Richard Seltzer's Blog: Richard Seltzer, page 15
May 1, 2020
When Story Matters More Than Fact
(from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)
In 1944, my Dad was a private in the US Army, stationed in Georgia — a bugle boy waiting to be shipped to the war in Europe.
The day before he was due to leave, he received orders for Officer Candidate School. It turned out that his company was sent to the Battle of the Bulge. He heard that they were all captured, without casualties, and that the train taking them to prison camp was bombed by the Allies, and then there was only one casualty — the bugle boy, the man who replaced him, died.
Some might see that as chance. But to Dad, he owed his life that to other bugle boy. He had an obligation to pay it back, to live a life that mattered.
Dad was given a life and also given a belief that he had a personal destiny.
And at every decision point in his life, in the back of his head was the image of that bugle boy who had taken his place, a humbling sense of responsibility, a debt owed.
I'm reminded of the final scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan, at Arlington National Cemetery, long after World War II. The man who was saved is standing with his children and his grandchildren. Not a word is said. But you get the sense that the man's whole life was predicated on that sacrifice and that debt.
Fifty years after the war, when Dad had retired as a superintendent of schools and a colonel in the Army Reserves, he connected over the Internet with a group of veterans from his old company that got captured in the Battle of the Bulge. He learned that the bugle boy didn't die, and he got in touch with him by email and they shared life experiences.
Then a year later, the officer who took command of that company soon after Dad left for OCS and before the Bulge chanced upon Dad's autobiography on my web site and emailed him a detailed account of what had actually happened. In fact, more than half the men in the company died in the battle.
There was the story that gave Dad a sense of debt and destiny; and there are the facts, which were very different.
The story Dad believed for so long mattered more than the facts, giving shape and meaning to his life -- that was a rare gift and far more important than mere facts.
In 1944, my Dad was a private in the US Army, stationed in Georgia — a bugle boy waiting to be shipped to the war in Europe.
The day before he was due to leave, he received orders for Officer Candidate School. It turned out that his company was sent to the Battle of the Bulge. He heard that they were all captured, without casualties, and that the train taking them to prison camp was bombed by the Allies, and then there was only one casualty — the bugle boy, the man who replaced him, died.
Some might see that as chance. But to Dad, he owed his life that to other bugle boy. He had an obligation to pay it back, to live a life that mattered.
Dad was given a life and also given a belief that he had a personal destiny.
And at every decision point in his life, in the back of his head was the image of that bugle boy who had taken his place, a humbling sense of responsibility, a debt owed.
I'm reminded of the final scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan, at Arlington National Cemetery, long after World War II. The man who was saved is standing with his children and his grandchildren. Not a word is said. But you get the sense that the man's whole life was predicated on that sacrifice and that debt.
Fifty years after the war, when Dad had retired as a superintendent of schools and a colonel in the Army Reserves, he connected over the Internet with a group of veterans from his old company that got captured in the Battle of the Bulge. He learned that the bugle boy didn't die, and he got in touch with him by email and they shared life experiences.
Then a year later, the officer who took command of that company soon after Dad left for OCS and before the Bulge chanced upon Dad's autobiography on my web site and emailed him a detailed account of what had actually happened. In fact, more than half the men in the company died in the battle.
There was the story that gave Dad a sense of debt and destiny; and there are the facts, which were very different.
The story Dad believed for so long mattered more than the facts, giving shape and meaning to his life -- that was a rare gift and far more important than mere facts.
Reading and the Zerg
(from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)
In the Starcraft game series, the Zerg are one of the races struggling for dominance. While there are many Zerg, they act together (more or less) as a single-entity, a single horde or hive. When they capture an opponent, they “assimilate” him or her, acquiring new strength, new powers, new perceptions.
Reading books is a bit like that assimilation.
I've been keeping lists of the books I read (and finish) since 1958, when I was in the seventh grade. In those 62 years, I've read over 3700 books. I'd like to believe that I have grown through the process, that thoughts and emotions of authors whose works I have read have become part of me and enriched me.
This feels like a variation on Auden's line in memory of Yeats, “The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.” Auden meant it ironically. He was writing from the perspective of the poet who on death “became his admirers,” ceased being himself. I'm thinking of that same phenomenon from the perspective of the reader. In that sense, as the words of dead men are modified in my “guts”, they become part of me; they nourish me; they give me strength.
In the Starcraft game series, the Zerg are one of the races struggling for dominance. While there are many Zerg, they act together (more or less) as a single-entity, a single horde or hive. When they capture an opponent, they “assimilate” him or her, acquiring new strength, new powers, new perceptions.
Reading books is a bit like that assimilation.
I've been keeping lists of the books I read (and finish) since 1958, when I was in the seventh grade. In those 62 years, I've read over 3700 books. I'd like to believe that I have grown through the process, that thoughts and emotions of authors whose works I have read have become part of me and enriched me.
This feels like a variation on Auden's line in memory of Yeats, “The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.” Auden meant it ironically. He was writing from the perspective of the poet who on death “became his admirers,” ceased being himself. I'm thinking of that same phenomenon from the perspective of the reader. In that sense, as the words of dead men are modified in my “guts”, they become part of me; they nourish me; they give me strength.
The Western Canon of Literature
from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)
When Harold Bloom in The Western Canon detailed his selection of the best books of all time, he wrote with love for the works themselves and with sorrow that they are no longer getting the attention they deserve. His act of defining the canon was a rearguard action. The battle was lost. He was in full retreat.
That sorrow resonates with me in several ways.
One of the main purposes of my fiction writing has been to try to take part in the dialogue across the centuries that the canon represents. I wanted to be someone inspired by the past and involved in the present, and someone who would be read and who would inspire others in the future.
No such luck. I've always been a spectator on the sidelines, cheering the team on, but having no effect on the present, much less the future.
So now I write and brainstorm and speculate and converse simply for the pleasure of it. I try to sort out what matters to me and why, and what sense it might make, with no expectation that anyone else will care; but because it matters to me, because I'd like to learn to ask better questions, even if I can't find answers.
My amateur status let's me see connections where an expert would see only differences. And when, in my ignorance, pieces seem to fit together in unexpected ways, I get a manic high that feels great. I guess I'm addicted to the process of trying to make sense of life.
Yes, like Harold Bloom, I'm sorry that schools have lost the concept of a literary canon; and I lament the end of the two-and-a-half-millennium cultural dialogue that the canon represents. But on the other hand, I'm encouraged by all the writing and reading that is happening outside of schools, and the growth of a global audience now has easy access to many works that previously were hard-to-find and expensive.
The Internet is having an effect on the world of literature like the fall of Constantinople had in triggering the Renaissance. Works that had been locked away are being spread worldwide, and are being read voraciously by people who have no sense of a previously established canon. They are reading and enjoying and establishing their own sense of what they should value and what they want to share with friends and pass on to future generations.
I tend to be a literary anarchist. I have faith that if books are readily available, people will read them and will tell friends about the ones that matter most to them. I believe that it can be good that there is no institutionalized canon.
When Harold Bloom in The Western Canon detailed his selection of the best books of all time, he wrote with love for the works themselves and with sorrow that they are no longer getting the attention they deserve. His act of defining the canon was a rearguard action. The battle was lost. He was in full retreat.
That sorrow resonates with me in several ways.
One of the main purposes of my fiction writing has been to try to take part in the dialogue across the centuries that the canon represents. I wanted to be someone inspired by the past and involved in the present, and someone who would be read and who would inspire others in the future.
No such luck. I've always been a spectator on the sidelines, cheering the team on, but having no effect on the present, much less the future.
So now I write and brainstorm and speculate and converse simply for the pleasure of it. I try to sort out what matters to me and why, and what sense it might make, with no expectation that anyone else will care; but because it matters to me, because I'd like to learn to ask better questions, even if I can't find answers.
My amateur status let's me see connections where an expert would see only differences. And when, in my ignorance, pieces seem to fit together in unexpected ways, I get a manic high that feels great. I guess I'm addicted to the process of trying to make sense of life.
Yes, like Harold Bloom, I'm sorry that schools have lost the concept of a literary canon; and I lament the end of the two-and-a-half-millennium cultural dialogue that the canon represents. But on the other hand, I'm encouraged by all the writing and reading that is happening outside of schools, and the growth of a global audience now has easy access to many works that previously were hard-to-find and expensive.
The Internet is having an effect on the world of literature like the fall of Constantinople had in triggering the Renaissance. Works that had been locked away are being spread worldwide, and are being read voraciously by people who have no sense of a previously established canon. They are reading and enjoying and establishing their own sense of what they should value and what they want to share with friends and pass on to future generations.
I tend to be a literary anarchist. I have faith that if books are readily available, people will read them and will tell friends about the ones that matter most to them. I believe that it can be good that there is no institutionalized canon.
Today's Youth and Reading
from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)
There's a plus as well as a minus to the reading habits of the young today. Tim, my youngest, has for more than ten years been into “fanfiction”. Those are stories written by ordinary fans based on well-known stories and characters from TV, movies, and videogames. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of fanfics that you can read for free on the Internet. Many are book length. The authors have no intention of ever being paid for this work. They write for the social-sharing high of finding an appreciative audience, no matter how small.
For about half a dozen years, Tim (in junior high and high school) read such stories — the bad as well as the good, for long hours. (He's a fast reader — polishing off a typical Harry Potter book in less than a day). He would email the authors with comments and suggestions for improvements; and for the best fanfics, he would ask permission to post the stories at his own site, and then would work with the authors to make copy-editing improvements.
Meanwhile, with the rise of ebooks, far more books are being written and published than ever before, though many of them get very few readers if any at all. It costs nothing to publish an ebook in the Amazon Kindle store. There are millions of books available there, and I believe that the vast majority of those have probably been written and published in the last five years.
In other words, a lot more people are writing and reading than ever before. Many who read online for several hours every day have never read and never heard of the greatest books that were ever written. But when such people acquire a taste for the classics, they can get immediate access to them at very little cost.
As a publisher of public domain classic ebooks, my best seller list might surprise you — Gibbon's Rome, the 20-volume Babylonian Talmud, the complete works of Mark Twain, each selling for just 99 cents.
I've been amazed at how closely some of the fans of classic books read. I got dozens of complaints that my edition of Gibbon didn't include the Greek spelling of Greek words in the footnotes. And I got a complaint that my edition of Jane Eyre was missing one word in the penultimate chapter. (Spell check can't detect what's missing, nor could any proofreader). Some of my most loyal customers are blind and use technology to convert the text to voice. (One of those is a spelunker, exploring caves on her weekends …)
I see no reason to despair. Quite the contrary.
The cultural climate is chaotic. Schools no longer drill the western canon into students (as Harold Bloom decries in his book of that title). That makes it difficult to build on and to pass on to future generations a rich literary context for allusion and enjoyment and understanding. But thanks to the Internet, I see broad-based enthusiasm for story such as the world has never seen before.
Good things are happening and will happen. The glass is seven-eighths full. Rejoice! Write those novels and poems that have been festering in the back of your mind. Pull the unfinished ones out of dusty drawers and finish them. Don't worry about convincing traditional publishers to publish them. Publish them as ebooks or post them on a website of your own. Or go to Kindle or to PublishDrive and offer them as ebooks. Encourage friends and colleagues to read and spread the word. You won't get rich, but you might find a few good readers. And what more could any writer ever hope for?
There's a plus as well as a minus to the reading habits of the young today. Tim, my youngest, has for more than ten years been into “fanfiction”. Those are stories written by ordinary fans based on well-known stories and characters from TV, movies, and videogames. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of fanfics that you can read for free on the Internet. Many are book length. The authors have no intention of ever being paid for this work. They write for the social-sharing high of finding an appreciative audience, no matter how small.
For about half a dozen years, Tim (in junior high and high school) read such stories — the bad as well as the good, for long hours. (He's a fast reader — polishing off a typical Harry Potter book in less than a day). He would email the authors with comments and suggestions for improvements; and for the best fanfics, he would ask permission to post the stories at his own site, and then would work with the authors to make copy-editing improvements.
Meanwhile, with the rise of ebooks, far more books are being written and published than ever before, though many of them get very few readers if any at all. It costs nothing to publish an ebook in the Amazon Kindle store. There are millions of books available there, and I believe that the vast majority of those have probably been written and published in the last five years.
In other words, a lot more people are writing and reading than ever before. Many who read online for several hours every day have never read and never heard of the greatest books that were ever written. But when such people acquire a taste for the classics, they can get immediate access to them at very little cost.
As a publisher of public domain classic ebooks, my best seller list might surprise you — Gibbon's Rome, the 20-volume Babylonian Talmud, the complete works of Mark Twain, each selling for just 99 cents.
I've been amazed at how closely some of the fans of classic books read. I got dozens of complaints that my edition of Gibbon didn't include the Greek spelling of Greek words in the footnotes. And I got a complaint that my edition of Jane Eyre was missing one word in the penultimate chapter. (Spell check can't detect what's missing, nor could any proofreader). Some of my most loyal customers are blind and use technology to convert the text to voice. (One of those is a spelunker, exploring caves on her weekends …)
I see no reason to despair. Quite the contrary.
The cultural climate is chaotic. Schools no longer drill the western canon into students (as Harold Bloom decries in his book of that title). That makes it difficult to build on and to pass on to future generations a rich literary context for allusion and enjoyment and understanding. But thanks to the Internet, I see broad-based enthusiasm for story such as the world has never seen before.
Good things are happening and will happen. The glass is seven-eighths full. Rejoice! Write those novels and poems that have been festering in the back of your mind. Pull the unfinished ones out of dusty drawers and finish them. Don't worry about convincing traditional publishers to publish them. Publish them as ebooks or post them on a website of your own. Or go to Kindle or to PublishDrive and offer them as ebooks. Encourage friends and colleagues to read and spread the word. You won't get rich, but you might find a few good readers. And what more could any writer ever hope for?
in just-spring and Hemingway
from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)
One of my favorite poems is “In Just-spring…” by e. e. cummings, which ends:
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloon/Man whistles
far
and
wee
High-school textbook footnotes connect “goat-footed” with Pan, a god in Greek mythology. But for so spontaneous and natural a poem, that feels like a stretch.
Having recently seen Woody Allen's movie Midnight in Paris, I read books about Americans in Paris in the 1920s, and books by Ernest Hemingway, and I was surprised to learn that e. e. cummings was in Paris when Hemingway was there; and in A Moveable Feast I stumbled on the following evocation of spring:
“In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying the wet faces of the houses that faced the window. The shops were all shuttered. The goat-herd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot. The goat-herd chose one of the heavy-bagged, black milk-goats and milked her into the pot while his dog pushed the others onto the sidewalk. The goats looked around, turning their necks like sight-seers. The goat-herd took the money from the woman and thanked her and went on up the street piping, and the dog herded the goats on ahead, their horns bobbing. I went back to writing and the woman came up the stairs with the goat milk. She wore her felt-soled cleaning shoes and I only heard her breathing as she stopped on the stairs outside our door and the shutting of her door. She was the only customer for goat milk in our building.”
Both the poem and the Hemingway passage are evocations of spring. And, by chance, both Hemingway and cummings were in Paris at the same time. So rereading the cummings poem with the Hemingway in mind gives the words of the poem new connotations, makes it more tactile and fresh.
I don't know what cummings was thinking when he wrote it. But thinking of the Hemingway passage when reading the poem helps me enjoy it more.
One of my favorite poems is “In Just-spring…” by e. e. cummings, which ends:
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloon/Man whistles
far
and
wee
High-school textbook footnotes connect “goat-footed” with Pan, a god in Greek mythology. But for so spontaneous and natural a poem, that feels like a stretch.
Having recently seen Woody Allen's movie Midnight in Paris, I read books about Americans in Paris in the 1920s, and books by Ernest Hemingway, and I was surprised to learn that e. e. cummings was in Paris when Hemingway was there; and in A Moveable Feast I stumbled on the following evocation of spring:
“In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying the wet faces of the houses that faced the window. The shops were all shuttered. The goat-herd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot. The goat-herd chose one of the heavy-bagged, black milk-goats and milked her into the pot while his dog pushed the others onto the sidewalk. The goats looked around, turning their necks like sight-seers. The goat-herd took the money from the woman and thanked her and went on up the street piping, and the dog herded the goats on ahead, their horns bobbing. I went back to writing and the woman came up the stairs with the goat milk. She wore her felt-soled cleaning shoes and I only heard her breathing as she stopped on the stairs outside our door and the shutting of her door. She was the only customer for goat milk in our building.”
Both the poem and the Hemingway passage are evocations of spring. And, by chance, both Hemingway and cummings were in Paris at the same time. So rereading the cummings poem with the Hemingway in mind gives the words of the poem new connotations, makes it more tactile and fresh.
I don't know what cummings was thinking when he wrote it. But thinking of the Hemingway passage when reading the poem helps me enjoy it more.
Binge reading Shakespeare
from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)
We binge watch. Why not binge read?
When you change the context of writing, you change its meaning.
To binge watch a TV series is to experience a series of episodes as if they were a single work, to enjoy them in a new way.
In the old days, the only choice for watching series was broadcast television. Typically, 22 episodes constituted a season, and the episodes were broadcast one per week, with the time slots for the rest of the year being reruns. It was a stop-start experience, often with cliff-hanger stories to encourage viewers to come back next week or next year.
The advent of video recorders changed that experience. You could save episodes and watch them whenever your wanted or in a bunch. You could rent or buy. You were no longer constrained by the schedule of the network or local station. You could fast-forward past commercials. You could pause. You could rewind and rewatch. You were in control.
Then came cable with video on demand and DVRs, giving you similar control even more conveniently. Programming to record what you wanted when you wanted was far easier.
Now with streaming, you don't have to plan ahead. You can at any moment decide to binge on a series and watch one episode after another, from the first episode of the series through the last one, without commercials. Watching in that mode, with only the interruptions you want, you can get deeply involved in the story and identify with the characters, and see the actors growing up and aging -- like time-laps photography, watching grass grow or a flower bloom, where what normally takes days or months or years unfolds for you fast enough for you to perceive and enjoy the spectacle of change. Or you can choose to watch in stop-start mode, with breaks as long as you want, to suit your personal schedule and lifestyle.
I'm watching the same content I saw before or could have seen before as separate episodes. But seen together, an entire series is a different genre, a different way of telling stories and enjoying them.
My favorite instance of this is Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin, which originally aired on Showtime from 2012 to 2014, twenty-five episodes spread across three seasons. Viewed in its entirety, it has a beginning, middle, and end. While each episode is satisfying in and of itself, the series as a whole is a single work of art, deliberately written to be experienced that way.
Typically, graduate students in literature read in a similar way. In preparing for orals they are responsible for reading the complete works of a set of authors. Rarely do they get the opportunity to focus on one author at a time. But they do often come to think of an author's life's work as a single work. Today, when E-books are readily available and the classics are free, or nearly free, many more people have the opportunity to have such experiences.
I'm getting warmed up to write an historical novel set in the time of Shakespeare. So I decided to binge read his complete works, one play every day or two. That's 38 plays, written over the course of about 19 years. I'm a third of the way through now, and it has been a surprisingly delightful experience, prompting me to want to do the same with other authors, and also prompting me to rethink what I write and why.
I'm reading the Shakespeare plays aloud to get a feel for the rhythm. As I become familiar with the vocabulary and the syntax I don't have to go running to the footnotes all the time. His langugage begins to feel normal rather than alien as I become familiar with stock phrases and images and allusions, as well as the range of reactions of characters experiencing love, jealousy, hate, vengeance, temptation, ambition. What they are willing to do. What they are willing to die for. What they are willing to kill for.
The histories, in particular. make much more sense read together. The complexities of genealogy and royal succession fall into the background as you become familiar with them, freeing you to focus on the characters and the spectacle and the pageant. Imagine watching the player introductions at an all-star baseball game when you know nothing about baseball, or watching the red-carpet arrivals of celebrities at the Oscars when you've never heard of the celebrities. Shakespeare's audience knew these historical figures, knew about their tangled relationships, and the ins and outs of royal succession -- at least knew enough about them to recognize them as celebrities and to enjoy seeing how they were portrayed. To them there was no more surprise in what happened in the plays of Henry VI than there is in watching a Christmas pageant at your church, with the stable, the manger, the shepherds, and the wise men. And there's pageant -- portraying what is well known and expected, with pomp and glitter and fine words -- in many other plays as well.
Now I'm tempted to binge read the complete works of other authors -- of course the ones like Balzac and Zola who deliberately set out to tell multi-volume stories, but others as well, light weight as well as heavy weight -- Faulkner, Michener, Somerset Maugham's stories, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency: sets of books that gain from being read together, one after the other.
This experience also makes me think differently about what I write and why I write.
If I am driven by what I need to write rather than what an editor wants or what I guess the market wants, then, by nature rather than by plan, the pieces will fit together and form a coherent story. And, for me, the main purpose of writing is to discover that story and tell it.
We binge watch. Why not binge read?
When you change the context of writing, you change its meaning.
To binge watch a TV series is to experience a series of episodes as if they were a single work, to enjoy them in a new way.
In the old days, the only choice for watching series was broadcast television. Typically, 22 episodes constituted a season, and the episodes were broadcast one per week, with the time slots for the rest of the year being reruns. It was a stop-start experience, often with cliff-hanger stories to encourage viewers to come back next week or next year.
The advent of video recorders changed that experience. You could save episodes and watch them whenever your wanted or in a bunch. You could rent or buy. You were no longer constrained by the schedule of the network or local station. You could fast-forward past commercials. You could pause. You could rewind and rewatch. You were in control.
Then came cable with video on demand and DVRs, giving you similar control even more conveniently. Programming to record what you wanted when you wanted was far easier.
Now with streaming, you don't have to plan ahead. You can at any moment decide to binge on a series and watch one episode after another, from the first episode of the series through the last one, without commercials. Watching in that mode, with only the interruptions you want, you can get deeply involved in the story and identify with the characters, and see the actors growing up and aging -- like time-laps photography, watching grass grow or a flower bloom, where what normally takes days or months or years unfolds for you fast enough for you to perceive and enjoy the spectacle of change. Or you can choose to watch in stop-start mode, with breaks as long as you want, to suit your personal schedule and lifestyle.
I'm watching the same content I saw before or could have seen before as separate episodes. But seen together, an entire series is a different genre, a different way of telling stories and enjoying them.
My favorite instance of this is Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin, which originally aired on Showtime from 2012 to 2014, twenty-five episodes spread across three seasons. Viewed in its entirety, it has a beginning, middle, and end. While each episode is satisfying in and of itself, the series as a whole is a single work of art, deliberately written to be experienced that way.
Typically, graduate students in literature read in a similar way. In preparing for orals they are responsible for reading the complete works of a set of authors. Rarely do they get the opportunity to focus on one author at a time. But they do often come to think of an author's life's work as a single work. Today, when E-books are readily available and the classics are free, or nearly free, many more people have the opportunity to have such experiences.
I'm getting warmed up to write an historical novel set in the time of Shakespeare. So I decided to binge read his complete works, one play every day or two. That's 38 plays, written over the course of about 19 years. I'm a third of the way through now, and it has been a surprisingly delightful experience, prompting me to want to do the same with other authors, and also prompting me to rethink what I write and why.
I'm reading the Shakespeare plays aloud to get a feel for the rhythm. As I become familiar with the vocabulary and the syntax I don't have to go running to the footnotes all the time. His langugage begins to feel normal rather than alien as I become familiar with stock phrases and images and allusions, as well as the range of reactions of characters experiencing love, jealousy, hate, vengeance, temptation, ambition. What they are willing to do. What they are willing to die for. What they are willing to kill for.
The histories, in particular. make much more sense read together. The complexities of genealogy and royal succession fall into the background as you become familiar with them, freeing you to focus on the characters and the spectacle and the pageant. Imagine watching the player introductions at an all-star baseball game when you know nothing about baseball, or watching the red-carpet arrivals of celebrities at the Oscars when you've never heard of the celebrities. Shakespeare's audience knew these historical figures, knew about their tangled relationships, and the ins and outs of royal succession -- at least knew enough about them to recognize them as celebrities and to enjoy seeing how they were portrayed. To them there was no more surprise in what happened in the plays of Henry VI than there is in watching a Christmas pageant at your church, with the stable, the manger, the shepherds, and the wise men. And there's pageant -- portraying what is well known and expected, with pomp and glitter and fine words -- in many other plays as well.
Now I'm tempted to binge read the complete works of other authors -- of course the ones like Balzac and Zola who deliberately set out to tell multi-volume stories, but others as well, light weight as well as heavy weight -- Faulkner, Michener, Somerset Maugham's stories, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency: sets of books that gain from being read together, one after the other.
This experience also makes me think differently about what I write and why I write.
If I am driven by what I need to write rather than what an editor wants or what I guess the market wants, then, by nature rather than by plan, the pieces will fit together and form a coherent story. And, for me, the main purpose of writing is to discover that story and tell it.
Why do we read/write/watch stories?
from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)
Fiction is not just for entertainment. It's also for survival of the species.
Each of us has the potential for living many different kinds of lives, with many different personalities.
When a group faces a crisis, individuals take on roles that are necessary for the survival of the group, with previously hidden potential coming to the fore. This happens naturally, like water finding its own level.
In reading and writing stories, we exercise multiple potential lives, and vicariously acquire experience and insight, which could, in crisis, prove important.
Fiction is not just for entertainment. It's also for survival of the species.
Each of us has the potential for living many different kinds of lives, with many different personalities.
When a group faces a crisis, individuals take on roles that are necessary for the survival of the group, with previously hidden potential coming to the fore. This happens naturally, like water finding its own level.
In reading and writing stories, we exercise multiple potential lives, and vicariously acquire experience and insight, which could, in crisis, prove important.
Advoce to a Memoirist
from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)
Don't let yourself be constrained by the limits of your chosen genre.
When you dream that your daughter is a mother and you a grandmother, write down what you see and what that feels like, and see where such a scene takes you.
Let your characters tell you which way your story shuld go. And one of those characters is the image of yourself that you have created and who now has a life and a will of her own.
Don't let yourself be constrained by the limits of your chosen genre.
When you dream that your daughter is a mother and you a grandmother, write down what you see and what that feels like, and see where such a scene takes you.
Let your characters tell you which way your story shuld go. And one of those characters is the image of yourself that you have created and who now has a life and a will of her own.
Aphorisms about Writing and Rewriting
from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)
• The first draft is the cocoon in which the real story matures.
• The need to write fiction is an incurable disease you are born with.
• I write to find out what I think and believe.
• Create characters, not ideas.
• Thinking about your book is the real work. Putting it on paper is easy.
• In rewrite mode -- anomalies are opportunities, adding layers to the narrative.
• Sometimes a book happens to you -- like you are pregnant with it.
• One measure of the power of an author is how little needs to happen to show the characters undergoing enormous life-shifting changes. the best can tell a story with both subtlety and passion, where a look or a word has the narrative power of an earthquake. By that measure, Penelope Fitzgerald is one of the finest novelists of all time.
• The creative phase of writing is very different from the polishing and editing phase.
• To write something new or to significantly rewrite, I need to find a "generative" phrase -- a line that implies a whole character, a whole life; a line that leads to another line and another and that generates a rhythm that carries the story forward. That's a very different process from analysis and criticism.
• Sometimes a good line is a hazard. You can like a line so much that you keep it, even though it wrecks the flow of the lines around it and of the story as a whole.
• The story is the vessel into which I pour my blood and guts -- making exterior what's interior, so I can look at it and try to make sense of it.
• In writing, what is most private and personal is what connects us most with others, for that is what we most have in common.
• The aim is to get to a state of "flow" in which what matters to you finds external expression, and that external expression triggers in others something resembling your own internal experience.
• Poetry happens when a word you would have never expected, turns out to be perfect, and changes how you think forever after.
• Definition of poetry -- When words explode in your mind, and that feels good.
• Our self-knowledge and our knowledge of others is limited. Every memoir we write is fictitious in ways we do not fathom. It is more honest to call what we write "fiction", and to shape the story the way its internal logic demands.
• The characters appear in your dreams and you write down what they say and do; then edit and rewrite. It's their book, not yours. Treat them with respect, and follow their advice.
• Once your characters come alive, you are always writing -- no matter where you are and no matter what else you might be doing at the same time.
• Publication does not equal success. You have to enjoy writing for its own sake. Half a million people run in marathons in the US each year. Only a couple dozen win. They simply enjoy doing it.
• For me, when the characters come alive and take charge, and I'm just along for the ride -- that's an author's high: a wonderful ride.
• When you begin your novel, the characters are your means for telling the story. If and when your characters come alive, the characters become the story.
• Typically, I begin with a critical situation and scene. The I hear the main characters talking in that scene and from that begin to flesh out who they are and some of the scenes and incidents that might have led to that point. Then I decide on an opening scene. Then fill in.
• The first draft is the cocoon in which the real story matures.
• The need to write fiction is an incurable disease you are born with.
• I write to find out what I think and believe.
• Create characters, not ideas.
• Thinking about your book is the real work. Putting it on paper is easy.
• In rewrite mode -- anomalies are opportunities, adding layers to the narrative.
• Sometimes a book happens to you -- like you are pregnant with it.
• One measure of the power of an author is how little needs to happen to show the characters undergoing enormous life-shifting changes. the best can tell a story with both subtlety and passion, where a look or a word has the narrative power of an earthquake. By that measure, Penelope Fitzgerald is one of the finest novelists of all time.
• The creative phase of writing is very different from the polishing and editing phase.
• To write something new or to significantly rewrite, I need to find a "generative" phrase -- a line that implies a whole character, a whole life; a line that leads to another line and another and that generates a rhythm that carries the story forward. That's a very different process from analysis and criticism.
• Sometimes a good line is a hazard. You can like a line so much that you keep it, even though it wrecks the flow of the lines around it and of the story as a whole.
• The story is the vessel into which I pour my blood and guts -- making exterior what's interior, so I can look at it and try to make sense of it.
• In writing, what is most private and personal is what connects us most with others, for that is what we most have in common.
• The aim is to get to a state of "flow" in which what matters to you finds external expression, and that external expression triggers in others something resembling your own internal experience.
• Poetry happens when a word you would have never expected, turns out to be perfect, and changes how you think forever after.
• Definition of poetry -- When words explode in your mind, and that feels good.
• Our self-knowledge and our knowledge of others is limited. Every memoir we write is fictitious in ways we do not fathom. It is more honest to call what we write "fiction", and to shape the story the way its internal logic demands.
• The characters appear in your dreams and you write down what they say and do; then edit and rewrite. It's their book, not yours. Treat them with respect, and follow their advice.
• Once your characters come alive, you are always writing -- no matter where you are and no matter what else you might be doing at the same time.
• Publication does not equal success. You have to enjoy writing for its own sake. Half a million people run in marathons in the US each year. Only a couple dozen win. They simply enjoy doing it.
• For me, when the characters come alive and take charge, and I'm just along for the ride -- that's an author's high: a wonderful ride.
• When you begin your novel, the characters are your means for telling the story. If and when your characters come alive, the characters become the story.
• Typically, I begin with a critical situation and scene. The I hear the main characters talking in that scene and from that begin to flesh out who they are and some of the scenes and incidents that might have led to that point. Then I decide on an opening scene. Then fill in.
Contractions
(from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)
A point of style just occurred to me that I wasn't aware of before, having followed it by instinct, without being conscious of why.
"He is" is subtlely but significantly different from "he's". And similarly with other contractions of "is".
He's puts the focus on what follows -- adjective, participle of noun. But he is puts the focus on the fact of being, as if there could be some doubt, as in he knows who he is.
She knows it's right. She knows she's going to the city. The focus is on what comes after the contraction. She knows it is right -- there was some doubt. She knows she is going -- instead of not going.
The effect of this subtle difference is cumulative. When it's done right, it feels right. When it's done wrong, friction slows the reader down and puts the meaning of sentences a little out of focus.
A point of style just occurred to me that I wasn't aware of before, having followed it by instinct, without being conscious of why.
"He is" is subtlely but significantly different from "he's". And similarly with other contractions of "is".
He's puts the focus on what follows -- adjective, participle of noun. But he is puts the focus on the fact of being, as if there could be some doubt, as in he knows who he is.
She knows it's right. She knows she's going to the city. The focus is on what comes after the contraction. She knows it is right -- there was some doubt. She knows she is going -- instead of not going.
The effect of this subtle difference is cumulative. When it's done right, it feels right. When it's done wrong, friction slows the reader down and puts the meaning of sentences a little out of focus.
Richard Seltzer
Here I post thoughts, memories, stories, essays, jokes -- anything that strikes my fancy. This meant to be idiosyncratic and fun. I welcome feedback and suggestions. seltzer@seltzerbooks.com
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