molarsmolars:

Almost two years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz spoke at Montgomery County Community College, where one of my younger brothers goes to school. I went and listened and made notes afterward. He was pretty incredible. Here are the notes I made (everything below is paraphrased from his talk):

Art shows us our best selves and helps us connect to others. We get to interact with another person’s nervous system when we read a book. The most important thing a young reader can do is read 1,000 books. Best advice he received: “Go out and get your heart broken on three continents.”

Four things he learned about writing:

Audience. Manipulate audiences, not words. You have to allow the reader to interpret a scene. Do not tell them how to interpret it with something built in. 

Characters exist because of relationships. You can’t observe a person in isolation. In Cast Away, they had to make the character of Wilson to allow Tom Hanks a relationship while he was on a desert island. One relationship is good, but two is better, the classic triangle of dramaturgy. Characters interact with each other. You could write a 500 page description of a character and it wouldn’t be as good as a one sentence description that involved the same character in a relationship.

The fictional world has to resist the character. See the first Matrix movie when Agent Smith explains why the first matrix world was rejected by humans, because there was no fear, or war, or hunger. The world did not resist. People might not know a lot about literature, but they are professors emiriti of reality, and every day the world resists them.

Point of telling: when, in relation to the events of the story, is the story being told. Six months later, six years later? A way to maintain consistency in the narrative and make sure the focus is correct, close or distant. What details are related: fine details, or the big picture. 

Thoughts on society: it teaches us to compete, to accumulate, to make hierarchies, and to be afraid. What art does is allow us to access what makes us most human: compassion, communion, the we-feeling. Developing these things is what allows you to make it through life. Those things will save your life. 

Reading takes us off the market. No one can sell you anything when you’re reading. You’re literally offline. Puts you in touch with yourself. People come out of college without being able to deliver an operational definition of compassion. That is the main ontological (purpose) of being human—compassion. 

Our business leaders have failed us, our political leaders have failed us, but our artists never have. That’s who we should be turning towards. 

Reblogged from my friend Kevin who tumblrs at molarsmolars. Go follow him and check out his music blog, Molars. 

I’ve noticed sometimes writers at readings will read things that are incomprehensible as spoken word. Sometimes they inflect their sentences like poets because their words are so far removed from what they would actually say. This writing always breaks Padgett Powell’s rule, “Write as if you were telling your story to someone in a bar” or my (new) version of the rule, “Write how you would like to hear it read to you on audiobook while walking by the river.”

I have been guilty of doing some of this awkward writing, especially as a younger person.

I think this sentence from Christopher Alexander’s Timeless Art of Building captures the essence of the problem:

‘People are afraid of being laughed at for their ignorance about “art”; and it is this fear which makes them abandon their own stable knowledge of what is simple and right.’

“I recycle every word, every sentence, every fragment, and every juxtaposition. Because I recycle everything, I view writing as a large, long fabric in which I measure the lengths, widths, and dimensions of the sentences to make a dress or a shirt. These I turn into short stories or novellas, and the smaller pieces or end pieces of the fabric that can’t be used for a blouse, I turn them into small poems.” 

—Vi Khi Nao

“And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes, but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.”

—John Cage

“None of my demons are my own.” 

“I can’t decide on which unpublishable novel to write.” 

Just described one of the voices I write with as my, “fake Nicholson Baker gentle coo.”

I’ve moved on from bribing myself with donuts. Last night I bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Half-Baked and didn’t let myself get into it until I wrote 500 words. 

I am going to be the fattest novelist.

I’m currently working based on the cosmological model of the universe in mind: From chaos springs order. And the evolutionary model: From primordial ooze comes Bach. Hopefully, from the disorganized scraps of donut writing, with its characters from different time periods and social spheres and cities and states, and a shared theme of freedom and egality, will come a shining donut novel. 

(I’m bribing myself since I fell out of groove over the summer. The sun, it parched my bones. Maybe I’ll be able to quit the donuts soon.)

It’s absurd when the novelists say that they want the words on the page to sound like something. “I want to marry sound to scene. Sound to action. Above all, it’s the sound that matter.” But what is a sound to the eye! It’s the eye that takes in the page. Very few of these words that are supposed to make sounds will ever make sounds—how many in five or ten readers will speak aloud the lines in the novels that these “sound-obsessed” authors write?

If one, then, writes to the voice in the readers’ head, please be aware, that the brain will say aloud, perhaps you can say, but its voice is not as steady as you presume it to be. It will be silent for stretches, reading the words “silently.” Then it might find certain words to proclaim. Words to get stuck on. Words to read while the reader has stopped paying attention. The reader will also skip words at will; she will skim them when she wants. Pages and pages brushed over. Your sacred words treated like breadcrumbs on a picnic blanket. 

And then what are you left with? A novel swept into a dustpan? 

“I should…be working, creating in my own way right up to the end, living as best I can, as actively as possible, until the wall falls back into the moat for us all, all mankind. Fate will poleax us eventually anyhow, but I have my job in the meantime; I must use my mind, my hands.”

—Philip K. Dick on creating despite impending doom.

You may have seen my post on Tuesday announcing We Were Emergent a new anthology of writing by people aged 18-25 (or 16-27!) that Kevin and I are putting together. 

But… Why? Why do this? 

It started when we were teaching fiction writing while we were MFA students at the University of Florida and found ourselves constantly surprised by what our students would bring in to workshop. Most of the students wouldn’t go on to have writing careers, or even continue writing after college, but for that one semester, they were writers, and they sent their stories off like bottle rockets. A quick burst, and then—

The world is full of discouragement for young writers. And even when an institution opts to celebrate them, the word young is stretched to its limits. When The New Yorker celebrates young writers it’s in their list of twenty writers under forty. We’re guessing most are pushing 40. Where’s the 20 under 30? The 20 under 20? Is there really nothing praiseworthy being written by people before they hit the age of 30? 

Let’s not let lit be only the realm of the old or the rich. Let’s not heed society who says there’s no money in writing. There isn’t—but so what. Has anyone seen what money’s done to us? How the water is rising and the banks are crashing?

I’ve been reading the new Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy book and am flabbergasted at how cool and collaborative the music world is. I felt this same way when reading the 33 1/3 book about In The Aeroplane Over the Sea and the Elephant 6 Collective. Musicians create together, live together, travel together… Where can you find that vibe for writers? In MFA programs somewhat. And I think tumblr sometimes gives me the same feeling. That I can make writing and give it to you instantly, while at the same time seeing what you just put out there for the world. You’re not here. I’m not there. We’re not in a van together. But we are, somehow, together. 

So let’s make a playlist of new writing by new writers and release it to the world. (I apologize, of course, to the adults in the room—but that’s not what this one’s about.)

Young people have always made hit singles. We believe they can make stories too. If what we get is amazing, we’ll print a book or try to sell it to a publisher. And maybe we’ll press a couple of writers reading their stories to vinyl—A&B sides on a run of 45s. Yeah? Let’s do this thing. Come visit!

wewereemergent.com