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For whatever reason today, I was thinking of a Neil Gaiman quote I especially love. It is pulled (I am told) from The Wake, one of the Sandman volumes, and it goes like this:

"Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost."

Is that not lovely? In looking it up and double-checking it, I found also this quote from The Wake, which I shall add to my commonplace book when I get home:

"It's astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best."

That second quote reminds me of a bit I especially love from the movie Shakespeare in Love, involving Geoffrey Rush's character, Philip Henslowe:

HENSLOWE
Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Believe me, to be closed by the plague is a bagatelle in the ups and downs of owning a theatre.

FENNYMAN
So what do we do?

HENSLOWE
Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

FENNYMAN
How?

HENSLOWE
I don't know. It's a mystery.

and

WILL
(to HENSLOWE)
We are lost.

HENSLOWE
No, it will turn out well.

WILL
How will it?

HENSLOWE
I don't know, it's a mystery.

I have no clue why I was thinking "and nothing is truly lost", but it sent me to re-read his poem (also a picture book) Instructions, in case it came from there, and then I found its true source, plus a new quote, plus I was reminded of my favorite bit (which repeats another two times) from Shakespeare in Love, so I'm thankful it popped into my head.

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My friend Angela De Groot made a good point the other day. Sometimes, it's not really writer's block that's an issue:

"I believe writer’s reluctance dovetails with writer’s block – sometimes all you need is a beginning, somebody or something to help you get rolling. Once you do get going, hobbling along, falling down, dragging yourself back up again, you eventually get there."

On creating a believable world, brni has this to say:

"The small details are what flesh out your world, what make it live and breathe, but don't infodump. First, infodumps are boring. Also, they are dangerous. Each detail is something you can get wrong. You need to find the right balance for your story, the right amount of detail, and then be accurate with your details."

On whether there's such a thing as a muse, separate and apart from the author,bogwitch said this:

"Give credit to the Great and Powerful Oz if that makes things fun and exciting, but don't forget that there really is a little person behind the curtain, and that person is you."

To adult critics of YA literature, my favorite bit of advice (that applies in other situations as well), comes from Maggie Stiefvater: "Stop being nostalgic, it's ruining your camera lens."

And as Colin Firth just said on the Red Carpet prior to the Oscars: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." No, Colin didn't make that up - he's quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson. (One more reason to adore Colin, of course.)

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I don't have many quotes today, but I like the two that I've got:

Back in April, British author Sir Clement Freud died. And Neil Gaiman posted about his death and his obituary, but it was what he said about his own work and its main character (Coraline, a book of which I am particularly fond) that spoke to me:

I never met him. I loved corresponding with him -- he was funny and dry, and he loved Coraline, although he didn't like the bit where she cried in the night in the empty bed. He thought that, as hero and a brave girl, she should not have cried. And I thought that she was a hero and a brave girl because she cried in the night and kept going anyway.

And a quote from motivational speaker and self-help guru Frank Tibolt, which I think argues quite cogently for the butt-in-chair method of writing, even though his comment is not limited to writing alone, but to any activity, really:

"We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action."

Ooh - reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Emma, the novel by Jane Austen, and this line spoken by Mr. Weston: "What is right to be done cannot be done too soon."

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On the difference between motivation and inspiration.

Lisa Schroeder's post about motivation and inspiration, and whether they are the same thing or not, was interesting to me. Here's some of what said:

To me, motivation is what keeps you going - it's the force that keeps you moving forward.

When I'm writing a book, most of the time, there is motivation enough from inside of me to finish it. I love that feeling of accomplishment. I WANT to finish it. When we start out writing a novel, we have to be motivated enough to sit down and put words to the page consistently almost every day. And I think it is important to understand where your motivation comes from.

Now that I'm published, I'm motivated by having editors who want to see other things from me. And I'm motivated by wanting my career to grow.

Inspiration is more about the act of creating. When I talked about praying and hoping for inspiration, what I'm looking for are nuggets of experiences that speak to my heart and soul. That move me in such a way that I, in turn, want to work hard to move others with my words.

. . .

So, I look for things that touch me. That MOVE me. You know what I'm talking about here. It's that sunrise that takes your breath away. It's a music video like this one ["How to Save a Life" by The Fray.] It's holding a precious baby and watching as he reaches up and touches your face. It's watching a movie that moves you to tears. And then I take those feelings of joy/sorrow/regret/pain and try my best to drop them into my story.

On finding satisfaction in the writing alone

The ginormously talented Justine Larbalestier wrote a post the other day entitled "Make it the best book you can", in which she picked up on some of what Elizabeth Gilbert said in her TED speech, which I quoteskimmed in February. I commend Justine's entire post to you. (Hell, I commend her entire blog to you, but that's not the point.) Here, however, is the bit I quoteskimmed:

You can only control the book you write.

You can’t control whether you sell it. You can’t control how big the advance is if you sell it. You can’t control how much is spent promoting it. You can’t control how many copies Barnes & Noble takes or whether they take it at all. You can’t control whether punters buy it when it finally appears on the shelves. You can’t control the reviews. You can’t control the award committees.

Spending time and energy angsting about any of that stuff will only do your head in.

All you can do is write the very best book you can.

It will get published or it won’t. It will find its market or it won’t. It will sell or it won’t. It will win awards or it won’t. None of that matters if you’ve written the best book you can.

Books with huge advances and the biggest marketing and publicity budget in the world sink like a stone. Books with nary a sheckle spent on them take off out of nowhere. Books you think are terrible do great; books you worship sell fewer than a thousand copies. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. Do not let it do your head in.

On understanding your characters

First up, a post from , who found writing advice in an inspirational email:

I receive daily inspirational emails from tut.com. This morning, one of the comments in the email was "Sometimes, understanding their fears, Julia, helps you to understand their actions, as well as their pain."

I know what that means on a personal level, as far as people with whom I interact - but, it hit me (since I'm in the middle of revisions) that understanding my characters' fears (from protagonist to antagonist) will help me to make sure that the actions I assign to them are in accord with the fear and pain (or desire to avoid pain.)

As a writer, I know the reason for the character's action. But, in writing down those actions, it's not enough to just write 1) a cool scene, 2) move the plot along, 3) get to 70K, etc. - there has to be a valid basis in the psyche of my character for anything they do. And, I have to give my reader enough information that they will understand why that particular character acts in that way.

For example, it's necessary to be aware that I can't suddenly having someone run screaming from a clown, if I haven't set up their fear. Perhaps at a first grade party a clown trick went bad and scared them half to death. The motivational reveal doesn't need to be more than perhaps a sentence or a comment from another character - like, "Yeah, remember when that bozo dumped the whole ant farm on her? She itched for a week."

Fears and Actions and Pain... intimately intertwined.

On crafting villains

I've been listening to U2's new album, "No Line on the Horizon" in extremely heavy rotation whilst in my minivan. Great album, solid start-to-finish, plus it comes with excellent liner notes (I'm sick of opening those CD booklets to find nothing but photos, sometimes not even good photos - U2 provides lyrics and information about who did what on each track. Happy day!) My favorite tracks are 1 ("No Line on the Horizon"), 2 ("Magnificent" - as you probably guessed if you've read my "Music" line in posts this week), 3 ("Moment of Surrender"), 6 ("Get on Your Boots") & 9 ("White as Snow", the tune of which is based on O Come O Come Emanuel), if you care. That said, this bit at the end of the final track, "Cedars of Lebanon", caught my ear as potential writing advice:

Choose your enemies carefully 'cos they will define you
Make them interesting 'cos in some ways they will mind you
They’re not there in the beginning but when your story ends
Gonna last with you longer than your friend

On balancing craft and mass appeal, and on "boy books"

My friend put up a post earlier this week in which he quoted an answer he gave to a newspaper interviewer (whether the full answer ran in the publication is beside the point, as I believe you'll agree). Here's what David's post said:

I got a chance to really think about the art of balancing craft and mass appeal recently, when I was doing a newspaper interview and encountered this as the first question:

"The recent publishing trend in boys' books has incorporated toilet humor, blood and gore in an effort to gain boys' reading attention. Your Weenies series incorporates this type of humor. Despite what critics say, do you believe that these kinds of books have a place in reading today? If so, why?"

Yikers. That seemed to be a bit loaded, but here's my response:

My first story collection appeared in 1996, so I think I'm safely ahead of the bandwagon. I guess I'm ahead of the meat wagon, too, since there's actually very little blood and gore in my work. The stories have been called "Twilight Zone for kids," by more than one reviewer. While I do have some shocking endings, I tend to pull the camera away before things get graphic. I use some bathroom humor. I also use a bathroom. To deny this part of our existence seems a bit Puritanical. It's definitely not an either/or situation. I might have a story where a kid drops his pants and sits on a photocopier, but I have another that pays homage to Kafka's "Metamorphosis," and one that explores Zeno's paradox. I sneak a lot of philosophy into my work, in an attempt to justify the four years I spent getting a degree in it. The bottom line is that I've had countless teachers and parents tell me that one of my books turned a nonreader into a reader. As for the issue of quality, one of my stories was voted the best young-adult magazine story of 2005 by the Association of Educational Publishers . Others have been reprinted in textbooks. Teachers all over the country are using my story, "Predators," from The Curse of the Campfire Weenies and Other Warped and Creepy Tales, to teach Internet safety. I suspect that many of the critics haven't done anything more than glance at the covers. Admittedly, the Weenie theme suggests a certain level of frivolity. But while the cover gets a kid to pick up the book, it's the stories that hold the reader. And they do this not by virtue of the occasional splash of body fluid or whiff of gas, but by a richness of plot and wealth of ideas.

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On writing

First up, something skimmed from the lovely and talented Cassandra, who attended the Asilomar conference a week or so ago. She reports having heard Jim Averbeck say this, and I have to say that the longer I work at being a writer, the more I understand the truth of this remark:

"You have to love writing, but more importantly, you have to love learning to write better."

On taking risks in your writing

Laurie Halse Anderson, whose new novel, Wintergirls, comes out in about 10 days' time, took time to answer some reader questions earlier this week. I know her blog is named "Mad Woman in the Forest", but I find nothing crazy at all about most of her posts. She talked about taking risks with her writing, and somewhere in the middle of her wonderful blog post, she said this:

"There is no way you can please everyone. Neither can you write a book that will appeal to everyone's tastes. First and foremost, you need to write the book that is in your heart."

And then, in closing, she said this:

"We cannot control how people react to our books. Our job is to write; write honestly, write with passion and compassion, write the true."

On reading poetry

I was fortunate to catch not one, but two, John Green live chats this week. On March 4, 2009 at about 11:53 p.m. ET, while in the midst of reading some poetry selections to his viewers, John said this, which is, I think as good a reason to read poetry as any other:

"One of the things I like best about poetry is that it allows us to be quiet and contemplative."

On what to write about
The next evening, John hosted a vlog featuring poet extraordinaire Katrina Vandenberg, whose debut poetry collection, Atlas, appears to be out of print, but I will nevertheless persevere and track one down, based on the loveliness of the poems I've heard John Green, and now Katrina herself, read. During the live interview/reading, Katrina read a poem about records (of the vinyl persuasion), the title of which I cannot recall. Afterwards, in conversation with John, she said:

"I like writing about things you can't get back to – [writing about] the thing that you get rid of, and you later wish you hadn't."

It occurs to me that a lot of us write about just such a thing, whether it's a feeling or an object or a person, and whether we write fiction or poetry or memoir or songs, or whether we make visual art.

On the life of a writer

Last night, I read a novel entitled Gods Behaving Badly, which I found extremely diverting. It was witty and clever and amusing, and I liked the way the author, Marie Phillips, envisioned the Greek gods in their modern-day incarnations: Artemis is a dog walker, Aphrodite runs a phone-sex line, Athena is an academic, and Apollo is trying his hand at television psychic. At the end of the paperback edition of the book (which is what I purchased), there is "book group" material, including an essay by the author called "Marie Phillips on her approach to writing fiction". I commend the entire essay to you for its entertainment value and its truth, but here is a quoteskimmed version:

When I meet people at parties and I tell them that I'm a writer, the first question is always the same. "Are you very disciplined?" "Oh yes," I say. . . . And it's almost true – about the discipline, I mean. My approach to writing is like improvised acting: I lose myself in my characters and let them do all the work. So I can write large amounts over long stretches of the day. However, I try as far as possible to avoid conscious thought while I'm writing, because it interrupts the flow and pulls me out of my characters. Before I start on a novel I have to do a huge amount of thinking, for months on end, without writing a word. I don't like to begin until I have a destination in mind and at least a vague idea of how I'm going to get there, otherwise I am liable to write around in circles.

I'm not a comfortable thinker, however. What am I supposed to look at while I'm thinking? What should I do with my hands? Research is my favorite way to think, as it gives me something tangible to do. I like spending the entire day reading, and then sounding like a harassed intellectual to friends in the pub ("God, I've been reading all day, I'm knackered").

. . . But reading is ultimately distracting as I'm dealing with other people's thoughts, so sometimes I have to put the books down and just think. I think in the shower, doing the shopping, tidying the house, and I get vast amounts of thinking done on the bus. I think in bed, last thing at night and first thing in the morning, because being half asleep pushes open the door to my subconscious just that little bit wider. Mostly, though, I lie on the sofa and think (I have a special sofa in my study for this purpose – chosen by stretching out on all the sofas in Ikea to find out which one was the thinkiest). This causes untold problems in the pub ("God, I've been lying on the sofa all day, I'm knackered").

I think until I can't bear it any longer and then I start writing, but it's never long enough. I get myself stuck and have to take weeks out in the middle of drafts just to think some more, and then I get furious with myself for "not doing any work," force myself back to the computer too soon, and end up with writer's block, which is basically just thinking plus self-loathing.

. . . What made sense when I was thinking can make no sense at all when I'm writing, as once I'm inside my characters' heads I discover that there is no way that they would behave in the way I have so carefully set up for them. So the writing takes me in a new direction and the thinking falls down like a game of Jenga after the rash removal of the wrong brick. And then it's back to the sofa to start over and build all my thoughts back up again.

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When I was at ALA, I scored a paperback copy of How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster. I've only read a bit of the book thus far, but I can tell you that thus far, the subtitle is not a lie. The chapters are short. They are written conversationally. And they are full of pithy advice and sentences, some of which are oversimplifications, but most of which are useful in any case.

On poetry
Foster's fourth chapter is entitled "If It's Square, It's a Sonnet". He goes on to explain that he doesn't bother teaching much of anything but sonnets (fie on Mr. Foster, fie!), because unless you're a poet or really into poetry, it's kind of pointless. (A thousand times fie! Which would, I suppose, be fie thousand. But I digress.) He notes that a sonnet contains 14 lines, and is usually in iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line), which means that it's roughly as high as it is wide on the page. And then he says this:

I think people who read poems for enjoyment should always read the poem first, without a formal or stylistic care in the world. They should not begin by counting lines, or looking at line endings to find the rhyme scheme, if any, just as I think people should read novels without peeking at the ending: just enjoy the experience. After you've had your first pleasure, though, one of the additional pleasures is seeing how the poet worked that magic on you. There are many ways a poem can charm the reader: choice of images, music of the language, idea content, cleverness or wordplay. And at least some part of the answer, if that magic came in a sonnet, is form.

Huzzah! for Mr. Foster after all. And his further explication of what a sonnet is and what it can accomplish is equally good. He closes his chapter by noting that "Sonnets are . . . short poems that take far more time [to write], because everything has to be perfect, than long ones. We owe it to poets, I think, to notice that they've gone to this trouble, as well as to ourselves, to understand the nature of the thing we're reading. When you start to read a poem, then, look at the shape."

On writing compelling biography or nonfiction

I recently read a 2003 New York Times interview with Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the acclaimed bestseller, Seabiscuit. Here are some bits from the interview. The first bit is her explanation as to how she made the book feel alive and contemporary.

I think the secret to bringing immediacy to any nonfiction story is to ferret out every detail that is there to be found, so that the reader feels like an eyewitness. To do this, I consulted a very broad range of sources, from record books to living witnesses, and everything in between. I studied every film and photograph that I could find, and acquired complete newspapers and magazines from the period and read them cover to cover so I could put myself in the mindset of the men and women of the era. I researched what things cost, what books and movies were popular, what the weather was on a particular day, anything that might help me stand in the shoes of an average American of the Depression era. I was very fortunate in that Seabiscuit was covered very heavily in the press and followed by millions of people, so there was a lot to be found.

Hillenbrand was asked whether any "artful nonfiction" had an influence on her method of storytelling, but her answer really goes to her philosophy of writing nonfiction, and to her use of novelistic devices.

My goal as an historian is to make nonfiction read as smoothly as fiction while adhering very strictly to fact. I read a lot of nonfiction, and have certainly been influenced by such superb historians as Bruce Catton and David McCullough, but the writers who have had the greatest impact on me have been novelists. Michael Shaara's masterpiece "The Killer Angels," an historic novel about Gettysburg, has had a tremendous influence on my writing. Tolstoy has also been a wonderful teacher, namely "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." Other writers I read over and over again, and try to emulate, include Austen, Wharton, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

On re-reading books (or, perhaps, on writing novels?)

When I find a book I really and truly love, I tend to be a re-reader. I believe that will be the subject of tomorrow's blog post, in fact. For today, I'll stick with quoting a bit from another, far more famous re-reader: Jane Austen, in a letter to her sister, Cassandra, dated Feb. 8-9, 1807, referring to a novel by Sarah Burney:

"We are reading Clarentine, & are surprised to find how foolish it is. I remember liking it much less on a 2d reading than at the 1st & it does not bear a 3d at all. It is full of unnatural conduct & forced difficulties, without striking merit of any kind."

Don't forget that Masterpiece Theatre is airing Miss Austen Regrets at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations tonight. And try not to laugh (as I did) at the name of the lovely younger girl pictured here in the role of Fanny Austen Knight. (And no, Fanny isn't the name I found funny - it's her real name, Imogen Poots, that cracked me up. I am so very immature.)

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Another Sunday, another batch of quotes for you. With related open letters, because I felt like mixing it up a bit today.

First, one about books and readers that caught my eye in this article in today's New York Times*. Usually I like what Mr. Jobs has to say about advances in technology, but this bit in an article about Amazon's wireless reading device, the Kindle got my goat:

". . .when Mr. Jobs was asked two weeks ago at the Macworld Expo what he thought of the Kindle, he heaped scorn on the book industry. 'It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,' he said. 'Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.'

To Mr. Jobs, this statistic dooms everyone in the book business to inevitable failure."

Dear Mr. Jobs: Those of us who do read more than one book a year read a lot of books. Last year was a slow year for me owing to all the research I did, and I still read over 100 books. And book readers are still in the majority. Please send my goat back.

On first drafts
From an article by Bonita Pate Davis in the November/December 2007 SCBWI Bulletin:

"First drafts attempt to capture coalescing ideas into a semblance of order. They barely rise one step above the primordial soup. Still, no matter how rough, those first drafts come nearest to capturing the pure essence of ideas and feelings."

Dear Ms. Davis: I sure hope all the writers I know can find a copy of the Bulletin and read your article on page 16. Your thoughts are cogent, you make wonderful points about first drafts and your use of language is wonderful. Your reference to "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" and the Romantic poets just clinched this as a work of genius, in my opinion

On writing with integrity
In the same issue of the SCBWI Bulletin, Susan Salzman Raab interviewed last year's Newbery award-winner, Susan Patron. The question was "From your perspective as an author whose book has been challenged and as a former librarian who has defended other people's books, what would you recommend to authors who are afraid that a book they're writing may be controversial?" Here's an excerpt from Patron's answer:

As writers we choose each word with care so that it conveys our specific meaning, mood, emphasis, style, etc. And we write with respect for the reader's intelligence. We're doomed if we permit the specter of sensors or critics to enter our creative process. We must not let those crows of fear caw into our ears as we write, or we won't hear the genuine inner voice that we need to access in order to write honestly and well.

Dear Ms. Patron: Thank you. Thank you for your words, which all writers need to hear, and for your integrity, grace and humor. Thanks also for fighting back when the crows of censure/censorship came cawing over the innocent use of a correct anatomical term.

Next, this quote on poetry from Ted Hughes, which I discovered over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast the other day:

Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something — perhaps not much, just something — of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being — not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses — but a human being, we call it poetry.

Dear Jules and Eisha: Thanks for all the excellent posts you guys do, including reminding me about books I should read and books I have read.

Dear Ted Hughes: From what I understand, you weren't always a nice guy. But I really like what you said here about poetry and language. So thanks.

On memory, a quote from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, the ITV version of which will be appearing at 9 p.m. tonight on most PBS stations.

Tonight's version features Billie Piper as the "insipid" Fanny Price. Pictured with her from left to right are Joseph Beattie as Henry Crawford, Joseph Morgan as William Price, and Blake Ritson as Edmund Bertram. This movie features excellent performances by Beattie and his screen-sister, Mary Crawford, as played by Hayley Atwell, and by Maggie O'Neill as Mrs. Norris.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

Dear Jane: Thank you for this book, which I happen to like, even if some members of your family did find Fanny to be a bit of a prig. There are a number of people who lead long-suffering lives, and the thought that all might turn out well for them is encouragin. I also like how the book can be read as allegory, with Fanny in a Job-like position, and various characters representing the 7 deadly sins: Lust (Maria Bertram), Gluttony (Tom Bertram), Greed (Mary Crawford), Sloth (Lady Bertram), Wrath (Sir Thomas Bertram), Envy (Rushworth), and Pride (Mary Crawford). At least that's how I'm assigning the roles today, although some of these folks do double-duty, and I've not assigned a particular sin to one of the most despicable characters in the book, Mrs. Norris, who seems to have Greed, Wrath, Envy and Pride in abundance. Also unassigned? Our "hero", Edmund Bertram, to whom I assign the sin of being annoyingly obtuse. But I digress, dear Lady, and I've gone on too long. I hope my friends will watch the latest cinematic adaptation of your fine book.

*You may need to sign up for a free account to read the NY Times online. I can't tell for sure because, well, I already have one.

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On what writing is

"I always thought writing was arraying words in beautiful patterns, but now I think it's more like walking blindfolded, listening with your whole heart, and then looking backward to see if you made any tracks worth keeping." Sara Lewis Holmes in her recent Poetry Friday post at Read Write Believe.

On why fiction/fantasy matter

Ten days ago, I put up a post entitled "Why We Need Fiction", about which I remain pleased. One of my rationales for why fiction is important reads as follows: "We need fiction because it allows us to create an artificial barrier, behind which we can examine Big Important Issues in a hypothetical setting, instead of beating people's brains out, possibly literally, by addressing those issues in the real world."

I've started reading my copy of The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy by Leonard S. Marcus, and it appears that Lloyd Alexander agreed with me in part:

"Q: Why do you write fantasy?
A: Because, paradoxically, fantasy is a good way to show the world as it is. Fantasy can show us the truth about human relationships and moral dilemmas because it works on our emotions on a deeper, symbolic level than realistic fiction. It has the same emotional power as a dream."

On poetry

Here, the first seven lines of a fourteen-line poem by James Kirkup called "The Poet":

Each instant of his life, a task, he never rests,
And works most when he appears to be doing nothing.
The least of it is putting down in words
What usually remains unwritten and unspoken,
And would so often be much better left
Unsaid, for it is really the unspeakable
That he must try to give an ordinary tongue to.

And from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which airs tonight at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations, the novel of which I reviewed last July. Here is a portion of the text taken from a description of the developing friendship between Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe. This section is often referred to as Austen's "defence of the novel", and is found in Volume I, chapter 5 of the novel:

. . . and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; ——for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding ——joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, -- there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader ——I seldom look into novels ——Do not imagine that I often read novels ——It is really very well for a novel." ——Such is the common cant. —— "And what are you reading, Miss ——————?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ——"It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;" or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.

Seems the more things change, the more they remain the same. No?

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Because it's Jane Austen season on PBS
In honor of tonight's U.S. television debut of the new ITV production of Jane Austen's Persuasion, here's one of the most popular quotes from the novel for you, in the context of its entire paragraph. Oh, and for the interested, I provided a very short and completely incomplete cheat sheet in the comments of Friday's Persuasion post. The quote (about learning romance) comes from early on in the book, when Anne Elliot is thinking about the choice she was persuaded to make when she was nineteen, which was to renounce Frederick Wentworth, the man she loved, for financial and other security reasons:

How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been,——how eloquent, at least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence!——She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older——the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning.

On revision

From the very wise and talented Jennifer Hubbard, with whom I spent so much time at ALA yesterday:

One byproduct of the revision process is doubt. . . . The inner critic helps identify trouble spots. The inner critic tries not to let me get away with crap. The inner critic keeps me working when I might get lazy. But sometimes, one must stuff a pillow in the inner critic's mouth and listen to the story.

On poetry

"All poems are journeys. The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys——while remaining in the human scale——to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing." ~Robert Bly

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Gah! It's almost day's end, and in a sudden forehead-slapping moment I remembered that today was Sunday, and Sunday is quoteskimming day, and I hadn't yet done it. Never fear, however, I am squeaking under the limbo pole. Heck, I'm still able to make it without serious contortion.

About poets and other solitary writers

A word about the woman whose book of poems I'm still wending my way through, the lovely Miss Emily Dickinson, from an interesting source, TV character Lisa Simpson. Yes, from The Simpsons:

"Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon."

About first drafts

According to Bernard Malamud, a Jewish writer described as a sort of human version of Eeyore by Jay Cantor (the quote can be found in this article, although use of the name Eeyore is mine, and not Cantor's), a first draft is:
"the most uncertain——where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better."

According to John Dufresne, who wrote an article for The Writer back in October of 1992, which got reprinted in September of 2007:
Writing a first draft should be easy because, in a sense, you can't get it wrong. . . . You have nothing to prove in the first draft, nothing to defend, everything to imagine. . . . You write the draft in order to eread what you have written and to determine what you still have to say. . . .
You must have the courage to allow yourself to fail. The first draft is where the beginning writer most often finds himself blocked, to use a conventional, though perhaps misleading, verb.

I highly, heartily recommend that everyone get their mitts on a copy of Dufresne's article, entitled "Write a first draft to FIND YOUR STORY: If you allow for spontaneity and surprise, a story will reveal itself to you in the writing" (yelling bit of the title as in the original). I've not yet read his book, The Lie That Tells a Truth, but I rather suspect that a version of this article (or its information) is contained therein. Particularly since GoogleBooks was able to give me an excerpt that confirms that bit of info.

I know lots of you writer sorts are big fans of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and myriads of fans quote her advice to allow oneself to write a "shitty first draft." What Dufresne does a bit later in the article I've cited and quoted above is tell you how to write a shitty first draft:

Do not try to write beyond what the first draft is meant to accomplish: Do not demand or expect a finished manuscript in one draft. The worst thing you may do in writing the first draft may be to focus on the form or content of the story. Do not even consider technical problems at this early stage. And do not let your critical self sit at your desk with your creative self. The critic will stifle the writer within.

Along those lines, a quote from Jane Austen

". . . why did we wait for any thing?—why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!" Frank Churchill in Emma.

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