Empty Rooms
The photo here is really more illustration than the focus of today's entry. It's the interior of the Santa Croce church in Florence, if you're interested, and the photo just has this kind of beautiful but inaccessible atmosphere about it.
Which brings me to a potentially upsetting trend that I'm seeing in my students' work. In about half of the stories we've read for workshop, the author keeps us at a chilled, emotional remove from the characters, including the main one. This distance is extreme, and quite devoid of empathy or even genuine interest in the inner lives and workings of these people. The stories seem to be *about* detachment, isolation, distance, hollowness.
It's really all very depressing.
Anne Lamott, in her fabulous book for writers, "Bird by Bird," writes about how necessary it is to know one's characters: "...look at your characters again," she writes. "You've got to go into these people, and since you don't know them, this means that you need to go into you, wonderful you, who has so many problems and idiosyncrasies--you, who will be able to figure out what is true for these people and hence, what they would or would not do in a given situation."
In that passage, it's the part about going into yourself that resonates the most for me. I know from my own experience that this is true, and so when I see writers writing zombies on the page, I wonder if it is that they have little or no "self" to go into.
I've been known to extrapolate the apocalypse from almost any writerly gaffe, but this is so pervasive, so trendy, so similar, that I do find it unsettling.
The only reason I'm not prognosticating the death of emotionally affecting fiction and getting ready to slice my wrists is because I believe that even if these writers feel empty and emotionless now, if they keep pursuing the craft, a quickening of human sentiment and empathy will fill them.
When this happens, and they revisit their previous stories of detached, distant characters, I hope they will ask: Who wrote this? and really not know.
And that is why I spend two and a half hours on Wednesday nights teaching fiction for $17 hour.
Which brings me to a potentially upsetting trend that I'm seeing in my students' work. In about half of the stories we've read for workshop, the author keeps us at a chilled, emotional remove from the characters, including the main one. This distance is extreme, and quite devoid of empathy or even genuine interest in the inner lives and workings of these people. The stories seem to be *about* detachment, isolation, distance, hollowness.
It's really all very depressing.
Anne Lamott, in her fabulous book for writers, "Bird by Bird," writes about how necessary it is to know one's characters: "...look at your characters again," she writes. "You've got to go into these people, and since you don't know them, this means that you need to go into you, wonderful you, who has so many problems and idiosyncrasies--you, who will be able to figure out what is true for these people and hence, what they would or would not do in a given situation."
In that passage, it's the part about going into yourself that resonates the most for me. I know from my own experience that this is true, and so when I see writers writing zombies on the page, I wonder if it is that they have little or no "self" to go into.
I've been known to extrapolate the apocalypse from almost any writerly gaffe, but this is so pervasive, so trendy, so similar, that I do find it unsettling.
The only reason I'm not prognosticating the death of emotionally affecting fiction and getting ready to slice my wrists is because I believe that even if these writers feel empty and emotionless now, if they keep pursuing the craft, a quickening of human sentiment and empathy will fill them.
When this happens, and they revisit their previous stories of detached, distant characters, I hope they will ask: Who wrote this? and really not know.
And that is why I spend two and a half hours on Wednesday nights teaching fiction for $17 hour.
posted by Tiffany Hamburger at
3:11 PM
1 Comments:
$17 an hour is a pretty fair wage, but don't quit your day job.
By
Anonymous, at 9:19 AM
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