Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:


"I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak."

—Kurt Vonnegut, interview, The Paris Review, Issue 69, Spring 1977



This is a great interview, which you can read here. Thanks to lilithsaintcrow for pointing her blog readers to it in The Hack Manifesto.




( Illustrated version. )




Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

I was listening to a literary lady talk this morning on NPR about Maureen McHugh's latest collection of stories. She said something to the effect of, "It's really too bad you find her writing in the science fiction and fantasy section of book stores. Her stories may start out in the fantastic but they're so well-written you don't even think about it after awhile."

ETA: Here's the exact quote, courtesy jaylake: "The thing about Maureen McHugh is you're going to find her shelved in the science fiction and fantasy section. And that's unfortunate."

I make no claim whatsoever to being a literary writer. I want to tell cranking good yarns that make people turn the pages--and yes, if there's some thought-provoking going on, if I attempt to write as well as I can and be as true to the realities of human nature within my fantastic boundaries, insert a little mythopoetic dynamic here and there, that's just swell. That's all about my pride in doing the best job I can, striving to always do better. In my quirky, fantastic kind of way. Too bad I will never be a serious writer if I keep writing the fantastic.

I'd suggest forming a Fantasists Anti-Defamation League, but I'm not serious enough to carry something like that off. Gosh, wouldn't that take rather a lot of commitment?

Quote of the day:

"Discipline and desire make a writer, a mantra I have to repeat to myself several times a week."

—Charlaine Harris
(a non-serious fantasy writer)

Writing thought of the day:

It occurs to me that if I could fix the problems with the novels I've started in my Ideas file, I could crank out a novel a year for many years without ever getting a new idea again. Phew, what a relief. I was seriously worried about my lack of ideas. In a non-serious way.

If you haven't already, and get a chance to, I recommend you read the Jeffrey Ford interview in the July 2004 issue of Locus. It'll be posted here:

http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Issues/07Ford.html

Shortly, according to the web site.

Jeffrey Ford is a particular favorite of mine, and what I particularly liked about this interview was how hauntingly familiar some of his process is. I'm light years away from being in Mr. Ford's class—quite possibly will never get there—but it's always a comfort when I can look at someone successful and recognize some, or a lot, of my crazy technique in their way of doing things. I guess it means I'm not totally crazy. Or if I am, there are other crazy people out there who've made a go of it.

Other than the egocentric stuff, I also liked what he had to say about genre vs. literary writing. "Works laboring under either of these artificial labels can be great or lousy. Basically, I don't have time for these arguments and I just have to pay attention to the work...."

I've always thought Jeffrey Ford was one of the more literary guys in the field, one of those pushing the boundaries out beyond the ghetto. He says, and I agree, that this is a liberating time for sff. The boundaries are being expanded. Or, at the very least, smudged so that it's difficult to tell where they lie. This is a good thing. This is a healthy thing.

He also makes the point that in the past, phenomenal experience and scientific projection were regarded as part of human experience, something to be included in serious works of literary art. Ask Mary Shelley, ask Shakespeare, Plato, Milton. Realism is a recent development in the history of writing. And I think, whether we are skeptics or believers, we can't deny that aspect of our humanity which exists in dreams, in the subconscious, in the phenomenal world of pure imagination. All of that messy and contradictory and emotional stuff makes us human. They're part of our animal natures, sure, filtered through the layers of our brain from the reptilian stem to the human-making frontal lobes, but they can't be separated out or denied. We may be technically advanced, but we're techno savages beneath our pinstripes—monkeys with gizmos.

SFF, and the best literary writers, recognize this, I think. We are more than the sum of our mechanistic parts and our gadgets.

Ford quotes his teacher, John Gardner, about writing being "a vivid and continuous dream." Ford goes on to say that unlike dreams, "with writing it's not something that ends in a few minutes; it carries on through the length of a story or book....you see the story in your head and then basically try to record what you see. You don't comment on it, and you almost fall into a trance. If you do it well, it allows you to get in touch with things that make the story work that you're not even conscious of." He tells his writing students that less control will get them in touch with what the story is really about.

Sure, I know so-called "organized" writers (vs. us messy organic types) will probably disagree. But...

Yeah, for people like me it's about haunting the boundaries of reason and pushing through the paper wall that separates us from...the other. That may be me talking, not Jeffrey Ford, but he definitely put me in the zone to think about this stuff.

Writing isn't a mechanical process—just like life isn't. Writing is an experience, a search after meaning, a way of trying to make sense out of things that may be contradictory or beyond our previous experience. It's a process of reconciling irreconcilable differences, of holding more than one truth inside your head at a time, of stretching beyond your level of understanding or emotional maturity. It's about taking risks and pushing the envelope, even if the envelope is only the one inside your own soul. Writing is standing on the edge of a precipice and not being afraid to see if you can fly. It's also about jumping and falling on your face. But hey, it wouldn't be any fun if there wasn't the risk of catastrophic failure, now would it?