This story originally caught my eye because a University of Texas associate professor was involved. Since I haven’t read the book, and since I’m not very familiar with Muslim culture, I’ll refrain from making my own judgment, but you can get the general facts and see both sides (I think) in this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece:

You Still Can’t Write About Muhammad

I will say that I feel sorry for the author. It doesn’t seem like she had any bad intentions, and this must be a huge disappointment, not to mention a bit scary.

My friend Casey introduced me to Robert Olen Butler when we met in Spain. Not literally, haha. She lent me his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories, A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN, which is fabulous, and now one of my favorite books. That’s all I’ve read of his so far, but I really want to check out this new collection, HAD A GOOD TIME, and the guillotine-inspired collection, SEVERANCE.

What astounds me most is how he comes to these ideas. The original inspirations almost sound like the hokey writing prompts you get in class or from Web sites, and yet he transforms them into non-hokey, fascinating voices and stories.

The inspiration for Robert Olen Butler’s new book of short stories, Had a Good Time, came from a collection of picture postcards. For ten years, he frequented postcard collectors’ conventions and antique malls, and while other collectors concerned themselves with the postcard photographs, Butler dug for glimpses of story—or as he says, “little fragments of expressed life”—in the written messages on the back. He chose fifteen postcards, breathed lives into the correspondents, and the result is a wonderful collection of stories that depicts American life after the turn of the twentieth century from a wide variety of perspectives.

I also liked his take on interracial relationships:

It’s not just a guy going and finding an exotic woman. It’s a much deeper thing than that. It’s that basic human yearning for connection—for an identity—in a world in which people clash over things like culture and religion, race and ethnicity. That seems to me the central issue of humanity. It always has been, and it’s particularly heightened today.

And of course, some general good advice/insight on writing:

It has to be historically plausible, but ultimately in fiction it’s the deeper human truth that you’re after.

All works of fiction are built around a character who yearns, and if you’re in touch with what the character is yearning for, then every detail is filtered through that emotional center. That will guide you as to which details are appropriate and which aren’t.

Graham Greene once said that all good writers have bad memories. He was speaking about a larger issue. He said that what you remember comes out as journalism, and what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. That’s an important point about the artistic origin of the work, but for me it also applies to the editing process: a writer needs to forget what she has just written in order to reengage it, in order to fix it or to improve it.

(Ah good, another excuse reason for my bad memory!)

Especially in this day and age, when literary fiction is not in great favor, my advice is to hang in there. If after fifteen rejections, or even twenty, I’d said, “aw fuck it,” I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. The thing that helps with rejection is to just move on to the next book or the next story. Once you’ve written a thing, and it’s the way you feel it needs to be artistically, you put it out in the world and you let it go. If you let the ambition to be published—or to be famous or to get book prizes—supersede your ambition to look into the deepest part of your self and to articulate your vision as truly as you can, you will never succeed as a writer. Your art will be destroyed. And if you do succeed in getting published, it will be as a compromised writer whose works will never endure. So you just write the thing you know to be true, and you put it into the world. Then you let it go, and you turn to the next story or the next book.

Based on this interview, I work in very much the same way as noteworthy screenwriter John August.

I really don’t like writing. That’s a terrible thing to say of course, because one is supposed to love one’s art. But I’d rather do just about anything than sit down and start writing.

The thing is, I love having written. I love going back and looking at the scene I wrote. So “writing” is a necessary, painful process I go through in order to get to “having written.”

When people say, “Oh, I just loving writing!” I know they’re full of crap. They’re probably lousy writers who are regurgitating their daily thoughts in a journal. Actual writing is hard work. Even when you have the flow and it’s going well, it’s still incredibly taxing. My deepest nights of sleep are after days of having to write ten pages.

(By the way, this — answering questions for an email interview — isn’t writing. This is talking with a keyboard, which is damn near effortless. I think one of the dangerous things that’s come with the rise of the Internet is that people are confusing typing with writing. Just because your words are captured in a UTF-8 character set doesn’t mean that you’re actually writing. Writing involves carefully shaping a thought for its desired impact. Writing means anticipating the reader’s reaction, and honoring (or defeating) that expectation. Writing requires logic. Blogging just requires an account.)

Hmm, can I be a professional keyboard-talker then?

Just kidding. Sort of.

Following The Most Unproductive Week Ever, i.e., last week, I’m trying to make sure I remember that my stories and books are not going to write themselves. And even if they could, I’d still have to find agents and write query letters and send out submissions. SO I’ve got a sh*t ton of work ahead of me, and the faster I get going, the sooner I’ll find success.

Back to that necessary, painful process…

This is my life.

I love that I spent all week anticipating Andy’s return from Germany, doing everything possible to make his homecoming pleasant and relaxing — i.e., laundry, vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing, bathing the dog, etc. — and not thirty minutes after he arrives, he gets stung on the toe by a wasp.

>_<

Speaking of unfortunate events, Lemony Snicket was on ABC last night. I enjoyed it even though it was kind of sad the whole way through, I suppose because there was an undertone of comic relief and optimism. Both child actors were excellent — I even think I would have preferred Liam Aiken as Harry Potter — and of course so was Jim Carrey, despite being rather creepy.

Anyway, since I just watched the movie, it seems fitting to post my favorite part of an interview with Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), which I read a few days ago.

I use a quote a lot that Miles Davis supposedly said to John Coltrane when John Coltrane was in his mode where he would get up and he would solo for five hours. And he was playing with Miles Davis, and Miles Davis said, “Um, you really, you have to keep those solos shorter because we’re trying to have an evening.” And John Coltrane said, “I don’t know what to do. I just put it in my mouth and I keep playing and I don’t know how to stop.” And Miles Davis said, “Take the horn out of your mouth.”

And I always think that when I’m too in love with my own work that I feel that I can’t change it. You know, when I think, “This passage is too long, but every sentence seems glorious. What in the world can I do?” And I think, “Just take the horn out of your mouth.” There is in fact a way to change something. And the fact that you feel sad about it is not necessarily an excuse.

Since Andy’s been gone (no Kelly Clarkson pun intended) all this week in Germany on business, I decided to send him a little surprise, similar to what he did for me before.

I can’t even say “Dad” or the poor little guy goes bonkers looking for Andy, sniffing at the door, etc. Thank goodness he can’t spell.

From the movie Miss Potter:

There’s something quite delicious about writing the first words of a story.

“A Writing Woman” by Gail Godwin is a really excellent piece — almost more a story than an essay or an advice column.

(This is the fourth and final of the Atlantic Monthly articles I mentioned, BUT then there is their whole archive of literary interviews, plus a few articles I found elsewhere. It never ends!)

Fact and fiction, fiction and fact. Which stops where, and how much to put in of each? At what point does regurgitated autobiography graduate into memory shaped by art? How do you know when to stop telling it as it is, or was, and make it into what it ought to be—or what would make a better story?

I think that’s something every fiction (or “fiction”) writer wrestles with. I still remember when Catie scratched out “Fiction Workshop” in the header of one of my stories and wrote (lovingly), “LIIIIES!!”

We are told to write what we know, and then told that what really happened is too boring, or unresolved. Dialogue should be lifelike, not peppered with the yeahs and ums and whats that we really hear. But so much fiction doesn’t “ring true.” And so much non-fiction (at least lately) has been exposed as fabrication.

Where is the line? Does it matter (to readers)? Isn’t it all just marketing anyway?

I don’t have any answers. Just my own struggles.

I was badly in need of a miracle. I was twenty‑seven years old and had not yet become what I had wanted to be since the age five: a writer. True, I wrote every evening, long exhaustive entries in my journal, to compensate for boring days. I had stayed for three years in my cushy government job — helping the British plan their holidays in the United States — though I had intended to stay one year. I had begun countless stories and novels but there was something “off” about all of them. Either they had the ring of self‑consciousness about them, or they started too slowly and petered out before I ever got to the interesting material that had inspired me in the first place, or they were so close to the current problems of my own life that I couldn’t gain the proper distance and perspective.

Andy pointed out that “proper distance and perspective” may be what I’m lacking with The Good Daughters, and what’s causing me to struggle so much with the revision. [sigh] I think he’s probably right. So I’m going back to the drawing board, which is somewhat disheartening because I’ve invested so much time, effort, and heart into what I’ve already written, but also somewhat exciting, because I know I can do better.

.

These last two are not writing-related, but I liked them.

“The best means of learning to know oneself is seeking to understand others.”

“Yes, that’s it,” he said, in his cool, professional voice. But I saw the blood come into his face; the blush of exultation; he knew he had freed me. Even if it meant freeing me from him.

Wow, I’ve never read SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE (though I have read a couple other books by Vonnegut) but what a passage:

Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet. He went into the kitchen, where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle of champagne on the kitchen table, all that was left from the reception in the tent. Somebody had stoppered it again. “Drink me,” it seemed to say.

So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn’t make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

Thanks to Sarah for linking to it.