Category Archives: Writing

Happy Birthday Raymond Carver

Had he lived, Raymond Carver would have been 75 today.

Raymond Carver

Considering the brilliance of the the body of work he left behind, I can’t help but be a little sad when I consider what great fictions he might have created in the years since his death in 1988. As a way of marking this day I thought I might share a few of my favourite bits of Carver.

First up audio recordings of three of my favourite Carver stories, The Student’s Wife (read by Richard Ford), Fat (read by Anne Enright) and Chef’s House (read by David Means), can be found on OpenCulture, along with a handy text commentary for the uninitiated.

To get a glimpse at the writer behind the work you could do a lot worse than read his Paris Review interview with Mona Simpson.

You can read one of his most striking and one of his shortest fictions, Popular Mechanics, from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. (You might want to use Readability or some such extension to do away with the nasty pale green background and let the words come to the fore though).

Carver’s essay on the Principles of a Story is essential reading for those writing short fiction, beginner and veteran alike.

And the wonderful, Carver-inspired magazine Carve has 25% off everything in their store today. Worth a look, particularly as you can get a cut price subscription which will include the upcoming 2013 Carver Prize Winners Edition.

Lots to go at. I’m off to read some stories from Elephant, but I’ll leave you with my favourite of Carver’s many insights into the art of writing:

“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.” — A Storyteller’s Shoptalk

Feel free to share your favourite slices of Carver in the comments below.

The Novelist

Just stumbled across a new game called The Novelist:

From The Novelist website:

The Novelist asks one central question: can you achieve your dreams without pushing away the people you love? The game focuses on Dan Kaplan, a novelist struggling to write the most important book of his career while trying to be the best husband and father he can be. The Kaplans have come to a remote coastal home for the summer, unaware that they’re sharing the house with a mysterious ghostly presence: you.

Read the family’s thoughts. Explore their memories. Uncover their desires and intervene in their lives. But stay out of sight; you can’t help the Kaplans if they know there’s a ghost in the house. It’s up to you to decide how Dan’s career and family life will evolve, but choose carefully; there are no easy answers, and every choice has a cost.

Dan’s relationships – to his work, his wife, and his son – react and shift in response to your choices. With a different sequence of events in every playthrough, The Novelist gives life to a unique experience each time you play.

The decisions you make will define the Kaplans’ lives, but they may also tell you something about yourself.

The Novelist screen 1

Obviously both the writer and gamer parts of me are pretty keen to play this, but so is the father part. The key question (whether as a writer you can achieve your dreams without pushing away the people you love?) is one I think any writer with a family struggles with. Time spent on your writing, particularly when writing is not your ‘real’ job, is time spent shutting yourself away from those most important to you. Finding a balance is not easy and a game that explores that idea makes a nice change from the usual identikit shooters out there. Plus, you play a ghost.

I’m also hoping that the screenshot below means you can spend hours just typing ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ into the typewriter:

The Novelist screen 2

You can pre-order the DRM free game for the discount price of $14.99 from the website.

Communication, baby.

Christoph Niemann, the designer behind the Abstract City blog for The New York Times (and a plethora of New Yorker covers) discusses the necessity for anxiety in the creative process in this excellent interview with Gestalten.tv:

While he is obviously talking from a designer’s perspective, the following resonates with anyone engaged in creative work:

‘A certain amount of insecurity is a very helpful trait for and kind of designer because it really gives you the openness to relate to a reader.’

As he rightly points out, the reader/audience is what it’s all about. Without them we’re just shouting into a vacuum, pissing in the wind, tickling our own parts and nothing else:

‘It’s all about the audience, it’s not about fulfilling your own creativity, even though that’s always a part of it, but it’s about the reader understanding what you do.’

And his comment on the importance of communication between client and designer could be equally well applied to the beta reader or editors relationship to the writer:

‘It’s about communication and communication cannot really happen within one person so I think for most jobs you really need somebody to bounce things off, somebody who comes in with a suggestion, someone who has a larger view.’

After watching this I considered my own peculiar slice of anxiety. Looking back at my emails to beta reading friends I discovered one consistent question that I ask, in one form or another, again and again. It seems that my own particular anxiety tightrope, one that I tread with varying degrees of anxiousness with each individual story, is the one that crosses the chasm between giving the reader too much information and giving them too little.

Pretty much all of my emails to my beta reading friends feature some variation on  the following question:

Is there enough (insert informational detail relevant to the individual story here) for the reader to understand what is going on without wondering wtf?

It pleases me no end that the answer to my concerns about communicating to the reader just enough information to allow them to piece together the story without tripping into over-telling, lets call it my communication anxiety, is best dealt with through communication with (beta) readers. Seems fitting.*

On the noticeboard above my desk have pinned a whole host of 3 x 5 index cards, each one with a little bit of writing advice targeting a feature of the craft I feel I still have yet to fully grasp. One of the cards that has been up longest contains a little gem from Ray Robinson:

‘Writing is about what you DON’T say. It isn’t about expression, it’s communication.’

It appears I have been struggling with this particular anxiety, whether consciously or unconsciously, for some time.

What’s your individual flavour of creative anxiety?

*(I’d like to thank all my beta-reading writer friends for the time and keen criticism they’ve all been kind enough to gift me over the last five years. Without you I’d have fallen from that tight-rope far too often).

John Hodgman’s Advice to Writers

Watch this. What he has to say about ‘writing what you know’ is spot on.

‘You have to know what it is that is driving you to do this completely narcissistic and asocial act of creating, of forcing your thoughts and feelings upon a world that does not care. And you have to honestly figure out what it is you care about.’

I’m still working this out myself but I’ve written enough now to realise that the process itself, the act of writing is fundamental to reaching an answer. Compiling my short fiction collection and reading my work back to myself taught me much more about what it is I am trying to do with my writing than sitting around thinking about it could ever have done.

Know what you know. Write what you know. What you write will show you what it is you care about.

(Video found via Flavourwire)

Resolute

I will finish the first draft of my novel.

To this end I will write at least 500 words a day at least 5 days a week.

I will typecast once a month bimonthly.

I will read Moby Dick, 1Q84, London, A Death In The Family, Wolf Hall, and re-read The Brothers Karamazov (the largest books in my to read pile); not necessarily in that order.

I will submit at least one story every two weeks.

I will turn off the Internet when writing. (Freedom ftw!)

I will only buy books I will begin reading in the next seven days.

What will you be doing this year?