In recent and forthcoming weeks we celebrate Diwali, Bonfire Night, Halloween, All Hallows aka the Day of the Dead, the changing of the clocks, the onset of winter. A time to remember that life is made of cycles, and that winter is a time of rest for the earth. A time to hunker down with good books and writing projects. A time for the indoors, for making fires.
I remember visiting Sweden one January, and being charmed by the presence of candlelight everywhere. Candles flickering in little glass snowballs on cafe tables, darting in a deep red bowl on the high windowsill of some apartment. A hotel in Stockholm is even designed with mood lighting in mind, and the bedside lamps are programmed to light up the rooms in soft shades – blue or orange or indigo, or cycling through the rainbow if you desire. It struck me that the Scandinavians really make an effort to bring light into their lives at this time when daylight is at a minimum.
Light. Life. Love. Clarity.
For this week’s writing experiment, consider how you can bring light into a piece of writing. You can do this literally, e.g., devoting an ode to a candle or writing a story that involves lamplight. Or you can consider things figuratively, and work out how some concept of light might bring a piece of writing to life, or maybe help you revise a piece that needs some assistance.
You might also want to consider an earlier writing experiment that tasks you on writing by candlelight.
The clocks are turning back tonight, and the path’s twirling with red and yellow leaves because it’s getting very blustery out there. High winds are predicted over the next few days, which made me think about winds in literature. Shelley’s ‘Ode To The West Wind’. ‘Windy Nights’ by Robert Louis Stevenson. The cyclone that gathers up Dorothy and Toto in The Wizard Of Oz. Mary Poppins blows in on a wind (you want to skip to 2:01 there, rosy cheeks and everything), and of course all those answers are blowin’ there too in the Bob Dylan song. Gone With The Wind, The Shadow Of The Wind, Written On The Wind, The Wind In The Willows. In Tibetan Buddhist philosophy the windhorse holds a central place representing basic goodness, and most mythologies have gods or goddesses of the wind.
I was reaching for the memory of how Cathy’s ghost visits Lockwood at the start of Wuthering Heights, and turned to my tatty Penguin Classic: ‘I heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow.’ Then duh! Of course, ‘wuther‘ is a word that describes the wind (‘dialect English to blow with a dull roaring sound’).
And is there any song more lovely and more haunting than Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’? But is it out on the ‘wiley’, ‘wild and’, or ‘winding’ ‘windy moors?! I’m not sure I ever figured that out. We used to singalong with ‘winding’ as kids. Ah!
For this week’s writing experiment: Compose something that uses the wind. A character that blows in on a wind, either literally or metaphorically. An ode to the wind, or a haiku (I’m thinking haiku are often very still, but do they have to be?!). A tale about a windy deity, or a story that uses the wind in some other way, or maybe just a piece that uses wind in the title. Maybe look up wind-related words in an etymology. Blow out the cobwebs with some revision of an old piece by writing a wind into it. Consider how you too can conjure up all the romance and associative power and elemental energy of this force of nature.
As ever, be concrete and specific in your choices in writing.
This week’s Friday Writing Experiment celebrates the publication next week of Donna Tartt’s very exciting new novel The Goldfinch.
It’s getting the fantastic reviews it deserves, but I do suggest you don’t read any of them until you’ve read the novel itself, as too many reveal far too much. Even things such as the settings are best left to unfold for themselves – the second (or maybe it’s the third) act of the book took me someplace quite unexpected, and it’s richly rendered and full of further surprises. And that is what much of reading for pleasure is about: the surprises, the narrative tension.
This is touched upon in this very inspiring (and spoiler-free) clip from an interview with Donna Tartt shown on the BBC this week:
When asked what she wants people to read her books for, she answers:
First I want them to have fun. Reading’s no good unless it’s fun … What I always want is the one quality I look for in books and it’s very hard to find … I love that childhood quality of just that gleeful, greedy reading, can’t-get-enough-of-it, what’s-happening-to-these-people, the breathless kind of turning of the pages. That’s what I want in a book. But I also want something that’s well constructed, too. I like to be able to drop down in. Dickens goes so fast, he goes like lightning, but at the same time any sentence you can lift up and it’s a marvel and it’s a miracle. To me, I want those two qualities, the two qualities of any great art: density and speed. Density and speed.
Kirsty also says that her books are about secrets, and Donna replies that all books are about secrets and have mysteries at their heart. ‘Every book has some secret, there’s always a secret.’
One thing that can probably be revealed (something I knew before reading – not least as it’s on the cover) is that the story involves a painting. A painting of a little bird: ‘The Goldfinch’ by Carel Fabritius (and if you don’t know much about it, maybe don’t follow that link till you’ve read the novel either: let the novel bring it into your world in its own way). It’s a beautiful, beautiful painting, or so I believe – I’ve never seen the original, but we’ll all want to now, and thanks to Donna Tartt for describing it so well.
This set me to thinking about ekphrastic writing, which is writing that in some way describes art or uses it as an inspiration. Some examples are mentioned here. I remember my friend and co-teacher Stephanie Heit using Pictures From Brueghel in a workshop at Naropa.
Something further: that bird, that little bird. My goddess, that little bird really haunted me – its exquisite form, its vulnerability, ‘a yellow finch, against a plain, pale ground, chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle’. A little bird painted three and a half centuries ago comes to stand for so much, and mining this meaning allows for the depth and richness of reading this great book.
For this week’s writing experiment, create a piece that takes The Goldfinch as a model for writing:
* As an inspiration, use a painting of a bird or an animal, or maybe a fish or a lizard or an insect.
* As with The Goldfinch, you could also place a secret at the heart of this piece. And it might not hurt to aspire towards density and speed in your work, too: perhaps some of its sentences can be marvels and miracles.
* Or you could simply write a poem about that bird. Something like Elizabeth Bishop’s The Fish – I don’t think it was based on a painting, but you could imagine the moment in the artwork as an encounter brought to life in a similar way.
* Most of all, your readers must have FUN.
If you’d like to explore some inspirations, try Animals In Art or even visit the Animal Art Fair. Or take yourself on an artist date to one of your favourite galleries, or root around in gallery websites. Really take in all the details of an artwork featuring your own little bird or animal, and in your own writing embody whatever it – and its subject – might mean.
This is good for lots of reasons. A much-loved winner of much-loved writing. A writer who brings out the stories in the everyday. In Dear Life, a memoir piece about her childhood, Munro describes going to play at a friend’s house after school. The friend she calls Diane dances a Highland fling with Alice, and:
Eventually, we got thirsty and her grandmother gave us a drink of water, but it was horrid water from a dug well, just like at school. I explained about the superior water we got from a drilled well at home, and the grandmother said, without taking any sort of offense, that she wished they had that, too.
And there’s more in the next few paragraphs – a prohibition that reveals something that feels petty and turns out to be very spiteful and probably very defining – but you’ll have to read the piece to find that.
Throughout her writing we find the little surprises of ordinary life, those turns into unexpected joy, or moments laced with violence or revelation or connection. Lots of questions are asked, no easy answers are given, and something lingers.
Something key is a quality of perception: of looking, and seeing, and listening. The young (or older?) Alice in the selection above registers that the grandmother took no offence, and realises that she might have been offensive. A harmless interaction, perhaps, but one filled with harm – and lessons in compassion. And an understanding of what happened in this scene maybe only comes years later, in the moment of writing. Something is conjured up here.
Much of Munro’s art lies in the symmetry and energy of her sentences; note how the clause ‘without taking any sort of offense’ is slid between commas in the middle of a sentence in that extract above. And her sentences often rely on simple but strong word choices. Even neglected parts of speech such as prepositions have their own special powers. At the start of her story ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’: ‘We leave my mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for me against the opening of school’ – maybe it’s a Canadianism I’m unaware of, but the use of that preposition ‘against’ opens up all manner of associations in my mind, and among other things makes me most alert to her language.
This prize is also a victory that reminds us of the wonders of the short story, the literary form of most of Munro’s published writing. ‘For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel’, she says. Well, the short story is not second best, and let’s praise the Nobel judges for reminding us of that. But even if you are stuck on other forms, I do think many people writing, e.g., novels could gain important practice in the writing of fiction if they tackled some short stories along the way. And I also think that some short stories – by other people – do feel like practice too. So maybe we should also remember to write short stories for all the reasons they are so special. I repeat: the short story is not second best. (Here is one of my Friday Writing Experiments that grows out of some opining on that matter.)
If you’d like to enjoy some more of her stories, the New Yorker shares some here (but maybe skip the summaries, which can reveal too much). The New Yorker also shares some of the enthusiasm of other writers, as well as a nifty piece by one of her editors (though maybe skip the two longer extracts and the sentences just before them – those literary types and their fondness for spoilers). And (update on 13 October) the Paris Review also has a super interview in its ‘Art of …’ series. Paul McVeigh has gathered together many things Munro on his terrifically useful blog too, including audio clips, interviews, and stories.
‘Books seem to me to be magic, and I wanted to be part of the magic,’ Munro has said. For today’s writing experiment: write a piece in which you suffuse something very ordinary with something very magical. Not fantastical, not supernatural, but the magic of the ordinary. This ordinary magic could be observed in a place, a person, an object, or the view out of your window. Your form could be a story, or a poem, or memoir, or a paragraph of description or exchange of dialogue in a novel. And you probably want to be concrete and specific in what you behold.
I’m not sure how you’ll locate that magic, but let’s hope that the process of looking will help you find it.
I remember the sweet musty air of the mobile library. It came to the Caledonia every second Saturday morning, and parked itself on Mousehall Farm Road.
I remember Comet in Moominland, Little House in the Big Woods, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIHM.
I remember the high windows of Hull’s Brynmor Jones Library, the recently opened Humber Bridge in the distance.
I remember how we often found Allen’s Ginsberg’s own books on the shelves of the Allen Ginsberg Library at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. A Tibetan swingseat on the porch, tall flags fluttering on blue and red and yellow on the green, mountains through a narrow window.
I remember the University of New Mexico’s Zimmerman Library, and the long wooden tables, and the glow of low lamplight. I remember the murals, I remember the fountain at the duck pond, and I remember the fountain in the little courtyard right out of Rappaccini’s Daughter.
I remember Madeline Miller talking about The Song of Achilles at Twickenham Library a couple of days after she won the Orange Prize – some foresight on the part of local library services. She was totally charming, wholly intelligent, and very entertaining.
I remember the carved panels of the heavy wooden doors of Sydney’s Mitchell Library, telling tales of Aboriginal history.
I remember a tarot reading in the cafe of the British Library.
I could go on, and I shall at my leisure, but now it’s your turn: write an ‘I Remember’ about the libraries you have known.
If you want to take this further: you could place a limit on how long you remember libraries, and then stop and look back over your collection. Choose one of these libraries, and then write about an encounter within that hallowed place, real-life or fictional, or a bit of both.
(With full credit to Joe Brainard’s brilliant and inspirational ‘I Remember’.)
