Notes from George Saunders

“Inventive, wickedly funny. Dark, sharp and moving.” The first three words from James Magnuson are about George Saunders, the last three adjectives are about his essay “The Great Divider,” which he read from at the Texas Book Festival in Austin. However, from listening to him talk, the last three could be about Saunders, also.

Saunders drove from Brownsville to San Diego with Minutemen on Operation Sovereignty.(Video on Op Sovereignty)

His essays are hilarious. Saunders knows that real life is hilarious. He advises the writer to “let satirical stuff in. [There are] comic moments in everyday life.” He says that in literature, satire “reconcile(s) tragedy and beauty in life.”

“We must concede that life isn’t Norman Rockwell.” But “our actual substance of our life is beautiful.”

When writing, try “to get self from mental habits to being aesthetically agitated. Write yourself into a place you lose yourself then anything is fair game.”

You “want the story to expand outward and include as much actual life.”

As for short stories, “Keep the energy up for ten pages and get out of there without a hit in the ass.” “Keeping someone interested until you can get out clean.”

“Writing in a story is like riding a bike.” You need balance.

From the Q and A

What’s the difference in the process of fiction versus the process of essays?

Fiction-plot expectations and serious revision, so labor intensive. Deeper. More spiritual process.

Essays-slicing through data, predefined events-must just think “How do I make what happens come alive?”

In nonfiction, how do you suspend judgment about what people are doing or telling you?

“Don’t suspend opinion, but don’t bring it out, just be aware of it.”

About revision…

Okay, I wonder why it’s worse and I wonder how I can fix it.

He and his wife are Buddhist. He says first of all, “What is it?” “Be happy when you can detect that you suck.”

How do you know when to stop editing?

“Most beginning writers don’t edit enough.”

“When you read it back and it sounds like yep, yep, yep then soon nope, nope, nope.” Read it through “inch by inch.” “Read through without hesitating.” You’ll know it isn’t quite right when “the inner sound isn’t quite there.”

Someone asked a question about anger showing up in writing. He mentioned that there is a personal discomfort to feeling like you’re always failing.

“A little rage is a normal response to this life.”

He’s still frustrated because even at 48, he thinks he’s neurotic, graceless, anxious, and not aware enough of other people.

So, as a writer, continue “in pursuit of necessary joy,” and “get out of there without a hit in the ass.”

I recommend George Saunders’ fiction and his newest nonfiction, The Braindead Megaphone, where you can find his “The Great Divider” essay and more.

Hi All,

If you’ve been following my 360 blog, you know that my last blog before I started the Texas Book Festival Series of notes was Sand Pie. In that blog, I, Not really whined, but, okay I whined about not writing. I have been writing since then. I am still plugging away, feeling a little crazy in the head of crazy people. I will finish this novel.

Also, I wanted to mention that at the beginning of the Perotta video is my good friend, a great teacher, Ron Seybold.

More pressing,

The Strike continues.

Here’s some links to keep it fresh for you.

Seems there’s a flow of centralizing and decentralizing in life.

Companies have been conglomerating until there are only a few left, then many small ones start up. In this link, Marc Andreessen talks about the new vision for Scriptwriters.

Here’s the latest from the Writer’s Guild of America West.

Their perseverence will pay off. They are already making waves.

In today’s rally, thousands marched down Hollywood Boulevard. I am so happy to see the amazing amount of support showing up for these writers. Yahooooo!!!!

When I signed the petition, there were 57,419 total Signatures. 

So, I say to you, perseverence will pay off. You’ve heard it so many times.

Keep it up! You can do it. You are doing it. Just this wanting, this craving, this pain at your own resistance says you have what it takes.

Notes from Tom Perotta (and video)

Tom Perotta, author of The Abstinence Teacher, Joe College, Election, Little Children, and The Wishbones, also spoke at the House of Representatives in The Capitol. Both Little Children and Election were turned into movies. The Abstinence Teacher movie is coming out in 2008. With Little Children, Perotta was nominated for an Oscar in the adapted screenplay category.

Perotta read from his newest book, The Abstinence Teacher. He chose a section where a few teachers at the school were basically in detention, and a sex education expert came in to counsel them. The high school was changing to a sex education program of teaching children abstinence only, and these teachers had broken the rules. Funny piece, good writing, real characters.

Perotta says that over time, from writing, “he’s become more clear on what he can do on a novel.”

Dialogue has always come fairly easily to him, so he is working on prose style and sentences. His prose, he says, has thickened.

He was an autobiographical writer in his earlier books.

Perotta revealed that once Election was going to be a movie, then someone stepped up to publish the book.

When he prepared for the part in The Abstinence Teacher that was about the Evangelical Church, he visited contemporary evangelical churches, read the Bible (yes, all of it), and spent time online in the virtual Christian world.

He wants to get inside the hearts of the characters.

“You shouldn’t write a novel just to end up where you are. It should challenge you.”

Here’s a short video of Perotta talking about his revision process.

Connelly Vidoe 2 and 3 (Price and Vonnegut)

I’ll let Connelly do the talking. He’s the best-selling author with over 15 books out. These are two more videos from Connelly sharing his three most memorable quotes he posted on his computer.

Warning, raw video.

Richard Price

Kurt Vonnegut

This one’s going up on mine. Character desire and yearning keep readers reading. Desire and resistance are the makeup of tension.

Literary agent Donald Maass says 80% of his agency’s rejected novels are due to too little tension.

Michael Connelly part 2

Connelly kept saying that the “idea” that interested him was the line between vigilance and paranoia. This, I’ll call it space, kept coming up for him. He said, “That’s where The Overlook comes in. There’s serendipity in terms of ideas landing in my lap.”

But the serendipity doesn’t appear and someone gets it. He talked about putting himself in positions to hear the stories and using his experience to recognize which stories could go the distance.

He used an example: An FBI agent attended one of his signings. Instead of just signing the book, Connelly asked the agent if he’d stay and have coffee with him after the signing. Then, he established a relationship with the man with more meetings and lunches. That agent gave him a story about Cesium (explosive in high doses) being stolen from a clinic where they treated cancer. That story was The Overlook.

Connelly also talked about sitting next to a lawyer who worked out of his car. From talking with this man, Connelly came up with his best-selling legal thriller, The Lincoln Lawyer.

He did tell the agent that he didn’t have anything against FBI agents, but in a thriller, you have to have obstacles in front of your character. The easiest thing to do is to make those obstacles people that should be working with Harry Bosch, but are corrupt.

A crime novel, he believes, should be “first and foremost for entertainment, and then a character study.” “You want to entertain, and then you can slip in a message and get people to think.”

One reader asked how he kept up with Bosch and the details in the book. He said he had a dozen research assistants, then laughed and said he just has to go back and look it up.

He has a hard time reading crime fiction because he sees the writing behind it—“so it’s like work.”

Someone asked how he keeps it fresh. He said he writes a “good mix of character driven books and plot driven books.”

“Momentum is very, very important.”

“What happens in the writing process happens in the reading process.” A fast moving writing of a book will turn out fast, page-turning reading.

I myself struggle with that line between vigilance and paranoia. (Quit spying on me through my laptop.) In the end, I just call it vigilance and throw out the cliché, “Better safe than sorry.” But I don’t really believe it, or I wouldn’t be a writer.

Keep taking risks. Look for and take advantage of those serendipitous moments and then share them, tell me about them, tell your friends. They’re always inspirational.

These are the last of the Connelly notes.

I solved the video problem I had earlier, so next entry should be the next two videos. (I have a different problem, but at least the video plays.)

Later, I’ll share notes from listening to Tom Perotta, George Saunders, and then mystery novelists Rick Riordan (also writes Young Adult), Diane Fanning (known for her True Crime novels), and Harry Hunsicker.

Michael Connelly Video 1

In continuing with notes from authors’ talks at Texas Book Festival, here’s a rough video of Connelly talking about what Wambaugh’s quote means to him and to Bosch’s evolution.

I took my Connelly videos for my personal notes. They are very raw, but I think you may appreciate the content, so I uploaded them.

Jumping In

Coming over from http://360.yahoo.com/lacosbey.

I’m still fumbling around this space, but maybe I’ll have it more together by Sunday night.

Michael Connelly part 1 is the most recent entry in a series of Author notes I’m posting from the Texas Book Festival. 

I’m hoping with pages here, I can encourage that many more people to continue dreaming, painting, singing, dancing, writing, loving, planting, making music, sculpting… and maybe some of that will come back my way…and maybe it will come when I need it most.

Whatever your dream or your art is, keep doing it.

Michael Connelly part 1

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author Michael Connelly spoke in the House of Representatives at the Texas Capitol in Austin during the Texas Book Festival. He shared freely, and he sincerely wanted to help other writers.

Some real gems here from a “master storyteller in peak form.” (From Playboy’s review of City of Bones.)

Connelly learned a lot as a crime reporter, and it shows.

I’m going to break these gems up into two blog entries, so your eyes don’t glaze over like mine do when reading voluminous blog entries.

Connelly wasn’t arrogant or self-effacing, but he was true. Sometimes he was more confident than at other times. Close to when he started talking, he took a drink. Then he joked that in speech class he had learned that when you run out of things to say, you take a drink of water.

He said he wanted to be as good as he could in one thing and that thing for him is writing.

“I love writing crime novels. I love the crime novel because I love the form.”

“When you’re writing, you’re spinning a lot of different plates.”

“There’s comfort in the basic format of the crime novel.” He discussed that a crime novel travels a line from A to Z and that gives him the freedom to worry about other things like character and to a lesser degree to explore something of interest to him.

He thinks he can say anything as a writer through Harry Bosch.

For those that haven’t read any of his series, Hieronymous Bosch is a detective with the LAPD.

Connelly said, “What a gift to get to take someone [Bosch] across time and see how he’s tried to make sense of himself and his place in the world.”

I think that would be quite a gift.

He does tape notes with quotes on them around the edge of his computer monitor. He switches them out over time, but three stood out to him. I actually have them on video, but I have to figure out how to upload them.

The Quotes and Notes

From an interview with Richard Price…”When you circle around a murder long enough, you get to know a city.”

“Not so much how a cop works on a case, but how a case works on a cop.” –Joseph Wambaugh

Connelly tries to do this with Bosch. He sees the whole series of Bosch books as one big picture and wants Bosch to change and grow with each case.

In an interview, Kurt Vonnegut was asked what was the most important thing he could tell a young writer. He said, “Make sure that on every page you write, that every character wants something, even if it’s only a glass of water.”

Every page.