Writing itself is easy: it’s good writing, memorable writing, epiphany-inducing writing that’s life-challengingly difficult, and sometimes so overwhelming that it makes you want to give up altogether. I’ve just started reading The Best American Short Stories 2001, edited by none other than the amazing and brilliant Barbara Kingsolver, whose Poisonwood Bible I devoured over Easter. The women knows how to turn a phrase, capture a country and render a reader emotionally winded. In the introduction, she muses on what makes writing – and in particular, short stories – worth the labour and the read:
“I have always wondered by short stories aren’t more popular in this country. We Americans are such busy people you’d think we’d jump at the chance to have our literary wisdom served in doses that fit handily between taking the trash to the curb and waiting for the carpool. We should favour the short story and adore the poem. But we don’t...From what I gather, most Americans would sooner read a five-hundred-page book about southern France or a boy attending wizard school or how to make home decor from roadside trash or anything than pick up a book offering them a dozen tales of the world complete in twenty pages apiece. And I won’t even discuss what they will do to avoid reading poetry.
[...] “What makes writing good? That’s easy: the lyrical description, the arresting metaphor, the dialogue that falls so true on the ear it breaks the heart, the plot that winds up exactly where it should. But these stories I was to choose among had been culled from thousands of others, so all were beautifully written...my task was to choose, among the good, the truly great. How was I supposed to do that?
“With a pile of stories on my lap, I sat with this question early on and tried to divine why it is that I love a short story when I do, and the answer came to me quite clearly: I love it for what it tells me about life. If it tells me something I didn’t already know, or that I maybe suspected but never framed quite that way, or that never before socked me divinely in the solar plexus, then the story is worth the read.
[...] “I’m patient with most corners of my life, but put a book in my hands and suddenly I remind myself of a harrowing dating-game shark, long in the tooth and looking for love right now, thank you, get out of my way if you’re just going to waste my time and don’t really want kids or the long-term commitment. I give a novel thirty pages, and if it’s not by that point talking to me of till-death-do-us-part, sorry, buster, this dates over.
[...] “This is a critical lesson for writers. We are nothing if we can’t respect our readers. It’s audacious enough to send a piece o writing out into the world (which already contains Middlemarch), asking readers to sit down, shut up, ignore the kids or work or whatever important things they have going, and listen to me. Not just for a minute but for hours, days. It had better be important...Probably the greatest challenge of the form is to get a story launched and landed efficiently with a whole worthwhile journey in between...It may be that most Americans don’t read short stories because they don’t like this kind of a ride. A good short story cannot simply be Lit Lite; it is the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces.
“The stories in this book have survived my harpy eye on all accounts: they’ve told me something remarkable, they are beautifully executed, and they are nested in truth. The last I mean literally. I can’t abide fiction that’s too lazy to get its fact straight. People learn from what they read, they trust in words, and this is not a responsibility to take lightly. I’ve stopped reading books in which birds sang on the wrong continents or full moons appeared two weeks apart (it wasn’t set on Jupiter)...I believe fiction should inform as well as enlighten, and first, do no harm.
[...] “I don’t care what it’s about, as long as it’s not trivial...The business of fiction is to probe the tender spots of an imperfect world, which is where I live, write and read.”
Every word that Barbara speaks is the truth, and amen to that, but most important: there is so little time and so many books that beg to be read! So while I’m huddled up at home for the winter, please please please send me your reading suggestions (they may be frivolous, so long as they are entertaining)! I’ve already finished one crime novel (not the sort of thing I usually indulge in, but I’ve found in the past I enjoy this as a form of light reading that I don’t have to think about – Ruth Rendell, Patricia Cornwall, etc) at an alarming rate, and am loving the ability to read whatever I want, whenever I want, and immerse myself in books for days or hours. Please help me feed this insatiable appetite, which has been deprived all semester – you know how it is, between text books and lit books and essays and little sleep (not to mention parties, late nights, coffees with friends, tv shows, movie outings...) a book on the bedside is a dream and impossibility. So load me up friends with must-reads!
x
JAG
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