I’m sure there are some who will no doubt interpret this as another example of the death of reading, books, literature, etc.
I don’t know.
I think it’s pretty amusing.
Here’s the tweet for Dante’s “Inferno”:
“I’m having a midlife crisis. Lost in the woods. Shoulda brought my iPhone.”
And for “Oedipus the King”:
“PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is all over me.”
I’m always interested in hearing about the “process” of other writers. (Quotation marks used because I’m not even sure what it means; process is a mystery, and every writer is different.)
So I fairly regularly check out the New York Times “Stray Questions” series. Writers get asked the same three questions:
1) What are you working on now?
2) Describe a typical day in your writing life.
3) What have you been reading or recommending lately?
Pretty standard boilerplate questions, I know. But it’s the second one that gets the most interesting responses.
The most recent writer queried was Michelle Wildgen, author of the newly released novel But Not For Long and an editor at Tin House.
Her process seems similar to mine, especially the “mental coaxing” part:
“…I’m usually in front of my computer by about 10, getting a few e-mails out of the way (again, so I can concentrate, a recurring theme), and then rereading what I wrote the previous session or doing really elementary copy edits, all in the hopes of getting in the mindset to move forward. I do a lot of this kind of mental coaxing — little stretches and rereading and meandering toward the world of the story. I never just throw myself in front of my laptop and start writing, though I wish I did. I try to write toward something — toward a scene, toward an idea I know I want to get to, even just toward an evocative pairing of words that’s been on the tip of my tongue for a few days. I try to leave myself something to start with the next day, so I can’t feel completely stymied…
“I know it isn’t coal mining, but I’m generally pretty tired after a good four or five hours of writing. Then I can turn to lighter editing, less exhausting writing or any kind of work that uses a less generative part of the brain. If I’m really sapped, I just start cooking dinner so I can get out of my head entirely. As for actual workspace, no matter where I live, I always unintentionally turn my office into something distinctly garret-like, to the point that when someone offered to photograph me at my writing desk, I opened the door and he just went mute with pity. I never have music playing, and I never go to a coffee shop or anything. I stay home in my garret with the blinds down.”
Well, there are some significant differences. I don’t write during the day, and spending four- or five-hour stretches on my fiction just doesn’t happen these days. And I don’t have a garret.
Are we talking trend? (First saw mention of this on Avery’s blog.)
And did I just use memoir as a verb? I believe I did…
I see that Don DeLillo has a new novel, called Point Omega, due out in February.
Here’s the write-up from the Scribner catalog…
Writing about conspiracy theory in Libra, government cover-ups in White Noise, the Cold War in Underworld, and 9/11 in Falling Man, “DeLillo’s books have been weirdly prophetic about twenty-first century America” (The New York Times Book Review). Now, in Point Omega, he takes on the secret strategist in America’s war machine.
In the middle of a desert “somewhere south of nowhere,” to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualize their efforts – to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create “Bulk and swagger,” he called it.
At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character – “Just a man against a wall.”
The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster’s daughter Jessie visits – an “otherworldly” woman from New York – who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men’s talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and connection, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.
“Mommy, you’re not a girl. You’re a boy because you look like a boy.”
“But I’m a girl. I have boobies.”
“A different kind of boobies.”
