Topic: 
       Stegner on Writing (1 of 9), Read 25 times 
  Conf: 
       READING LIST BOOKS 
 From: 
       Dale Short (dshort5005@aol.com) 
  Date: 
       Thursday, July 27, 2000 08:59 AM 


As the great discussion of SPECTATOR BIRD begins to wind down,
I feel moved to post a few samples of Stegner's philosophy of
writing, as found in his neat little (72 pages, large print) book ON
THE TEACHING OF CREATIVE WRITING...

At Stanford we dealt with hundreds of applicants for fellowships.
Candidates wrote a letter saying what they hoped to do, and
sent along a sample of what they had done. I remember one
year when I picked up two application letters together.

One was full of pretension, metaphysical conceits, strained
metaphors, flowers of rhetoric. It was Faulkner crossed with
Tristan Tzara or Monty Python--so turgid that one strained for its
meaning--and it was four pages long.

The other one was four lines long. It said only that what spoke to
this candidate, in our program, was its willingness to give every
talent a chance to be itself; she hoped to write stories and hoped
to write them well. 

The second candidate's name was Tillie Olsen, and she did write
stories, and write them well. We gave her a fellowship, and did
not give one to the other applicant, because what spoke to us
from her letter was directness and honesty, and what spoke to
us from his was pretension and self-consciousness. He wanted,
terribly, to be "literary." She wanted to write stories.

Not all prediction is as easy as that, of course, and all such
decisions are harrowing to make, because they mean so much,
so personally, to the people you make them about. 

Ultimately, what one looks for is sensibility--which need not be as
effete as it sounds--and sensibility is essentially senses. One
looks for evidence that eyes and ears are acute and active, and
that there is some capacity to find words for conveying what the
senses perceive and what sense perceptions do to the mind that
perceives them.

What one looks for in language is not mechanical perfection of
syntax. What one looks for is accuracy, rightness, vividness. And
beyond that, of course, some notion, however rudimentary, of
the seriousness of good writing, some sense that literature
should enhance life...

          
>>Dale in Ala.

 
 

 Topic: 
       Stegner on Writing (2 of 9), Read 21 times 
  Conf: 
       READING LIST BOOKS 
 From: 
       Dale Short (dshort5005@aol.com) 
  Date: 
       Thursday, July 27, 2000 09:09 AM 


And one more quote, for now...

If you have to urge a writing student to "gain experience with
life," he is probably never going to be a writer. Henry James has
some useful advice in this regard. He urges young writers to be
people "upon whom nothing is lost." But in another essay, one on
Maupassant, he is dubious about Flaubert's celebrated instruction
to observe the cart horse until you can render him distinct from
every other cart horse on earth.

Note-taking, James suggests (and he was himself a great
note-taker, so that his advice may be ambiguous) is hardly the
best way. You don't go out and "commit experience" for the sake
of writing about it later; and if you have to make notes on how a
thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you.

The people who are really going to be writers don't need urging
to pay attention to their lives and experience. Experience strikes
them. Even James, whom one critic describes as having
proceeded through his life from inexperience to inexperience, was
never in any doubt when one of his inexperiences was
memorable. He was one of those upon whom nothing, even an
inexperience, was lost.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Willa Cather said that a novel is what happens in this room,
today. I think it is. No urging is necessary. The ones who are
going to do something will know what struck them. 

          
>>Dale in Ala.

 
 

 Topic: 
       Stegner on Writing (3 of 9), Read 19 times 
  Conf: 
       READING LIST BOOKS 
 From: 
       Barbara Moors (bar647@aol.com) 
  Date: 
       Thursday, July 27, 2000 09:36 AM 


This is wonderful stuff, Dale. I prevailed upon my 18 year old to
come up and read it. He's going off to college this Fall and said
that he was afraid that he would be one of the first types. I'm
just glad that he would be concerned about it.

Have you ever read any Tillie Olsen? I recognize that name I
think, but that's all. 

Barb 

 
 

 Topic: 
       Stegner on Writing (4 of 9), Read 21 times 
  Conf: 
       READING LIST BOOKS 
 From: 
       Dale Short (dshort5005@aol.com) 
  Date: 
       Thursday, July 27, 2000 09:43 AM 


Barb: I've read a few of Olsen's stories over the years. She's won
a ton of awards and some of her stories have been anthologized
more than 100 times in various languages.

Probably her best-known are "I Stand Here Ironing" and "Tell Me a
Riddle." The stories in general are long (one collection contains
just four), lyrical, and at times emotionally intense. One critic has
said she's a cross between Balzac and Emily Dickinson, if you can
imagine that. {G}

The Amazon site says she's also published a nonfiction book on
the relationship between mothers and daughters, which sounds
intriguing.

          
>>Dale in Ala.

 
 

 Topic: 
       Stegner on Writing (5 of 9), Read 21 times 
  Conf: 
       READING LIST BOOKS 
 From: 
       Dale Short (dshort5005@aol.com) 
  Date: 
       Thursday, July 27, 2000 09:55 AM 


Here's one more, Stegner on the art and joy of reading...

We learn any art, not from nature, but from the tradition, from
those who have practiced it before. Hemingway said you can
steal from anybody you're better than. But you can steal--in the
sense of being influenced by, and even improving upon--from
those who are better than you, too. People do it all the time.

You can hear Joyce in Dos Passos' U.S.A., and Dos Passos' U.S.A.
in Mailer's THE NAKED AND THE DEAD. Writers teach other writers
how to see and hear.

The possibility that illumination will come to your mind straight
from personal experience is about as likely as that a boy will
show slick basketball moves without having watched or played
with older boys in some playground.

Furthermore, what influences you will change with time. You
begin, after all, with what your taste and intelligence and
experience will permit you to begin with. 

Though it is always helpful to the young to be steered and guided
toward what may catch their interest, I would be inclined, also,
to throw open the library and let them find many things for
themselves. The delight of discovery is a major pleasure of
reading; and discovery is one of the best ways to light a fire in a
creative mind.

In fact, it's remarkable how wide and varied is the reading of
most of the writers I know. They read for curiosity, for the
purpose of keeping an eye on the competition, for the pleasure of
discovery in their own field. But they also read archaeology,
biography, history, physics, geography, the revelations out of
biochemistry labs. Anything that is intelligible to an intelligent
layman is a way to the understanding of the world they live in
and write about.

The most casual acts of their characters may touch areas
outside their own immediate experience, and states of mind
other than their own. So they read, not committing reading for
the sake of the information, but picking up all sorts of information
in the course of reading that is done with only curiosity and
interest as its motivation.

          
>>Dale in Ala.

 
 

 Topic: 
       Stegner on Writing (6 of 9), Read 18 times 
  Conf: 
       READING LIST BOOKS 
 From: 
       Steve Warbasse (wk4@uswest.net) 
  Date: 
       Thursday, July 27, 2000 10:32 AM 


Writers teach other writers how to see and hear.

George Saunders says exactly the same thing in the transcript of
that interview that you sent along, Dale. (Thank you.) Here is his
take on the very same subject:

Interrogator:
How did this experiences inform your work?
Saunders:
I always wanted to write but had never read anything
contemporary. When I was in Asia there were all these great
things to write about during the oil boom, but I didn't have the
vocabulary. I found myself drifting and not knowing how to put
the stuff that was happening into the work because I had never
seen it done before. But then I read that story "Hot Ice" by
Stuart Dybek and that was basically my neighborhood where I
grew up. To see that in prose. . .I couldn't pretend that only
Hemingway mattered after that. Dybek was a big breakthrough
because I could for the first time see what you had to do to
reality to make it literature, because I knew the neighborhood
and I knew the people and I could see what he'd done to it.

Steve

 
 

 Topic: 
       Stegner on Writing (7 of 9), Read 20 times 
  Conf: 
       READING LIST BOOKS 
 From: 
       Dale Short (dshort5005@aol.com) 
  Date: 
       Thursday, July 27, 2000 10:45 AM 


Steve: Isn't that a great line from Saunders?

Dybek was a big breakthrough because I could for the first time
see what you had to do to reality to make it literature, because I
knew the neighborhood and I knew the people and I could see
what he'd done to it.

The experience that did that for me was reading Flannery
O'Connor's COLLECTED STORIES for the first time. The book was a
going-away gift when I was drafted, and I read the whole thing
from start to finish while undergoing the cruelty and idiocy that is
basic training, as well as the worst homesickness of my life.
Seeing what Flannery had done with "my people" was one of the
things that pulled me through.

          
>>Dale in Ala.

 
 

 Topic: 
       Stegner on Writing (8 of 9), Read 18 times 
  Conf: 
       READING LIST BOOKS 
 From: 
       Pres Lancaster (plancast@slip.net) 
  Date: 
       Thursday, July 27, 2000 12:11 PM 


By sheer coincidence, I am reading a book called "Parthian Words"
by the novelist Storm Jameson - literary criticism and very good.

But it turns out to have a blurb by Wallace Stegner on the back.
Boy! Wouldn't you like to have a blurb like this on the back of
your book?

"There are few recent (1979) books that say anything sensible
about the novel, that understand it's function and respect its
durability, that avoid treating it either as a corpse or as an
abstract design. Parthian Words is one of the few. I like Miss
Jameson's stubborn Yorkshire habit of holding every new book up
against the best; that's a harsh grindstone but salutary. . .
.Reading this book along with her Journey from the North (surely
one of the great autobiographies of our time), I can't think of any
other writer who could have written these two books
simultaneously. There isn't a nonsensical or pretentious word in
either of them, and there is in both an exhilarating clarity of
mind."

Wallace Stegner

That last sentence blows my mind.

pres

 
 

 Topic: 
       Stegner on Writing (9 of 9), Read 19 times 
  Conf: 
       READING LIST BOOKS 
 From: 
       Dale Short (dshort5005@aol.com) 
  Date: 
       Thursday, July 27, 2000 12:28 PM 


Pres: Now, that's one hell of a blurb.

I'm as envious of it as I am of the one that appeared on Gabriel
Garcia-Marquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, from John
Leonard of the N.Y. Times:

You emerge from this wonderful novel as from a dream, the
mind on fire...

I've got to find some Jameson. 

          
>>Dale in Ala.