Tag Archives: Alice Munro

What Writers Can Learn from Tolstoy’s Novellas

Late Last Night Books

Lev_Nikolayevich_Tolstoy_1848I’m shocked when I read lists of favorite novels and see that most, and sometimes all, are American. There may be a leavening of British authors too; that’s something. Still, I think, haven’t you read the Russians or the Germans? You really think Toni Morrison or Jonathan Safran-Foer are better than Tolstoy or Musil? Anglo-Saxon culture is lamentably insular, and American culture is not merely insular but downright provincial these days. The greatest weakness of the writing done by creative writing students—graduates as well as undergraduates—is that it’s so rarely informed by wide reading. And however unfashionable it may be, my remedy is to send them to the canon. Not “back to the canon”, sadly, because most of them aren’t familiar with it in the first place.

Tell, Don’t Show

Late Last Night Books

9/26/15 – Tell, Don’t Show

Show, don’t tell is such an axiom of creative writing programs, and indeed of advice given to writers in general, that it is rarely questioned. The most recent author to visit the university program where I teach, for example, gave this advice to our students—and of course it’s sound, especially for the beginning writer, who is much more likely to err on the wrong side, of summary and exposition, including so few scenes that the writing remains dull. No less a master of fiction than Joseph Conrad said that the novelist’s task was to make the reader see, and who can doubt that that entails writing dramatic scenes most of the time? All the same, I have been pondering this question a good deal lately, and would like to share my reflections on why “show, don’t tell” has become such an unchallenged axiom—indeed an almost sacred Commandment—particularly in the United States, and what interesting alternatives to this strategy there might be.

In Praise of Women of Genius

Late Last Night Books

3/26/15  IN PRAISE OF WOMEN OF GENIUS  After my last essay, “On Talent and Genius”, whose examples of genius were mostly or—ahem—entirely male, one of my readers archly asked if I might be biased, even subconsciously. Of course one can affirm confidently that one is not biased consciously, but the charge of subconscious bias is unanswerable. The only way I could disprove it is by taking a psychological test. (And even then…) However, I do have a couple of responses to the accusation: first, my examples were male not because I believe that no women of genius could have been exercising those arts, but that in fact few did, until quite recently, because of societal pressures.

GUEST BLOGGER BARBARA WESTWOOD DIEHL ON THE ENDURING APPEAL OF THE SHORT STORY

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1 MARCH 2014 GUEST BLOGGER BARBARA WESTWOOD DIEHL ON THE ENDURING APPEAL OF THE SHORT STORY

3/1/14 – GUEST BLOGGER BARBARA WESTWOOD DIEHL ON THE SHORT STORY’S ENDURING APPEAL

Yes, I complain about the volume of submissions. (502 in the last 22 days, and 256 of those are short stories.) I complain about the time away from my own writing. I complain about all the administrative tasks of running a literary journal—I won’t put you to sleep with that laundry list—but all those tasks have nothing to do with the intoxicating work of reading hundreds of short stories each submission period. Yes, all of them, not only the stories that we finally publish. I’m humbled , stunned really, to have all those stories entrusted to me.