General Discussion : My Community

The Brawl is a great idea, good job Avery! My only question is why that slacker Utah isn't helping. Stop slacking, slacker!

Sadly, I can't parrticipate in the writing as I am sweating blood to get my novel finished. I do however plan to read and vote (waiti, do I need to put my name in to be able to vote on the stories?)

JGB,  my absence, both former and on-going, are subjects of heated debate.

Where has Utah gone?

Why is he gone?

Is he?

Should we go back to being his friend if he dares to stick his face back in this joint?

Everyone should go vote in the current Thunderdome battle HERE!

And if you fancy a challenge yourself, you can do that HERE.

It's a great way to beat a story out of your moth-eaten skull, and to learn about your LR friends' writing styles. Plus, free stories to read (even if they are first drafts). :)

I love The Umbrian.

Well...

i wish we'd talk more about writing subjects in general. i mean, i write my Storyville column, but rarely get more than a handful of comments. if we had some sort of writerly topic and open discussion, would that be worth checking out?

Yeah, definitely. I feel like this is something that we did, in the past, but not so much anymore. Talk about writing subjects that is.  There's a few things I want to kick out to the community, and maybe when I've had a chance to catch my breath and organize my thoughts, I will.

As far as the columns, I never miss one of yours, Rich. I can recall only once where there was any serious discussion in any column I commented on, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing...which kinda aggravates me.  I've thought about starting threads here with the column linked so we can discuss it.  There seems to be a whole different crowd commenting on the columns and commenting in threads.

the open call thread doesn't get nearly enough attention. i wish more people would post up in there when they heard of cool anthologies, journals/mags that have re-opened or launched, etc

I thought about this very thing recently, I kinda just chalked it up to our own competitiveness. But yeah, I'd love to see what folks are digging up.

good stuff, dave and vonnegut.

Throwing in my peice. I'm down for the chat about projects thing. Not sure how much I would have to talk about. Most of what I do is short fiction. Genre is going to be a bit of an issue.

I always like a good "At the Pub" thread, where you can pop in and talk about any random writing/book/nonsense on your mind, lay out your latest theories/arguments/revelations, or link the great interview/story you just read, etc, without having to start a new thread all the time. A flowing informal lit talk where people can get comfortable enough to debate, talk a little trash, have a laugh, whatever. 

I've considered starting one myself but had a feeling it would be me blabbering to myself for a while before slowly sinking down and out of sight... Kind of like me at the real pub.

I'd support a good short story breakdown thread as well.

"Puppy" by George Saunders. it's free online at The New Yorker. Or, "Harvey's Dream" by Stephen King also at TNY. Or, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates. 

Those are three of my favorites, and some of the best "literary" fiction I've ever read. 

Something else that might be interesting, kind of in the short story vein of discussion and dissection, would be to do the same thing for the occasional in-depth author interview. The Paris Review's collection of interviews, dozens if not hundreds, are available to all online. 

Just listed on the first page:

Nicholson Baker
2011
"There are all kinds of books I’d like to write that seem to be out of my grasp."

Ann Beattie
2011
"Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock."

Ray Bradbury
2010
"You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices."

Roberto Calasso
2012
“The author is the successor of the saint, everyone respects the author.”

Emmanuel Carrère
2013
“If I am able to write something that can evoke the emotion I felt during those two hours of listening to him, it is simply impossible that it won’t be a fantastic book.”

Dennis Cooper
2011
"I think pornography is a very rich medium, and I’ve studied it closely and learned quite a lot as a writer from it."

R. Crumb
2010
"It knocked you off your horse, taking LSD. I remember going to work that Monday, after taking LSD on Saturday, and it just seemed like a cardboard reality."

Samuel R. Delany
2011
"I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn’t black."

Deborah Eisenberg
2013
“I’m a person with virtually no feelings.”

Bret Easton Ellis
2012
On American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman: “The more he acquires, the emptier he feels. On a certain level, I was that man, too.”

Louise Erdrich
2010
"It’s because you’re always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way."

Jeffrey Eugenides
2011
“Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.”

James Fenton
2012
“What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.”

Jonathan Franzen
2010
"When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn’t mean I always write well."

William Gibson
2011
"I wanted to make room for antiheroes."

Alan Hollinghurst
2011
“I was rather a goody-goody as a child… It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.”

Michael Holroyd
2013
“I think that when one is dead one should be a little bit bolder, so that the rest of us may have some record of how things actually were.”

Michel Houellebecq
2010
"I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think."

Susan Howe
2012
“I often think of the space of a page as a stage, with words, letters, syllable characters moving across.”

Imre Kertész
2013
“I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.”

Tony Kushner
2012
“In some ways [the Internet]’s definitely an enemy.”

Ursula K. Le Guin
2013
“One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.”

Hermione Lee
2013
“Some cynical biographer said to me, Make sure it’s a good death. Make sure you’re not picking someone who just declined.”

Mark Leyner
2013
“The book attained a mind of its own, a subjectivity or an autocatalytic machinelike quality.”

Janet Malcolm
2011
“The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention.”

John McPhee
2010
"With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read."

David Mitchell
2010
"Is there such a thing as overreading? Just because it wasn’t part of my grand design doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Things do happen in books that the writer is too submersed in bringing the narrative to life to notice."

Norman Rush
2010
"I must love big novels, because that's what I've written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe."

Wallace Shawn
2012
“I love going to plays. There’s a subconscious side to it, obviously–some people like to be spanked for XYZ psychological reasons, and I like to go to plays, and I can’t entirely explain why.”

Terry Southern
2012
“I don’t know why, but I always feel a kind of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we can’t print that

I can think of one off the top of my head, but I'll try and get a list going.  Any suggestions?

Tim O'Brien, "How to Tell a True War Story"

Sam Lipsyte, "Deniers"

Junot Diaz, "Miss Lora"

what about The Lottery? Shirley Jackson. It's a must-read.

Hey, if you do an interview once in a while I promise to participate in a non snarkitorial way. I can be inauthentically gleeful if I try really hard.