cannot furnish a formula for editing, as none exists. Instead I’d like to offer what has helped me hone my skills: a close look at the work and work process of other artists.”
She does this by revealing a specific technique through anecdote – either from her own experience or that of another writer, and is careful to include the specific results that were achieved by use of the technique. She weaves in quotes from other writers, historical and cultural references, writing exercises, and excerpts from books and essays to yield a multi-layered tapestry studded with writing gems.
The book is short yet substantive. It is divided into five chapters. The first three give a top-down view of self-editing, from Gaining Perspective, to Macro Editing and finally to Micro Editing. In Chapter IV, Bell gives space to three writers and two artists to discuss how they revise their work, and Chapter V is A Brief History of Editors, from ancient scribes to some of the most effective editors of the 20th century.
October 10, 2009
Books on writing fall into three main categories. There are books to get you writing – filled with exercises, writing prompts, and motivational insights. There are books on technique -”how-to” develop character, devise a plot, get from point A to point B. And there are books about what it really is to be a writer. Natalie Goldberg’s latest book on writing, “Old Friend from Far Away: The Practiceof Writing Memoir” brings all three of these themes to one table. It’s a smorgasbord, with a hint of the pot luck; the kind where you want to sample every dish and if you go away unsatisfied you have no one to blame but yourself.
Goldberg is the guru of timed writing exercises. Writing practice. Writing as spiritual practice. Her first book on writing, “Writing Down the Bones,” introduced the concept of timed writing – 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, whatever you could commit to – to millions of readers. Keep your hand moving, don’t edit, don’t think. Just write. Write junk, write “I can’t think of anything to write about.” Just keep writing. Eventually, you get to the root, the heart, the good stuff. The scary stuff. In “Old Friend,” Goldberg focuses the use of this technique in writing memoir. “Ten minutes of continuous writing is much more expedient than ten years of musing and getting nowhere,” she tells us. If you look to memoir as a way of learning who you are, and why you are, rather than simply a means of self-expression, this book can help you on that path.
So yes, you get the exercises, the writing prompts, lots of them. “Tell me about your mother’s hands. Go. Ten minutes. Three minutes on a time you were freezing in July.” I can do that one! “Tell me about how a relationship ended.” Do they ever end? Or just morph into something different, something lesser, or greater, than what you thought you wanted. And you get technique – verb choice, structure, how to come at your memoir sideways instead of head on. Goldberg hops from exercise to technique and back again, barely pausing for breath.
But when she does pause, it is for my favorite parts of the book. The stories of how she, and other famous writers, did it, or said it, or lived it. James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Zora Neale Hurston and many more. Goldberg tells their story, or lets them tell it, and then says – now you, reader – it is your turn. Ten minutes. Go.
October 9, 2009
A Good Man by Larry Baker is one of those books that came to me under a halo of synchronicity. There’ve been a few like that in my life. For example, Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar which literally fell off the bookshelf at my feet in a used bookstore days after I had seen an interview with Alice Walker in an anti-war documentary that really hit me. So I bought the book, and found in it a theme that was completely consistent with something going on in my own life at that moment.
“A Good Man” was sent to me by the publisher, Steve Semken of Ice Cube Books in North Libery, Iowa. The cover caught my eye. A grainy, colorful photo, blue sky and tawny sand, and a man holding the hand of a small boy, both walking away from the camera. But I set it aside, because we had a full schedule for the next couple of months. I’d learned that Steve publishes interesting books by articulate authors, so I wanted to do the interview… someday.
Then the coincidences began. First, we had a slot open up in just a week, due to miscommunications when an author switched publicists. We called Steve to see if one of his authors was available. Larry Baker was the first to respond. I picked up the book. As usual I started with the blurbs on the back cover, where I learned that A Good Man was, in part, an update of several Flannery O’Connor characters from “The River,” one of the stories in O’Connor’s seminal collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Which I had just bought, and just read, for the first time. I had just discovered Flannery O’Connor, and now here were some of her characters seeking me out.
I started to read. At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It was a novel, with photographs, interspersedwith excerpts from newspaper columns and blog posts, with a few poems feeding the story line. The chronology jumped around a bit, but not too much. It tackled big themes - politics, religion, 9/11, salvation – in the venue of a small town radio station. Soon the main character, Harry Ducharme, finds himself interviewing writers on his talk show. Coincidence number three.
But what really sold me onthis book was the interview I did on Writers’ Voices the same day I started reading it, with Hugh Ferrer, associate director of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. This interview was based on a lecture I had heard Ferrer give on the Big Silent Dialogue – and the many ways that writers use and even hopefully steal material from those who came before them. I realized very quickly that Larry Baker was a living example of many of the techniques that Ferrer had divulged to our listeners. Like Baker says in his Notes to Readers, ” This is a work of fiction that sometimes relies on the words of writers other than me. That is an important point of the story. Read the book; you’ll understand.”
And I did.
