The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control--and Live to Tell the Tale - Softcover

Mattison, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143111639 ISBN 13: 9780143111634

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A targeted and insightful guide to the stages of writing fiction and memoir without falling into common traps, while wisely navigating the writing life, from an award-winning author and longtime teacher

“A book-length master class.” —The Atlantic

Writing well does not result from following rules and instructions, but from a blend of spontaneity, judgment, and a wise attitude toward the work—neither despairing nor defensive, but clear-eyed, courageous, and discerning. Writers must learn to tolerate the early stages, the dreamlike and irrational states of mind, and then to move from jottings and ideas to a messy first draft, and onward  into the work of revision. Understanding these stages is key.

The Kite and the String urges writers to let playfulness and spontaneity breathe life into the work—letting the kite move with the winds of feeling—while still holding on to the string that will keep it from flying away. Alice Mattison attends also to the difficulties of protecting writing time, preserving solitude, finding trusted readers, and setting the right goals for publication. The only writing guide that takes up both the stages of creative work and developing effective attitudes while progressing through them, plus strategies for learning more about the craft, The Kite and the String responds to a pressing need for writing guidance at all levels.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alice Mattison is a widely acclaimed author and longtime writing teacher. She has published six novels—including The Book Borrower, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, and When We Argued All Night, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice—as well as four collections of short stories and a collection of poems. Twelve of her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and other work has been published in The New York Times, Ploughshares, and Ecotone and anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories. A frequent panelist at AWP and other writing conferences, she has held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She has taught at Brooklyn College, Yale University, and, for the last twenty-one years, in the Bennington Writing Seminars, the MFA program at Bennington College.

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Chapter 1

Writing with Freedom and Common Sense

The Sound of Storytelling

Plenty of people—most people—don't write stories and don't want to. A few keep saying that one of these days they will write a story, a novel, or a memoir, implying that this task will be simple once they get around to it. That leaves those of us who regularly fool around—or make ourselves miserable—with sentences in which an imaginary person—or a real or sort of real person whom, at present, we are imagining—does something, sentences like "I opened the door." Or maybe, we decide, "The door, as I opened it . . ." or "Opening-in a hurry-the door . . ."

We may not remember how this odd practice began—putting human beings on the page and making them suffer and fear, making them love, discovering that they are about to do something we never thought they might. Like sexual longing, the wish to write—to make any art—starts in the body and precedes coherent thought about it. We want to hold a pen, or to type. Our fingers tingle; they are full of words. We have an itch, a yen, and the world tells us what our desire is called and whether it's one of the allowable kinds of wanting in our particular culture. Writing is closer to sex than we sometimes think, and for the susceptible, making sentences they like, at least for the moment ("Trembling, I opened the door, and just outside . . .") may induce arousal. Making up—or remembering—story is alluring and dangerous, even subversive: although writing is legal, it's disturbing to people uncomfortable with the ownership of an imagination, and some will do all they can to keep us from it, even if we are people they love. Writers of fiction and memoir, more than writers of fact, must defend—sometimes fiercely—their art and the time they give it. (And it's even worse for poets.)

As shocking as narrative-writing that tells a story-may be, however, this is a book about it, about those phrases and sentences we fret over ("Until I had opened the door . . ."). Fiction—sheer invention—may be most unsettling to unimaginative people: the lifelike nature of unreal people can be downright alarming. But the process of writing memoir isn't so different. When the memory comes, or the realization comes—"Here I must write down what Uncle Steve did!"—it is almost as surprising to the writer, as mysterious, as it would be if Uncle Steve weren't real.

Even before we want to make up narrative, we may find we love the sound and feel of story, its texture against our minds. As a college freshman I read James Joyce’s story “A Painful Case.” The main character, Mr. Duffy, is a Dublin bachelor who writes, adding sentences now and then to a manuscript that we sense goes nowhere. He is incurably lonely: when he makes a friend, he becomes so frightened that he ends the connection, and the story is about his belated understanding that his withdrawal was wrong and harmful. He is not someone to emulate, except possibly for his moment of insight at the end. But at the beginning of the story, we learn that he “had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense,” and when I first read this story, I was more struck by that sentence than by anything else. I too composed such sentences, also in the third-person past tense. I secretly narrated parts of my life to myself, as if I lived in the unexciting parts of a novel, the transitions in which characters get dressed or walk to the bus stop. Like a child realizing that others have heard of masturbation and even named it, I was amazed to learn that anyone else had this “odd autobiographical habit” or knew about it, and I wondered if Joyce had it too—if it meant I might be a writer. I’ve since discovered that when I mention my own reaction to that sentence to other writers, many will smile, flushing with pleasure and self-consciousness.

Maybe Mr. Duffy's sentences are "short" because he's ambivalent about his imagination; perhaps Joyce meant that Mr. Duffy sticks to simple facts when he narrates his life to himself, and the sentences he thinks are something like "He ate his dinner." He's a rigid person who can't let himself live the freer life he is drawn to. For better or worse, my inward sentences, when I was a child, weren't short or truthful. "She carried the plate from the cupboard," I might begin, but then I'd go on, giving my life an old-fashioned, literary flavor, "and gently set the simple earthenware dish with its chipped glaze on the scarred wooden table"—revising my mother's Danish Modern stoneware and Formica-topped aluminum kitchen set.

Whatever Mr. Duffy used his "odd autobiographical habit" for, I told my life to myself to pretend I was not just writing or reading a novel, but in one: I gave myself a narrated life. I think I wanted my actual life to be describable in the way that fictional lives may be described: I wanted it to suit the alert, androgynous, slightly acid tone of a sympathetic but sharp-eyed narrator, moral yet subtle, who observes and presents characters who may be flawed and confused but are worthy of our attention. It's a tone perfected in the British Isles, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth:

For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood—(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish)—and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles.

—from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, 1865

At lunch her brother, seeing her inclined for silence, insisted on talking. Tibby was not ill-natured, but from babyhood something drove him to do the unwelcome and the unexpected. Now he gave her a long account of the day-school that he sometimes patronised. The account was interesting, and she had often pressed him for it before, but she could not attend now, for her mind was focussed on the invisible.

—from Howards End, by E. M. Forster, 1910

Running below the beat and braying of the music was the steady needle-scratch on the gramophone record. Each sound had another underlying sound. She felt that if she could concentrate she would unpeel the outer sounds from the inner one, the one now buried, the last sound before complete silence—the tick of the blood in her wrist, she thought, turning her hand on the chair; the voice of her own mind.

—from A Game of Hide and Seek, by Elizabeth Taylor, 1951

When I began writing fiction I had no idea how to do it. I loved fiction's capacity to depict subtle shifts in awareness and scrupulous ethical distinctions; action without interior life had no lure. However, all I had was my love of how narrative can reveal the inner life. Even after writing poems, after studying literature, after making up narrative sentences like Joyce's Mr. Duffy, I was stuck. I had no subject matter, no ready tales to tell. I hadn't lived...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143111639
• ISBN 13: 9780143111634
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar