On Writing - Michelle Richmond

Ray Bradbury at Home

I just came across this odd and wonderful little collection of video clips, taken at Ray Bradbury’s home in LA in 2001, by the folks who publish raybradbury.com. In it you’ll see the chaotic basement where the exceedingly prolific Bradbury works, and hear him joking about holding the record for rejections from The New Yorker. I didn’t realize until visiting the site that Bradbury had a new book out in 2006, Farewell Summer, a follow-up to Dandelion Wine, first published in 1957. You’ll also see Bradbury talking about linked story collections, something he did way back in the 1940s with The Martian Chronicles, and on how he put together his collection of metaphorical objects from Hollywood and beyond that surround him (according to Bradbury, in the old days all you had to do was ask for something and it could be yours).

David Mamet on Hollywood

Mamet was interviewed in Time Out New York by Joshua Rothkopf. The subject: Mamet’s new book about film, Bambi vs. Godzilla.

Hollywood is capitalism at its best: opposing forces working it out, using the tools of the marketplace. As such, it’s vastly messier than totalitarianism, but it kills a lot less people.

On audience:

I write for the audience. The small market or the mass market may be a function of the worth of my script, or of the assiduousness by which it was sold. But, like any other artist, I consider my potential audience everybody alive and half of the people who are dead.

And, by my vote, a Mamet must-read for writers: Writing in Restaurants, circa 1987.

the feel of the pen

Empires fall, votes are accorded, but to those people writing in the circular room it is the feel of the pen between their fingers that matters most.
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Write Well. Imagine Deeply.

Today, in the graduate fiction workshop I teach, we’re discussing a story written by a young white woman who grew up somewhere in the middle of the country. The story is told from the point of view of an older black woman in New Orleans. The student told me she’s never been to New Orleans. Still, the story works; in many ways she’s defied the edict “write what you know.” She may not know what it means to be an older black woman in New Orleans, but what this young writer does know is music, and, wisely, she enters the story through music. I always tell my students not to take “write what you know” too literally, not to allow themselves to be constrained by it so much that they confine their writing to the most obvious realms of their knowledge. What we know goes far deeper than details of place or race or age or occupation. Emotional knowledge, or the knowledge of how human beings act and feel, is essential to a good story. Many of the external things that are alien to you can be filled in by research.

For example, I have another student who recently wrote a story about coalminers; the story seemed so true, so detailed, so accurate, that I thought she came from a coal mining family. After we discussed the story, she told me she had never met a coal miner, and had labored for a long time on the internet researching various types of mining, terminology, locations, and so forth.

Miss Snark wrote back in April:

One of the best books of all time is Stewart O’Nan’s The Speed Queen. Stewart O’Nan isn’t a girl, he’s not on Death Row and as far as I know, he’s never worked in a drive in. You’d never know it from reading the book. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was written by a man who did not serve in the Civil War. I’m pretty sure Anne McCaffrey as never seen a dragon, JK Rowling has never seen a wizard…That all of these people can imagine a world completely apart from their everyday haunts and suck me in so far that I not only think their worlds are real, I can’t imagine they AREN’T, is a testimony to their writing and imagination. Write well. Imagine deeply. That’s all you need to do.

The exercise:
Write a story in which the external circumstances are something you don’t know. Use what you do know about human nature to give the story emotional resonance. Use research to lend accuracy to the details.