Michael Greenwald
By: Michael James Greenwald-
Captain’s Log, Stardate 23.9, rounded off to the…nearest decimal point. We’ve…traveled back in time to save an ancient species from…total annihilation. So far…no…signs of aquatic life, but I’m going to find it. If I have to tear this universe another black hole, I’m going to find it. I’ve…got to, mister.
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Okay, I’ll admit it, caught Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on USA at 3AM, and I forgot how hilarious Jim Carrey is (Lois, your gun is digging into my hip!).
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Anyway, this week, which is an open week, (Why do you care about Snowflake? Do you know him? Does he call you at home? Do you have a dorsal fin?), I’m going to highlight an exceptional writer and his helpful writing “How-To” book.
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Most of us (especially those Arizonians in our blog-dience) know-of Sir Ron Carlson. Some of us may have even had the privilege of being a student of his when he taught at Arizona State University. Now, he directs the graduate program in fiction at the University of California, Irvine. His latest book, The Signal, is a typically Carlson, pared-down, rustic adventure, set in the stunning mountains of Wyoming, involving a reunion of Mack and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Vonnie, forced by the author to accomplish a task, a very Carlsonian literary construct (“When you have stilted lovers, give them a task they need to accomplish”).
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In Ron Carlson Writes a Story, Sir Carlson takes us through an in-depth examination of how he created one of his most revered short stories “The Governor’s Ball.” He reveals the germ for the story began when a mattress fell off the back of his pickup truck, goes through paragraph-by-paragraph of the story, talks about his thought processes at each moment and how he accomplished his primary tenet, “the writer is the person who stays in the room.”-
Yes, Sir Carlson provides the usual writing technique book suspects. Chapters titled:
- writing character: an inventory
- writing dialogue
- the purpose of a scene
- the idea of the story idea
- do you have an outline?
Not to take away from these chapters–where Sir Carlson does breath several original thoughts on topics hashed over in “How-To” books since Ug showed Ig how to carve an active rather than passive buffalo onto a cave wall–there are other chapters that enlighten wanna-be writers in fresh ways:
- the big boat
- these guys were hammering on my house
- going over to her window
- coffee
- potshots
One of the most helpful aspects of the book is Sir Carlson’s admission that in a lot (if not most) places of his writing process he had absolutely no idea what he was doing or where his story was traveling (And people, if Ron “F-ing” Carlson is human, then heck, I’ll subscribe to the humanity of us all).
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To highlight what I’m talking about, I hope Sir Carlson wouldn’t be too offended if I include an excerpt from page 65 of his book. When he began the story, he had two pieces of information: a water-soaked mattress will fall off the back of a pick up truck, and the narrator needs to be going to the Governor’s Ball with his wife. At this point, the Governor Ball pressure has been established and in the last paragraph the mattress on the back of the truck “rose like a playing card and jumped up, into the wind.”
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Carlson talks about where he was as the writer at that point:
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“By now in ‘The Governor’s Ball’, I’m terrified. I’ve done all the easy stuff, written my little event following the outer story as best I could, the way you follow a marked trail through the forest, and I’ve come to the end of that trail and I feel a lot like standing up and heading out to the kitchen, which is to say like lying down there in the woods until grim death lays its cold hands on me. But I have one more little crumb in my knapsack, that is, I know I continued to the landfill, so I can write that tiny episode and then lie down an wait for gruesome failure to grace my with his icy touch.
“The traffic all around me slowed, cautioned by this vision. I tried to wave at them as if I knew what was going on and everything was going to be all right. At the Twenty-first South exit, I headed west, letting the rope snap freely, as if whipping the truck for more speed.”
“That’s all I can do. Is it great? No. But it is that other blessed thing: serviceable. It is writing that takes me in its way from one place to another. Quite simply, it is the next thing. It serves–I’m still alive. I have had the opportunity to quit, and I have declined. For now. I was still in the room.”
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For a writer, the usefulness of this book is tied to the fact that Sir Carlson has a perspective on his process and is able to dictate blow-by-blow how he survived the story. I’d compare this to the extras a lot of DVD’s provide now, where viewers can go through episodes of TV shows or scenes of movies with a director voice over in the background, revealing information about process and technique in real time.
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Sir Carlson produces this resource for writers.
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At the end of the book, “The Governor’s Ball” is included in its polished-from, which is fascinating in itself, as you can examine what an author produces in a first draft and the kind of tweaking an author must do to have a publishable piece.
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In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor said, “If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.”-
Sir Ron Carlson in Ron Carlson Writes a Story proves O’Connor’s theorem.
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Thanks for reading. See y’all next Sunday.
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I have exorcised the demons…this, house, is clear.-
Go to de writing room, go to it…
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MJG
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If y’all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.
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