Tag: Lionel Shriver

Writer’s Corner: Maintain Momentum

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Waiting for inspiration is no way to write. One has to have a routine. Granted, that routine is likely to be a messy one. Take Lionel Shriver’s glimpse into her daily writing schedule:

Start with large, strong coffee. Read paper, doesn’t much matter which one. Concentrate on little stories. Dostoevsky snatched scads of ideas from newspapers. Self could not make this stuff up, so why bother?

…DO NOT LOOK AT EARLIER CHAPTERS. Do not pour through thousands of words searching for whatever Self called some character’s yappy dog several chapters back. First drafts rely on MOMENTUM. Refining adjectives does not count as work. Solving what-does-she-say-next and why-would-he-do-that, or making daily effort to construct at least one paragraph justifying stupid book’s existence – one paragraph other people might conceivably want to read in sloshing sea of unnecessary, look-at-me prose in which whole world is drowning – this is work.

There are writers who do not feel comfortable unless their prose has been raked over a dozen times until it is clean and sparkling bright. That can be done at one’s leisure, but as Shriver notes, momentum is all. If you don’t maintain a steady pace (helped along by routine) then you will not have anything to review later.

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Be a Jerk

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

The topic of cultural appropriation is never an easy one, particularly when it comes to writing. When Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, launched her jeremiad at the Brisbane Writers Festival, she steadfastly stood on the side of writers being free to write about whatever and whomever they damn well pleased, regardless of their race or background.

It was the speech that launched a thousand op-eds. Many leaped to Shriver’s defense, seeing a long-overdue pushback against the forces of political correctness, trigger warnings, and so on. Others saw it as just another example of white cultural dominance and arrogance.

sympathizer1There was more than a little of the provocateur in what Shriver did, of course—wearing a sombrero to make some point, and blasting any critique of her work from cultural grounds as censorship.

Into this white-hot mess waded Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the excellent novel The Sympathizers. In an essay for the Los Angeles Times, he valiantly carves a demilitarized zone out of the culture-war battlefield:

…engage in careful and curious conversation with people different from ourselves, both in terms of demographics and ideas. When I say careful, I mean that it is possible to use one’s free speech and yet also be respectful and ethical. It is advisable not to insult people, as in the case of a white author wearing a sombrero to make her point about cultural oversensitivity. When I say curious, I mean that too many of us are not interested in the lives of others, if my experience with my airplane seatmates is any indication.

Solid advice for any writer, under any circumstances.

southerncrossAlso, note novelist Kaitlyn Greenridge’s response to the Shriver dustup, in which she considers whether Asian writer Bill Cheng had the right to write a lynching scene:

…I felt so strongly that Bill had a right to write that scene because he wrote it well. Because he was a good writer, a thoughtful writer, and that scene had a reason to exist besides morbid curiosity or a petulant delight in shrugging on and off another’s pain — the fact that a reader couldn’t see that shook my core about what fiction could and couldn’t do.

So, a few things to consider when writing about events, places, or people outside your immediate experience; or even well within it:

  • Be careful
  • Do the work
  • Do it well
  • Don’t be a jerk