Happy 235th Birthday America! July is a wonderful month for birthdays; my family knows—we have several. In fact, if you count one from late June, we add up to 207 years old. What does this have to do with my writing process and progress? Absolutely nothing, but I wanted to include it regardless.
Today I was like a house painter who stands on his/her ladder taping and cutting, devoting time to PREP WORK. Today starts my creative PREP PROCESS, devoted to, as Francine Prose suggests to "read like a writer."
I don't usually read novels. Like a "protein-only-diet," those who know me understand I literally exist on short stories: collections, cycles, sequences, and the hybrid novel-in-stories. However, my esteemed colleague gave me the novel Plainsong by Kent Haruf, and I finished it early this morning, after savoring every bite, and falling hopelessly in love with the characters. Reading (and annotating) as a writer, I absorbed a great deal about characterization, especially the significance of a secondary character e.g. Mrs. Iva Stearns, an elderly, frail, impoverished, hoarder whom the two boys treat with dignity and respect. The narrator describes her as a “humpbacked woman in a thin blue housedress and apron, wearing a pair of men's wool socks inside her worn slippers, leaning on her twin silver canes” (144). No surprise Plainsong was a 1999 National Book Award Finalist.
Tonight, I’m finishing a collection of Joyce Carol Oates’ essays The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art. In each of these 13 essays JCO discusses a different facet; however, she threads them together by emphasizing “a balance between the private vision and the public world . . .Without craft art remains private . . . ” (xii). Significantly, the essay “Reading as a Writer: The Artist as Craftsman” resonates the loudest for me.
That is why tomorrow I plan to start William Trevor: The Collected Stories as he is according to The New Yorker ". . . probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language today.” I will worship at his literary feet, as I've read his work before, but I don’t plan to read all 1261 pages in one day, but I do plan to finish this volume before I leave Dorland.
Starting tomorrow, I’m prepping with Will Trevor, taping and cutting my fictional walls so when I roll on the color you’ll never know where this author cut, pasted, or revised.
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