Fortune and Glory

Thoughts while watching the trailer for The Great Gatsby:

I would like to enjoy this movie. I like this book. I have read it many times since that first time in 10th grade English. I am completely okay with something stylish and distinct from the book though.
Whoa, okay, Kanye and Jay-Z. Interesting. Some Louis Armstrong or Blind Lemon Jefferson would might have worked…
Interesting isn’t necessarily good, but I’ll roll with it. Gotta keep an open mind. It’s Baz, after all.
Hmm, a Tobey Maguire voiceover. He’s so bland. Then again, he’s playing Nick Carraway. Maybe that’s the point. Imagine this though: Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
I wrote an article in 2007 about “Five Novels I Want to See Adapted” and then I wanted Leonardo DiCaprio as Carraway in my grand vision of The Great Gatsby (and, for the record, Robert Downey Jr. as Gatsby).
The Jack White U2 cover is another interesting touch. Is it too much to expect at least a little jazz in an adaptation of the definitive Jazz Age novel?
The interaction between DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan is going to carry this film, as it should - and wow, their first moment in the trailer was nauseatingly tense.
Then Tobey yells. Ugh.
I’m hesitant, yet hopeful.

This is how we go on: one day a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.

“

—	Stephen King, Bag of Bones

You know why the birdies wake up singing, don’t you? … They’re happy to be alive one more day. You can’t count on that, Hewes. Them little birdies know it too. That’s why they’re out there singing all the time. They’re trying to tell us something. ‘Tweet, tweet, you’re alive, you ignorant asshole.’

“

—	Richard Ford, A Piece of My Heart Sometimes I reread this and I’m reminded that all is well. Tweet, tweet.

The long awaited 4.5th book in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. It will be nice to hang out with Roland again.

This should make for some good airplane reading to Miami tomorrow.

He felt a keen pang of nostalgia, but he didn’t know for what. Maybe for the time before he had realized that good intentions don’t make you innocent, for the time when he had less regret. Ransom wasn’t sure if he was waiting for something to happen, or hoping nothing would. Sometimes he felt he was preparing for some sort of confrontation, and at other times he believed he had seen enough trouble already.

“

—	Jay McInerney, Ransom

One resolves to do these things, one wants to do them; but when the time comes, in the cold morning light, they somehow don’t get done.

“

—	George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying - Ideas always do sounds so much better during the night than they do the next morning, don’t they?

What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is often overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.

“

—	Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Why I write. »

The prior excerpts that I posted from The Paris Review’s collection of Steinbeck’s writings about the craft of writing I had read in the past. This next excerpt I have not and it is equal parts hysterical and fascinating. Below, in a letter to his good friend and editor Pascal Covici (to whom Steinbeck dedicated East of Eden), Steinbeck writes a satirical summation of dialogue he had with various people involved in the process of publication once he had completed writing his magnum opus East of Eden.

Well - then the book is done. It has no virtue any more. The writer wants to cry out, “Bring it back! Let me rewrite it,” or better: “Let me burn it. Don’t let it out in the unfriendly cold in that condition.”

As you know better than most, Pat, the book does not go from writer to reader. It goes first to the lions - editors, publishers, critics, copyreaders, sales department. It is kicked and slashed and gouged. And its bloodied father stands attorney

EDITOR The book is out of balance. The reader expects one thing and you give him something else. You have written two books and stuck them together. The reader will not understand.

WRITER No, sir. It goes together. I have written about one family and used stories about another family as—well, as counterpoint, as rest, as contrast in pace and color.

EDITOR The reader won’t understand. What you call counterpoint only slows the book.

WRITER It has to be slowed—else how would you know when it goes fast?

EDITOR You have stopped the book and gone into discussions of God knows what.

WRITER Yes, I have. I don’t know why. Just wanted to. Perhaps I was wrong.

SALES DEPARTMENT The book’s too long. Costs are up. We’ll have to charge five dollars for it. People won’t pay five dollars. They won’t buy it.

WRITER My last book was short. You said then that people won’t buy a short book.

PROOFREADER The chronology is full of holes. The grammar has no relation to English. On page so and so you have a man look in the World Almanac for steamship rates. They aren’t there. I checked. You’ve got the Chinese New Year wrong. The characters aren’t consistent. You describe Liza Hamilton one way and then have her act a different way.

EDITOR You make Cathy too black. The reader won’t believe her. You make Sam Hamilton too white. The reader won’t believe him. No Irishman ever talked like that.

WRITER My grandfather did.

EDITOR Who’ll believe it.

2ND EDITOR No children ever talked like that.

WRITER (losing temper as a refuge from despair) God damn it. This is my book. I’ll make the children talk any way I want. My book is about good and evil. Maybe the theme got into the execution. Do you want to publish it or not?

EDITORS Let’s see if we can’t fix it up. It won’t be much work. You want it to be good, don’t you? For instance, the ending. The reader won’t understand it.

WRITER Do you?

EDITOR Yes, but the reader won’t.

PROOFREADER My God, how you do dangle a participle. Turn to page so and so.

There you are, Pat. You came in with a box of glory and there you stand with an arm full of damp garbage.

And from this meeting a new character has emerged. He is called The Reader.

THE READER

He is so stupid you can’t trust him with an idea.

He is so clever he will catch you in the least error.

He will not buy short books.

He will not buy long books.

He is part moron, part genius and part ogre.

There is some doubt as to whether he can read.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through - not ever much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can’t be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible. … And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it at all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

“

—	John Steinbeck on writing (from The Paris Review)

I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone’s experience which is probably why it is so freely offered. But the following are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person - a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it - bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue - say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

“

—	John Steinbeck on getting started to write a novel (from the Paris Review)

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

“

—	George Orwell, Why I Write

Jonathan Writing »

fortuneandglory:

If you are interested, the link above directs to my new blog, which will be focused on my writing and serve as a hub (eventually) for my original works. Some of it contains reposts from this blog, some of it will be original work, and some of it will be about the process of writing itself (and the eventual quest for publication) - but unlike this blog, all of it will be about my writing, rather than all of my other bizarre interests.

Just reblogging this in case anyone else in interested.

Jonathan Writing »

If you are interested, the link above directs to my new blog, which will be focused on my writing and serve a hub (eventually) will my original works. Some of it contains reposts from this blog, some of it will be original work, and some of it will be about the process of writing itself (and the eventual quest for publication) -but unlike this blog, all of it will be about my writing, rather than all of my other bizarre interests.