Averil Dean's Blog, page 19

Kansas

It’s almost time to start the next thing. Which is…what? What am I hoping to write? What are you? A handwritten journal in lavender ink, the pages bound with ribbon? A doorstop saga, first of a trilogy, eight hundred pages long? Deckle-edged, French-flapped, literary wank, fatter than the fattest Tartt. Hollywood tell-all, written from your farmhouse in Kansas? Or a tricky little novel to be read while looking through the slits of a plastic mask, with a velvet cover and pages edged in black a...

Wings

The writer by the nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. – Carson McCullers

Writers on dreaming, from A Writer’s Book of Days:

William Styron said the whole concept of Sophie’s Choice was the result, if not of a dream, of a kind of waking vision.

If Amy Tan was stuck on the ending of a story, she took the story with her to bed and let it become part of the dream.

Robert Stone said, “The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing...

We Were Liars

WOW.

I did not see that coming.

When’s the last time you read a book where the author really palmed the ace?

Back of the Church

How confident are you?

I will tell you a story.

Last March, I spent a few days on Whidbey Island, in a wonderful farmhouse with four of my dearest friends. During the day, we wrote. At night, we ate and drank and read our stuff and talked into the wee hours. One evening I asked for help choosing a bit of Alice Close Your Eyes for an upcoming reading. I chose chapter three, I think, something about the bike in the tree and the two characters meeting at a café. But one of my friends suggested a r...

Snapshots

I’ve been sitting here for an hour and have nothing to show for it. The fact is, my mind is elsewhere. An outline is forming around this new story idea, and for the moment I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything else.

Still here.

Yeah, I’ve got nothing. Just a head full of small-town images: long, low buildings, faded and shredding at the seams like old denim; dormant cornfields, exhausted cows; gas-station sign missing two of its letters; an old brown barn in slow-motion collapse, leani...

Creation Story

When they became writers, from The Writer’s Book of Days:

M.F.K. Fisher said she became a writer when she was four. It was her way of screaming and yelling, the primal scream.

Madeleine L’Engle knew she was going to be a writer from the moment she wrote her first story. “I was five and it was called ‘G-R-U-L.’ I didn’t know how to spell girl. My father got a new typewriter when I was ten and gave me his old one. I immediately wrote my first novel.”

James Michener didn’t start writing until he wa...

Puppet House

Damn, I’m making a lot of mistakes right now. I spent the weekend dissecting a collection of movies and novels, desperately in search of a story. I seem to have arrived at the idea that I can simply cobble together a series of plot elements from other people’s work and plunk my characters into the mix and voilà! Insta-novel! As if the characters have nothing to do with what happens to them, as if they exist apart from the world I’m building instead of in it.

Deep breath. This is what happens w...

Chaos

“The problem for people today is confusion, in a world that should make sense. A world in which you have more communication than ever, makes less and less sense than ever – and so you need storytellers, to make sense out of that chaos. But as I said, it’s a chaos of a very different kind today, and the writer struggles.” – Robert McKee

How do you see your role as a writer? Do you aim to serve a societal purpose with your writing or are you simply trying to manage the chaos in your head?

15 Inches

“All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life.You can do that in 20 minutes, and 15 inches.I still remember a piece that the great Barry Bearak did in The Miami Herald some 30 years ago.It was a nothingstory, really:Some high school kid was leading a campaign to ban books he found offensive from the school library.Bearak didn’t even have an interview with the kid, who was ducking him.The story was short, mostly about the issue. But Bearak had a fact th...

Johnny Bingo

Gillian Flynn is in the Times today, talking books. One of the questions she answered:

What kind of reader were you as a child? And what were your favorite childhood books?

This got me thinking about long-ago collections from my own bookshelf. Agatha Christie was there in force. Still is, actually. From where I sit this morning I can see fourteen paperbacks bearing her name. I loved horsey books when I was really young, especially the CW Andersons with those delicate pencil illustrations. My fa...