Research for writing

I don’t come out of an academic tradition, where research involves applications for funding and ethical approval along with a detailed exposition of methodology. Nor have I been a journalist in the usual sense, even when I was a magazine editor. I do understand about getting the facts right, and checking things, and information being as reliable as its sources, and giving credit where it is due and so on.

I’m thinking about research because the novel I have embarked on requires me to do some so I can write about subjects on which I do not already have expertise. For my second novel, Poppy’s Return I wanted to Poppy to go to Whitby, in England. So, as part of a holiday, my partner and I went to Whitby. That was a good call. All the places in my novels that have any significance at all are places I have been to, albeit for entirely different purposes from those of my characters. That, and checking dates and weather and the current locations of some art works and the habits of a few sea birds, and such has so far been sufficient research.

For this novel I have folders, both the sort that holds paper and the sort that live on my computer. And I have a fresh view on how the research can take over. It’s fun, and it involves the internet and the public library, both places I like to go. It’s easier than working out and writing a story, too, doesn’t require such hard thinking. So I’m being firm with myself, not reading and taking notes from every book that touches on my subject/s not saving every website into my electronic filing system. I’m looking for what I need to know so that I don’t write rubbish. Of course I will find out more than I could ever use—information is not the point of the novel, it’s a setting, a demonstration of my characters and what they are about.

There are writing programmes and apps that promise fool-proof ways of organising materials for writers and I decided not to spend the time learning to use one. I’m doing fine with my folders and a table or two for dates and names. 

Narrators and News

This week I finished reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. The only other book of his I have read is Lolita. Pnin is about Russian Professor Pnin, an unlikely lecturer at a minor American university, first published in 1953. Nabokov died in 1977.

I read it because I kept seeing references to Nabokov as “master prose stylist”—I quote from the back of the recent Vintage (Random House) edition. It’s a short book and I read it over a couple of weeks, which is slow for me, studying the style. I think I get it; it’s discursive, with a Narrator who carefully describes his relationship to Pnin at the end of the book and gets inside Pnin's head. A random example:

He seemed to be quite unexpectedly (for human despair seldom leads to great truths) on the verge of a simple solution of the universe but was interrupted by an urgent request.

The urgent request was from a squirrel wanting someone to activate the drinkng fountain in the park where Pnin was walking. Pnin is both funny and tragic.

Coincidentally I’ve read another book lately that has a narrator who is also a character; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I was surprised at how short it is, almost a novella. Nick is a character with a strong narrator role, and he’s an interesting side-line to the main story of the nouveau-riche Gatsby, a high-liver, bound to self-destruct. A book of flappers and car crashes, as the man who wrote the annoying Introduction says. This is one of those books I am glad to have read because it gets referred to often.

Teju Cole’s Open City is a book I heartily recommend to everyone. Written in the first person it’s a novel set largely in New York, with a side trip to Brussels. Julian is from Nigeria, a psychiatrist, registrar in a New York hospital, and he walks in the city. There’s no plot to speak of and few other characters. It’s like a riff on modern life, and is described on the cover as, “A meditation on history and culture, identity and solitude,” which is close enough. The detail—what Julian notices—is often original and the reflections on modern life and experiences thoughtful and thought-provoking. It’s not at all hard to read and I think everyone should read it. Nice writing, nothing fancy, does the job extremely well. One example of many, many possible examples:

… there isn't anything that immunizes us from a plague of one kind or another … we are just as susceptible as any of those past civilisations were, but we are especially unready for it. Even in the way we speak about what little has happened to us, we have already exhausted ourselves with hyperbole.

 It’s three weeks since my last blog entry, so I have a FAIL on my resolution to write in here weekly. So be it, no gnashing of teeth. I’ll see if I can Do Better.

Two pieces of writerly news have made the major media in the last twenty-four hours. The first is intriguing: the discover of some previously unknown Katherine Mansfield stories which have the pundits out in force. The second is sad: the death of Margaret Mahy. Her wonderful books are not, of course, lost to us but her eccentric presence is; there's an empty space in New Zealand’s cultural world. 

Writers on Writing

Neil Gaiman, famous for writing The Sandman series, American Gods, Coraline and a lot more, says, “I make things up and write them down.”

The pieces of my writing that I’m collecting for Stones Gathered Together, are partly made up stories, partly to do with things I think about and partly close to being memoirish, derived from my life. I think I remember what is remembered and what is made up, and am aware that the remembering and writing down add layers to the original memories, which become something other than the original experience, even though the thing remembered has its core of this-thing-happened-to-me.

(Unattributed photograph from (http://info.neded.org/stathand/parttwo/cather.htm)

Willa Cather said, “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” And Chekov said, “When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.” Both of these suggest that writing is largely memoir in different forms, in opposition to Neil Gaiman’s “making it up.”

What writers write about writing is one of my favourite areas of reading. As with, as it is said, the bible and Shakespeare, you could find a quote from a published writer to fit just about any opinion on what writing/ literature is and how it happens. That’s one of the things that makes it interesting; writing is more complex than learning how to fix a bicycle, or knit a jumper.

Susan Sontag writes in the second edited (by her son, David Reiff) collection of writings from her diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, that she  wanted to “play only with the top team,” who she defined as “Those who become reference points for successive generations in many languages (eg, Kafka).” Earlier in the same book she says, “I’m good at understanding things …. But I’m not a genius, I’ve always known that. My mind isn’t good enough, isn’t really first rate … ultimately too conventional … I’m not mad enough, not obsessed enough.”

Gertrude Stein [Internet]. 2012. http://www.biography.com/people/gertrude-stein-9493261

Gertrude Stein, on the other hand, knew she was a genius, and said so, often. (There are a few references to her in Sontag’s diaries but she doesn’t put Stein in the same team as Kafka.)

I could do this for a long time—quote writers and compare what they say about writing to what other writers say about it. However, the one central idea, the incontrovertible core, is that a writer writes. And if, as Gertrude Stein said, “Remarks are not literature,” then I had better stop these remarks and do some writing. Whether what I then write can be called “literature” involves a whole other discussion which I’ll pick up in a later post.

Why I read the LRB and the NYer

The London Review of Books is published fortnightly, The New Yorker weekly with a few double issues. I subscribe to the printed version of each which gives me electronic access to back issues.

As its title suggest the LRB consists largely of book reviews, though it does include occasional articles on contemporary issues/politics and a nod at a few art exhibitions. The reviews are long and discursive. Reviews of non-fiction books are often written by someone with extensive knowledge of the subject area. Writers of fiction reviews tend to be published writers or university teachers of literature.

So, LRB reviews are not necessarily an easy read, and a few defeat me altogether. Mostly, though, I am interested and stimulated and get an idea from the review about whether or not I want to read the book. I don’t make myself read every review to the end!

This New Yorker cover is by Bob Staake and is called "Spectrum of Light." 

The issue came out just after President Obama announced his support for gay marriage.

The New Yorker is not a literary magazine as such, though it has reviews, long, highly-researched articles about writers (as well as about sportspeople, politicians, dictators and any other category of people you can think of) and a short story in every issue. (And a lot more, I’m focusing here on the booky bits.) Again, I get pointers on what I want and don’t want to read. If I wanted a purely book-related magazine from the US, I’d get The New York Review of Books, but that I read from the Wellington Public Library shelves when I have time to spare in the library.

Both LRB and The New Yorker give me a sense of some slight connection to that big wide world of literature out there, and pander to my book-snobbery—that is, my wanting to know something about what is the “best” published writing, whatever that means. One of my other favourite kinds of reading is writing by writers about writing; not “how to” books so much as books about how they live as writers.

One final point about subscribing to these magazines—the cost per issue is about one fifth of the cost off a magazine stall, even with international postage.

Reading to write

The new writing idea I’m developing involves finding out about things I have ideas about but not a lot of information, so I’m reading, both on the internet and in books (oh, hail to the Wellington Public Library!) and writing a little. And there' a lot of thinking going on, and sketching of family trees to keep the generations clear in my head and hence on the page. (Once I inadvertently had a minor character have a baby at age 11, when I didn’t pay enough attention to dates and generations.)

I also plan to get my collection of short pieces, the one I tentatively call Stones Gathered Together, into final shape and published as an ebook. My self-imposed deadline for this is the end of this year, so I must remember to give it attention; the excitement of a new project tends to take over my mind. Here’s a photograph I took that might make it onto the cover. Although design experts say you should not use obvious images on a cover, I do l like this one.

Pleasing news of the week—a story I entered into the New Zealand Flash FIction contest (http://nationalflash.wordpress.com/) has made it to the next round.

My ideas about the new project change as I read, and I’ve never been keen on talking about the content of work in progress, so there’s not going to be a lot of plot revealed in these notes.

Books Books Books, or, What I’ve Been reading

I missed the brilliance so many others have found in Emily Perkins’ The Forrest, as did the five other members of my book group. None of the characters engaged me, not even Dorothy, who loves Daniel all of her life in a way he will never love her, which should have been moving, but I was irritated. At the beginning I enjoyed the detail involving the characters’ senses of things in the physical world, but, while each separate piece was excellent, the cumulative effect was—that word again—irritating. By page 64 I wanted to scream at this:

"He dug a ready-rolled cigarette from the pocket of his jacket. Tiny brown curls of tobacco dangled from the end of the cigarette paper and when touched by the flame from his match they illuminated bright orange and disappeared."

It’s good description, but there have been so many good description of small details by page 64 that the characters are buried under the sensations, the detail, and I’ve had enough. Clearly many others hadn’t, because there have been rave revues from all over the world. (The last time I remember being so badly out of step over a book was when Sandra Coney and I seemed to be the only people who hated Lynley Hood’s biography of Sylvia Ashton Warner.) On page 201 Dorothy throws away a pen without bothering to put its two pieces together, because, “there was nothing left to protect.” That bald statement had a strong emotional impact. I guess that was what I wanted more of, but then, Emily Perkins was writing her book.

Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is actually three books, published in English as one large volume, so I took a break between them and read the whole thing over several weeks. It certainly works as a story and I had a good time reading it. After I finished I wondered whether I had forgotten some details from the early book because some of the things about time shifts and odd creatures and their purpose seemed unexplained. Yet they are probably unexplainable. An over-riding theme about the need for balance between good and evil is played out kind of weirdly, but it was fun to read.

The second of Alison Bechdel’s comic-form memoirs about her parents is called Are You My Mother. Full marks for courage, publishing this while her mother is still alive—with her mother’s acceptance, if not full-scale approval. It gets a little bogged down in the psychology of WInnicott and the author’s therapy, but the portrait of her mother that comes out of it all is satisfyingly complex and interesting.

I’m in the middle of a re-read of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose and in total admiration of his erudition and ability to handle so many big themes in one book—faith, politics, pride, greed, power, love—along with a murder inquiry.  I’m going  to have another read of  his earlier novel Foucault’s Pendulum and then take on his latest, The Prague Cemetery, which is on my to-be-read pile.

I’m going to aim at more frequent—weekly—entries and alternate reading and writing as topics in separate entries. Maybe I can maintain a schedule.

Write on

The well of writing has been a bit low over the past few moths. Absence of ideas that excite me enough to want to write something has been the issue. I can always make myself write something but I prefer to be driven by an idea that lights up my mind. I have no idea in advance what will do this, it just happens from time to time.

However a couple of things have bubbled up. One of them, which will be a short story I think, is to do with Gertrude Stein and a “what if ….” Such as “what if a Gertrude was born in the forties on a diary farm in the Waikato?” A crazy notion, maybe, but I’m going with it for a bit. It involves a fair bit of re-reading what she wrote and what has been written about her as well as doing some writing "in the style of."

The other idea is, well, too embryonic to say anything about. I need to so some background reading, which is a fun idea in itself. This could turn out to be a short story or something longer, depending on how complicated it gets. Or nothing at all. More some time later.

Keeping on reading

In the meantime, there’s been a lot of reading going on. Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts, is not my usual reading, but as fantasy—or realism with fantasy elements or something—goes, it’s very grown-up and compelling. Terrific writing, a highly original story, even if it is based on mythology, achingly good characterisation and a satisfying ending that is neither too bleak nor too clappy-happy. I read it because Margot Lanagan came here for an earlier Writers’ and Readers’ week and I liked Tender Morsels. I think Sea Hearts is even better.

Terry Castle’s The Professor was recommended by a good friend. It’s seven essay/memoir pieces, the longest about her profoundly disturbing relationship as a grad student with a professor. Castle spares neither herself nor the professor. She (Castle) is neurotic, needy, and desperate, the professor cruel, dissociated and manipulative. Tears before bedtime is not the half of it. Something about the very clever telling of this sad tale was disturbing. Nonetheless I was fascinated, compelled along to the end. There’s an element of snarkiness in Castle’s writing which I didn’t like myself for enjoying. Her piece on Susan Sontag, “Desperately Seeking Susan,”is a particularly strong example; I’m not sure it’s enough of an excuse for what at times seems like mean-spiritedness, to acknowledge it in oneself. My friend, the one who recommended the book to me, would not agree at all I think, with what I have said about The Professor. She said it was “brilliant.”

In Anne Enright’s The Gathering one of the siblings in a large Irish family has committed suicide. The protagonist and voice of the novel, Veronica, was particularly close to Liam when they were children. She is married to Tom, who she either hates or loves, it’s hard to tell, and they have two daughters.  Veronica is uncertain. “I need to bear witness to uncertain events,” she says. The book evolves into her trying to know why Liam killed himself, and portrays the family as messy and dysfunctional. It’s wonderful writing, kind of bleak, kind of funny.

I read Joan Didion’s Blue Nights in a couple of hours one evening. It purports to be about the death of her daughter, but really it’s about her own aging. These are both topics of close interest to me, so I didn’t mind. The observations are sharp, the emotion raw. It’s a book I am glad to have read.

Other books I have read recently that are worth the attention are: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett; Look At Me, an earlier novel by Jennifer Egan of A Visit From the Goon Squad fame; The Bear Boy by Cynthia Ozick; and Granta 118: Exit Strategies. The story by Alice Munro in Exit Strategies disappointed me, but I guess not even AM can be brilliant every time.