Re: an Easter egg

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sun, 12 Apr 1998 01:43:31 -0400 

Scottie said:

> When a writer has
> a technique that I wish to emulate or steal from - like old man Hem,
> or Graham Greene, for example - I can't stop myself getting out
> the microscope.  But immediately, something is lost forever.
>The willing suspension of disbelief is no longer possible.  Just as
>too many films about the life & machinery backstage have destroyed
> any enjoyment I might have had in the `living theatre', so I can't
> really ever again get that tingle up my spine when I read about
> Pilar's young days in Valencia, or Jake Barnes walk down a street
> in Paris on a spring morning - because I now understand rather
> too well how it's done.

I may have said this in this forum before (if so, please be gentle with me,
everybody), but there are some writers whose work I re-read with the idea
that "THIS TIME I'll read objectively, not for the art and the story, but
for the technique."

I've tried it countless times with Catcher, and with "Carpenters"; I've
done it with Hemingway's astonishing A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also
Rises; and I've lost count of the number of times I tried this with Gatsby.
(There are others too; these are the ones that come readily to mind.)  But
each time -- literally -- the artist wrestles me to the ground, and my
suspension of disbelief comes back, and I realize yet again that I've read
the work and absolutely failed to dissect the technique.

One book writers here might like to investigate is a new text called
NARRATIVE DESIGN: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO STRUCTURE, by Madison Smartt Bell.
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, ISBN 0-393-97123-6, in paperback.)

Bell is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and is also a writing
teacher who heads the writing program at Goucher College.  He starts the
book with a wonderful essay, and then launches into a collection of
stories, with insightful analysis of each story, and many, many good notes.
He uses some stories by recognized writers and some by students (one, with
perfect cosmic justice here, whose first name is "Holden").

For those who have a visceral, negative reaction to analysis of creative
work, give this book a try.  Bell may get you to reconsider your notions.

He also published a splendid essay, "Less Is Less," which focused a cold
eye on the state of short stories in America during the fashionable time of
minimalism ten years ago (Harper's Magazine: "Less Is Less: The Dwindling
American Short Story," April 1986).

It was so eloquent and effective, I was once sitting in a hotel lobby
reading the bound galley of his then-forthcoming DOCTOR SLEEP, waiting for
a writer with whom I was riding to a conference.  She asked what I was
reading, and I showed her, and she stiffened and curled her lip in
contempt.  I was puzzled at the time, but realized later that she was one
of the writers who had been mentioned in the essay.  But in the sad
narrowness of her view, she neglected to recognize that Bell had singled
her out as one of the *good* writers in a sea of mediocre writers.  It's a
damned fine essay that holds up after ten years, if you're familiar with
the genre he discusses.

The writer in question really confused me: She arrogantly told me that
she'd never read Hemingway or Salinger or Fitzgerald or Faulkner or
(Flannery) O'Connor or Harper Lee; she'd read virtually nothing published
earlier than 1980.  I suppose that works if one wants to be a blank slate.
But I couldn't imagine being as blank as all that -- or as arrogant.

--tim