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July 19, 2005

AS LONG AS WE'RE TALKING ABOUT FAMILIES ...

House_1This summer, I’ve been teaching a Novel III workshop at UCLA Extension (I'm scheduled for Novel II in the fall, see catalog for information). One of my favorite exercises is to have students draw a floor plan of the house they grew up in. This can be as detailed as desired, with furniture, people, and landscaping. Or it can be as simple as an empty box.

When the floor plans are completed to the students’ satisfaction, I have them go back and look each room over very carefully, half-squinting, half-dreaming. The idea is to escape into the drawing, to conjure events that happened in specific places. The students label the most powerful incidents, such as: BR—virginity; garage—matches; bath—Dad’s .44. You get the idea. Almost always, the memories are about family.

They pick one event to write about and then go for 15 minutes, nonstop. The story can be told however they like, in first person, third, second. It can be a truthful version, or fictionalized in whole or in part.

When they’ve finished, everyone reads his or her piece aloud. Invariably, the writing that comes out of this exercise is like nothing else the students have yet produced, full of vivid particularity and emotion and life.

Posted at 01:06 PM |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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