Wisdom From Tim Powers
Nov. 27th, 2002 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_gneechLaurie is on the Tim Powers message list, and occasionally forwards me bits of writing info/advice/opinion from the esteemed Mr. Powers ...
Kim Smith, I know what you mean about that flavor of '50s SF -- Leiber and Budrys and Heinlein and Anderson; and I think Palle has it right in noting that it's an absence of cynicism. In reading sumbission manuscripts for the Clarion workshop -- which I'm already knee-deep in for 2003, though I'm not teaching it next year, just helping select -- cynicism is a an unattractive stain on lots of the stories we get. There's a tongue-in-cheek, flippant, hip, cynical style (which I see much more often in unpublished stories than in published ones!) that I find fatal to ... what I want a story to do for me, which is make me forget I'm sitting in a chair, make me imagine that I'm with the characters where they are.
I love some of the writers-on-writing quotes! Especially Elmore Leonard's "Leave out the parts that people skip."
Atara, right, the way I start a book. By the time I'm ready to start, I've spent a year or so reading and making notes and assembling an outline, and at last it's time to start, and I'm staring at a blank screen and thinking, "Okay Powers, you're about to write the first sentence of the book that will occupy you until you're [some advanced-sounding age]. Go."
And of course I recoil in a panic, and devote the day to reading some old John D. MacDonald paperback. Okay, so the next day I sit down at the machine and tell myself, "Today we won't do any actual work. We'll warm up for it, by ... oh, I don't know ... writing ten sample first sentences. We won't use any of the ten, these are just finger exercises. Write me ten sentences that _could_ start the book." So I do that -- no trouble. Then I tell myself, "Okay, now -- still just
for practice! -- take three of those sentences and make complete paragraphs of them, or if they're dialogue, take the conversation down to half a page or so." Fine, I can do that. Then I say, "Now take one of those three paragraphs or half-pages and extend it to three pages. Not gonna use it, this is just practice." And then after I've done that, I say "Hah! Gotcha! That's the first three pages of
your actual book!" -- which I doubt, at the time; but I hesitantly write another page or two, and then next day a few more -- still thinking this is just practice -- and finally I realize that yes, this _is_ the actual book. With Declare, I didn't decide I was writing the actual book until our man had got the phone call at college and driven to London and got well involved with stuff.
And Atara, I think I do agree with you, more or less, on the canon business. Certainly one century will find different antique writers arresting than the previous century did, and we're all familiar with the squinting suspicion that _this_ landmark of world literature (whichever it might be for each of us) is a fraud, perpetuated only because people are too shy to point out that it's no damn good.
But I like to think it's Darwin, in the form of the vast ungovernable readership, that defines the current "canon" -- and not so much literary critics. I like to think that most of the people who read ... I don't know, Mary Shelley, Lewis Carroll, Dante, Swift, the Brontes ... do it because they want to, not because it's been assigned. And I like to think that Cowper and Southey are forgotten
because nobody wants to read them, not because no professor is promoting them. I recently found myself staying in Los Angeles without a book to read, and luckily I was right around the corner from a Book Star, and I remembered that I was halfway through reading Matthew Lewis's _The Monk_ -- and they had three different editions of it there, in paperback. I doubt that any local teacher had
assigned that particular book for a class, but there I was in a bookstore that was presumably interested in making money, and they were ready for a dozen or so people to come in wanting _The Monk._ I doubt that Matthew Lewis is part of anyone's official canon -- unless it's a very long list! -- but he seems to be enduring.
I'm not sure that directly addresses the question -- but it's near the target, anyway!
Cheers,
Tim
Kim Smith, I know what you mean about that flavor of '50s SF -- Leiber and Budrys and Heinlein and Anderson; and I think Palle has it right in noting that it's an absence of cynicism. In reading sumbission manuscripts for the Clarion workshop -- which I'm already knee-deep in for 2003, though I'm not teaching it next year, just helping select -- cynicism is a an unattractive stain on lots of the stories we get. There's a tongue-in-cheek, flippant, hip, cynical style (which I see much more often in unpublished stories than in published ones!) that I find fatal to ... what I want a story to do for me, which is make me forget I'm sitting in a chair, make me imagine that I'm with the characters where they are.
I love some of the writers-on-writing quotes! Especially Elmore Leonard's "Leave out the parts that people skip."
Atara, right, the way I start a book. By the time I'm ready to start, I've spent a year or so reading and making notes and assembling an outline, and at last it's time to start, and I'm staring at a blank screen and thinking, "Okay Powers, you're about to write the first sentence of the book that will occupy you until you're [some advanced-sounding age]. Go."
And of course I recoil in a panic, and devote the day to reading some old John D. MacDonald paperback. Okay, so the next day I sit down at the machine and tell myself, "Today we won't do any actual work. We'll warm up for it, by ... oh, I don't know ... writing ten sample first sentences. We won't use any of the ten, these are just finger exercises. Write me ten sentences that _could_ start the book." So I do that -- no trouble. Then I tell myself, "Okay, now -- still just
for practice! -- take three of those sentences and make complete paragraphs of them, or if they're dialogue, take the conversation down to half a page or so." Fine, I can do that. Then I say, "Now take one of those three paragraphs or half-pages and extend it to three pages. Not gonna use it, this is just practice." And then after I've done that, I say "Hah! Gotcha! That's the first three pages of
your actual book!" -- which I doubt, at the time; but I hesitantly write another page or two, and then next day a few more -- still thinking this is just practice -- and finally I realize that yes, this _is_ the actual book. With Declare, I didn't decide I was writing the actual book until our man had got the phone call at college and driven to London and got well involved with stuff.
And Atara, I think I do agree with you, more or less, on the canon business. Certainly one century will find different antique writers arresting than the previous century did, and we're all familiar with the squinting suspicion that _this_ landmark of world literature (whichever it might be for each of us) is a fraud, perpetuated only because people are too shy to point out that it's no damn good.
But I like to think it's Darwin, in the form of the vast ungovernable readership, that defines the current "canon" -- and not so much literary critics. I like to think that most of the people who read ... I don't know, Mary Shelley, Lewis Carroll, Dante, Swift, the Brontes ... do it because they want to, not because it's been assigned. And I like to think that Cowper and Southey are forgotten
because nobody wants to read them, not because no professor is promoting them. I recently found myself staying in Los Angeles without a book to read, and luckily I was right around the corner from a Book Star, and I remembered that I was halfway through reading Matthew Lewis's _The Monk_ -- and they had three different editions of it there, in paperback. I doubt that any local teacher had
assigned that particular book for a class, but there I was in a bookstore that was presumably interested in making money, and they were ready for a dozen or so people to come in wanting _The Monk._ I doubt that Matthew Lewis is part of anyone's official canon -- unless it's a very long list! -- but he seems to be enduring.
I'm not sure that directly addresses the question -- but it's near the target, anyway!
Cheers,
Tim
