Ask the Author: Mary L. Tabor
Answered Questions (18)
Mary L. Tabor
Once again, reading your bio, I am so inspired by you, Mary. Just wanted to thank you for...being you! But okay, a question. How do you overcome those times when you are discouraged about your writing? Or ARE you ever discouraged about your writing or the business of writing?
Thank you, Shelley, for the kind words. In answer to another question, I say below that the blank page is the mystery that reveals what it knows without my full understanding. That blank page is daunting. How to start? —when, as I don’t write formula stories, I’m not sure how I did what I’ve done. So sure, I get discouraged, don’t think the work is good enough. And, probably like any working artist, I struggle with self-criticism and doubt.
As to “the business of writing,” I’ve never thought of writing as a business. If I had, I’d have given up long ago because the financial rewards for original art are so rare. Instead I think of writing as a process of discovery and every now and then am gifted with the luck of revelation. Eudora Welty in _One Writer’s Beginnings_, explains more eloquently: “The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”
Thank you, Shelley, for the kind words. In answer to another question, I say below that the blank page is the mystery that reveals what it knows without my full understanding. That blank page is daunting. How to start? —when, as I don’t write formula stories, I’m not sure how I did what I’ve done. So sure, I get discouraged, don’t think the work is good enough. And, probably like any working artist, I struggle with self-criticism and doubt.
As to “the business of writing,” I’ve never thought of writing as a business. If I had, I’d have given up long ago because the financial rewards for original art are so rare. Instead I think of writing as a process of discovery and every now and then am gifted with the luck of revelation. Eudora Welty in _One Writer’s Beginnings_, explains more eloquently: “The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”
Mary L. Tabor
Two key words in this q: “mystery” and “plot.”
First, I never begin with a plot idea—instead always with a vision of a person in trouble. For example, a woman standing in front of her 327 cookbooks and who can no longer cook.
The blank page is the mystery that reveals what it knows about my life without my full understanding. Here is how I’ve explained this as a teacher of invention, of creating without knowing answers to questions like this one.
In a workshop, I try to talk about the story I have in hand written from the heart of a student in terms of the elements of craft that I know I can teach, discuss objectively. But I try to do this with a continuing understanding that we are dealing with art or what we hope will become art. “Art”—what an elusive word. Let me try to make that word concrete with a quote from Lewis Hyde whose book _The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property_ I recommend to you if you wish to understand how or why one might spend what’s left of one’s life trying to do this work that rarely if ever sees the light of day and has little or no hope to make one rich. Indeed, great art (Van Gogh’s paintings, Joyce’s _Ulysses_) does not lie easy in the world.
Lewis Hyde says:
“I think, a gift—and particularly an inner gift, a talent—is a mystery. We know what giftedness is for having been gifted, or for having known a gifted man or woman. We know that art is a gift for having had the experience of art. We cannot know these things by way of economic, psychological, or aesthetic theories. Where an inner gift comes from, what obligations of reciprocity it brings with it, how and toward whom our gratitude should be discharged, to what degree we must leave a gift alone and to what degree we must discipline it, how we’re to feel its spirit and preserve its vitality—these and all other questions raised by a gift can only be answered by telling 'Just So' stories. As Whitman says, ‘the talkers talking their talk’ cannot explain these things; we learn by ‘faint clues and indirections.’” —Lewis Hyde, _The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property_, p. 280.
First, I never begin with a plot idea—instead always with a vision of a person in trouble. For example, a woman standing in front of her 327 cookbooks and who can no longer cook.
The blank page is the mystery that reveals what it knows about my life without my full understanding. Here is how I’ve explained this as a teacher of invention, of creating without knowing answers to questions like this one.
In a workshop, I try to talk about the story I have in hand written from the heart of a student in terms of the elements of craft that I know I can teach, discuss objectively. But I try to do this with a continuing understanding that we are dealing with art or what we hope will become art. “Art”—what an elusive word. Let me try to make that word concrete with a quote from Lewis Hyde whose book _The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property_ I recommend to you if you wish to understand how or why one might spend what’s left of one’s life trying to do this work that rarely if ever sees the light of day and has little or no hope to make one rich. Indeed, great art (Van Gogh’s paintings, Joyce’s _Ulysses_) does not lie easy in the world.
Lewis Hyde says:
“I think, a gift—and particularly an inner gift, a talent—is a mystery. We know what giftedness is for having been gifted, or for having known a gifted man or woman. We know that art is a gift for having had the experience of art. We cannot know these things by way of economic, psychological, or aesthetic theories. Where an inner gift comes from, what obligations of reciprocity it brings with it, how and toward whom our gratitude should be discharged, to what degree we must leave a gift alone and to what degree we must discipline it, how we’re to feel its spirit and preserve its vitality—these and all other questions raised by a gift can only be answered by telling 'Just So' stories. As Whitman says, ‘the talkers talking their talk’ cannot explain these things; we learn by ‘faint clues and indirections.’” —Lewis Hyde, _The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property_, p. 280.
Mary L. Tabor
I could go on about this one because there are so many, but will spare you (DH Lawrence’s Rupert and Ursula in _Women in Love_ are one):
But my first and no 1 are Romeo and Juliet because of the way they represent the Idealism of Youth versus Propriety
• Juliet takes hold of the play with these three unforgettable lines that I memorized when I read the play the first time at barely 17:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
Act II, scene ii, l. 133-5
We see the beauty of her soul, its fullness, its wisdom and its undying belief in the power of love.
• Death versus sensuality come into play because in the world of propriety, the power and eroticism of this love cannot be tolerated.
• Marriage is the propriety that George Bataille, thinker and writer who perhaps personifies a certain ironic take, for me anyway, talks about “taboo” and how man’s erotic urges “terrify” him. “Marriage is most often thought of having little to do with eroticism." (Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, p. 109)
• Eroticism is the other side of propriety. Bataille says, “in essence, love raises the feeling of one being for one another to such a pitch that the threatened loss of the beloved or the loss of his love is felt no less keenly than the threat of death.” (p. 241)
• In this play I see the only way for this licit love to remain so deeply erotic is for the lovers to die.
Now you might ask, Do I believe in erotic love over a lifetime not cut short? You bet I do.
But my first and no 1 are Romeo and Juliet because of the way they represent the Idealism of Youth versus Propriety
• Juliet takes hold of the play with these three unforgettable lines that I memorized when I read the play the first time at barely 17:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
Act II, scene ii, l. 133-5
We see the beauty of her soul, its fullness, its wisdom and its undying belief in the power of love.
• Death versus sensuality come into play because in the world of propriety, the power and eroticism of this love cannot be tolerated.
• Marriage is the propriety that George Bataille, thinker and writer who perhaps personifies a certain ironic take, for me anyway, talks about “taboo” and how man’s erotic urges “terrify” him. “Marriage is most often thought of having little to do with eroticism." (Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, p. 109)
• Eroticism is the other side of propriety. Bataille says, “in essence, love raises the feeling of one being for one another to such a pitch that the threatened loss of the beloved or the loss of his love is felt no less keenly than the threat of death.” (p. 241)
• In this play I see the only way for this licit love to remain so deeply erotic is for the lovers to die.
Now you might ask, Do I believe in erotic love over a lifetime not cut short? You bet I do.
Mary L. Tabor
My ideal reader loves narrative that dares to discover, that risks it all, heart and soul on the page. That reader understands that art does not follow a formula but instead unfolds in the search for meaning—and that the search matters.
Mary L. Tabor
On fear: I am on alert for the conclusion that I have with age achieved wisdom. As, T.S. Eliot reminds us in “East Coker” of The Four Quartets, and as I quote him, with, not-so-by-the-way, the paid permission, in chapter 18 “Something Old for Something New” of (Re)Making Love:
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
On “can’t help but love”: I fall in love with writers who take a risk on the page and bare the soul by asking the probing questions of existence.
I am hooked the way I’m hooked on Job in the Bible, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear.
I look for writers who search without the knowledge that they know. My reading list here on Goodreads reveals.
Here’s what I mean: Good writing, powerful thought reveal the extraordinary unity in man’s questionings throughout time and the unique ways in which he has attempted to answer the unanswerable.
Job on the ash heap cries out for a rationale for his punishment. Oedipus is caught in a world that he attempts to understand and control, but is doomed inevitably powerless. Lear in his madness cries, “Is man no more than this?”
From my reading, from my teaching, and from the struggles I face in my own writing, I learn, I search, I question, I try to understand—and, you can bet on it, the best of all, to fall in love again.
Love is the answer. Now, what was the question?
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
On “can’t help but love”: I fall in love with writers who take a risk on the page and bare the soul by asking the probing questions of existence.
I am hooked the way I’m hooked on Job in the Bible, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear.
I look for writers who search without the knowledge that they know. My reading list here on Goodreads reveals.
Here’s what I mean: Good writing, powerful thought reveal the extraordinary unity in man’s questionings throughout time and the unique ways in which he has attempted to answer the unanswerable.
Job on the ash heap cries out for a rationale for his punishment. Oedipus is caught in a world that he attempts to understand and control, but is doomed inevitably powerless. Lear in his madness cries, “Is man no more than this?”
From my reading, from my teaching, and from the struggles I face in my own writing, I learn, I search, I question, I try to understand—and, you can bet on it, the best of all, to fall in love again.
Love is the answer. Now, what was the question?
Mary L. Tabor
I often tell my students when they are stuck with a writing problem or are having trouble finding the invention that builds on the craft they’ve learned, “Go to sleep,” “Take a nap.”
I keep a lighted pen and a journal by my bed. When I am in the midst of the invention and don’t know where to go, I read the last passage I’ve written before I go to sleep. Dreams are a great source for me of imagery. They provide solutions. The old saw, “Sleep on it” is right on the money.
If I tell myself before sleeping that I need to dream, I awake after the dream—I may not be wide awake, but I write down the narrative of the dream, not worried about grammar or punctuation or form. In the morning I copy the dream into my journal. Somewhere along the line that dream will serve me. The power of the dream is that dreams are non-verbal; they’re like watching a movie in your sleep.
My most vivid dreams occur right before waking. So, yes, early morning writing is key for me. But I’ve been a day-dreamer since childhood. I can bring on the dream-like state pretty much at will—sometimes to the annoyance of those close to me. “Where are you?” I’m asked. I’ve drifted, for sure, but I know that I’ve been working. I know the story is in the dreaming.
When I’m in the midst of the invention, I like to visit a museum and stand before one painting and look. I used to live near The Phillips Museum in DC. The museum has a Rothko room. I went there often while writing Who by Fire and as a result, Rothko’s paintings are key to the novel.
Seeing is key for writing. I dislike tours through museums because someone else is talking, invading the process of perception and telling me what to see. I like to stand before a single painting until I’m able to write something about it, not move on to the next. Instead, to see, to be attentive, awake.
The paradox here is that sleeping, dreaming, and focusing on art are key to being awake. When I’m writing, I’m awake and in the dream of creation.
I keep a lighted pen and a journal by my bed. When I am in the midst of the invention and don’t know where to go, I read the last passage I’ve written before I go to sleep. Dreams are a great source for me of imagery. They provide solutions. The old saw, “Sleep on it” is right on the money.
If I tell myself before sleeping that I need to dream, I awake after the dream—I may not be wide awake, but I write down the narrative of the dream, not worried about grammar or punctuation or form. In the morning I copy the dream into my journal. Somewhere along the line that dream will serve me. The power of the dream is that dreams are non-verbal; they’re like watching a movie in your sleep.
My most vivid dreams occur right before waking. So, yes, early morning writing is key for me. But I’ve been a day-dreamer since childhood. I can bring on the dream-like state pretty much at will—sometimes to the annoyance of those close to me. “Where are you?” I’m asked. I’ve drifted, for sure, but I know that I’ve been working. I know the story is in the dreaming.
When I’m in the midst of the invention, I like to visit a museum and stand before one painting and look. I used to live near The Phillips Museum in DC. The museum has a Rothko room. I went there often while writing Who by Fire and as a result, Rothko’s paintings are key to the novel.
Seeing is key for writing. I dislike tours through museums because someone else is talking, invading the process of perception and telling me what to see. I like to stand before a single painting until I’m able to write something about it, not move on to the next. Instead, to see, to be attentive, awake.
The paradox here is that sleeping, dreaming, and focusing on art are key to being awake. When I’m writing, I’m awake and in the dream of creation.
Mary L. Tabor
I never write from the place of “knowing”. I write from the place of “not knowing” and am on a journey of discovery. And that applies to both my non-fiction and my fiction.
But the novel Who by Fire did work the memoir couldn’t do. Here’s why.
I put aside this novel that was finished when my husband, said after 22 years of marriage, oh-so-Greta-Garbo, “I need to live alone.”
This event stopped me in my tracks—and eventually I blogged my life while I was living it. And that turned into the memoir (Re)Making Love. That book like Who by Fire is a love story but oddly one that fiction would probably not find credible.
You know the line: Truth is stranger than fiction?
I have a twist on that one. I learned through these two books that the fictional account of my story has greater emotional truth and intellectual significance than the factual one that you can find online and in the 2011 Valentine’s Day issue of Real Simple Magazine where my husband and I tell our story.
Here’s how I learned what the so-called real story didn’t reveal and how I learned the difference between the writing of the memoir and the writing of the novel.
I am the reader for the audible.com version of Who by Fire. While reading it aloud in an NPR recording studio, I discovered my own book as if for the first time.
I realized I’d written this novel to find the man I somehow knew on the unconscious level I was losing.
Good fiction, meaning you know while you’re reading that the writer is risking her life, can go to this place of hard truth in a way that memoir because of its hold on the so-called facts can’t do.
So in the novel, what you get is the close-to the bone story that answers the question, Can memory lead to forgiveness?
I had to write the novel to find out.
But the novel Who by Fire did work the memoir couldn’t do. Here’s why.
I put aside this novel that was finished when my husband, said after 22 years of marriage, oh-so-Greta-Garbo, “I need to live alone.”
This event stopped me in my tracks—and eventually I blogged my life while I was living it. And that turned into the memoir (Re)Making Love. That book like Who by Fire is a love story but oddly one that fiction would probably not find credible.
You know the line: Truth is stranger than fiction?
I have a twist on that one. I learned through these two books that the fictional account of my story has greater emotional truth and intellectual significance than the factual one that you can find online and in the 2011 Valentine’s Day issue of Real Simple Magazine where my husband and I tell our story.
Here’s how I learned what the so-called real story didn’t reveal and how I learned the difference between the writing of the memoir and the writing of the novel.
I am the reader for the audible.com version of Who by Fire. While reading it aloud in an NPR recording studio, I discovered my own book as if for the first time.
I realized I’d written this novel to find the man I somehow knew on the unconscious level I was losing.
Good fiction, meaning you know while you’re reading that the writer is risking her life, can go to this place of hard truth in a way that memoir because of its hold on the so-called facts can’t do.
So in the novel, what you get is the close-to the bone story that answers the question, Can memory lead to forgiveness?
I had to write the novel to find out.
Mary L. Tabor
Are you referring to the fact that I don’t remember what I’ve written? I haven’t talked about the dream-like state here—but that is what it’s like at times when the going is good and why I suspect I don’t recall what I write and can’t quote myself—probably a good thing. Wouldn’t that be kinda awful: repeating one’s work to others as if I were some sort of guru. Ugh.
I do write in the morning and try to write as soon as possible on waking. When the going is good, I’m in a state of “flow”—perhaps like a pianist who has learned all his scales, practiced them, knows how to soften the sound, who understands how the sound board of the piano resonates, who knows how to glide through the piece of music and make it his own.
What I’ve studied from reading all my life since I was a child, what I’ve learned about how good stories get made lies somewhere inside me.
When the story comes, it comes willed by something “other”—and I’m grateful to have been the vessel that brought it to the page. To tell you the new-age-y truth, I’m not even sure I should get the credit for doing it. I’ll take the credit, though, for the editing after it’s cooled off from that heated dreamlike state of invention.
I do write in the morning and try to write as soon as possible on waking. When the going is good, I’m in a state of “flow”—perhaps like a pianist who has learned all his scales, practiced them, knows how to soften the sound, who understands how the sound board of the piano resonates, who knows how to glide through the piece of music and make it his own.
What I’ve studied from reading all my life since I was a child, what I’ve learned about how good stories get made lies somewhere inside me.
When the story comes, it comes willed by something “other”—and I’m grateful to have been the vessel that brought it to the page. To tell you the new-age-y truth, I’m not even sure I should get the credit for doing it. I’ll take the credit, though, for the editing after it’s cooled off from that heated dreamlike state of invention.
Mary L. Tabor
My mother had died when I wrote that line. Her death broke my heart and it stays broken in a place that won’t ever repair. For that reason, she enters my writing in ways I don’t understand, perhaps because she is always with me.
Since I don’t recall what I write, I had to go back to the memoir to find it. What follows the line you quoted is this: "She was a natural beauty: long dark thick hair, fair skin, hazel eyes, delicate hands. She was obscured by the shrubbery of age. We could both see her through the trees of time. There was no noise while the nineteen year-old girl slid behind the trees.”
When I reread the line, it was as if someone else wrote it and what followed, and I was reading it for the first time. I’m not sure that gets to anything significant about the writing process, but it’s how I feel when I think about the line you quoted and discover as if for the first time where it sits in the memoir—as if it was meant to be there, right in that place juxtaposed with my reference to an avalanche that hit in Chamonix, France.
Since I don’t recall what I write, I had to go back to the memoir to find it. What follows the line you quoted is this: "She was a natural beauty: long dark thick hair, fair skin, hazel eyes, delicate hands. She was obscured by the shrubbery of age. We could both see her through the trees of time. There was no noise while the nineteen year-old girl slid behind the trees.”
When I reread the line, it was as if someone else wrote it and what followed, and I was reading it for the first time. I’m not sure that gets to anything significant about the writing process, but it’s how I feel when I think about the line you quoted and discover as if for the first time where it sits in the memoir—as if it was meant to be there, right in that place juxtaposed with my reference to an avalanche that hit in Chamonix, France.
Mary L. Tabor
“Write what you know” in fiction does not mean “write your life.” It’s better explained by acknowledging that artists who write close-to-the-bone rely on the unconscious mind to do the work of invention.
You can tell when you’re reading work that does that. One extraordinary example is the unforgettable and brilliant work of Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude feels so real that nothing can compare with its brilliance. I am quite certain that even as Gabo invented, he wrote from his own unconscious knowing.
As I said in answer to your first question, I am inside all my characters. My novel is a fictional tale—the narrator is a man and well-versed in Physics, in Quantum Mechanics, in finance. He plays the piano. I can barely balance my check book and I don’t play an instrument, but I did years and years of research to create my narrator’s voice and to think the way Robert would. In this way fiction released me to write the story as if I were my husband who had left me and then lost me, meaning totally lost through death.
I am every character in the novel. I tell stories about myself all through this novel, stories I don’t actually know. My daughter, who is in fact a philosopher, accuses me regularly of remaking the past.
Memory by its very nature is flawed. Revisiting memory again and again is the way we search for the narrative of our lives.
William Faulkner says in Light in August, “Memory believes before knowing remembers.”
The difference between memoir and fiction is that memoir is bound to the facts. Fiction, on the other hand, when it is startlingly good often reads like memoir in this sense: We believe it as if it is happening as we read. A gorgeous example is Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story.
In the memoir (Re)Making Love, I recall events. I cannot make up those events to suit the narrative. I cannot lie in the book. But, for example, the psychiatrist in the chapter “Something Old for Something New” would surely not tell the story the way I have—with the notable exception of the phone conversation between us that he recorded, transcribed and then e-mailed to me.
The reason I chose memoir as my form for this tale is that, in this case, the truth is stranger than fiction. I don’t think anyone would believe my story if it were written as fiction. In that sense it’s a romantic comedy that really happened—but was deeply wounding to live through.
You can tell when you’re reading work that does that. One extraordinary example is the unforgettable and brilliant work of Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude feels so real that nothing can compare with its brilliance. I am quite certain that even as Gabo invented, he wrote from his own unconscious knowing.
As I said in answer to your first question, I am inside all my characters. My novel is a fictional tale—the narrator is a man and well-versed in Physics, in Quantum Mechanics, in finance. He plays the piano. I can barely balance my check book and I don’t play an instrument, but I did years and years of research to create my narrator’s voice and to think the way Robert would. In this way fiction released me to write the story as if I were my husband who had left me and then lost me, meaning totally lost through death.
I am every character in the novel. I tell stories about myself all through this novel, stories I don’t actually know. My daughter, who is in fact a philosopher, accuses me regularly of remaking the past.
Memory by its very nature is flawed. Revisiting memory again and again is the way we search for the narrative of our lives.
William Faulkner says in Light in August, “Memory believes before knowing remembers.”
The difference between memoir and fiction is that memoir is bound to the facts. Fiction, on the other hand, when it is startlingly good often reads like memoir in this sense: We believe it as if it is happening as we read. A gorgeous example is Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story.
In the memoir (Re)Making Love, I recall events. I cannot make up those events to suit the narrative. I cannot lie in the book. But, for example, the psychiatrist in the chapter “Something Old for Something New” would surely not tell the story the way I have—with the notable exception of the phone conversation between us that he recorded, transcribed and then e-mailed to me.
The reason I chose memoir as my form for this tale is that, in this case, the truth is stranger than fiction. I don’t think anyone would believe my story if it were written as fiction. In that sense it’s a romantic comedy that really happened—but was deeply wounding to live through.
Mary L. Tabor
The idea of working to “hook” a reader only operates for me in the sense that I know how good writing works. On the macro level: I read great fiction and memoir and poetry. On the micro level: I know, as one example, that the first sentence of a story needs to do a lot of work—or forget it. Your reader is already gone, out the door.
However, and more to your point, the real problem for me is that “hooking” a reader based on my last book, would be an act of “selling direct.” And I think the work would be “idea” driven. Ideas are not conflict as we understand the nature of conflict in fiction or memoir. Good memoir and fiction don’t operate that way.
Let me explain this way: Newspaper op-eds sell direct—the idea drives the essay. Stories that sell direct—and no, I won’t name names here—only wear the clothes of good fiction and good memoir.
A story takes on the feeling of experience for the reader when it’s told inside the character. In my memoir (Re)Making Love, I am indeed the foolish, broken-hearted woman who lived the tale to tell it. My readers know I’m telling them the story from inside me, as the character on a journey. I’m not pulling punches. I’m on the page in a way I could never be in person or in any social situation.
I hope my readers will want to read my novel Who by Fire that tells this real-life story through fiction—and a very different story it is: For one thing, the heroine is dead in sentence one. In whatever sense my novel is autobiographical—and maybe Freud would have a field day with this one—I kill myself off at the get-go. I suppose I felt as if I had died when the man I love left me.
In this fictional account I go to the place of hard emotional truth in a way that my memoir can’t do because of its hold on the facts, on what really happened. I hope readers who get to know me will want to read that book and my fourth book. It’s in the works.
However, and more to your point, the real problem for me is that “hooking” a reader based on my last book, would be an act of “selling direct.” And I think the work would be “idea” driven. Ideas are not conflict as we understand the nature of conflict in fiction or memoir. Good memoir and fiction don’t operate that way.
Let me explain this way: Newspaper op-eds sell direct—the idea drives the essay. Stories that sell direct—and no, I won’t name names here—only wear the clothes of good fiction and good memoir.
A story takes on the feeling of experience for the reader when it’s told inside the character. In my memoir (Re)Making Love, I am indeed the foolish, broken-hearted woman who lived the tale to tell it. My readers know I’m telling them the story from inside me, as the character on a journey. I’m not pulling punches. I’m on the page in a way I could never be in person or in any social situation.
I hope my readers will want to read my novel Who by Fire that tells this real-life story through fiction—and a very different story it is: For one thing, the heroine is dead in sentence one. In whatever sense my novel is autobiographical—and maybe Freud would have a field day with this one—I kill myself off at the get-go. I suppose I felt as if I had died when the man I love left me.
In this fictional account I go to the place of hard emotional truth in a way that my memoir can’t do because of its hold on the facts, on what really happened. I hope readers who get to know me will want to read that book and my fourth book. It’s in the works.
Mary L. Tabor
I define “genre” fiction as any story that follows predetermined “rules” so that the reader isn’t challenged, a story that totally fulfills the reader’s expectations, meaning, no well-earned and character-driven conflict—what great stories achieve.
Such genre fiction includes the romance novel, the vampire story, horror, fantasy. But that doesn’t mean those categories don’t produce great work. In all these so-called genres, sterling examples of great writing that does entertain and does also challenge and as a result is transformative for the reader are on my bookshelves and in my heart. I love these books and many of them have been made into wildly successful films.
Let’s get specific to explain. Two terrific books I once used in an advanced fiction writing class are Stephen King’s Misery and John Fowles’ The Collector. Both books deal with the subject of an abduction.
Both books were made into successful films. And both books are in my view literary and genre, if you will. The reason Misery is so good is best explained by Stephen King himself. Here’s what he says in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, a fabulous read that is more memoir than toolbox, a terrific close-to-the bone story. He is talking about his addiction to drugs and alcohol while writing Misery and his decision to get sober:
“I did think, though— as well as I could in my addled state— and what finally decided me was Annie Wilkes, the psycho nurse in Misery. Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer.”
His struggle to get sober underlies the force of this novel.
John Fowles’ The Collector is arguably more lyrical in its telling, but it’s still a horror story.
The romance novel—not the bodice-buster predictable story—but novels with layered conflict and social commentary include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman might be termed a gothic or Victorian romance novel. It might also be termed meta-fiction with its choice for the reader of two endings and I think it’s brilliant—also a fabulous flick.
I argue that for fantasy and science fiction the bar is raised even higher to create a continuous dream for the reader and human, layered conflict.
Writers who have succeeded include of course Tolkien and the brilliant Margaret Attwood who is a master of the dystopian story. Some folks label her as writing science fiction, but she is better labeled, simply brilliant—and I read her. I have one of her books open right now, Surfacing recommended to me by a poet who is reading (Re)Making Love, that I am posting serially on Wattpad.com. I certainly hope that the memoir is proving to be entertaining while also written close-to-the-bone.
Ray Bradbury was a master of science fiction: Who can forget Farenheit 451? I must admit though that my favorite of all his books is the tale of his childhood Dandelion Wine.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love was on The New York Times bestseller list for more than 200 weeks. Sure, it’s a romance; sure, it’s a memoir; but, also for sure, it’s complex and layered and Liz bleeds on the page, on every page. I read it in one sitting and I love her.
I read widely and voraciously. The one thing I’m seeking is narrative with more than one story in it, layered, complex and written with the heart bleeding on the page. No matter what you call such writing, it rises over its genre category, to, for lack of better term, literary fiction or memoir.
I close this answer with this thought: Reading everything I can get my hands on has saved my life all my life. What could be better than that?
Such genre fiction includes the romance novel, the vampire story, horror, fantasy. But that doesn’t mean those categories don’t produce great work. In all these so-called genres, sterling examples of great writing that does entertain and does also challenge and as a result is transformative for the reader are on my bookshelves and in my heart. I love these books and many of them have been made into wildly successful films.
Let’s get specific to explain. Two terrific books I once used in an advanced fiction writing class are Stephen King’s Misery and John Fowles’ The Collector. Both books deal with the subject of an abduction.
Both books were made into successful films. And both books are in my view literary and genre, if you will. The reason Misery is so good is best explained by Stephen King himself. Here’s what he says in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, a fabulous read that is more memoir than toolbox, a terrific close-to-the bone story. He is talking about his addiction to drugs and alcohol while writing Misery and his decision to get sober:
“I did think, though— as well as I could in my addled state— and what finally decided me was Annie Wilkes, the psycho nurse in Misery. Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer.”
His struggle to get sober underlies the force of this novel.
John Fowles’ The Collector is arguably more lyrical in its telling, but it’s still a horror story.
The romance novel—not the bodice-buster predictable story—but novels with layered conflict and social commentary include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman might be termed a gothic or Victorian romance novel. It might also be termed meta-fiction with its choice for the reader of two endings and I think it’s brilliant—also a fabulous flick.
I argue that for fantasy and science fiction the bar is raised even higher to create a continuous dream for the reader and human, layered conflict.
Writers who have succeeded include of course Tolkien and the brilliant Margaret Attwood who is a master of the dystopian story. Some folks label her as writing science fiction, but she is better labeled, simply brilliant—and I read her. I have one of her books open right now, Surfacing recommended to me by a poet who is reading (Re)Making Love, that I am posting serially on Wattpad.com. I certainly hope that the memoir is proving to be entertaining while also written close-to-the-bone.
Ray Bradbury was a master of science fiction: Who can forget Farenheit 451? I must admit though that my favorite of all his books is the tale of his childhood Dandelion Wine.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love was on The New York Times bestseller list for more than 200 weeks. Sure, it’s a romance; sure, it’s a memoir; but, also for sure, it’s complex and layered and Liz bleeds on the page, on every page. I read it in one sitting and I love her.
I read widely and voraciously. The one thing I’m seeking is narrative with more than one story in it, layered, complex and written with the heart bleeding on the page. No matter what you call such writing, it rises over its genre category, to, for lack of better term, literary fiction or memoir.
I close this answer with this thought: Reading everything I can get my hands on has saved my life all my life. What could be better than that?
Mary L. Tabor
I like to call this ripple you refer to, this giving that moves and gives again and again, the Butterfly Effect. Edward Lorenz, who worked on the physics concept, the chaos theory, gets the credit for this phrase entering our vernacular. I’m no physicist but here’s my way to understand it: The unheard move of that delicate wing whispers on the wind. It ripples and is heard somewhere else. Some say a flick of the wing can start a hurricane.
You may be right that I have just defined literature’s “moral dynamic.” But I find the word “morality” to describe this effect of transformation between writer and reader a bit troubling, a slippery slope I don’t care to be sliding on. Let’s take for example Nabokov’s Lolita, a book that was once banned for its pederasty. And certainly Humbert Humbert is an awful man. So now let’s briefly examine the morality of this novel. The journey we travel on with Nabokov and Humbert Humbert’s sexual relationship with a pubescent young girl is hardly moral. But the book is a search for the “good,” as part and parcel of its horrid journey.
Nabokov closes the novel with a prose elegy to the voices of children at play and to the unheard voice of Lolita from that concord. Nabokov’s flawed hero, for lack of a better term, speaks at the end of the novel of the children’s “vapor of blended voices,” of the “spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or clatter of a toy wagon” and his elegy on the sounds of childhood ends this way:
I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the concord.
The so-called “moral” reading of this book was to ban it. The empathic read of this book is to understand that the love of childhood and its loss, stolen from the young Lolita, are palpable by book’s end.
The transformation between writer and reader is more aptly termed “love.” We love a great book, we love its author even if we never get to meet him or converse with him.
When we know that the author’s search is a search for the “good,” we want to join him on that journey and we fall in love along the way.
Full disclosure here: I wrote an essay about love and the Butterfly Effect for the Internet publication http://www.FactsandArts.com.
But the pointed answer here for me is that the gift exchange is a transformation equivalent to love.
You may be right that I have just defined literature’s “moral dynamic.” But I find the word “morality” to describe this effect of transformation between writer and reader a bit troubling, a slippery slope I don’t care to be sliding on. Let’s take for example Nabokov’s Lolita, a book that was once banned for its pederasty. And certainly Humbert Humbert is an awful man. So now let’s briefly examine the morality of this novel. The journey we travel on with Nabokov and Humbert Humbert’s sexual relationship with a pubescent young girl is hardly moral. But the book is a search for the “good,” as part and parcel of its horrid journey.
Nabokov closes the novel with a prose elegy to the voices of children at play and to the unheard voice of Lolita from that concord. Nabokov’s flawed hero, for lack of a better term, speaks at the end of the novel of the children’s “vapor of blended voices,” of the “spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or clatter of a toy wagon” and his elegy on the sounds of childhood ends this way:
I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the concord.
The so-called “moral” reading of this book was to ban it. The empathic read of this book is to understand that the love of childhood and its loss, stolen from the young Lolita, are palpable by book’s end.
The transformation between writer and reader is more aptly termed “love.” We love a great book, we love its author even if we never get to meet him or converse with him.
When we know that the author’s search is a search for the “good,” we want to join him on that journey and we fall in love along the way.
Full disclosure here: I wrote an essay about love and the Butterfly Effect for the Internet publication http://www.FactsandArts.com.
But the pointed answer here for me is that the gift exchange is a transformation equivalent to love.
Mary L. Tabor
You know the old workshop line, “Show, don’t tell”? Maybe the best way to explain is with a concrete example. When my novel Who by Fire came out from a small press, the publicist for the book Tyson Cornell suggested I go on his Rare Bird Radio Blogtalk station. His idea was that I talk with other writers who were promoting a new book—in other words, unknowns talking to unknowns about themselves. Could we get any more boring, any more self-promotional than that? I don’t think so. And maybe it works. But it didn’t suit my way in the world.
Here’s what I suggested: Why don’t I ask folks I’ve read, find fascinating and see if they’ll come on the show. I’ll do research about them, read everything they’ve written, watch every film they’ve made in the case of the indie directory Henry Jaglom, for example. The show will be about others, not me. Tyson thought this was a great idea and he reached out for starters, through their agents if needed, to poet Dana Gioia, poet and memoir writer Molly Peacock. He also created a Goodreads book club for Who by Fire. Here’s the link: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... All the radio shows can be found there and on my website at this link: http://www.maryltabor.com/2013/10/rad...
Over the course of a year, I did 20 radio interviews about other artists: poets, novelists, essayists and filmmakers, including Gioia, Peacock, the filmmaker Henry Jaglom and many others: all about them, nada about me. The show became quite popular.
Did I sell any books? Probably not—even after the editor and CEO of Shelf Unbound: What to read next in independent publishing, Margaret Brown found my book at Book Expo in Manhattan and featured it in her magazine with an interview she did with me. I later interviewed her on the show, too—probably the only person I interviewed who had actually read my novel.
So, you might ask, what was the point? And that brings me full circle to your question about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, to why I read voraciously, to why I write: The folks I interviewed have given me the gift of my own transformation through their work. When I write, I experience this as well—even if no one is reading.
Do I hope some day that the book club and the radio show would be about my novel Who by Fire or my other work, the memoir (Re)Making Love, for example that I’m posting for free on Wattpad.com? Sure I do.
Here’s what I suggested: Why don’t I ask folks I’ve read, find fascinating and see if they’ll come on the show. I’ll do research about them, read everything they’ve written, watch every film they’ve made in the case of the indie directory Henry Jaglom, for example. The show will be about others, not me. Tyson thought this was a great idea and he reached out for starters, through their agents if needed, to poet Dana Gioia, poet and memoir writer Molly Peacock. He also created a Goodreads book club for Who by Fire. Here’s the link: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... All the radio shows can be found there and on my website at this link: http://www.maryltabor.com/2013/10/rad...
Over the course of a year, I did 20 radio interviews about other artists: poets, novelists, essayists and filmmakers, including Gioia, Peacock, the filmmaker Henry Jaglom and many others: all about them, nada about me. The show became quite popular.
Did I sell any books? Probably not—even after the editor and CEO of Shelf Unbound: What to read next in independent publishing, Margaret Brown found my book at Book Expo in Manhattan and featured it in her magazine with an interview she did with me. I later interviewed her on the show, too—probably the only person I interviewed who had actually read my novel.
So, you might ask, what was the point? And that brings me full circle to your question about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, to why I read voraciously, to why I write: The folks I interviewed have given me the gift of my own transformation through their work. When I write, I experience this as well—even if no one is reading.
Do I hope some day that the book club and the radio show would be about my novel Who by Fire or my other work, the memoir (Re)Making Love, for example that I’m posting for free on Wattpad.com? Sure I do.
Mary L. Tabor
In teaching workshops at the university and graduate levels, I consider this the “elephant” in the room. There sits that big lug and nobody’s talking about him. So what to do to help? First, I tell my students, those I’m working with now and all those from all my years of teaching, “If there is no risk, there is no writing,” wise words from the French philosopher Edmond Jabès. With a good teacher, the student will find the safety to take a chance. To risk, means a willingness to fail—in the best sense of that word.
The worst outcome of the creative writing workshop is the “competent short story”—the one that follows all those so-called rules, but doesn’t cut to the jugular, no heart bleeds on the page. The writer has to find his voice by selling his heart and no analytical work will achieve this.
Analytical work is the work of studying accomplished fiction, the study of craft—and all good writers do this work. They read. They read everything they can get their hands on.
But invention comes only when the writer is willing to risk. When you find that on the page, you know it. You see it. You can’t help but want to say so if you are already reading and studying literature.
And if you’re really lucky, you’ll find a mentor/teacher who will tell you when you “hit” it but who won’t throw the invention out with the bath water. When I see that glimmer of invention in work, I want more than anything to encourage, to say so—to say, I see it, go for it!
The worst outcome of the creative writing workshop is the “competent short story”—the one that follows all those so-called rules, but doesn’t cut to the jugular, no heart bleeds on the page. The writer has to find his voice by selling his heart and no analytical work will achieve this.
Analytical work is the work of studying accomplished fiction, the study of craft—and all good writers do this work. They read. They read everything they can get their hands on.
But invention comes only when the writer is willing to risk. When you find that on the page, you know it. You see it. You can’t help but want to say so if you are already reading and studying literature.
And if you’re really lucky, you’ll find a mentor/teacher who will tell you when you “hit” it but who won’t throw the invention out with the bath water. When I see that glimmer of invention in work, I want more than anything to encourage, to say so—to say, I see it, go for it!
Mary L. Tabor
Studying the craft is a primary task when learning, say, in the dreaded “workshop” but that workshop mentality has little to do with the process of invention.
The key for me as a student of the art and for my teaching has been lifting the curtain on the “continuous dream” the writer strives to create. That’s why when I teach—and I still do, pro bono—I insist the emerging writer come to me with a desire to read published fiction, meaning, yes, anointed “great stuff.” We then take apart, working together, to figure out how the writer “did it,” the so-called “craft” that the gifted writer may in fact never have consciously thought that much about.
But the process of invention is crippled by the “toolbox” of craft. Once we learn it, we need in some real sense to “forget” it and what I mean by that is this: The writer must trust what he knows—and I think all great artists have loved and have read challenging work. What the artist learns by reading “great stuff” lies somewhere inside him. He’s got it and he’s gotta trust it.
The plan of action is to move forward “not knowing” and that means without a plan, without an outline, without knowing how the story will end. I trust the “not knowing” because that’s where the invention takes place.
I do move forward sentence by sentence, but I keep moving forward. Once the story takes on a life of its own, I let it go wherever it wants. When I “hit” it, I don’t know how I did it. I praise the genie or muse. I bow down in gratefulness. And I wonder, How will I ever do it again?
The key for me as a student of the art and for my teaching has been lifting the curtain on the “continuous dream” the writer strives to create. That’s why when I teach—and I still do, pro bono—I insist the emerging writer come to me with a desire to read published fiction, meaning, yes, anointed “great stuff.” We then take apart, working together, to figure out how the writer “did it,” the so-called “craft” that the gifted writer may in fact never have consciously thought that much about.
But the process of invention is crippled by the “toolbox” of craft. Once we learn it, we need in some real sense to “forget” it and what I mean by that is this: The writer must trust what he knows—and I think all great artists have loved and have read challenging work. What the artist learns by reading “great stuff” lies somewhere inside him. He’s got it and he’s gotta trust it.
The plan of action is to move forward “not knowing” and that means without a plan, without an outline, without knowing how the story will end. I trust the “not knowing” because that’s where the invention takes place.
I do move forward sentence by sentence, but I keep moving forward. Once the story takes on a life of its own, I let it go wherever it wants. When I “hit” it, I don’t know how I did it. I praise the genie or muse. I bow down in gratefulness. And I wonder, How will I ever do it again?
Mary L. Tabor
The phrase “laying bare” should not be confused with “catharsis.” Let’s reserve that for the therapist’s couch or for our journals.
When I write, I attempt to make something “other.” That seems to me not a solipsistic—or in the vernacular “navel-gazing”—act that rarely, if ever, gifts another.
I can best explain by how I receive the gift from others. Reading great writing, often difficult, challenging writing is transformational for me. I feel gifted for having received from another the unexpected journey that extends and informs my own experience. The act of reading is transformational when that happens. From the canon: Nabokov, Bishop, Auden, Joyce, Woolf are writers who have given me this gift again and again.
When I write, the gift I wish for the reader is to have been along for the journey with me, to feel the experience as it unfolds. If something happens for the reader, something both emotionally and intellectually significant, the gift has moved forward.
Here’s how Hyde explains more eloquently, “… [M]ost artists are converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts. Those of us who do not become artists nonetheless attend to art in a similar spirit. We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude.”
When I write, I attempt to make something “other.” That seems to me not a solipsistic—or in the vernacular “navel-gazing”—act that rarely, if ever, gifts another.
I can best explain by how I receive the gift from others. Reading great writing, often difficult, challenging writing is transformational for me. I feel gifted for having received from another the unexpected journey that extends and informs my own experience. The act of reading is transformational when that happens. From the canon: Nabokov, Bishop, Auden, Joyce, Woolf are writers who have given me this gift again and again.
When I write, the gift I wish for the reader is to have been along for the journey with me, to feel the experience as it unfolds. If something happens for the reader, something both emotionally and intellectually significant, the gift has moved forward.
Here’s how Hyde explains more eloquently, “… [M]ost artists are converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts. Those of us who do not become artists nonetheless attend to art in a similar spirit. We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude.”
Mary L. Tabor
The pro forma answer casts back to the wisdom of Flaubert who famously said, “Emma c’est moi” about Emma Bovary. But what did he mean?
Did Flaubert mean that he committed adultery flagrantly, spent money unrestrainedly? I suspect not.
What I think his famous phrase means is that a writer’s consciousness writes her prose. I am inside all the work.
But my search is not for morality, it is for discovery and a search for “the good”.
That for me means that I go places in my fiction where I am less likely to venture in my memoir (Re)Making Love that is non-fiction.
Here’s an example from my book of short stories, The Woman Who Never Cooked.. A reader, via my website, noted the coolness of the relationship in the fictional marriage inside the short story and how the burglar might be the sexuality missing there.
I saw then how in writing fiction I had indirectly discovered an “emotional truth” that surfaces in the memoir, after my marriage had indeed failed.
You know the old saw, “Truth is stranger than fiction”?
I wonder if fiction is more likely to find that so-called “truth” than non-fiction if the writer is willing to risk heart and soul on the page.
In either case though, I am sure only of this: My personal “writing values” are in search of discovery—through the good, the bad and the foolish.
Did Flaubert mean that he committed adultery flagrantly, spent money unrestrainedly? I suspect not.
What I think his famous phrase means is that a writer’s consciousness writes her prose. I am inside all the work.
But my search is not for morality, it is for discovery and a search for “the good”.
That for me means that I go places in my fiction where I am less likely to venture in my memoir (Re)Making Love that is non-fiction.
Here’s an example from my book of short stories, The Woman Who Never Cooked.. A reader, via my website, noted the coolness of the relationship in the fictional marriage inside the short story and how the burglar might be the sexuality missing there.
I saw then how in writing fiction I had indirectly discovered an “emotional truth” that surfaces in the memoir, after my marriage had indeed failed.
You know the old saw, “Truth is stranger than fiction”?
I wonder if fiction is more likely to find that so-called “truth” than non-fiction if the writer is willing to risk heart and soul on the page.
In either case though, I am sure only of this: My personal “writing values” are in search of discovery—through the good, the bad and the foolish.
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