WEALTH OF IDEAS

I just finished reading Orhan Pamuk's essay "The Implied Author" in which he discusses his writing process. Having just reread Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" I liked Pamuk's reference to automatic writing, when the author makes himself available to a story that's raging to be written. Perhap not raging, but that which is within range. He concludes his short piece by arguing that just Wolfang Iser argued that each novel has an implied reader on account of whom it will reveal its meaning, there is also an implied author for each novel. Thus to "writer a novel is to open to [the work's available] desires, winds, and inspirations, and also to the dark recesses of our minds and their moments of mist and stillness". Pamuk's mention of the implied author got me thinkin again about Wolfang Iser's "implied reader" for each work. Then I realized that I have read many books, all of which have revealed their meaning as I read them, a me...

There is general agreement, in my book circles, that 2009 is the year of the short story. Of course, this is not to say that we are not prepared to accept 2010 as a short story year if it becomes one. I asked the question somewhere, perhaps in one of my classes, about why it would make sense for 2009 to be a short story year, and the answers were practical: "Global warming", "shortening reading spans", and "a rediscovery of the short story". So perhaps the Melvillean big American novel may go out of fashion on the basis of green thinking. I like that reason. There is nothng wrong with being concise out of necessity. Then once in a while you hear that a 1200 page collection of J.G. Ballard's short stories has been published, then you say, "short stories!" "That's not all," you are told, "they just came out with another collection: Raymond Carver's stories in one volume." You start doubting whether the size of the bo...

When you become serious with fiction writing, you begin to understand that there is a difference between you and your narrator, even in stories that you consider autobiographical. The writer just becomes the facilitator of what's told, but how its told may be completely dependent on the narrative POV you have selected. It is very important to let this narrator have an independent voice. I am reading Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence , whose narrator shocked me by "abandoning" the story and telling the reader that Orhan Pamuk himself will finish the story, and as you read along, you can see that the author agreed to do so. Here is a narrator so self-aware and independent that he knows his limits, knows where he can stop and authorize or trust the author to finish telling the story. Lately, I have been writing stories told by female narrators and this has become an example of writing what I don't know, to open new possibilities, and I have found myself worrying ...