Comments on: Keep your hand moving

By: TheOtherIvy

TheOtherIvy — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:34:23 +0000

Excellent…those books are new to me. I’ll take a look at them.
Opening to a random page is a good strategy…I’ve been feeling a little stuck lately. I will give that a try.
Thanks, Tigereye.

By: tigereye

tigereye — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:27:32 +0000

I enjoyed On Writing, and I doubt I’ll ever find anything else as helpful as Bird by Bird, but there are a couple more that struck a chord with me: Lawrence Block’s Spider, Spin Me a Web, and Elizabeth Berg’s Escaping Into the Open (although compared to her novels it was a bit disappointing). When I’m stuck, I often open Bird by Bird to a random page and just read from there for a while. It often acts as a kind of mental Drano.

By: TheOtherIvy

TheOtherIvy — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:11:38 +0000

Being part of the community of writers doesn’t necessarily mean being part of the academic community of writers.

I agree that the rise in the perceived need for MFA programs and the degrees that they grant creates the danger of producing more homogenized groups of writers. There are also more and more PhD programs emerging to extend the once “terminal” MFA degrees designed, I believe, to keep the academic machine churning (and earning). Terminal. I love the irony of that label. I have been in these workshops, the land of the infamous “workshop poem.” Homogeneity is a danger.

I wonder if it is the pace of our culture or the expectations. Wallace Stevens comes to mind. Insurance salesman by day, poet by night…and what a poet! Virginia Woolf was able to afford a room of her own but not all writers were people of means.

By: davidrochester

davidrochester — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 17:38:58 +0000

I know what you’re saying, but … it seems to me that many of the great Titans of writing didn’t have instruction, and that we are falling more and more into imitative art. So many folks from MFA programs all sound alike; there’s a lot of conformity in literature these days. Perhaps it’s just that the pace and difficulties of our current culture do not foster self-teaching as artists.

By: TheOtherIvy

TheOtherIvy — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 13:43:11 +0000

Mindful reading is an important means of learning the craft, I agree. I eventually earned a degree in English that included some Victorian literature but I still did more reading, even in that area, outside of school. I lived in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair for one long day after procrastinating until the last weekend before a test. I read Oscar Wilde, the Brontës and Dickens in high school when I was ducking out of boring classes. By the time I got to college, I’d usually already read most of the required texts for classes.

It’s important to see Victorian literature as a reflection of its time, too. The language, the use of passive voice, the interplay of characters are not just literary conventions but craft that emerged out of a particular period for a specific audience.

It is possible to profit from the benefit of other writers’ experience and education in reading books about writing. Like the three blind men and the elephant, the more we share our portions of the truth, the greater our understanding of the greater picture beyond the limitations of our own perspectives.