Back in the early 1990s when I was a poor graduate student, I used to stay home on Saturday nights and watch my little black-and-white TV. I couldn’t afford cable, of course, but thankfully there was always PBS, so I watched a lot of documentaries and episodes of Great Performances. On one such night, I saw a filmed performance of Peter Brook’s stage play The Mahabharata. The play is, of course, a dramatic adaptation of the great Hindu epic, the tale of a feud between two groups of royal cousins, the Pāṇḍava princes and their arch-nemeses, the Kauravas. As epic tales are wont to do, the feud escalates into a civil war so catastrophic that even the gods are pulled into the conflict (in the same way that the Greek gods Mars, Apollo, and Venus involve themselves in the The Illiad).
Being a filmed staged play, Brook’s TV version is low on special effects (this was before CGI) but packed with minimalistic, highly-stylized interpretations of sweeping battles, multi-armed demons, and flying chariots. Somehow, it all works, and I found myself obsessed with both the film and the story. A few years later I would finally read a popular translation of The Bhagavad Gita, which is really just one portion of the much larger Mahabharata.
I had a really good chat with Ms. Karen Abernathy on WLOX’s Four O’Clock Show out of Biloxi. It was a blast. Many thanks to her and the whole WLOX team!
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while (sorry, I’m a flake). Marshal Zeringue has (another) really cool web site called The Page 69 Test, where he invites writers to turn to page 69 of their latest book and write about it. It’s actually a lot of fun! Here is my entry (for which I am grateful to Mr. Zeringue for inviting me to write).
Big shout-out and many thanks to Jeff Circle for making one of his famous dossiers on me. I had a blast. He’s one of the smartest and funniest guys I’ve met in a long time.
One can hardly imagine my admiration and delight as I read Alex Kenna’s fine and refreshingly original novel, What Meets the Eye. One thing that sets this book above—far above—the vast majority of mysteries is the symbolic connection it draws between two central characters–a cop-turned-P.I. named Kate Myles, and a brilliant artist named Margot Starling. Kenna sets them up as linked opposites, each a very smart and driven woman struggling to succeed in a dangerous (and largely male-dominated) world. Both are driven by a deep outrage at the injustice they see around them. And both have some dark history.
Ultimately, of course, Kate and Margot are connected in a different way: Margot becomes the victim of a murder, and Kate is hired to find her killer.
Very seldom have I seen a mystery novel that attempts multiple points-of-view, and never with such skill. Kenna bounces back and forth between past and present, giving the reader before-and-after clues as to what, exactly, befell Margo, even as Kate unravels the mystery. It’s a very fresh and compelling technique. I also really enjoyed the surprising and original insights the novel offers about both women’s realms: the art world for Margot, and the law enforcement world for Kate.
But the real triumph of this book, for me, is Kate herself. It’s her book, and she’s a great character. Funny, smart, earthy, and fearless, she gives the reader an unequivocal here to root for. Yes, she’s done some questionable things in her past (she had a bit of an opioid habit), but she’s a devoted mother and a driven seeker of truth. She makes a great, new entry in the cannon of classic private detective heroes.
In this episode, Ash and Margaret finish-off Jean Rhys’s classic 1967 novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea.” Also, Margaret explains the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope to Ash, while Ash considers how “Wide Sargasso Sea” might have been improved if the main character had known Kung Fu.
Like a lot of people, my first exposure to Walter Mosely was when I saw the 1995 film adaptation of his novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington. It’s a good movie, with fine performances by Washington and Don Cheadle, but it didn’t inspire me to seek out Mosely’s fiction. As far as I knew, he was just another solid mystery writer, one of many whom I hadn’t read.
Sometime later, I bought a copy of The Best American Short Stories and I was surprised to see a story by Mosely among that year’s selections. The story is called “Pet Fly” and it’s a deceptively simple tale of an office grunt (who happens to be black) trying to keep his integrity while working in modern corporate America. I was knocked-out by it. Later still, I stumbled upon an actual novel by Mosely, a science fiction work called The Wave, which turned out to be one of the best novels (sci-fi or otherwise) that I had read in years.
My great friend Margaret Luongo and I just released the premier episode of our new YouTube Channel, Read a Classic Novel…Together. In this series, we tackle classic novels that we’ve been meaning to read forever, and we invite the viewer to read each chunk along with us. (We try not to read ahead, but do anyway sometimes. Sorry.)
For this first episode, we take on Part I of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Check it out when you can.
I am a perpetual student of the writing craft and, as such, I am an avid consumer of books about writing. Here is a list of my favorites, from great to greatest…
10. Aspects of the Novel Kindle Edition — E. M. Forster
Forster is one of my all-time favorite novelists, a capital-G Great Writer who penned classics like Howard’s End and A Passage to India. So, he could write with some authority on both the broad and fine points of novel-writing. It’s also a very practical book. Best of all, it’s in the public domain, so you can get it for free/cheap.
9. Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer
J. Michael Straczynski is best known as the creator of the classic sci-fi TV show Babylon Five. But he’s also had a long, successful career in screenwriting and producing. He takes his title from a quote by his friend, the late Harlan Ellison: “The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.” Indeed. Straczynski has good, strategic advice for writers at every level, from novice to published (and wanting to stay published).
8. From Where You Dream – Robert Olen Butler
This is not a book on craft, but rather a high-level meditation on how to channel inspiration into the art of writing, and how writing itself can almost be a form of spiritual practice. Butler makes a strong case that this practice is what really separates “hack” writers from true artists.
7. Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott
An extremely witty and inspirational book about starting a novel, keeping momentum, and fighting off self-doubt. The title comes from an anecdote that Lamott tells about her father instructing her brother on how to write a big term-paper on local bird-life.
6. Stein on Writing – Sol Stein
This is one of my favorite books on the practical matter of writing fiction that doesn’t suck. From description, to pacing, to style and character motivation, Stein covers it all. His section on titles alone is worth the cost of the book.
5. Don’t Sabotage Your Submission: Save Your Manuscript from Turning Up D.O.A. – Chris Roerden
This is the absolutely best craft manual that I’ve ever found. No joke—reading it changed the way I write. What this book teaches you is the fiction-writing equivalent of not picking your nose in public. Avoid tons of stupid, stupid shit (that I have done and many others have done) in your fiction—the kinds of things that make an agent or a publisher sock your manuscript straight into the circular file. If you can find this book, new or used, it’s worth the money.
4. The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface – Donald Maass
Maass is the only author on this list who is also a successful literary agent. The Emotional Craft of Fiction is a great book about how to make the reader feel something—which, to me, is the highest (and perhaps the only important) goal of fiction. How do you do it? Well, obviously, by making your characters feeling something—that is, complex, believable, and yet somehow ineffable emotions.
3. Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True – Elizabeth Berg
This has recently become one of my favorite books on the writing life. One great quote:
I believe that fiction feeds on itself, grows like a pregnancy. The more you write, the more there is to draw from; the more you say, the more there is to say. The deeper you go into your imagination, the richer that reservoir becomes. You do not run out of material by using all that’s in you; rather, when you take everything that is available one day, it only makes room for new things to appear the next.
2. Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert is one of the best writers of her generation, so it makes perfect sense that she would write one of the best books ever on the creative process. While not limited to the literary arts specifically, Big Magic is a meditation on how any kind of creative art is a kind of inexplicable, real magic. It has to be nurtured, defended, shared, and—above all—respected.
1. On Writing – Stephen King
As one might expect, this is my favorite of all the books on this list, and the one I find myself re-reading. Stephen King is a master, and his is the most entertaining and trenchant book on this list. Part is devoted to practical matters like plot, description, dialog, etc., while the rest is a very compelling memoir.
Ash Clifton, Writer 