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The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write
Since 1984, Literary Arts has welcomed many of the world's most renowned authors and storytellers to its stage. In celebration of their thirty-year anniversary, Tin House Books has collected highlights from the series in a single volume.
Since 1984, Literary Arts has welcomed many of the world’s most renowned authors and storytellers to its stage for one of the country’s largest lectures series. Sold-out crowds congregate at Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall to hear these writers’ discuss their work and their thoughts on the trajectory of contemporary literature and culture. In celebration of Literary Arts’ thirty-year anniversary, Tin House Books has collected highlights from the series in a single volume. Whether it’s Wallace Stegner exploring how we use fiction to make sense of life or Ursula K. Le Guin on where ideas come from, Margaret Atwood on the need for complex female characters or Robert Stone on morality and truth in literature, Edward P. Jones on the role of imagination in historical novels or Marilynne Robinson on the nature of beauty, these essays illuminate not just the world of letters but the world at large.
208 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 20, 2014
48 people are currently reading
2035 people want to read
About the author
Margaret Atwood
564 books90.9k followersMargaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.
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March 16, 2018
The world would "split open" if we told the truth about ourselves. We write stories to share the truth about ourselves. We read fiction to learn the truth about ourselves.
"For those who want to live in a deeper, funnier, wilder, more troubled, more colorful, more interesting way, the way in which not only writing matters but also has beauty, memory, politics, family, and everything else, put on your reading glasses and turn the page. Your people have something to tell you..."
This book refutes the claim that writing exists as a dying cultural activity that was surpassed by film, television, and interactive gaming--that literature is dying as surely as chamber music. This book collects the lectures from 10 famous authors who spoke at the Portland Literature Festival about the passionate engagement of the human soul with literature.
1. Chimamanda Adichie: "305 Cartwright Avenue"
"My writing comes from hope, from melancholy, from rage, and from curiosity."
Adichie grew up loving literature in Nigeria. She lived in the same house (on Cartwright Avenue) where Chinua Achebe lived and spirits hovered. She thought that all books had to have white people in them, but, after reading Chinua Achebe, she realized that Igbo culture was worthy of literature. Writing gives her extravagant joy. When she can't write, she feels soul-crushing anxiety. She loves the solitude of writing and the near mystical experience of creating. She writes because she loves the possibility of touching another person with her work. (Leftist political prisoner Lori Berenson repeatedly read "Half of a Yellow Sun during her captivity.) Writing is a wondrous blessing but it is also a craft that requires steely determination and sacrifice of time with the people whom she loves. Anything can be an inspiration. She writes about the "the grittiness of being a human being," not socio-political metaphors for Nigerian corruption.
2. Margaret Atwood "Spotty-Handed Viallainess: Problems of Female Bad Behavior in Literature" Atwood agrees with me. I despise political correctness. To me it is anti-feminist behavior when females decry: "MISOGYNY!!!!" whenever a writer portrays a woman in evil light. What rank hypocrisy and stupidity!!! Equality? What should men think about the way that men are usually portrayed by everybody? Atwood starts with Lady Macbeth ("the Spotty-handed villainess") and traces the richness of dirty women in fiction. For males, the bad female is anima; for women, the shadow. Has she no free will? Did the patriarchy make her do it? "Goodness is boring. Why should men get all the juicy parts? Women characters arise. Take back the night."
3. Russell Banks: "No, But I Saw the Movie."
"The Sweethereafter" and "Affliction" by Banks had critically acclaimed film adaptations. The Hollywo0d-writer relationship changed for the better. Some chase it; some flee. Banks had a positive experience. Neither is superior, just different. Separate but equal art forms. (Other authors disagree, pronouncing the "activeness" of reading is superior to the passiveness of viewing.) Films are in your face; books are in your head. Inexpensive technology allows auteur directors to bring literary films to sophisticated viewers with acceptable financial risk. Writing is more intimate than sex and is best when it occurs between extreme strangers. Therefore, writers must desire to be intimate with strangers: to speak from one's most vulnerable, secret and truthful self to the reader's most intimate self."It's the kindness of strangers that count. Two different solar systems have intersecting orbits. When we open a novel, we bring our memories, our fears, our longings, our dreams. The writer does the same. two strangers become secret sharers."
4. E.L. Doctorow: Childhood of a Writer
Doctorow reflects on how an enriched childhood with poor parents and a wealth of books led him to become a great novelist. As a child, he almost died of appendicitis. The books that he read during convalescence "imprinted" on him. He presents a warm picture of growing up Jewish in New York City where the males were skeptical and the women religious and money was tight during the Depression and World War II.
5. Edward P. Jones: Finding the Known World.
Jones confesses that he did almost no research on the subject of slavery or the geography of Virginia. He wanted an imaginary world that would capture the imagination. In making all of the book up, he avoided people nitpicking to find historical inaccuracies; yet, the world he described seems even more realistic than the world that was. He wrote this book with no reader in mind other than himself. "You cannot write with faith in yourself if you are worried about the reader's tastes." Jones was governed by the unadorned poetry of the Bible and the voice of his southern mother.
6. Ursula Le Guin: Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?
The question is unanswerable, but fiction writers attempt to answer the unanswerable. Writing is hard work. The secret to writing is writing. Writing is how you be a writer. Experience. The air is full of stories. You must let the story tell itself. It's not a secret, but it is a mystery, and you must wait in silence and listen for the tune, the story the vision and be ready for it when it comes. Trust in yourself. Trust in the world. The world will give me what I need, and I will use it rightly. Readiness. Not grabbiness or greed. Willingness to hear, to listen carefully, to see accurately and carefully--to let the words be right. To know how to make something out of the vision. She quotes Virginia Woolf that rhythm is the way to dislodge these constipated visions. Next to Jeanette Winterson's, Le Guin's is the most quotable and inspiring essay. Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We force the world to be coherent and tell us a story. "Storytellers are liars. All humans are liars; that is true, you must believe me." She prefers invention to imitation. She loves made up stuff. Invention can transfigure the dark matter of life. A novel is a collaboration between reader and writer. She gets her ideas from other people's books. Literature is a communal experience. Likewise, ULG quotes VW on the rhythm of words being the key to writing.
7. Marilynne Robinson: On Beauty
MR (after Doctorow is my favorite writer in this collection). Oddly, I thought this lecture the weakest and most abstract essay in the anthology. We don't have very many words in English for the nuance of beauty. The narrative is how we make sense of things. (That's pretty all I have to offer after only one reading.)
8. Wallace Stegner: Fiction to Make Sense of Life
Stegner prefers quiet understatement to grandiosity in writing. He admires writers who are sculptors rather than carpenters. Good writers are lenses not mirrors. All fiction is autobiographical, and all autobiographies are fictions. Fiction attempts to impose order upon the only life we will ever know. We write to try and make sense of this one life. "Our life begins by accident and proceeds by trial and error until dubious ends." We have to examine life if only to persuade ourselves that we are in control of it. The guts of fiction is the anguished question. He has a hard enough time trying to make sense of what life hands him rather than chasing excitement, riots or mass meetings. Fiction should have no agenda other than to try to be truthful. The thunder shouts from pulpits and podiums trying to speak to the deaf, Stegner squeaks, but this essay is one of the better ones.
9. Robert Stone: Morality and Truth in Literature
A novelist must take on moral and political dimensions. He believes it is best done by showing the effect of a system on individual human beings. However, a writer should first understand and then take great pains to get inside the mind of the oppressor and to present it for the complexity of life. We tell ourselves stories to keep our sense of self intact. As dreams wake to life, so does fiction to reality. Writers must write well and truly. Fiction is an act of loneliness to appeal to a community. Fiction forbids moralizing, religiosity, or propaganda.
10. Jeanette Winterson: What is Art For?
Wow. The editor saved the best for last. Winterson is a lesbian who was raised in extreme religious fundamentalism where reading books other than the Bible were forbidden. She would hide paperback novels under her mattress. Rather than seeing herself as a victim, she imagined herself as characters in books she read. She makes a passionate case for finding art which keeps us human and nourishes our soul in a capitalist culture that sees us as products rather than souls. Art is not for education or moralizing; churches and schools take care of this. The best art outlasts all moral and political theories. Art looks past period to the permanent. Art gives us a sense of ourselves. Art requires the participation of imagination. Imagination requires involvement. It is not passive. As your mind becomes engaged, you start asking questions. Cults/extreme religions are popular because they purport to tell us who we are and to define our world. They offer fast food approach to a slow cook problem. The sense of self requires a lifetime of development. Out of the conversation with art comes a new sense of who we are. Art, by its very nature, is a question. It requires our uninterrupted attention. We receive it best in the posture of alert-rest.
Art's counterculture celebrates love and imagination. It comes from a passionate, reckless love for the work of art in its own right. Art is about the individual, the individual commitment. It speaks to the part of us that is fully human, the part that belongs only to ourselves. It speaks voice-to-voice, across time, singing a song pitched to the human ear, singing of destiny, of fear, of loss, of hope, of renewal, of change, of connection, of all the subtle and fragile relationships between men and women, their children, their country, and all the things not measured or understood by our money culture. Art slips through, and us with it-- slips past the border police and the currency controls to talk as we've always wanted to, about matters of the spirit in the heart, to imagine a world not dominated by numbers, to find in colors and poetry and sand an equivalent to our deepest feelings, a language for what we are. Human beings, made of flesh, something strange called the soul that just won't let us forget about the invisible world we deny. Art is the soul's ally and calls us out, past what we know and take for granted, into what we dream. Unlike the money culture, art values the sensitive human being.
Add the fact is that human beings are what we have to deal with, including ourselves, and human nature always has been, and still will be, the raw material of art. That is why times spent reading books, is never a waste of time. What you find are templates that make sense of yourself, and your self in the world. Humans learn by copying; humans learn by analogy. When anything new comes along, we refer to it we relate to what we already know. Our brains find a template and use it to formulate the unique experience or emotion. Art creates new templates.
Art expands our territory. We shaken and awaken ourselves. "Art won't let you sleepwalk from one experience to another, going through the motions of life, art keeps you alert." When we understand the rhythms of poetry and the images of language, we begin to hear the speech of what is around us. The life of things.
"Art tells the truth. That makes it desperately needed, and desperately feared. There is no better communicator for our deepest feelings than art, and no better way of connecting those limbic and neural pathways nature gave us to struggle with until the end of time. What are we for? We are restless, searching creatures–poignant in our smallness, triumphant in our determination not to be small. It is all of these things–our determination, our aspiration, perhaps our an inevitable failure–that Art relates back to us. But art is more than a recording angel. It is the creative force that marks out our humanness, the creative force that seeks to bind together all the separations that we are.
Books split me open and unleash my atomic energy and explosive power. Periods of my life have been so harsh that I am surprised that I have become more sensitive rather than less. When pain is too acute, we seek comfort in numbness. We "damage" ourselves to save ourselves. Reading nurtures my sensitivity. I create stories to lead my lonely way through this new experience.
I bought this book to plan a novel that has been sloshing around in my belly for a couple of decades but is now ready for conception. These lectures do not teach technical aspect of the craft like Stephen King. Instead they explain why it is worth my effort to write a novel that nobody else will ever read and why that is a valuable use of my life.
All of the voices in this collection inspired me:
Adichie--no place like home but sacrifice it for solitude to write about gritty humanity;
Atwood--real feminists create juicy bad girls who are both shadow and anime;
Jones--create an imaginary world without apology or speculation about its reception;
Banks--become a secret sharer with a stranger;
Le Guin--the readiness (to observe and write) is all;
Stegner-- be a sculptor (not a carpenter); be a lens (not a mirror); make truth the only agenda;
Stone--Show the effect of political systems on individuals without preaching.
I yearn for the intimate connection with strangers; however, I will have no readers at all. I summon my multiple voices to speak to each other as intimate strangers. My sense of self is task enough, and I create with no expectation of reward. Writing is my final act of grace. I resolve to look and listen and then to tell the gritty truth about the world that I observe. I make the same mistakes, but I do the right thing.
"For those who want to live in a deeper, funnier, wilder, more troubled, more colorful, more interesting way, the way in which not only writing matters but also has beauty, memory, politics, family, and everything else, put on your reading glasses and turn the page. Your people have something to tell you..."
This book refutes the claim that writing exists as a dying cultural activity that was surpassed by film, television, and interactive gaming--that literature is dying as surely as chamber music. This book collects the lectures from 10 famous authors who spoke at the Portland Literature Festival about the passionate engagement of the human soul with literature.
1. Chimamanda Adichie: "305 Cartwright Avenue"
"My writing comes from hope, from melancholy, from rage, and from curiosity."
Adichie grew up loving literature in Nigeria. She lived in the same house (on Cartwright Avenue) where Chinua Achebe lived and spirits hovered. She thought that all books had to have white people in them, but, after reading Chinua Achebe, she realized that Igbo culture was worthy of literature. Writing gives her extravagant joy. When she can't write, she feels soul-crushing anxiety. She loves the solitude of writing and the near mystical experience of creating. She writes because she loves the possibility of touching another person with her work. (Leftist political prisoner Lori Berenson repeatedly read "Half of a Yellow Sun during her captivity.) Writing is a wondrous blessing but it is also a craft that requires steely determination and sacrifice of time with the people whom she loves. Anything can be an inspiration. She writes about the "the grittiness of being a human being," not socio-political metaphors for Nigerian corruption.
2. Margaret Atwood "Spotty-Handed Viallainess: Problems of Female Bad Behavior in Literature" Atwood agrees with me. I despise political correctness. To me it is anti-feminist behavior when females decry: "MISOGYNY!!!!" whenever a writer portrays a woman in evil light. What rank hypocrisy and stupidity!!! Equality? What should men think about the way that men are usually portrayed by everybody? Atwood starts with Lady Macbeth ("the Spotty-handed villainess") and traces the richness of dirty women in fiction. For males, the bad female is anima; for women, the shadow. Has she no free will? Did the patriarchy make her do it? "Goodness is boring. Why should men get all the juicy parts? Women characters arise. Take back the night."
3. Russell Banks: "No, But I Saw the Movie."
"The Sweethereafter" and "Affliction" by Banks had critically acclaimed film adaptations. The Hollywo0d-writer relationship changed for the better. Some chase it; some flee. Banks had a positive experience. Neither is superior, just different. Separate but equal art forms. (Other authors disagree, pronouncing the "activeness" of reading is superior to the passiveness of viewing.) Films are in your face; books are in your head. Inexpensive technology allows auteur directors to bring literary films to sophisticated viewers with acceptable financial risk. Writing is more intimate than sex and is best when it occurs between extreme strangers. Therefore, writers must desire to be intimate with strangers: to speak from one's most vulnerable, secret and truthful self to the reader's most intimate self."It's the kindness of strangers that count. Two different solar systems have intersecting orbits. When we open a novel, we bring our memories, our fears, our longings, our dreams. The writer does the same. two strangers become secret sharers."
4. E.L. Doctorow: Childhood of a Writer
Doctorow reflects on how an enriched childhood with poor parents and a wealth of books led him to become a great novelist. As a child, he almost died of appendicitis. The books that he read during convalescence "imprinted" on him. He presents a warm picture of growing up Jewish in New York City where the males were skeptical and the women religious and money was tight during the Depression and World War II.
5. Edward P. Jones: Finding the Known World.
Jones confesses that he did almost no research on the subject of slavery or the geography of Virginia. He wanted an imaginary world that would capture the imagination. In making all of the book up, he avoided people nitpicking to find historical inaccuracies; yet, the world he described seems even more realistic than the world that was. He wrote this book with no reader in mind other than himself. "You cannot write with faith in yourself if you are worried about the reader's tastes." Jones was governed by the unadorned poetry of the Bible and the voice of his southern mother.
6. Ursula Le Guin: Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?
The question is unanswerable, but fiction writers attempt to answer the unanswerable. Writing is hard work. The secret to writing is writing. Writing is how you be a writer. Experience. The air is full of stories. You must let the story tell itself. It's not a secret, but it is a mystery, and you must wait in silence and listen for the tune, the story the vision and be ready for it when it comes. Trust in yourself. Trust in the world. The world will give me what I need, and I will use it rightly. Readiness. Not grabbiness or greed. Willingness to hear, to listen carefully, to see accurately and carefully--to let the words be right. To know how to make something out of the vision. She quotes Virginia Woolf that rhythm is the way to dislodge these constipated visions. Next to Jeanette Winterson's, Le Guin's is the most quotable and inspiring essay. Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We force the world to be coherent and tell us a story. "Storytellers are liars. All humans are liars; that is true, you must believe me." She prefers invention to imitation. She loves made up stuff. Invention can transfigure the dark matter of life. A novel is a collaboration between reader and writer. She gets her ideas from other people's books. Literature is a communal experience. Likewise, ULG quotes VW on the rhythm of words being the key to writing.
7. Marilynne Robinson: On Beauty
MR (after Doctorow is my favorite writer in this collection). Oddly, I thought this lecture the weakest and most abstract essay in the anthology. We don't have very many words in English for the nuance of beauty. The narrative is how we make sense of things. (That's pretty all I have to offer after only one reading.)
8. Wallace Stegner: Fiction to Make Sense of Life
Stegner prefers quiet understatement to grandiosity in writing. He admires writers who are sculptors rather than carpenters. Good writers are lenses not mirrors. All fiction is autobiographical, and all autobiographies are fictions. Fiction attempts to impose order upon the only life we will ever know. We write to try and make sense of this one life. "Our life begins by accident and proceeds by trial and error until dubious ends." We have to examine life if only to persuade ourselves that we are in control of it. The guts of fiction is the anguished question. He has a hard enough time trying to make sense of what life hands him rather than chasing excitement, riots or mass meetings. Fiction should have no agenda other than to try to be truthful. The thunder shouts from pulpits and podiums trying to speak to the deaf, Stegner squeaks, but this essay is one of the better ones.
9. Robert Stone: Morality and Truth in Literature
A novelist must take on moral and political dimensions. He believes it is best done by showing the effect of a system on individual human beings. However, a writer should first understand and then take great pains to get inside the mind of the oppressor and to present it for the complexity of life. We tell ourselves stories to keep our sense of self intact. As dreams wake to life, so does fiction to reality. Writers must write well and truly. Fiction is an act of loneliness to appeal to a community. Fiction forbids moralizing, religiosity, or propaganda.
10. Jeanette Winterson: What is Art For?
Wow. The editor saved the best for last. Winterson is a lesbian who was raised in extreme religious fundamentalism where reading books other than the Bible were forbidden. She would hide paperback novels under her mattress. Rather than seeing herself as a victim, she imagined herself as characters in books she read. She makes a passionate case for finding art which keeps us human and nourishes our soul in a capitalist culture that sees us as products rather than souls. Art is not for education or moralizing; churches and schools take care of this. The best art outlasts all moral and political theories. Art looks past period to the permanent. Art gives us a sense of ourselves. Art requires the participation of imagination. Imagination requires involvement. It is not passive. As your mind becomes engaged, you start asking questions. Cults/extreme religions are popular because they purport to tell us who we are and to define our world. They offer fast food approach to a slow cook problem. The sense of self requires a lifetime of development. Out of the conversation with art comes a new sense of who we are. Art, by its very nature, is a question. It requires our uninterrupted attention. We receive it best in the posture of alert-rest.
Art's counterculture celebrates love and imagination. It comes from a passionate, reckless love for the work of art in its own right. Art is about the individual, the individual commitment. It speaks to the part of us that is fully human, the part that belongs only to ourselves. It speaks voice-to-voice, across time, singing a song pitched to the human ear, singing of destiny, of fear, of loss, of hope, of renewal, of change, of connection, of all the subtle and fragile relationships between men and women, their children, their country, and all the things not measured or understood by our money culture. Art slips through, and us with it-- slips past the border police and the currency controls to talk as we've always wanted to, about matters of the spirit in the heart, to imagine a world not dominated by numbers, to find in colors and poetry and sand an equivalent to our deepest feelings, a language for what we are. Human beings, made of flesh, something strange called the soul that just won't let us forget about the invisible world we deny. Art is the soul's ally and calls us out, past what we know and take for granted, into what we dream. Unlike the money culture, art values the sensitive human being.
Add the fact is that human beings are what we have to deal with, including ourselves, and human nature always has been, and still will be, the raw material of art. That is why times spent reading books, is never a waste of time. What you find are templates that make sense of yourself, and your self in the world. Humans learn by copying; humans learn by analogy. When anything new comes along, we refer to it we relate to what we already know. Our brains find a template and use it to formulate the unique experience or emotion. Art creates new templates.
Art expands our territory. We shaken and awaken ourselves. "Art won't let you sleepwalk from one experience to another, going through the motions of life, art keeps you alert." When we understand the rhythms of poetry and the images of language, we begin to hear the speech of what is around us. The life of things.
"Art tells the truth. That makes it desperately needed, and desperately feared. There is no better communicator for our deepest feelings than art, and no better way of connecting those limbic and neural pathways nature gave us to struggle with until the end of time. What are we for? We are restless, searching creatures–poignant in our smallness, triumphant in our determination not to be small. It is all of these things–our determination, our aspiration, perhaps our an inevitable failure–that Art relates back to us. But art is more than a recording angel. It is the creative force that marks out our humanness, the creative force that seeks to bind together all the separations that we are.
Books split me open and unleash my atomic energy and explosive power. Periods of my life have been so harsh that I am surprised that I have become more sensitive rather than less. When pain is too acute, we seek comfort in numbness. We "damage" ourselves to save ourselves. Reading nurtures my sensitivity. I create stories to lead my lonely way through this new experience.
I bought this book to plan a novel that has been sloshing around in my belly for a couple of decades but is now ready for conception. These lectures do not teach technical aspect of the craft like Stephen King. Instead they explain why it is worth my effort to write a novel that nobody else will ever read and why that is a valuable use of my life.
All of the voices in this collection inspired me:
Adichie--no place like home but sacrifice it for solitude to write about gritty humanity;
Atwood--real feminists create juicy bad girls who are both shadow and anime;
Jones--create an imaginary world without apology or speculation about its reception;
Banks--become a secret sharer with a stranger;
Le Guin--the readiness (to observe and write) is all;
Stegner-- be a sculptor (not a carpenter); be a lens (not a mirror); make truth the only agenda;
Stone--Show the effect of political systems on individuals without preaching.
I yearn for the intimate connection with strangers; however, I will have no readers at all. I summon my multiple voices to speak to each other as intimate strangers. My sense of self is task enough, and I create with no expectation of reward. Writing is my final act of grace. I resolve to look and listen and then to tell the gritty truth about the world that I observe. I make the same mistakes, but I do the right thing.
July 31, 2015
I've always enjoyed listening to writers talking about their work and learning more about the writing process from the experts. This collection of talks by writers at Portland's (US) Literary Arts includes presentations over more than a twenty year period, from ten writers (some unknown to me).
As in any collection, each presentation is likely to interest some listeners (or readers) more than others. The ones I found most fascinating were those by Chimanda Adiche (who talks about the importance of place for a writer), Jeanette Winterson (who made up for her background deprived of books except for the Bible and who talks about searching out - and even stealing - books to nourish the imagination) and Margaret Atwood who writes about the importance of transgression in writing - challenging the prevailing norms - and of the importance of the feminist movement in encouraging writers to think differently about their women protagonists.
This is a confirmation of all I believe about writing and reading - the importance of realism, experience, empathy and imagination. And above all, the craft of writing that searches for that exact word or phrase to enlarge and challenge our thinking and emotions.
As in any collection, each presentation is likely to interest some listeners (or readers) more than others. The ones I found most fascinating were those by Chimanda Adiche (who talks about the importance of place for a writer), Jeanette Winterson (who made up for her background deprived of books except for the Bible and who talks about searching out - and even stealing - books to nourish the imagination) and Margaret Atwood who writes about the importance of transgression in writing - challenging the prevailing norms - and of the importance of the feminist movement in encouraging writers to think differently about their women protagonists.
This is a confirmation of all I believe about writing and reading - the importance of realism, experience, empathy and imagination. And above all, the craft of writing that searches for that exact word or phrase to enlarge and challenge our thinking and emotions.
February 4, 2015
This collection of lectures and essays is uneven, but the opening piece by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie alone justifies its publication. Adichie's mesmerising novel Americanah was one of the standout reads of 2014, and this reflection on writing, childhood, postcolonial politics, academia and life in general makes me want to read everything she's ever written and then take her out for drinks to just listen to her talk. She is one of the luminescent minds of our time.
November 24, 2021
Reading the thoughts of experienced writers about art, literature, science, love, and finding similarities with my thoughts felt incredibly pleasing
March 26, 2015
This collection opens with an essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which was the text of a talk I saw her give at Seattle Arts & Lectures in 2012. I was entranced at the time, and enjoyed reading it again to be transported into the house where the author grew up in Nigeria. The book is an assortment of essays about writing by famous writers though the individual topics are quite different. My favorites were those by Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, and Ursula K. LeGuin. If you're a literary sort of reader, and especially if you're a writer, I recommend this collection!
January 11, 2015
If you read only one essay from this diverse collection, make it Ursula K. LeGuin's "Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?" Some quotes from the piece:
"Fiction results from imagination working on experience." (p. 101)
"To say that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to imply that imitation is superior to invention." (p. 103)
"Truth in art is not imitation, but reincarnation." (p. 105)
"Reading is an active transaction between the text and the reader." (p. 106)
"Fiction results from imagination working on experience." (p. 101)
"To say that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to imply that imitation is superior to invention." (p. 103)
"Truth in art is not imitation, but reincarnation." (p. 105)
"Reading is an active transaction between the text and the reader." (p. 106)
November 17, 2014
Overall, somewhat disappointed. I admit, I bought the book without checking the contents very closely. Most of these essays are from the 1990s — which doesn't mean they can't be good, relevant, etc. But the collection is very uneven. Different people will, no doubt, have their own favorites. Mine were Adiche, Atwood, and Doctorow. Russell Banks was okay. I couldn't warm to the rest.
January 23, 2018
I read books on the craft of writing a lot since I am on the road to publication. This is a book of lectures these authors gave.
Unfortunately, it didn't move me much. I did, however, find the lecture by Edward P. Jones very interesting.
I'm glad I got this from the library and didn't buy. Hate to say it, but it was disappointing.
Unfortunately, it didn't move me much. I did, however, find the lecture by Edward P. Jones very interesting.
I'm glad I got this from the library and didn't buy. Hate to say it, but it was disappointing.
Read
February 10, 2018Ursula K. Le Guin's essay "Where do you get your ideas from" simply blew me away. What an inspirational essay for writers--humorous, with a real human element that lets you know that the sitting part of writing is necessary. Her incorporation of Virginia Woolf's comments at the end were a great tie in, as well. I will definitely move forward an enriched writer after reading this essay.
December 15, 2017
An interesting collection from a wide variety of authors. Mostly transcriptions from presentations, which gives it a different feel. Some essays were more appealing to me than others, but that's pretty much par for the course with collections.
June 1, 2017
This is a wonderful little book for readers who are interested in what writers have to say about their craft, published to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the non-profit organization Literary Arts in Oregon. Tin House Books has put together a collection of ten lectures delivered on the Portland Arts and Lecture stage by authors who discuss why good literature matters, both in their own personal lives and in the world at large.
The collection comes from presentations given during the years 1999-2012 and is presented in alphabetical order rather than chronologically, with each author commenting on the subject from a different point of view. The essays range widely moving from a world view of writing to the more personal viewpoint of individual writers. This is not a book aimed at those looking for a “how to” on writing good fiction, but a collection of thoughts and recollections from successful writers. There were several pieces that resonated with me.
In her “305 Marguerite Cartwright Avenue” presentation from May 2012, Nigerian author Chimamanda Adiche discusses how the home she grew up in became an inspiration for her writing. She describes it as a small safe space, although the dining room table where she first starting writing was often a noisy place. Adiche believes spirits still linger in that house which also coincidentally provided a home for Chinua Achebe, a writer she reveres and whose work is important to her. Adiche writes about the Biafra War and how it has haunted her family and hundreds of others. She admits to finding her writing process difficult to describe because it is both conscious and unconscious and not something she purposefully controls. She knows she is a keen observer of people, their postures and their expressions and is also alert to the colors of objects around her. Any of these may become an inspiration for a story and later a part of her fiction. When she does write she becomes inward, locking herself up for weeks, ignoring the pleas of friends and paying little personal attention to herself. She admits that in both her reading and her writing she is often drawn to what is dark, melancholy and sad. Like other authors in this collection, she tries to make sense of the world by story-telling, reminding herself what it means to be human.
In the March 1991 lecture “Childhood of a Writer” given by E.L. Doctorow, the author talks about the special books he read as a young boy that resonated throughout his lifetime. He describes how he first began reading in earnest when he spent long days in bed recovering from a burst appendix. His parents left piles of books by his bedside which they regularly replenished and reading helped him pass the long hours and days of recovery. Slowly and gradually over time, books and reading simply became an important part of his life.
In the December 1999 presentation “No But I Saw the Movie”, Russell Banks speaks to the process of adapting books to film and how that process has changed over time. In the past movies based on books were poorly done and writers felt exploited and deceived by the dictates of studio bosses, marketing mavens and financiers. But the results have changed since the industry moved into the hands of independent filmmakers who now have control of what ends up on film. Banks’ experience with independent film makers Quentin Tarantino and Atom Egoyan has shown that when serious writers and artistic filmmakers work together, they can produce something that enhances the written word and of which both partners can be proud. Banks now believes that film is no longer a threat to good literature. He has learned that what can be done in film often cannot be done in a novel. Conversely, what can be done in a novel cannot always be done in a film. He describes the process of trying to get "a fiction that is in his head on to a film that is in your face” an instructive and interesting experience.
In the lecture on April 2005, Edward P. Jones described the decade long process he took to write his prize winning novel “The Known World” about black slave owner Henry Townsend from the fictional county of Manchester Virginia. He started out with piles of research but eventually abandoned that process to let his ideas sit and germinate in his head. They stayed there for over a decade until the right story formed itself and he was able to get it on paper. Interestingly, even though he wrote the novel without doing any research, his Pulitzer Prize book was praised for its authenticity. Jones believes that abandoning the research and creating his own imaginary history allowed him to tell a story that was completely his own, making him responsible only to himself for the characters he was creating, the city, scenes and architecture he described and the historical incidents he fabricated for its context. It proved an award winning combination.
In Ursula K. le Guin’s October 2000 lecture “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” she mocks this foolish question often asked of writers. She believes the world is full of stories and a writer simply needs to choose one and tell it. But they must be ready to hear what that story is, hear it with a good ear, see it with a keen eye and write it with a skilled hand, rich vocabulary and correct grammar. She stresses the need for patience to get the words right and believes patience over time delivers mastery. She reminds all would be writers of what they don’t want to hear: that if they want to be writers they must write. There is no magic bullet. The secret to good writing is writing and writers master their craft through practice.
LeGuin believes ideas come from a writer’s experience of reality, but are not just a mirror of that reality. That experience has been worked upon, changed, filtered, distorted and clarified by imagination. It is how she gets the ideas for the fantasy and science fiction she writes. And she reminds story tellers to be careful to tell just enough of the story that the reader can imagine it himself. Delivering a story to a reader is a collaborative process.
Wallace Stegner’s lecture in November 1990 put forward his belief that writers write about what is important to them. Like many others, he believes we use literature to help us make sense of life. We live life; then we write about it. But just like every fiction is autobiographical, every autobiography is to some extent a fiction. They are different, but both are attempts at the truth.
Stegner’s novel “Crossing to Safety” was his attempt to understand and make sense of an important relationship in the lives of both himself and his wife. It was a rich and rewarding friendship that lasted over thirty years, but left the couple searching for meaning. Stegner wrote the story because he was trying to understand how the deepest and most troubling relationship of their lives was at the same time the most rewarding. And although he still does not understand the couple who were close friends, he says the relationship that existed in his life and is now his memory is less troubling since he put it between the pages of a book.
In the November 2000 lecture “What is Art for?” Jeanette Winterson’s answers the question by saying that art gives us a sense of ourselves. She describes growing up poor in a mill town, the adopted child of very religious parents who distrusted education and any book that was not the bible. Reading was the process by which Winterson nurtured her free will, smuggling books into the house and hiding them under her mattress. Even when her mother discovered her cache and burned her collection in the back yard, Winterson’s resolve was not deterred. The written word became her path to survival.
She also discusses how true classics, although written in the past never become dated because they continue to hold truths relevant for the present day. Art stimulates the brain and gives it something new to absorb. It challenges the egocentric “I” that we are and asks us to see beyond our own assumptions, prejudices and templates. It keeps us alive to life, its beauty and its complexity. Art pushes aside old fixed structures and boundaries and reminds us those boundaries exist only in our head and can be altered.
Margaret Atwood’s contribution in February 1994 titled “Spotty Handed Villainesses: Problems of Females Bad Behavior in the Creation of Literature” is presented in her usual witty way. She talks about the need for complex female characters and who else but Atwood could have such a quirky title for her presentation? She believes characters such as Madame Bovary and Hester Prynne have helped readers explore the idea of moral freedom, ideas which writers have explored by creating illicit individuals and exploring distasteful topics rather than dictating moral certitude. As a result, writers now have a broader number of subjects and a wider range of characters and language to use in their fiction. Stories that include female characters that did bad things have helped readers look at a wide range of possibilities in human behavior. These imaginative characters rebelled against social and sexual norms, said what was previously deemed unsayable or unthinkable, flaunted authority, expressed pain and anger, left their husbands, deserted their children and even lived with other woman. They helped society to consider and even accept that these were not such bad things after all.
The essays all underlie the belief that books are an important way to widen our horizons as well as entertain. In a time when books are overshadowed by the plethora of film, television and video games, great writing survives and holds its own. Readers still enjoy a good read, an intense, eager and impassioned engagement with the written word. Like all good writing this collection does not tell us good writing matters; it shows us that it does.
The collection comes from presentations given during the years 1999-2012 and is presented in alphabetical order rather than chronologically, with each author commenting on the subject from a different point of view. The essays range widely moving from a world view of writing to the more personal viewpoint of individual writers. This is not a book aimed at those looking for a “how to” on writing good fiction, but a collection of thoughts and recollections from successful writers. There were several pieces that resonated with me.
In her “305 Marguerite Cartwright Avenue” presentation from May 2012, Nigerian author Chimamanda Adiche discusses how the home she grew up in became an inspiration for her writing. She describes it as a small safe space, although the dining room table where she first starting writing was often a noisy place. Adiche believes spirits still linger in that house which also coincidentally provided a home for Chinua Achebe, a writer she reveres and whose work is important to her. Adiche writes about the Biafra War and how it has haunted her family and hundreds of others. She admits to finding her writing process difficult to describe because it is both conscious and unconscious and not something she purposefully controls. She knows she is a keen observer of people, their postures and their expressions and is also alert to the colors of objects around her. Any of these may become an inspiration for a story and later a part of her fiction. When she does write she becomes inward, locking herself up for weeks, ignoring the pleas of friends and paying little personal attention to herself. She admits that in both her reading and her writing she is often drawn to what is dark, melancholy and sad. Like other authors in this collection, she tries to make sense of the world by story-telling, reminding herself what it means to be human.
In the March 1991 lecture “Childhood of a Writer” given by E.L. Doctorow, the author talks about the special books he read as a young boy that resonated throughout his lifetime. He describes how he first began reading in earnest when he spent long days in bed recovering from a burst appendix. His parents left piles of books by his bedside which they regularly replenished and reading helped him pass the long hours and days of recovery. Slowly and gradually over time, books and reading simply became an important part of his life.
In the December 1999 presentation “No But I Saw the Movie”, Russell Banks speaks to the process of adapting books to film and how that process has changed over time. In the past movies based on books were poorly done and writers felt exploited and deceived by the dictates of studio bosses, marketing mavens and financiers. But the results have changed since the industry moved into the hands of independent filmmakers who now have control of what ends up on film. Banks’ experience with independent film makers Quentin Tarantino and Atom Egoyan has shown that when serious writers and artistic filmmakers work together, they can produce something that enhances the written word and of which both partners can be proud. Banks now believes that film is no longer a threat to good literature. He has learned that what can be done in film often cannot be done in a novel. Conversely, what can be done in a novel cannot always be done in a film. He describes the process of trying to get "a fiction that is in his head on to a film that is in your face” an instructive and interesting experience.
In the lecture on April 2005, Edward P. Jones described the decade long process he took to write his prize winning novel “The Known World” about black slave owner Henry Townsend from the fictional county of Manchester Virginia. He started out with piles of research but eventually abandoned that process to let his ideas sit and germinate in his head. They stayed there for over a decade until the right story formed itself and he was able to get it on paper. Interestingly, even though he wrote the novel without doing any research, his Pulitzer Prize book was praised for its authenticity. Jones believes that abandoning the research and creating his own imaginary history allowed him to tell a story that was completely his own, making him responsible only to himself for the characters he was creating, the city, scenes and architecture he described and the historical incidents he fabricated for its context. It proved an award winning combination.
In Ursula K. le Guin’s October 2000 lecture “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” she mocks this foolish question often asked of writers. She believes the world is full of stories and a writer simply needs to choose one and tell it. But they must be ready to hear what that story is, hear it with a good ear, see it with a keen eye and write it with a skilled hand, rich vocabulary and correct grammar. She stresses the need for patience to get the words right and believes patience over time delivers mastery. She reminds all would be writers of what they don’t want to hear: that if they want to be writers they must write. There is no magic bullet. The secret to good writing is writing and writers master their craft through practice.
LeGuin believes ideas come from a writer’s experience of reality, but are not just a mirror of that reality. That experience has been worked upon, changed, filtered, distorted and clarified by imagination. It is how she gets the ideas for the fantasy and science fiction she writes. And she reminds story tellers to be careful to tell just enough of the story that the reader can imagine it himself. Delivering a story to a reader is a collaborative process.
Wallace Stegner’s lecture in November 1990 put forward his belief that writers write about what is important to them. Like many others, he believes we use literature to help us make sense of life. We live life; then we write about it. But just like every fiction is autobiographical, every autobiography is to some extent a fiction. They are different, but both are attempts at the truth.
Stegner’s novel “Crossing to Safety” was his attempt to understand and make sense of an important relationship in the lives of both himself and his wife. It was a rich and rewarding friendship that lasted over thirty years, but left the couple searching for meaning. Stegner wrote the story because he was trying to understand how the deepest and most troubling relationship of their lives was at the same time the most rewarding. And although he still does not understand the couple who were close friends, he says the relationship that existed in his life and is now his memory is less troubling since he put it between the pages of a book.
In the November 2000 lecture “What is Art for?” Jeanette Winterson’s answers the question by saying that art gives us a sense of ourselves. She describes growing up poor in a mill town, the adopted child of very religious parents who distrusted education and any book that was not the bible. Reading was the process by which Winterson nurtured her free will, smuggling books into the house and hiding them under her mattress. Even when her mother discovered her cache and burned her collection in the back yard, Winterson’s resolve was not deterred. The written word became her path to survival.
She also discusses how true classics, although written in the past never become dated because they continue to hold truths relevant for the present day. Art stimulates the brain and gives it something new to absorb. It challenges the egocentric “I” that we are and asks us to see beyond our own assumptions, prejudices and templates. It keeps us alive to life, its beauty and its complexity. Art pushes aside old fixed structures and boundaries and reminds us those boundaries exist only in our head and can be altered.
Margaret Atwood’s contribution in February 1994 titled “Spotty Handed Villainesses: Problems of Females Bad Behavior in the Creation of Literature” is presented in her usual witty way. She talks about the need for complex female characters and who else but Atwood could have such a quirky title for her presentation? She believes characters such as Madame Bovary and Hester Prynne have helped readers explore the idea of moral freedom, ideas which writers have explored by creating illicit individuals and exploring distasteful topics rather than dictating moral certitude. As a result, writers now have a broader number of subjects and a wider range of characters and language to use in their fiction. Stories that include female characters that did bad things have helped readers look at a wide range of possibilities in human behavior. These imaginative characters rebelled against social and sexual norms, said what was previously deemed unsayable or unthinkable, flaunted authority, expressed pain and anger, left their husbands, deserted their children and even lived with other woman. They helped society to consider and even accept that these were not such bad things after all.
The essays all underlie the belief that books are an important way to widen our horizons as well as entertain. In a time when books are overshadowed by the plethora of film, television and video games, great writing survives and holds its own. Readers still enjoy a good read, an intense, eager and impassioned engagement with the written word. Like all good writing this collection does not tell us good writing matters; it shows us that it does.
May 10, 2018
This extraordinary collection of essays on the subject of writing deserves a deeper appreciation. I'll work up a "Books for Fantasy Authors" post in the near future.
December 5, 2014
Actually read the Kindle edition, but never mind.
Reading about why writing--and fiction--matter by some of my favorite novelists? What could be better? Margaret Atwood, Wallace Stegner, Ursula K. LeGuin?
"...the way to make an object in fiction exist is to have it worked upon by another object. What makes things come into being is their transaction."
"To say that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to imply that imitation is superior to invention."
"Truth in art is not imitation, but reincarnation... To be valuable in a factual history, the raw material of experience has to be selected, arranged, and shaped. In a novel, the process is even more radical: the raw materials are not only selected and shaped but also fused, composted, recombined, reworked, reconfigured, reborn, and at the same time allowed to find their own forms and shapes..."
"In his Education, Henry Adams wrote, 'Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.' Both fiction and autobiography attempt ... to impose order upon the only life any of us knows, which is our own."
"One of the reasons why tyrants hate books, from Hitler to the Ayatollah, is not so much for what they contain, though that its the usual indictment against them, but what they stand for. Church, state, and media have no powers over the private dialogue between a book and its reader. Reading is an act of free will."
Also includes essays by E.L Doctorow, Russell Banks, Chimamanda Adichie, Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Robert Stone, Jeannette Winterson... A very worthwhile book.
Reading about why writing--and fiction--matter by some of my favorite novelists? What could be better? Margaret Atwood, Wallace Stegner, Ursula K. LeGuin?
"...the way to make an object in fiction exist is to have it worked upon by another object. What makes things come into being is their transaction."
"To say that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to imply that imitation is superior to invention."
"Truth in art is not imitation, but reincarnation... To be valuable in a factual history, the raw material of experience has to be selected, arranged, and shaped. In a novel, the process is even more radical: the raw materials are not only selected and shaped but also fused, composted, recombined, reworked, reconfigured, reborn, and at the same time allowed to find their own forms and shapes..."
"In his Education, Henry Adams wrote, 'Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.' Both fiction and autobiography attempt ... to impose order upon the only life any of us knows, which is our own."
"One of the reasons why tyrants hate books, from Hitler to the Ayatollah, is not so much for what they contain, though that its the usual indictment against them, but what they stand for. Church, state, and media have no powers over the private dialogue between a book and its reader. Reading is an act of free will."
Also includes essays by E.L Doctorow, Russell Banks, Chimamanda Adichie, Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Robert Stone, Jeannette Winterson... A very worthwhile book.
November 25, 2014
My Review:
I have always been fascinated with writers and their writing process. When I read a story I often wonder what went through the writers minds while they were composing. As readers we often glean what we think the writers meant. Are they making a political statement? What hidden meanings are underlying the words that are on the page?
The World Split Open is a book of essays by different writers. In this book they talk about the writing process and how they get their ideas among many other things. This book had some of my favorite writers in it and I was super excited to get a "look behind the scenes" so to speak. One writer who I was sure wrote her book to make a political statement said that she was surprised when people took her book that way. That she was just making up a story based on events that fascinated her. I was somewhat taken aback by this but it makes sense. Writers dont always set out to make any kind of statement but rather to make sense of things in their world.
There are many authors represented here covering a multitude of topics ranging from feminism to handling criticism and such. I found a lot of useful information in this book. We don't often see authors as humans with feelings but this book brings to life the whole picture of authors.
This review was originally posted on Adventures in Never Never Land
I have always been fascinated with writers and their writing process. When I read a story I often wonder what went through the writers minds while they were composing. As readers we often glean what we think the writers meant. Are they making a political statement? What hidden meanings are underlying the words that are on the page?
The World Split Open is a book of essays by different writers. In this book they talk about the writing process and how they get their ideas among many other things. This book had some of my favorite writers in it and I was super excited to get a "look behind the scenes" so to speak. One writer who I was sure wrote her book to make a political statement said that she was surprised when people took her book that way. That she was just making up a story based on events that fascinated her. I was somewhat taken aback by this but it makes sense. Writers dont always set out to make any kind of statement but rather to make sense of things in their world.
There are many authors represented here covering a multitude of topics ranging from feminism to handling criticism and such. I found a lot of useful information in this book. We don't often see authors as humans with feelings but this book brings to life the whole picture of authors.
This review was originally posted on Adventures in Never Never Land
March 13, 2022
I enjoyed reading this book, learned a great deal from it, and especially valued the diversity of contributions enabling a multiple of perspectives on the value of writing and literature in modern society. Film, television, and video games have been threats, but they do not bring joy – just temporary relief from the pain or suffering (David Foster Wallace’s term) of the human condition, at best. So good literature has a fantastic future.
The book editor, Jon Raymond, considers the book a "rebuttal" to the digital age, and although the nine essays included here "don’t constitute a defense of literature,' per se," they do affirm a fundamental relationship of: "the passionate engagement of the human soul with the written word."
The essays constituting this book were originally talks given at the Portland Arts and Lectures series and were selected (with minimal editing) by the editors at Tin House Books in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of Literary Arts, the organization through which the series is run. (The works are presented alphabetically, not chronologically, with the earliest talk dating back to 1988, the most current to 2012.)
The book attempts to explain that significance of good writing in two ways: first, through philosophical exploration, with authors making arguments on behalf of literature's aesthetic and moral place in the modern world; second, through anecdote, with a look over the authors shoulders at how writing has impacted their own lives - and helped shape the lives of their creations.
In my review, I want to highlight some of the key insights from a few authors that I took from this book, for which there is no plot – so there are no spoilers. I was not familiar with the work of some of the authors, so did a little basic research on each (I confess, Wikipedia) to provide some context. For example, the works of Russell Banks (1940-) deal with working class people struggling to overcome destructive relationships, poverty, drug abuse and spiritual confusion – realism. All novels are unavoidably autobiographical to a degree.
The book came to my attention because Margaret Atwood has a chapter, “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behavior in the Creation of Literature.” I agree when she says that writers are among the “last great generalists.” Atwood decries the widespread tendency to judge characters as if they were job applicants, public servants, prospective roommates, or somebody you are considering marrying. Novels are not sociological textbooks, political tracts, how-to books, moral tracts, nor a beautiful structure of art for art’s sake. The novel instead is ambiguous and multi-faceted because it deals with the human condition. She contrasts novelists with critics, and all stories must have conflict of some sort (as the human condition so suffers!) and suspense. E.L. Doctorow’s chapter “Childhood of a Writer” makes similar points. Conflicts can come from the natural world, from outside, from the character’s own experience, or from relationships among the characters. Female bad characters can act as keys to doors we need to open, as mirrors in which we see more than just a pretty face. They can be explorations of moral freedom.
How to write? Insights from all contributors, but I loved the tale of Edward P. Jones in his chapter “Finding the Known World” in which he describes how his novel started with six pages of introduction, six pages of ending, and then he had to fill the 376-page middle. The middle was filled over time as Jones created – and put to paper – multiple stories in his head. Avoid the orderly (research-based) approach and nourish the creative part of your mind.
Ursula K. Le Guin asks, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” and emphasizes the role of imagination in moving from experience (autobiography here) to action. Novelists create fiction by letting imagination work on their experience. As Virginia Woolf wrote in 1926, writing needs a rhythm. Serious fantasy has morality qualities, and a good story must help the reader’s understanding of the shared human condition. Memorable to me was the Le Guin insight that commercial fantasy involves power struggles, but not moral struggles. Moral seriousness makes a fantasy matter. Harry Potter novels are just power struggles among those with power, ignoring the powerless and concerned only with infighting among the “good” and the “bad.” Stories of powerful people sell well to those without power – children. What is “good”? This should be explored, not given as a preliminary to set up the infighting and battles. A good novel needs an “anguished question” as Wallace Stegner puts it so brilliantly in his chapter, “Fiction to Make Sense of Life.” Think of something important to you, something you have brooded about.
Fiction and art have a moral imperative, while a recurring theme, is the focus of “Morality and Truth in Literature” by Robert Stone. Fiction versus meretricious writing. Fiction must understand and illustrate varieties of the human condition, not offer superficial and empty reassurances (of the palliative kind seen in television for example). But there’s more to this – as Jeanette Winterson argues in “What is Art For?” Art holds love and imagination in plain sight. Art is the soul’s ally. How do we learn? By analogy. Education begins where evolution ends. Education gives us templates, and the more templates we have, the better adapted and adjusted we can be. Art ends the wars between heart and head. The best art is the art that lasts. We don’t look at 16th or early 17th Century Caravaggio paintings today because we wish to return to the life of simple piety envisaged by the Cardinal who commissioned them. His paintings combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting. We look at Caravaggio’s paintings today because their wild, strange dark and light still moves us, still makes us puzzle over what it means to be human. Art outlasts moral theories and interpretations that existed at the time of its creation, when the artwork or novel was created.
Reflecting on what makes a good writer. All the writers seem to share some life suffering, and in childhood books were there means of escape into a better place. I was left pondering whether being drawn to good writing later in life means you cannot write well. This is a challenge.
The book editor, Jon Raymond, considers the book a "rebuttal" to the digital age, and although the nine essays included here "don’t constitute a defense of literature,' per se," they do affirm a fundamental relationship of: "the passionate engagement of the human soul with the written word."
The essays constituting this book were originally talks given at the Portland Arts and Lectures series and were selected (with minimal editing) by the editors at Tin House Books in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of Literary Arts, the organization through which the series is run. (The works are presented alphabetically, not chronologically, with the earliest talk dating back to 1988, the most current to 2012.)
The book attempts to explain that significance of good writing in two ways: first, through philosophical exploration, with authors making arguments on behalf of literature's aesthetic and moral place in the modern world; second, through anecdote, with a look over the authors shoulders at how writing has impacted their own lives - and helped shape the lives of their creations.
In my review, I want to highlight some of the key insights from a few authors that I took from this book, for which there is no plot – so there are no spoilers. I was not familiar with the work of some of the authors, so did a little basic research on each (I confess, Wikipedia) to provide some context. For example, the works of Russell Banks (1940-) deal with working class people struggling to overcome destructive relationships, poverty, drug abuse and spiritual confusion – realism. All novels are unavoidably autobiographical to a degree.
The book came to my attention because Margaret Atwood has a chapter, “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behavior in the Creation of Literature.” I agree when she says that writers are among the “last great generalists.” Atwood decries the widespread tendency to judge characters as if they were job applicants, public servants, prospective roommates, or somebody you are considering marrying. Novels are not sociological textbooks, political tracts, how-to books, moral tracts, nor a beautiful structure of art for art’s sake. The novel instead is ambiguous and multi-faceted because it deals with the human condition. She contrasts novelists with critics, and all stories must have conflict of some sort (as the human condition so suffers!) and suspense. E.L. Doctorow’s chapter “Childhood of a Writer” makes similar points. Conflicts can come from the natural world, from outside, from the character’s own experience, or from relationships among the characters. Female bad characters can act as keys to doors we need to open, as mirrors in which we see more than just a pretty face. They can be explorations of moral freedom.
How to write? Insights from all contributors, but I loved the tale of Edward P. Jones in his chapter “Finding the Known World” in which he describes how his novel started with six pages of introduction, six pages of ending, and then he had to fill the 376-page middle. The middle was filled over time as Jones created – and put to paper – multiple stories in his head. Avoid the orderly (research-based) approach and nourish the creative part of your mind.
Ursula K. Le Guin asks, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” and emphasizes the role of imagination in moving from experience (autobiography here) to action. Novelists create fiction by letting imagination work on their experience. As Virginia Woolf wrote in 1926, writing needs a rhythm. Serious fantasy has morality qualities, and a good story must help the reader’s understanding of the shared human condition. Memorable to me was the Le Guin insight that commercial fantasy involves power struggles, but not moral struggles. Moral seriousness makes a fantasy matter. Harry Potter novels are just power struggles among those with power, ignoring the powerless and concerned only with infighting among the “good” and the “bad.” Stories of powerful people sell well to those without power – children. What is “good”? This should be explored, not given as a preliminary to set up the infighting and battles. A good novel needs an “anguished question” as Wallace Stegner puts it so brilliantly in his chapter, “Fiction to Make Sense of Life.” Think of something important to you, something you have brooded about.
Fiction and art have a moral imperative, while a recurring theme, is the focus of “Morality and Truth in Literature” by Robert Stone. Fiction versus meretricious writing. Fiction must understand and illustrate varieties of the human condition, not offer superficial and empty reassurances (of the palliative kind seen in television for example). But there’s more to this – as Jeanette Winterson argues in “What is Art For?” Art holds love and imagination in plain sight. Art is the soul’s ally. How do we learn? By analogy. Education begins where evolution ends. Education gives us templates, and the more templates we have, the better adapted and adjusted we can be. Art ends the wars between heart and head. The best art is the art that lasts. We don’t look at 16th or early 17th Century Caravaggio paintings today because we wish to return to the life of simple piety envisaged by the Cardinal who commissioned them. His paintings combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting. We look at Caravaggio’s paintings today because their wild, strange dark and light still moves us, still makes us puzzle over what it means to be human. Art outlasts moral theories and interpretations that existed at the time of its creation, when the artwork or novel was created.
Reflecting on what makes a good writer. All the writers seem to share some life suffering, and in childhood books were there means of escape into a better place. I was left pondering whether being drawn to good writing later in life means you cannot write well. This is a challenge.
April 25, 2015
I received this book through Goodreads' First reads program.
The World Split Open is a collection of essays (and transcriptions of speeches) about why people write fiction (written by various fiction authors). As is often the case with collections of this type, the topics and the readability/enjoyability of the essays varies.
One of the largest obstacles in reading this collection was the apparent need of some authors to define "legitimate" fiction, often at the expense of other authors within the collection.
The vast differences in style from one author to the next sometimes made it difficult to keep moving through the book, and could probably have been improved by arranging the stories with this in mind.
Each reader will likely find one or two gems within the collection that make the whole worth reading. Those which I found enjoyable certainly raised the score I ultimately gave this book.
The World Split Open is a collection of essays (and transcriptions of speeches) about why people write fiction (written by various fiction authors). As is often the case with collections of this type, the topics and the readability/enjoyability of the essays varies.
One of the largest obstacles in reading this collection was the apparent need of some authors to define "legitimate" fiction, often at the expense of other authors within the collection.
The vast differences in style from one author to the next sometimes made it difficult to keep moving through the book, and could probably have been improved by arranging the stories with this in mind.
Each reader will likely find one or two gems within the collection that make the whole worth reading. Those which I found enjoyable certainly raised the score I ultimately gave this book.
February 7, 2016
As other reviewers have mentioned, there are definitely a few standouts in this collection of essays about writing: Adichie, Doctorow, and Jones were by far my favorites.
Taken as a whole, these pieces offer not only a view into why these writers write, but some useful themes for any practicing or aspiring writer to reflect on themselves - place as a metaphor for identity, or the role of imagination in transforming history into fiction. Understanding the engines beneath the hoods of these various writers was both instructive and inspiring, making this a worthwhile addition to your writer's library, something you'll reach for again and again when you need to get yourself a little unstuck.
Taken as a whole, these pieces offer not only a view into why these writers write, but some useful themes for any practicing or aspiring writer to reflect on themselves - place as a metaphor for identity, or the role of imagination in transforming history into fiction. Understanding the engines beneath the hoods of these various writers was both instructive and inspiring, making this a worthwhile addition to your writer's library, something you'll reach for again and again when you need to get yourself a little unstuck.
March 3, 2017
Came across this book on a shelf of literary criticism in Kramerbooks in DC. It is not at all like one's first reaction when hearing "literary criticism". You, like me, may therefore be pleased. I would recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed works by any of the authors whose talks are included - you will enjoy hearing what they have to say about fiction, What Art Is For, and How One Gets Ideas. I would recommend it to anyone who aspires to writing - there is much to learn from these wise voices. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys ruminating on life and the human condition. I would recommend it to anyone who had to hide books under her mattress as a child, or who does believe we need dragons, or who has ever opened a book like opening a door on a whole new world.
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July 22, 2018Some speeches I loved, some I found more boring, and each was unexpected. So many great stories to be told in these pages. All of them made me think - of writing, of reading, and of humanity. Here's one of my favorite quotes:
From "On Beauty" - My theory of narrative as a fundamental act of consciousness implies to me that paranoia might be entrapment in a bad narrative, and depression may be the inability to sustain narrative.
To see the rest of what I thought, and read a couple more of my favorite quotes from the book, check out my blogpost at https://amylsauder.wordpress.com/2015...
From "On Beauty" - My theory of narrative as a fundamental act of consciousness implies to me that paranoia might be entrapment in a bad narrative, and depression may be the inability to sustain narrative.
To see the rest of what I thought, and read a couple more of my favorite quotes from the book, check out my blogpost at https://amylsauder.wordpress.com/2015...
November 17, 2015
This book first caught my eye as I was doing online research on Jeanette Winterson and her writing on adoption. When I saw that she was included in this compilation (although the presentation she gave for the Portland Literary Arts series has nothing to do with her birth-story), I had to have it. I thought it was a nice bit of serendipity to come across the collection, as the Arts & Lecture series plays a small part in the first Mata Morrow Mystery series.
All of the contributions in the book have withstood the test of time. My personal favorite is the E.L. Doctorow, although all of them have inspired me to read the featured authors yet another time.
All of the contributions in the book have withstood the test of time. My personal favorite is the E.L. Doctorow, although all of them have inspired me to read the featured authors yet another time.
June 17, 2016
Though each of these authors makes a wonderful contribution, my favorites are the speeches given by Ursula K. LeGuin, Marilynne Robinson, and Jeanette Winterson. This collection is a balm for the soul chafed raw by the uncaring industrial, capitalist world that intrudes and imposes itself on us constantly. If we learn our lessons from these masters, we can hopefully endeavor more succesfully to resist and refuse the cold mechanical claws that only try to rip away the dreams and imagination which make us human.
February 22, 2015
A truly inspiring book and a peek into how some of the best writers of our time write.
My favourite contributor was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who was born in Nigeria. I loved her story and her way of telling stories. Other Contributing authors are: Margaret Atwood,Russell Banks,E. L. Doctorow, Edward P. Jones, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, Marilynne Robinson, Wallace Stegner, Robert Stone, Jeanette Winterson and Jonathan Raymond.
My favourite contributor was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who was born in Nigeria. I loved her story and her way of telling stories. Other Contributing authors are: Margaret Atwood,Russell Banks,E. L. Doctorow, Edward P. Jones, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, Marilynne Robinson, Wallace Stegner, Robert Stone, Jeanette Winterson and Jonathan Raymond.
December 17, 2014
3.5 Very interesting collection of essays of writers on writing fiction. My favorites were Russell Banks on fiction and screenplays (Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter) and the essay by Wallace Stegner. I need to reread Crossing to Safety! Marilynne Robinson's essay on Beauty was a bit too esoteric for me, but interesting nonetheless.
July 2, 2015
The ten lectures collected herein explore the great abstractions, and many do so well. Adichie, Atwood, Le Guin, Robinson, and Stegner are particularly notable, though Robinson has, by far and not surprisingly, the most sophisticated--and study-worthy--diction. This volume contains some fine writers doing some fine thinking and requires it of readers as well.
April 24, 2016
Generally interesting essays. I didn't read them all, as I hadn't the time.
Best part? Ursula K. Le Guin's thoughts on imaginative fiction.
Best part? Ursula K. Le Guin's thoughts on imaginative fiction.
February 5, 2017
Some of the essays in this volume merit five stars - Atwood's, Stegner's, and Winterson's, for sure, because they are wise about writing, of course, but also about living and seeing. Atwood's has the further distinction of being hilariously funny. I read a library copy, but the book's a keeper, one you want on the shelves to read again and think about freshly.
December 7, 2014
B A lot of these essays depressed me a bit because what am I doing? Of course I want to write more but how can I with a FT job/ultrarunning/RDing/etc? Need to change some stuff. The essays were not always as inspirational to me as a writer, but some interesting.
August 30, 2016
Some inspiring, thought provoking pieces in here. There were also a couple of meandering pieces, and I feel particularly sorry for the people who had to listen to the Marilynne Robinson talk - I couldn't even finish reading it.
January 28, 2015
There is food for some good discussions in these lectures.
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October 21, 2014Review forthcoming in Shelf Awareness
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