The Paris Review: Writers at Work · 4:36am Nov 13th, 2013
In the late 1950s, a group of enthusiastic highbrow readers created a magazine called The Paris Review, which had nothing to do with Paris (except aspirationally). Its main draw was interviews with famous authors. Later, these interviews were collected in books. Much later, these books went out of print and became impossible to obtain. Much, much later, I was able to collect the complete set of volumes 1 through 8 buying used books through Amazon.com. (Links to amazon are on the volume numbers.) These authors were interviewed in volumes 1 through 4:
1
Nelson Algren
Truman Capote
Joyce Cary
William Faulkner
E.M. Forster
Alberto Moravia
Francois Mauriac
Frank O'Connor
Dorothy Parker
Francoise Sagan
Georges Simenon
William Styron
James Thurber
Robert Penn Warren
Thornton Wilder
Angus Wilson
2
Lawrence Durrell
T S Eliot
Ralph Ellison
Robert Frost
Ernest Hemingway
Aldous Huxley
Robert Lowell
Mary McCarthy
Henry Miller
Marianne Moore
Boris Pasternak
S J Perelman
Ezra Pound
Katherine Anne Porter
3
Edward Albee
Saul Bellow
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Blaise Cendrars
Jean Cocteau
Allen Ginsberg
Lillian Hellman
James Jones
Norman Mailer
Arthur Miller
Harold Pinter
Evelyn Waugh
William Carlos Williams
4
Conrad Aiken
W H Auden
John Berryman
Jorge Luis Borges
Anthony Burgess
Isak Dinesen
John Dos Passos
Robert Graves
Christopher Isherwood
Jack Kerouac
Vladimir Nabokov
George Seferis
Anne Sexton
John Steinbeck
John Updike
Eudora Welty
(Isn't it weird to realize that Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac were contemporaries?)
While writing this up, I found that all these interviews, and many more, have been posted online here.
I've highlighted different passages, and plan to post extracts from them on this blog. The first chapter of the first book is a summary of sorts of the whole first ten years. Here's my own much briefer summary.
One surprising thing is that none of the great authors agreed on who the great authors were. We can easily enough agree on who is "considered" great. But no one great author thought that everybody else on the great author list was great, or even competent. Moravia disliked Dickens and detested Zola. Capote couldn't stomach Poe or Dickens. Pound didn't like Robinson. A large percentage of modernist poets disliked Frost. Half of the great authors listed Joyce and Faulkner as among their favorites, and the other half thought they were terrible writers. Most admired Dostoyevsky; some disliked Tolstoy. No one mentioned Steinbeck, although (or perhaps because) he outsold them all in the thirties and forties. The most-admired contemporary authors were Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Forster, and someone I'd never heard of, John Dos Passos. The only author that everyone unanimously praised was Shakespeare. (So, of course, I'm writing a post on why I think Shakespeare was a bad writer.)
This lends some support to my notion that there's no such thing as a great book. People are too different for any one book to be meaningful to them all. That also requires its own blog post.
Another surprising thing was that the people who thought they worked the hardest — the full-time authors — hardly worked. The interviewers grilled everyone about their working habits, and those who wrote full-time almost always said that they worked four hours a day. Most of them wrote something like one novel every three to five years. The fabulously successful authors, who sold enough books to be full-time authors, generally wrote less than those who had to hold down a full-time job and write in their spare time, although the most-prolific authors (Simenon, Hemingway, Steinbeck) were also full-time and fabulously successful writers.
If you're hoping to learn a good way of writing stories from these interviews, I'll summarize for you:
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right!
There was a clear divide between authors who believed you have to know what's going to happen before you can write the story, and authors who believed you have to write the story before you can find out what happens. There didn't seem to be any middle ground on that. There were some authors who had nothing but pictures, isolated scenes in their head with no evident connection, and they wrote or thought until they found some path between those scenes. (CS Lewis was also sometimes that kind of writer.)
There was also a division between authors who loved a beautiful style, and authors who thought that style was an impediment to story. There were more of the former than of the latter, but I suspect that if you had asked the authors on the bestseller lists for the 1950s, the situation would be reversed. I love a beautiful style, but I don't want to have "my own" style. People used to ask Bruce Lee what the best style was, and he would say that he didn't know, but he knew that the best martial artists were those who had no one style. I feel that way about writing, but I can't point to any authors as exemplars.
None of them thought that criticism was of any use. The universal opinion was that the author is an artist who must follow his or her star and ignore all advice. Everyone who was asked to said either that they did not read any reviews of their work, or that the reviews were stupid and useless. This is one of our secret weapons as fanfiction writers: We know how to take criticism. We realize that we are writing for an audience, and can't forget or haughtily ignore them.
Hemingway kept insulting the interviewer and complaining about how stupid the questions were, and I realized he was right. The interviewers were phenomenally well-read, yet I don't think they wrote. They asked the questions that beginning writers past: Where do you get your ideas? What are your work habits? Do you conceive first of the plot, the place, the characters, or the theme? What are the symbols in your stories? They didn't ask the questions I would ask: What trade-offs have you made in your stories? How can you tell whether what you wrote is any good? Are you limited more by your own ability, or by your readers'? Is there a difference between practicing writing and writing? Why do you write more sad stories than happy ones?
These interviews contain a lot of useful advice and ideas about writing and the writing life, interspersed between long biographical stretches. I liked the interviews with Thornton Wilder, Frank O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Miller, & James Jones. I disliked or generally disagreed with Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. I'll try to post some extracts now and then.
Sweet, I'm looking forward to this blog series.
To be fair, the audience is literally right next to the story here. That's something that couldn't have happened at all in the fifties, not unless you turned your story into a speech. I don't think it's a secret weapon so much as a happy accident of technology.
There's really no secret to writing, is there? I mean, there's plenty of craft to it, nobody disputes that, but when you distill what great writers--great, at least according to uneasy cultural consensus[1]--say about writing, it's just a welter of conflicting confusing ideas. Two possibilities emerge:
a) There's really no one model of good writing, and what models can be constructed are so heavily dependent on the time, the context, and a thousand difficult-to-quantify environmental variables, that they are close to useless and function primarily to cover personal intuition and prejudice with a veneer of respectability.
b) There is a model of good writing but great writers, by and large, aren't the best people to ask about it.
Both possibilities are interesting, I think.
Regarding the questions to ask writers, I think I vastly prefer yours[2]. I think my favorite question to ask a writer--though it could be construed as rude--is where they think their most famous/"best" story fails. What do they regret? What did they miss?
[1] Incidentally, praising Shakespeare as a writer, incidentally, is a pet peeve of mine. Shakespeare may be a great writer. We'll never know. It's absolutely impossible to approach anything he wrote as you would the work of any other writer. So much of what he wrote permeates the popular consciousness that it's impossible to evaluate what he wrote with a clear mind. I mean, consider the ultimate chestnut, Hamlet's legendary soliloquy in Act 3, scene 1. Can anyone read 'To be or not to be' and see what is written instead of all the times it is quoted, misquoted, joked about, and adapted? Can anyone read it and not react with the sure and certain knowledge that they are reading one of the canonically Important Bits of English Lit? That might be the price of literary apotheosis. The loss of innocent readership, the loss of readers who just read an run--to mangle a quote--and becoming, instead, the common clay used to build future literature.
[2] "Where do you get your ideas?" is such an odd question. I mean, it's not like there's a mine you have to get them out of, it's not like you must hunt for them in vernal woods or, I don't know, steal them from ancient sages dwelling on frosty mountain-tops[3]. Everyone gets ideas in the same way from the same place: they come from dreams, from books, from the way light plays on water, from the taste of cherries, or malaise on a Sunday morning. From life, in fact. Where else would writers get them? Elves?
[3] The preceding sentence includes the most obscure and self-indulgent joke I've ever made. I am, however, unrepentant.
1504630
Technology makes it possible, granted, or at least easier, but there's also a question of motivation, I think. The key feature of a fanfic writer--good or bad--is that they write not because they self-consciously want to make ART (with manifestos and cliquishness and all that), not because they want to get paid (because they aren't going to be), but because they want to be read. The will to communicate is part and parcel of fanficcery. Not that such an outlook is unique to fanfiction, of course.
1504699
I think the argument to that would be... isn't that what we're trying to do? I mean, is there a writer in the world who wouldn't love for their works to be as read and remembered as Shakespeare? And, if that is the case, he must have done something right.
Looking forward to the essays, but there is one observation I must make: Shakespeare wasn't a great writer because Shakespeare wasn't a writer at all. He was a playwright. Despite his flair for language and poetry, his works were never meant to be read.* He created the blueprints from which performances were built. It's a mistake to ask writers about Shakespeare because they aren't fully qualified to judge him. Rather, ask actors and directors, the craftsmen who must work from his blueprints, though near universal praise is what you will get from that direction, too.
BTW, we fanfic authors share something in common with Shakespeare: He took the plot, characters, and setting for many of his plays from other sources. Even his "histories" can be considered historical fanfic, as they diverge so much from what was known to be true in his time.
-----
* Sonnets excepted.
1504807 That's a reasonable defense against the charge that most of Shakespeare's characters weren't interesting (one of my opinions). They require actors to bring them to life. But most of my issues with Shakespeare don't have to do with the distinction between plays and novels. To wit:
- He continually deliberately obfuscated his meaning with strange word choice, word order, and metaphors, because he thought that was cool. Almost at random, here are some lines from Merchant of Venice:
Actors traditionally read lines like these as fast as they possibly can, to add to the "fun" of trying to catch just what old Bill was trying to say. I've read this paragraph at leisure and I don't know what it's trying to say. This isn't because Shakespeare was Elizabethan. Christopher Marlowe doesn't encipher his lines in tongue-twisters. This kind of deliberately trying to trip up the listener could be clever, once, in one play, with one character, but Shakespeare does it all the damn time.
- He used a lot of bad plots. Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Midsummer Night's Dream, heck, all his comedies.
- He wasn't funny. At all. He knew how to make puns and sexual jokes, and that was all. Yet he persisted in writing comedy after awful comedy.
- He wasn't romantic. At all. I've found no romance in Shakespeare. Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, MacBeth, Taming of the Shrew--any story you name that has a couple married or in love--they don't give me any romantic feelings. Some of his sonnets do, a little, but not his plays.
The Shakespeare play I like best is Julius Caesar, because Brutus does the right thing and gets killed for it. That's a story worth thinking about.
Shakespeare was good, but he's not on a par with the best authors of today. Compare Romeo & Juliet to West Side Story. There's more emotion and more-endearing characters in a six-page Charles de Lint fairy story than in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and more humor in one page of Pratchett than in all of Shakespeare.
The adulation of Shakespeare is part of a literary culture of elevating style over content. Shakespeare had style, incredible style. But pretty words aren't enough to heap that much praise on someone. Saying what I say about Shakespeare is a way of saying that story and character matter deeply to me, much more than pretty phrases.
I wonder if there would have been more of a consensus on the "great" authors if term were more directed. For example, "Which authors are great at inducing empathy in readers? Great at inspiring curiosity? Great at taking silly things seriously?" Really, anything to reduce ambiguity in the word. I've not read the interviews, so I don't know what you mean by it here.
1504699>>1504712
That's interesting. Are you saying that Shakespeare should not be praised as a good writer despite being overwhelmingly successful at achieving your goal as a writer (ie. to be read)?
Um. I think the closest I can get to this is my claim to have the complete "N'th Man" comic series.
(and the first three trade paperbacks of the MLP comic now)
1504872 Are you saying that Shakespeare should not be praised as a good writer despite being overwhelmingly successful at achieving your goal as a writer (ie. to be read)?
1504782 is there a writer in the world who wouldn't love for their works to be as read and remembered as Shakespeare? And, if that is the case, he must have done something right.
You're both right — but those statements are equally right applied to Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer.
1504880
You know my thoughts on that subject. Though I do think that lasting for centuries with that kind of fame puts you a couple of steps up from them.
1504892 You know my thoughts on that subject.
Er, actually, I've forgotten. Summary / link?
1504896
I'm of the opinion, in general, that books that entertain people are good. I talked about it some on my (probably outdated) list of tips for selling out on FiMfiction. But generally, I think that writing beautiful, touching stories that only English professors read is not a more worthy goal than writing books that millions of people enjoy, and I'd rather have the latter myself.
1504699
It's easy to figure out whether Shakespeare was great. All you have to do is pin down exactly what makes any writer good or bad, and... oh, wait.
But seriously... I understand that feeling, believe me, but it's just a matter of deciding which elements of a story are important to you, the reader. No metric of quality is rendered insurmountable by cultural baggage, even with the massive reputation of Shakespeare.
(good rule of thumb: If anyone ever tells you that Shakespeare is 'highbrow,' or that Shakespeare productions should be somber and moody for gravitas, you should probably clobber them with a fire extinguisher)
1504880
I'm not saying that Shakespeare should be considered a good writer because he's popular. I'm saying that GhostOfHeraclitus's position is weird.
I don't believe that it makes sense to say that Shakespeare is a good writer for the same reason I don't think it makes sense to say that "X is a good writer" for any X. "Good" is not a... good... description here. The problem isn't that it's subjective, just that it's not qualified enough alone for me to reasonably believe that you and I are thinking of similar enough things when I say it.
1504782
I'm not saying he isn't remembered. And I'm certainly not saying it isn't a wonderful thing to be as transformative an influence on an entire literary tradition and, indeed, language. I'm, rather, saying--or trying to, not with any great success--that while we can accept the historical fact of Shakespeare's popularity, and we have no choice but accept his massive influence, there is an enormous difficulty in appreciating him for what he wrote alone. He must have done something right, yes, but it's hard to tell what. We are all raised in a cultural milieu where his plays permeate our understanding of language and literature, and it's hard to assess things from such an inside perspective. It's hard to speak of Shakespeare's literary greatness when we, in a way, use him as a yardstick for what greatness is.
That was my point, though I'm not sure I've explained myself well.
1504872
I'm not. I'm not saying he's not great. I'm saying that saying that he is great is a bit pointless. He is too central a figure for that to have much meaning anymore. Saying that someone is a great X is supposed to be a judgement that carries some interesting information. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is almost great by definition.
1504868
A quick reply (because seriously grappling with a critique of Shakespeare is a daunting prospect and demands more time than I have):
1. The quote you include doesn't seem to me that confusing (though, possibly, being a dirty furrin' fellow I misunderstood it). The speaker is explaining (in an As You Know fashion) that he is much given to a lush lifestyle, and that this has left him with crippling debt, and that his wish is to be rid of said debt, but (as he disclaims) he has no desire to abandon the lifestyle.
2. What 'romance' means--or even more importantly, what is generally believed that romance means, varies from culture to culture and from time to time.
3. So does what's funny. Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan palate, and not a highbrow one, either. After all, in London of the time, the choice of diversions of a lovely evening was either King Lear or bear baiting. That's said, speaking of comedy, there are funny bits. Not much, but some. Dogberry, say.
Come on. Give that to a halfway decent actor, and it's bound to get at least a smile.
4. Romeo and Juliet isn't really about love. It's more a riff (a fanfic, if you will) on a popular genre of the time, viz. "Young lads and lasses act inappropriately and punishment rains upon them from on high to an extent that's, frankly, ludicrous.[1]" Shaksepare, instead, adds on this rather mean-spirited skeleton an intriguing layer of empathy. The kids are for-the-period naughty and they do end up ruined, but there's a lot of exenuating circumstances. There is, he points out, a purity in their motive. Consider that the way they flirt is using sacral metaphors -- that's straight out of an etiquette manual of the day. And, of course, their situation is exacerbated by the conflict of their own desires and those of society, except now society is a bit to blame, too. Civil blood makes civil hands unclean and all that. In essence, he takes a stern morality play sort of thing, slathers it with subversive[2] empathy for the young, and sprinkles an individual-versus-society theme straight from Antigone with the society not in as unassailable position as it generally was at the time. It's subversive and slightly metafictional, but it really isn't a romance. For some unknowable reason, everyone thinks it is one.
5. Regarding daft plots and the triumph of style over substance. The plots are daft, but they are meant to. We read Shakespeare today with a magnifying glass, looking at every bit with care. We watch performances in much the same way. Don't forget, the Globe was poorly lit (this was before limelight), and noisy. And the people (who were invariably drunk) were talking amongst themselves and treating the proceedings with absolutely no gravitas whatsoever. This means that the plot had to be a bit on the broad-strokes side and that style had to carry the whole thing quite frequently.
1504913
See above.
[1] You may know the pattern from the modern slasher film, actually.
[2] For the time. For the time. It's the same problem as with Tolstoy, actually. The fact that we are meant to feel for Anna Karenina was--at the time--bold. This is invariably lost on the modern reader.
1504903
If nothing else, Shakespeare proved that "writing beautiful, touching stories" and writing stories that people enjoy isn't mutually exclusive. I love breaking down the completely artificial barriers between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" art.
1504868
Only if they are bloody incompetent. It is an actor's primary job to communicate, not to obfuscate. Amateurs rush over lines they don't understand. Professionals can communicate the meaning of the lines to the audience, even though that audience might not understand the lines as written.
Prefaced with, "In my opinion..." your criticisms are perfectly understandable, but framed as universal fact, you might as well be saying that laughing fish are eating your furniture for all that I can take them seriously, or debate them. So I'm not going to try.
You may well be right, and the majority of theater-goers for four hundred years, wrong. But I know which way the smart money is betting.
1504972
Pretty much this.
One thing I've actually found helpful, as silly as this sounds, is to watch WALL•E (again...) and study how, in the mostly-silent first act, the characters convey expressions solely through body language and inflection of their beeps. Then put that sort of stylized inflection into the lines of Shakespeare in order to convey their meaning via gestures and signals.
Theatre doesn't work in naturalistic-dialogue formats anyway. The audience isn't close enough to catch the subtle nuances of body language.
Thank you very much for this! You may also be interested in the Caedmon label, which specialized in recordings of authors reading their own works. Through them I've heard both Tolkien and Hemingway read their poetry aloud (yes, Hemingway wrote poetry).
1504699
"Non elves, sed Elvis."
--Not Gregory I
1504920
One day in the far future there will be some silly future-people writing future-words about how Friendship is Magic is only considered a good animated tv show because it was popular and not because the show itself had much or any quality. To which I say, for the audience at the time it was the perfect show. (Not that all the episodes were the best, but that the show in general was.)
Is that a bit pretentious? I think the above paragraph is kinda pretentious. Sorry. Anyways, I love that all the authors interviewed hated criticism. That can only ever be funny. Looking forward to your future posts.
1504920
I've been considering my response, because I do know what you mean, and it is a hard thing to wrap one's head around.
Actually, it's an idea similar to patriotism. To say that <my country> is the greatest country in the world is just foolish for a large portion of the population of the world, because there's no way to compare it fairly. The combination of lack of experience with other countries, nostalgia for the place you were born and raised, indoctrination, and comfort in the known combine to make up patriotism, even though A) the idea of a "great" country would involve agreeing on criteria that no one is going to agree on and is likely to lean towards "ways that other countries are like mine," and B) most people don't know enough about their country or any other to effectively argue it even if they did settle on some kind or criteria.
So, your original point is that people who list Shakespeare as a favorite writer are, essentially, patriots. And I can see that being annoying. It doesn't mean that there aren't great things to take from Shakespeare, just that it's difficult to see what those are for lack of clarity.
1505130
I once heard T.S. Elliot read the Wasteland and was deeply disappointed. That sort of put me off of 'read by the author' as concept.
1505138
Be it so resolved -- you are the Internet gaining consciousness.
...
I have to say, you are a lot nicer than I expected.
1505319
Don't get me wrong, I love Shakespeare, and of course I think he's a great playwright, but I can't shake the feeling I was sort of programmed to. I don't feel this is a meaningful fact about me, but rather merely a symptom of having been educated partially in the western tradition.
I quite like you comparison to patriotism. It is a bit like that.
1505319 Hey!
Are you saying America isn't the greatest country?
You gotta stop talking to them dirty furriners.
1505581 I understand what you mean about not being able to look at Shakespeares' work and see it for itself. But we can infer many bits of information from his circumstances.
We know something like a dozen Elizabethan authors. We don't know how many people tried to write professionally in English before 1610, but the number is probably less than a thousand, probably much less. Which is more likely?
A. One of these thousand was immeasurably more-talented than the millions who wrote after him, and who had better training and better literature to draw on as examples. We can measure these odds; they are certainly less than one in a thousand.
B. Shakespeare has been grandfathered in. Everyone is programmed to like Shakespeare by their progenitors who were programmed to like Shakespeare. Odds: Considerably more than one in a thousand.
Add to that the fact that some of his most popular plays are ones that are just bad, like The Comedy of Errors, and I don't find it plausible that people are driven to watch Shakespeare because he's so good. Maybe it's because he provides a unique experience. Watching a Shakespeare play is different. Strange dress, strange thoughts, strange ways of speaking. To the modern viewer, Shakespeare presents a fantasy world with remarkable internal consistency.
It is possible that Shakespeare had the great advantage of keeping his audience in mind and writing for both highbrow and lowbrow tastes. It's possible that almost nobody has tried to do that since, at least almost nobody who's gotten sucked into the respectable literary mainstream.
It's also possible that his great advantage was that he was allowed to write great literature. If anyone tried to write with that kind of elevated style today, they'd just get laughed at.
1505604
Of course not! America is totally the greatest country in the world*!
* Criteria for "greatest country in the world" in this instance is "the country that most influenced the production of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic." No claim is made with regards to other potential criteria.
1505620
The two aren't mutually exclusive.
The question becomes, why was Shakespeare grandfathered in? Well, it's because he got exposure at the time for writing crowd-pleasers, which kept him in the public consciousness long enough to be brought to the attention of the scholars and literary critics who later canonized him.
Now, I don't think for a minute that "fifty bazillion art critics can't all be wrong" (as the War Nerd says, "the people on top are just as dumb as you are, only meaner and greedier"). But Shakespeare wasn't "immeasurably" more talented. In the closest ways you can get to "measuring" quality, he was better. The thing is, he was better than others in a lot of ways, and no areas or categories of writing skill matter to all audience members. He didn't care about continuity or plot holes, partially because he wasn't interested in technical coherency but mostly because that wasn't what his audiences showed up to see, or what most audiences show up to see. He didn't write about Ideas™ (a fact which earned him the ire of George Bernard Shaw... and boy could Shaw ever turn a phrase about anyone he didn't like, so if you're looking for "ammo" you need look no further than Shaw's interminable prefaces to his also-brilliant plays, which he actually called "theatre of the mind," because that was the kind of guy Shaw was), he wrote first and foremost about people, and ideas grew out of that. And he was apolitical to a fault... to the point that people who have spent entire academic careers studying Shakespeare's work in the context of his era and culture will proudly tell you that we don't know Shakespeare's personal opinions on any topic.
Theoretically, as an antihumanist (in the traditional sense of the term, not in the "four legs good, two legs bad" sense that it's commonly defined as in this fandom), this should make me dislike Shakespeare as well... and I more than understand that his thematic material isn't to everyone's tastes. But, he did question societal norms, if only by being so fair in his ideological portraits that he lent sympathy to character archetypes who had never been portrayed remotely sympathetically by any of his contemporaries (coughShylockcough).
Also, creativity is in the details. Shakespeare was hardly the first to tell the story of King Lear, but he was the first (at least, the first one that we can find any evidence of whatsoever) to have Lear and Cordelia die at the end, which is a much more dramatically consistent resolution to the arcs, and a more direct addressing of the horrors that have just taken place onstage.
1505620
I think that Shakespeare was just the right writer to be Shakespeare.
By that, I mean his plays were the right mix of highbrow and lowbrow, and happened to be published and preserved for the most part. They found their ways into the right homes and libraries. They were broad enough, with enough different kinds of comedy and drama for them to continue to to be entertaining to a wide range of audiences, but also deep enough to provide some fuel for academic analysis.
If Shakespeare was a genius, his genius was in the balance needed to continue to offer something to different audiences in different times. While I do agree with what Ghost said, I also think that aspects of Shakespeare do legitimately continue to appeal to different people on their own merits. Say what you will about Midsummer Night's Dream and its clusterfuck of characters and plot, I really do enjoy a lot of the snarkier stuff from Puck or Helena (and the same sort of thing from Rosalind, Touchstone, and Jacques in As You Like It.) I think there really are teenagers who read Romeo and Juliet (or see the movie) who think it's so romantic. You might disagree with all of that, but Shakespeare didn't mind, any more than he minded that I couldn't care less about Bottom and the players, or that those same teenaged girls would find Macbeth totally boring. He did something for everyone, and he did it at the right time, in the right place, and got noticed by the right people, so he lasts.
So, Shakespeare is probably 90% luck, and 10% making sure he threw in the kitchen sink so that when he got his lucky break, it was able to last through every style of literature and theater so far by appealing to almost anyone with something.
1505730 Why do you say you are an anti-humanist? I just looked at the Wikipedia page for anti-humanists, and I seem to be both a humanist (materialist ethics) and an anti-humanist (humanity is not good in and of itself). Perhaps I'm a zen humanist...
1506207
Admittedly, it's too vague a term, and it's certainly accumulated a lot of cultural baggage. "Posthumanist" would probably be a better term for me, though in some ways that's even vaguer.
I'm just overall suspicious of this notion that "The Human Condition™" is the apex of philosophical concepts... though that in itself is such a vague term that perhaps all this is just my knee-jerk reaction to the anthropocentrism of the literary critics who claim that all good fiction must necessarily be about "The Human Condition.™"
Full disclosure, I'm probably talking out my ass. ETA: But I certainly know the feeling of reading all those Wikipedia pages about humanist philosophy and feeling that you hold a dozen of these disparate ideas in your head at once.
1504920
All the elements of character, plot and theme you note in Romeo and Juliet are real, but they aren't original to Shakespeare. All of them are found in "The Two Lovers" of Boccaccio's Decameron, which he finished up between 1351 and 1353. Given that they'd been around, and extremely popular, for over two hundred years by the time Shakespeare stole them, I'm having a hard time seeing them as "subversive for the time." It seems to me that star-crossed lovers have always been sympathetic figures, unless of course one of them happens to be your own kid.
[EDIT--awhups, seems it wasn't Boccaccio but Bandello (REALLY HOW COULD I MIX THE TWO UP?). The following is its true lineage:
A common misconception is that Shakespeare invented the plot of Romeo
and Juliet. In fact, his play is a dramatisation of Arthur Brooke’s narrative
poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). Shakespeare
followed Brooke’s poem but improved it considerably by adding extra detail
to both major and minor characters, in particular the Nurse and Mercutio.
Brooke’s poem was not original either, being a translation and adaptation of
Giuletta e Romeo, by Matteo Bandello, included in his Novelle of 1554. This
was in turn an adaptation of Luigi da Porto’s Giulietta e Romeo, included in
his Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due Nobili Amanti (c. 1530). This latter
text is the version that gave the story much of its modern form, including the
names of the lovers, the rival families of the Montecchi and Capuleti, and
the location in Verona, in the Veneto. The earliest-known version of the tale
is the 1476 story of Mariotto and Gianozza of Siena by Masuccio
Salernitano, in Il Novellino (Novella XXXIII).
Bandello’s story, however, was the most famous
From here:
http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/folio/Sources/Source_texts_IF.pdf
Okay, so it'd only been around for a little over a hundred years. Still.]
True fact: there is a character in the Decameron named Buttafuco (Americans who remember the 90's will get a kick out of that). The name means, quite literally, "Spitfire."
So I think we can agree that Shakespeare was a writer of significant skill and ability who was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor of a huge new enterprise, that is, commercial dramas performed before the general public in purpose-built theatres. Due to the aforementioned talent and good luck as well as a surprisingly good sense for what the public wanted, he managed to establish a design language for that enterprise which is still in use today. But this language strikes many as flawed and arbitrary.
In other words, he's the Steve Jobs of playwrights and we react to him as such (QED--see below)
1506309 I'm planning a blog post about the anthropocentrism of the literary critics who claim that all good fiction must necessarily be about "The Human Condition.™"
1506025
Have you ever met any? It seems you haven't. I haven't either. Do they even exist? Maybe so.
But if they do, they wouldn't be wrong. Romeo and Juliet is romantic. And bawdy, bloody, sad and tragic. It's the juxtaposition of very sincere young love with these other elements that gives the play such great aesthetic tension.
When I was younger I snooted at R&J for the very reason you mention. As I grew older and I saw all the young first marriages of my friends come to grief in death and divorce, I began to appreciate its tragic elements and through them, to final understand its romantic elements. Because that romance is the same unclouded hope and affection which attended those marriages, and which I felt as much as anyone who wasn't actually getting married that day.
You hope it all turns out all right. You hope they at least get away. But circumstances always seem to catch up with us.
1506545
I've never spoken with one personally, in a way where I could verify whether they actually liked the play or were saying it to sound smart, or because they thought it was supposed to be romantic. That's why I qualified my answer.
I have seen teenagers say that Romeo and Juliet is their favorite book though, and I suspect at least some of them were actually being honest.
1506534
Boy did I walk into that one.
Everyone's focused like a laser in on Shakespeare, so I want to say that the rest of this post is great reading and I eagerly look forward to further dissections of Famous Authors Talking Out Their Ass.
Seriously, I think that "What makes writing great?" is a big and important and most of all scary question, because all intuition tells us that there should be an answer, but the lack of a generally agreed upon one despite centuries of navel-gazing is an interesting suggestion that we're all of us chasing shadows with it. And that means the wrong question's being asked, and THAT means that the right question is likely to be goddamn interesting.
Speaking of questions:
> Is there a difference between practicing writing and writing?
I'm really curious to hear your own answer to this.
> Why do you write more sad stories than happy ones?
My instinct is to say that sad stories are more compelling than happy ones, because it's adversity and failure which throw characters into relief and lead to growth, and because something wrong sticks further out in our brain than something right. I'd like to make a counterargument in defense of happy stories that doesn't sound prima facie twee, but I'll have to think about that some.
1504699
> That might be the price of literary apotheosis.
That is a hell of a turn of phrase.
1505620
It's intriguing to know that at the time Shakespeare was popular, sure, but wasn't regarded with anything like the reverence we have form him today. And, even more curiously, the plays that were most favored differ between then and now.
It's intriguing to ask if Shakespeare's greatness lies in him or in his works, i.e. do we imbue them with more than he meant to put in or more than his contemporaries got out of it? And you can go one level of abstraction beyond that actually. What if the greatness lies not in Shakespeare, as such, and not in his works, as such, but in the cultural context that surrounds his works? And does it matter for his greatness what the answer might be?
Huh, That's abstruse even by my standards. This is not so much 'death of the author' as 'the molting of author into a beautiful butterfly which subsequently escapes into the Tangerine Dimension.'
1506457
I knew that, actually, that's why I called it fanfiction. Though, admittedly, I didn't have quite all the details straight. And, obviously, I don't have the scholarly wherewithal to present an authoritative analysis, but my point was this bit from "Romeus and Juliet"
(bolding mine, of course)
There was a strong element of the moralistic to the star-crossed lovers tales, a sort of ritual punishment of the wayward for the edification of the audience. Shakespeare subverts that, to an extent, by tweaking the plot, and by knocking down the age of Romeo and Juliet. In the original they were much older, if memory serves, sixteen with Brooke and older still with Bandello eighteen or twenty.
But, again, I am no scholar of this matter, so I could be very much wrong.
1506648
I try.
1506648
I never do writing exercises. I don't like writing prompts, either. Sometimes I think of the writing I do here as practice, but I put as much effort into it as if I had been hired to write it. I don't think that practice in which you made less effort than in the real thing could do much good.
But I don't do writing exercises mostly because I'm lazy. I did the exercises in a book by Damon Knight, but I don't know whether they helped me or not.
I do things like saying, "My scene descriptions are boring; I'm going to spend special attention to them in this next story." But I wouldn't write a paragraph of scene description to practice. Getting elements in balance with each other is more difficult than getting them down in the first place. A surgeon doesn't say, "Today I'm just going to practice cutting, without worrying about infection, or where the arteries or nerves are, or scarring," because cutting properly is doing all those things right at the same time. I think writing is something like that.
Maybe a better analogy is sports. A judoka will practice a particular throw over and over again, but would never isolate the movements of individual muscles and practice them by themselves. There is an appropriate level of abstraction at which to practice. I think that level in writing is the scene or the short story.
Now and then I think about writing a long shortskirts-style story where I update every week with little revision, to practice writing quickly. But I'm not shortskirts, and I don't think I could do it.
1507999
Interesting. I like writing prompts because they force me to write, and secondarily because they have helped me to evaluate what the difference is between my quickly written material and my ponderously slaved-over material. (Answer: for shorter works, not as much as I think, and for longer works, the cohesiveness that comes from editing.)
As with visual art, I think the micro-exercises are helpful when you are trying to build your style, or trying to change your style, and if you already are comfortable with how you approach your craft, you just have to get out there and do it.
Which is not to say that work can't be practice. Just as artists draw in sketchbooks even when they have paintings to work on, the stories we toss off more casually help shape our high-effort works.