Reading About Writers (When You Should Be Writing)

I love to read what authors have to say about themselves and their craft. Lately I have been really addicted to a semi-regular feature in the Shelf Awareness newsletter called Book Brahmin. Today this newsletter has introduced me to Mary Guterson and if her books are anything like her interviews, I may have a new favorite author whose books I can devour in what little spare time I can steal away from everything else I ought to be doing.

After all, how can you not love a woman whose response to “what book do you wish you had written” is “my next one, duh.”? Or who when asked for a favorite line from a book, clearly picks a book at random and still comes up with the line “If the underachiever were a mixed drink, he would be a dry martini, one part obscurity (vermouth), three parts unhappiness (gin).”  from Underachiever’s Diary by Benjamin Anastas?

Do yourself a favor, go fall in love with Mary Guterson, too.

The Hard Part

Thomas Disch expresses very eloquently what I’ve been trying for years to put my finger on about the hardest part of writing (or at least the part that takes the longest):

“I think it took me a while to figure out what the book was about, emotionally. Also the trick of any book is getting the tone.”

I often know what happens in every scene through a whole book, but am hard pressed to put pen to paper until I discover that magical tone that makes it all come together on the page and in my mind.

Which suggests to me that actually the hardest part about writing is the actual writing. I’m sure to find that elusive tone faster with enumerable miscues of the pen than misfires of the synapses. Leonard Wolf was right when he said (as quoted in Naomi Wolf’s The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom From My Father on How to Live, Love, and See) to write anything, just put down the words. Writing is hard, but it is impossible to edit a blank page.

Half an Idea

Here’s a quote from an interview with author Darin Strauss that I was reading in Publisher’s Weekly today.

“But I always liked that quote from Saul Bellow: half an idea is better than a whole idea. You can just tell your story and be passionate about it and not try to bang people over the head with the message.”

I completely agree. I think that messages in fiction writing should be treated the way that Churchill treated vermouth in his martinis – he’d “look at it from across the room”.

After all, we writers don’t get to decide what our stories are about. Only the readers get to do that.