I kept a journal from a time I graduated from college, and just wrote and wrote about my life experiences. I don't really write in my journal much any more, and mostly I just blog a lot (into the void) or write on Reddit or write emails. There's a reddit that gives writer prompts, if you'd like to riff off another person's idea. I've also written like a writer. The best example of copying a writer, I thought, was A Million Tiny Pieces, which copied Hemingway in places. The memoir was discredited, and is now labeled as fiction but it was still interesting. I wrote a crappy paper once that copied Beckett's novel writing, that the professor didn't like and I had to write a paper over. There's a million books on writing. I really like writing autobiography but I haven't mustered the follow through to complete an autobiography. I had a friend who took a class with David Huddle, who put checks next to stories in the autobiography that he thought should be developed into a story. Reading Shakespeare, there's so little of him in it, I've come to admire writing that isn't autobiography, and can enter into everyone's experience. What I like about Shakespeare is that I never really feel like I know anything, there's a kind of dialectic. He was building on other's plots, rewriting things to suit his style. So maybe all the plots are taken up, you just have to riff on the ones you like. Vonnegut has a cool video on YouTube where he charts whether things are getting better or worse in the novel. I took a writing class with Jeffery Reynard Allen at Queens College. He wrote The Rails Under My Back, which was compared to Falkner and Joyce in the Times, but I've never heard anyone mention him outside of that. It was cool to give other people feedback on their writing and I remember really liking this Muslim woman's experience, how wearing the head stuff led to people bothering her. I guess listening to people in therapy, I've lost my interest in voyeurism, and feel like I've heard a lot of stories. I'm full of stories. In the class they talked about showing and not telling, and I like the opposite which I find in Philip Roth. He tells, but somehow there is also showing. The novel Asymmetry was by a woman who had an affair with Roth, and was good not because of the gossip but the rest of it.
Spoiler alert: My approach to the novel I wrote was that I wanted to create a kind of pure land on Mars. Reading pure land sutras were a real trip. The idea of a huge tongue exploring the pure land was kind of weird. I wanted to create a realistic pure land. I thought of a guy who won the state quarter mile sophomore year. I also thought about how when I was meditating next to a friend who was working hard in meditation, I had a deeper meditation. So I imagined an alien who supported the people on Mars. I've studied Mars quite a lot and supposedly we're not going to Mars for many reasons and it's pretty unrealistic to have a colony there, so I just skipped over that, and just tried to put as much science as I could put into it. I also wanted to make it as multicultural as I could make it. And it turned out I wanted to share my knowledge of the african american community, so maybe I shouldn't write from that perspective, but I did. I don't think I really pulled it off, but my next novel is continuing the story, called Viviparous Mars, about the sex all the teens on Mars have--though it's not erotica--not sure what it's about yet, perhaps confronting renunciation. What you tell and what you hide is a huge choice. The linear narrative is quite interesting. I don't really like Bandersnatch and the novels I've read that you choose lines and explore them. I have read a few novels where you choose things. I'm also reading Auster's novel 4, 3, 2, 1 where he explores different versions of the same story. Well, I read the first chapter, and then returned it, but I just checked it out again and might keep reading it.
I've filled notebooks and notebooks of writing and read so much that at this point, as flawed as a human as I am, I'm as ready as I'm ever going to be. I saw Jennifer Egan in a video where a woman has authors cook with her, and she talks a little about her process. She just writes what she thinks is interesting. I liked her A Visit from the Goon Squad.
My final idea is that as hokey as it is, I love Anne of Green Gables, and while I've written a lot of dark, Naked Lunch type stuff, that I really appreciate the positive. I don't know if you like Jack Kerouac, but I was into his stuff for a while because stream of consciousness is so easy. I liked just opening up the spigot and writing. I sometimes do free writes, where I just write whatever comes into my mind and not worry about it. I always hear your mother saying that Laurie Colwin's writing was "self indulgent". I think it's pretty hard to mask that, but I keep that in mind.
Just like a therapist listening on many levels, I try to write on various levels. There's the beauty of a sentence, a character, a plot and a form. Ah, Aspects of The Novel, I read that Forster thought there was a choice between plot or character development. I like character development. I try to analyse why I liked Battlestar Galactica so much, or the kitsch I like, like Stormship Troopers (my guilty pleasure). I loved Smokey and the Bandit, and Animal House growing up. What is it about those narratives that wang me? What did I really love the movie Razor's Edge, but I hated the novel. Certain questions that come up from consumption of the narratives, lead to other questions and pretty soon you're trying to write something.
I'll forgive you if you didn't make it to the end of this email and applaud your indulgence if you did. I think it helped me to write this. I think you need to think of an audience, but you also have to please yourself. Bertrand Russell said that reading his own writing was like being dragged back to his own vomit. The first draft is the most fun, in my opinion, but it's the drafting and crafting that I think is the real process. Editing saved The Sun Also Rises, and Hemingway was really shitty to not credit Fitzgerald for saving it by editing it. He was a real fuck in many ways, but also interesting and had an interesting style at times. I read The Sun Also Rises every year, but after reading almost everything he wrote, I can't really read much of it again, somehow The Sun Also Rises is something I like to reread. I also like Franny and Zooey and Slaughterhouse 5 and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. I'm so thick I need to reread things. I guess it's OK to not know everything and still write. I also love Raymond Carver. Supposedly his editor made him, but I really like his stories. I'm not as into short stories, but for a while that was all I read.
Another thing has been to eject the fantasy of being a writer. You have to like the process and not want fame or money. That will come if it comes. I have struggled with the meaninglessness of life, and writing has helped me to cope with that. The urge to create a meaningful life is what pushes me.
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