More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Every single person had a unique voice and a story nobody else could tell. And anybody—especially with the guidance and support of the Ripley Symposia—could be a writer.
He’d read stubbornly (and, it should be noted, already competitively, and with envy) throughout his childhood, departing the mandatory curriculum, leapfrogging the usual adolescent dross to vet the emerging field of his future rivals.
Run on
Sometimes, with books he especially loved, he imagined that he had actually written them himself, and was giving interviews about them to critics or reviewers (always humble in his deflection of the interviewer’s praise) or reading from them to large, avid audiences in a bookstore or some hall full of occupied seats.
Really?
He also understood that the field was not uncrowded: a lot of young people just like himself felt the way he did about books and wanted to write them one day, and it was even possible that some of these other young people might conceivably have even more natural talent than he did, or possibly a more robust imagination, or just a greater will to get the job done.
but the would-be David Foster Wallaces and Donna Tartts who were certainly present in the pile of folders? Not so much.
But first, he had to deliver on that Ripley fantasy that they were all, “students” and “teachers” alike, colleagues-in-art, each with a unique voice and a singular story to tell with it, and each equally deserving of being called that magical thing: a writer.
(Jake had nothing of value to teach aspiring poets. In his experience, poets often read fiction, but fiction writers who said they read poetry with any regularity were liars),
Grammatically, the worst of them made Donald Trump look like Stephen Fry and most of the rest were makers of sentences that could only be described as … utterly ordinary.
The Invention of Wonder, a quiet novel set in his own native Long Island and featuring a young man named Arthur. Arthur, whose fascination with the life and ideas of Isaac Newton provides a through line for the novel and a stay against chaos when his brother dies suddenly, was not, emphatically not, a stand-in for Jake’s own younger self.
Humbert Humbert meets John Updike
Somehow it made him feel awful. But really, didn’t everything?
Depressed
(during which time he had watched certain less talented friends and acquaintances get accepted).
spunky young woman who escapes from a penal colony planet aboard some kind of intergalactic junk ship, and discovers a mutant population among the garbage which she transforms into a vengeful army and ultimately leads into battle.
Joan!
Maybe that’s why our tradition of sharing our work with fellow writers has evolved the way it has. There’ve always been groups of us coming together, reading work aloud or sharing manuscripts. And not even just for the company or the sense of community, but because we actually need other eyes on our writing. We need to know what’s working and, even more important, what’s not working, and most of the time we can’t trust ourselves to know. No matter how successful an author is, by whatever metric you measure success, I’m willing to bet they have a reader they trust who sees the work before the
...more
I think our role in this group is to add what we can to the work of our fellow writers, and open ourselves to their guidance as much as possible.
and which Jake himself had never once imparted to a student (as he, himself, had never once received it from a teacher).
Contrast with his Day One speech
Ruby, the daughter, was studious and sullen, and she came up out of the page as a closely observed and even textured character.
Diandra, the mother, was a less defined but heavy presence at the edges of the daughter’s perspective, as Jake supposed one might expect in a capacious old house with only two people in it. But even at opposite ends of the home they shared, their mutual loathing was radiant.
well written, to be sure, but utterly devoid of any plot, let alone a plot so scintillating even a “lousy writer” couldn’t mess it up—Jake had wanted to laugh.
Many fledgling writers labored under the misperception that if they themselves knew what a character looked like, that was sufficient to magically communicate it to the reader. Others believed a single detail was enough to render a character memorable,
“We’re all only as good as the work we’re doing now. Which is why I’d like to focus on what you’re writing. And where it might be going.”
Probably, even if he did manage to finish his tale of a smart girl growing up in an old house with her mother, the best it could likely aspire to was the same degree of literary notice Jake himself had too briefly enjoyed, and he was completely available to describe, if asked to do so, how profoundly painful that experience, or at least its aftermath, had been.
Run on sentence
You’re only as successful as the last book you published, and you’re only as good as the next book you’re writing. So shut up and write.
Those trees, he’d never noticed, formed a kind of opaque obstacle through which the lights of the campus buildings on the far side could barely be seen, and yet everyone went through them instead of around, every single time. Midway upon the journey of our life, he heard himself think, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. Words he had known forever, but never, until this moment, truly understood.
Dante, Divine Comedy
The story he had just been told, that was the only story.
writers understood the power of their commonalities.
“Of course you are.” The guy shook his head. “Anybody can be a writer.”
he did something he had never done, not once since he’d watched his fortunate student walk into a grove of trees on the Ripley campus. At his computer,
Later, of course, Jake would go back to this moment. Later, he would recognize it for the crossroads it was,
the first of what would be many layers of rationalization.
But there was one thing he actually did believe in that bordered on the magical, or at least the beyond-pedestrian, and that was the duty a writer owed to a story.
Stories are the wells we dip into to be reminded of who we are, and the ways we reassure ourselves that, however obscure we may appear to others, we are actually important, even crucial, to the ongoing drama of survival: personal, societal, and even as a species.
The superstition held that if you did not do right by the magnificent idea that had chosen you, among all possible writers, to bring it to life, that great idea didn’t just leave you to spin your stupid and ineffectual wheels. It actually went to somebody else.
as all artists ought to know, that every story, like single work of art—from the cave paintings to whatever was playing at the Park Theater in Cobleskill to his own puny books—was in conversation with every other work of art: bouncing against its predecessors, drawing from its contemporaries, harmonizing with the patterns.
All of it, paintings and choreography and poetry and photography and performance art and the ever-fluctuating novel, was whirling away in an unstoppable spin art machine of its own. And that was a beautiful, thrilling thing.
but come it had and here it was: this urgent, shimmering thing, already tap, tapping in his head, already hounding him: the idea, the characters, the problem. So what was Jake going to do about that?
The Raven
“I don’t think ideas, even great ideas, are all that hard to come by. When people ask me where I get my ideas, my answer is that there are a hundred novels in every day’s issue of The New York Times, and we recycle the paper or use it to line the birdcage. If you are trapped in your own experience you may find it hard to see beyond things that have actually happened to you, and unless you’ve had a life of National Geographic–worthy adventures you’re probably going to think you have nothing to write a novel about. But if you spend even a few minutes with other people’s stories and learn to ask
...more
So how’d you come up with it?”
Something we ask authors?
His agent Matilda (who was not the agent who’d bungled Jake’s first novel and resolutely detached herself from his second!) called every few days to casually ask how far into the next novel he was (answer: not far enough), and a chorus of writers he’d known in graduate school and college and during those New York years were following him like Furies, bombarding him with requests—everything from blurbs for their manuscripts to recommendations for artists’ colonies to requests to be put in touch with Matilda. In short, he could look no farther ahead than a day or two. Farther than that he left
...more
Run-on
“Nobody else gets to live your life.”
Earlville,
Really?
the long years of professional failure but during the past two years of dizzying success, in which he had merely traded one form of dread and self-castigation for another.
Then, all through the hours that followed, he waited for the terrible thing to happen, the one that would force him
Something relevant to his present crisis had taken place at Ripley, that was obvious, and it was understandable; the heightened camaraderie of the MFA program—even (perhaps especially?) the low-residency MFA program!—acted powerfully upon people who couldn’t be “out” as writers in their ordinary, daily lives, perhaps not even to their own friends and families.
Run on
Gathering on an otherwise empty college campus they were, perhaps for the first time, suddenly enfolded by their tribe and able to talk story! plot! character! with people they’d only just met and would know for only a brief, intense period.
The mistake, a product of his own arrogance, had cost him months. This had never been about an appropriation, real or imaginary, between two writers. This had been a far more intimate theft: not Jake’s at all but one Evan Parker himself had committed. What Parker had stolen was something he must have seen up close and very personal: the mother and the daughter and what had happened between them, right here, in this house.
Did it even matter anymore that Crib was his—every word of it? That the book’s success was inextricably entwined with his own skill in presenting the story Evan Parker had told him that night in Richard Peng Hall? It had been an exceptional story, of course it had, but could Parker himself really have done justice to it?
At least while the teller was … alive.
I’ve always thought there was a kind of beauty to it, the way narratives get told and retold. It’s how stories survive through the ages. You can follow an idea from one author’s work to another, and to me that’s something I find powerful and exciting.”
“All right,” she conceded. “So maybe plagiarism isn’t the right word. Maybe theft of story gets closer.”
a book strangers had paid money to buy, and spent time to read, and liked enough to have filed into the DeKalb County Courthouse just to see him and hear him say, presumably, something of interest.
???
