writing

Christopher Hitchens on Charles Dickens

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Published today is Christopher Hitchens’s last piece for Vanity Fair, in which he writes about Charles Dickens (whose 200th would-be birthday will be on February 7, 2012) and the celebration of childhood.

I was surprised to learn from this piece that perhaps Fyodor Dostoyevsky met Charles Dickens:

And then, in late 2002, The Dickensiancarried a little bombshell of a tale: it seemed that in 1862, during Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s visit to London, he had met Dickens. And not only met him but elicited from him the exact admission that we would all have wanted the great man to make. Here is how it goes in En­glish, as summarized by Dostoyevsky in an 1878 letter to a certain Stepan Dimitriyevich Yanovsky. According to this, the two men met at the offices of Dickens’s own personal magazine, All the Year Round.

And here is Hitchens’ take on the supposed encounter:

So it was sweet while it lasted, the rumor of a meeting between two great literary titans: an encounter that one of them didn’t even find interesting enough to put in a letter. It could have happened, but I doubt it. That’s the wonderful thing about the celebration of Charles Dickens: he truly is ranked among our immortals, and it truly doesn’t matter if the legend should sprout and then drop a Dostoyevsky or two.

Hitchens wished to empart one of Dickens’ core beliefs:

It is all there to emphasize the one central and polar and critical point that Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes inA Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.

There is also another lesson that we can learn from Dickens, writes Hitchens: atoning for ones mistakes. But you’ll have to read the piece to find out what he says about that.

Write More in 2012

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David Tate has as good a resolution as any for 2012: to write more. He explains:

In writing you create something from nothing.  Most of us don’t think that we can draw or sing or dance or freestyle rap but any literate person can write.  You don’t have to be fancy; you can write a story about anything to please yourself and create a thing. Creating changes you in many positive ways and writing is the most accessible of those ways.  One of my takeaways this year was how often I came up with something new while writing.

Writing helps you learn to focus

Writing is a very intensive focus-based activity.  You can switch over to a web browser while writing but the structure of words and sentences means you probably won’t do so in the middle of typing out the word “encyclopedia”.  In this way writing is a good way to bootstrap your focus muscles – letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, book by book, obscenity by obscenity.

One of the points David makes is that what you write need necessarily be published (online or otherwise). In David’s words, writing for oneself “is a language of communication in which the sender is the present me and the receiver is future me.” Beautiful.

Combine David’s advice to write more with my advice of reading more in 2012, and you’ll be on your way to a more fulfilling year.

Who Was the First Novelist to Use a Word Processor?

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The literary history of the typewriter has its well-established milestones, with Mark Twain producing the first typewritten manuscript with Life on the Mississippi. But what about the first novel produced with a word processor? From an interesting New York Times piece, we learn about Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, who is on a mission to answer this question:

Uncovering a clean answer to the question “Who was the first novelist to use a word processor?” is a trickier business, though Mr. Kirschenbaum has promising leads. Through his agent he recently heard that the science-fiction writer Frank Herbert, the author of “Dune,” who died in 1986, may have submitted work to his publisher in the late 1970s on 8-inch floppy disks.

From his website, Kirschenbaum notes about his project:

The project I will be working on is entitled “Track Changes: Authorship, Archives, and Literary Culture After Word Processing.” Unlike my first book, Mechanisms (2008), where I was primarily interested in experimental instances of electronic literature, here I will be looking at the impact of digital media throughout all sectors of contemporary literary composition, publishing, reception, and archival preservation. I intend to argue that the full parameters of computers as what electronic publishing pioneer Ted Nelson three decades ago called “literary machines” have not yet been fully delineated, and that as a consequence we conceive of print and the digital as rival or successive forms rather than as elements of a process wherein relations between the two media (at the level of both individual and collective practice) are considerably more dynamic and contingent.

On a related note, it seems that Stephen King was one of the leaders in using a word processor to publish his stories/novels. Mr. King’s first computer — a behemoth with a beige molded casing, built-in monochrome screen, and an $11,500 price tag — has enjoyed a certain cultish afterlife. The name of Stephen King’s his first computer? Stephen King’s Wang. And Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is trying to buy it.

Stephen King on Successful Novels

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Stephen King was blown away by The Lord of the Flies when he first read it as a child. In this interview in The Telegraph, he goes on to explain how he found the novel and why it appeals to him. But the biggest takeaway are his thoughts on what makes a successful novel (emphasis mine):

To me, Lord of the Flies has always represented what novels are for; what makes them indispensable. Should we expect to be entertained when we read a story? Of course. An act of the imagination that doesn’t entertain is a poor act indeed. But there should be more. A successful novel should erase the boundary line between writer and reader, so they can unite. When that happens, the novel becomes a part of life – the main course, not the dessert. A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog. In the best novels, the writer’s imagination becomes the reader’s reality. It glows, incandescent and furious. I’ve been espousing these ideas for most of my life as a writer, and not without being criticised for them. If the novel is strictly about emotion and imagination, the most potent of these criticisms go, then analysis is swept away and discussion of the book becomes irrelevant.

This is why I read fiction.

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Hat tip: @matthiasrascher

Roberto Bolaño on Exile and Writing

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I enjoyed reading Roberto Bolaño’s essay Exiles in The New York Review of Books. Exiles was drawn from Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches (1998–2003), and translated by Natasha Wimmer.

Here is how Bolaño describes exile:

To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self… Exile is a question of tastes, personalities, likes, dislikes. For some writers exile means leaving the family home; for others, leaving the childhood town or city; for others, more radically, growing up. There are exiles that last a lifetime and others that last a weekend. Bartleby, who prefers not to, is an absolute exile, an alien on planet Earth. Melville, who was always leaving, didn’t experience—or wasn’t adversely affected by—the chilliness of the word exile. Philip K. Dick knew better than anyone how to recognize the disturbances of exile. William Burroughs was the incarnation of every one of those disturbances.

I also really like the thought process here (especially the part I emphasize below):

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind. Which would lead to the conclusion that the exiled person or the category of exile doesn’t exist, especially in regards to literature. The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

But the passage below is my favourite, about how writers are different from other professions:

No one forces you to write. The writer enters the labyrinth voluntarily—for many reasons, of course: because he doesn’t want to die, because he wants to be loved, etc.—but he isn’t forced into it. In the final instance he’s no more forced than a politician is forced into politics or a lawyer is forced into law school. With the great advantage for the writer that the lawyer or politician, outside his country of origin, tends to flounder like a fish out of water, at least for a while. Whereas a writer outside his native country seems to grow wings. The same thing applies to other situations. What does a politician do in prison? What does a lawyer do in the hospital? Anything but work. What, on the other hand, does a writer do in prison or in the hospital? He works. Sometimes he even works a lot. And that’s not even to mention poets. Of course the claim can be made that in prison the libraries are no good and that in hospitals there are often are no libraries. It can be argued that in most cases exile means the loss of the writer’s books, among other material losses, and in some cases even the loss of his papers, unfinished manuscripts, projects, letters. It doesn’t matter. Better to lose manuscripts than to lose your life. In any case, the point is that the writer works wherever he is, even while he sleeps, which isn’t true of those in other professions.

Would you agree with Roberto Bolaño’s comparison? Note that you may sympathize with Bolaño’s description of exile (first quoted passage), but disagree with his assessment of writers.

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Aside: on my reading list is Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

Dubai on Empty

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Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn’t just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money. In the darkness of the hot night, the motorways roar with Ferraris and Porsches and Lamborghinis; the fat boys are befuddled and stupefied by sports cars they race around on nowhere roads, going nowhere. Taxi drivers of their ambitionless, all-consuming entitlement. Shortchanged by being given everything. Cursed with money.

What is it about Dubai that warrants extensive pieces in magazines? In 2009, I read Johann Hari’s fantastic piece “The Dark Side of Dubai.” In 2010, I read no less than three articles on Dubai. And today, I finished reading A.A. Gill’s piece “Dubai on Empty” in Vanity Fair. I can’t say I’ve learned a lot new information from the piece, but I enjoyed it for the writing. The quote above best summarizes the piece. A few other passages of note below.

Love the descriptions and strong metaphors here:

A derelict skyscraper looks exactly the same as one that’s teeming with commerce. They huddle around the current tallest building in the world—a monument to small-nation penis envy. This pylon erected with the Viagra of credit is now a big, naked exclamation of Dubai’s fiscal embarrassment. It was going to be called Burj Dubai, but as Dubai was unable to make their payments, they were forced to go to their Gulf neighbor, head towel in hand, to get a loan. So now it’s called Burj Khalifa, after Abu Dhabi’s ruler, who coughed up $10 billion to its over-extended neighbor.

Making a strong case that Dubai isn’t a real city (there are no squares, no plazas, no center), and that it’s unwalkable:

My driver gets lost more than once. He’s lived here all his life. He says he always gets lost. The roads keep changing. It’s a confusion of orange traffic cones and interlocking barriers; access roads peter out into long drops to rubble and dust. Nothing actually goes anywhere. The wide lanes loop around endlessly, and then there’s no place to go. No plaza or square, no center. Nowhere to hang out, nowhere to walk. Why would you walk? In this heat?

On the rapid transformation of the city:

No one dreamed of this. Twenty years ago, none of this was here. No Narnia. No seven-star hotels [Editor’s note: The Burj-Al-Arab is the only seven-star hotel in the world]. No tallest prick buildings. Just a home of pastoralist tented families herding goats, racing camels, shooting one another. And a handful of greasy, armed empire mechanics in khaki shorts, drilling for oil. In just one life span, Dubai has gone from sitting on a rug to swiveling on a fake Eames chair 100 stories up. And not a single local has had to lift a finger to make it happen. That’s not quite fair—of course they’ve lifted a finger; to call the waiter, berate the busboy. The money seeped out of the ground and they spent it. Pretty much all of it. You look at this place and you realize not a single thing is indigenous, not one of this culture’s goods and chattels originated here.

A reminder of how the workers in the city are mistreated (I reiterate that reading “The Dark Side of Dubai” will give you a better perspective on this topic):

Yet, the workers, who make up roughly 71 percent of the population, have precious few rights here. They can’t become citizens, though some are the third generation of their family to be born here. They can be deported at any time. They have no redress. Many of the Asian laborers are owed back pay they aren’t likely to get.

Another passage with vivid, bold descriptions. The words jump out of the page:

The track sits in a wasteland surrounded by the exhausted squirm of motorways. I walk around it and look not at the galloping horses and their bright jockeys but back up at the stands. Here in one long panorama is the Dantean vision of modern Dubai—the Arabs huddled in a glass dome, looking like creatures from a Star Trek episode in their sepulchral winding-sheet dishdashas. Next to them are the stands for Westerners, mostly British, loud and drunk, dressed in their tarty party gear. The girls, raucous and provocative, have fat thighs that wobble in tiny frocks. Cantilevered bosoms lurch. The boys, spiky and gelled, glassy-eyed and leering…

My consensus? Read the entire piece for the writing, which I like to highlight from time to time on this blog.

Writing Advice from Stephen King

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Love him or hate him, Stephen King is a prolific writer. But he’s a damn good writer.

I recently posted a link on Twitter to his advice on writing, which he gave in 1986. And even though the advice seems dated, it is still perfectly applicable today. I encourage you to read the entire entry, but I highlight the most important parts below.

Stephen King makes a great point about giving advice (and who listens to it):

I am going to tell you these things again because often people will only listen – really listen – to someone who makes a lot of money doing the thing he’s talking about.

King writes that talent is absolutely essential to write well. But I like how he factors the importance of rejection into the mix:

If you’re not talented, you won’t succeed. And if you’re not succeeding, you should know when to quit. When is that? I don’t know. It’s different for each writer. Not after six rejection slips, certainly, nor after sixty. But after six hundred? Maybe. After six thousand? My friend, after six thousand pinks, it’s time you tried painting or computer programming.

Don’t rely on reference book(s) when doing the first draft:

You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time.

In this day, just substitute the World Almanac and encyclopedias for Wikipedia, and you’ve essentially got the same advice.

This is the kicker for me:

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.

Don’t be afraid to kill things if they’re bad:

When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.

You can read the entire piece in ten minutes (which is Stephen King’s intention). Highly, highly recommended.

Haruki Murakami on Writing

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I recently finished reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (I loved this book; I am still thinking about how to write a review), and it made me think about his style of writing and what things in his life have inspired him.

Many of my questions were answered in this absolutely fascinating interview with Haruki Murakami posted in Paris Review.

The entire interview is worth reading, but I highlight three of the most notable parts below…

Continue reading →

Readings: John Grisham on Writing, Lying Pants, Frog Census

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A few short reads for today:

1) “Dreams of a Desk Job” [New York Times] – from laying asphalt to selling underwear, John Grisham explains how, one day, he just started writing:

Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn’t sure how to start. Over the following weeks I refined my plot outline and fleshed out my characters. One night I wrote “Chapter One” at the top of the first page of a legal pad; the novel, “A Time to Kill,” was finished three years later.

This is a fascinating op-ed. I really like John Grisham’s conclusion:

I had never worked so hard in my life, nor imagined that writing could be such an effort. It was more difficult than laying asphalt, and at times more frustrating than selling underwear. But it paid off. Eventually, I was able to leave the law and quit politics. Writing’s still the most difficult job I’ve ever had — but it’s worth it.

2) “Are Your Pants Lying to You? An Investigation” [Esquire] – a short, but informative piece explaining that not all brands of pants fit the same. I like the author’s frustration:
This isn’t the subjective business of mediums, larges and extra-larges — nor is it the murky business of women’s sizes, what with its black-hole size zero. This is science, damnit. Numbers! Should inches be different than miles per hour? Do highway signs make us feel better by informing us that Chicago is but 45 miles away when it’s really 72? Multiplication tables don’t yield to make us feel better about badness at math; why should pants make us feel better about badness at health? Are we all so many emperors with no clothes?
3) “Is That the Croak of the Pickerel?” [Wall Street Journal] – could a frog census be really important? This finding seems a bit haphazard:
A good frog census is important. Frogs have sensitive skins, so their changing population helps scientists track pollution, disease and other ecological maladies. Other research has indicated a sharp and somewhat mysterious decline in amphibians around the world, which helped spur the American census.