What writing is

My Uncle Vinton was one of the most influential persons in my teenage years. He taught me to play guitar and drink whiskey without shuddering. He was a strange fellow- he once typed his own copy of Huckleberry Finn on a manual typewriter, copying from the original book. What made this strange was he actually had the book- why type a copy? Among his many obscure talents he was a guitar player, a sketch artist, and a woodcarver.

My grandfather had cut down a rogue cedar tree and Vinton claimed the trunk for his own. He cut it up into small chunks which he carved into pieces for a chess set. The carvings were very intricate- the bishop was a demon with wings, and I remember the detail of the face was such that you could see the eyebrows and the lines on the face of this small figure barely four inches tall. It was crouched down on one knee with its chin resting on one fist like the thinker, and the wings wrapped around its shoulders. I marveled at the detail and asked him "how can you carve this out of a chunk of wood?". He answered with the age old advice of " you just cut away everything that doesn't look like the bishop." Easy enough to say if you have the talent.

I have tried to apply the same principle to my writing,  I have tried to write stories that cut away everything that I am not trying to convey. I have tried, through each story written, to capture human nature in such away that no one who reads the story will doubt its validity. Granted, quality of writing will always be subjective, but some writers have achieved talent which can not collectively be denied. This, then, has been my goal: to write a story that may not be accepted by everyone who reads it as good writing, but accepted by a majority of people as such. To cut away everything that is doesn't look like the bishop.

First post of 2012

I saw this at GlimmerTrain. I found it interesting enough to repost. Also, google website is up and running.
https://sites.google.com/site/wscottbowlin/




I have an idea that some men are born out of their
due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in
their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known
from childhood or the populous streets in which they
have played, remain but a place of passage. They may
spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred
and remain aloof among the only scenes they have
ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that
sends men far and wide in the search for something
permanent, to which they may attach themselves.
Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the
wanderer back to lands which his ancestors
left in the dim beginnings of history.
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which
he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here
is the home he sought, and he will settle
amid scenes that he has never seen before,
among men he has never known, as though
they were familiar to him from his birth.
Here at last he finds rest.
—from The Moon and Sixpence
by W. Somerset Maugham, 1919

Poets & Writer's Magazine

     I read an essay in the Mar/April issue of Poet's & Writer's Magazine in the "Why We Write" section that described the loss of a relative. In the essay, author Lise Saffran chronicles the declining health of her grandmother and how Saffran visited her regularly, taking along her laptop to continue working during these visits. The article is very moving, and I recommend anyone who gets a chance should read it.
     At the end of the article there was a little footnote suggesting that this is an open-submission column. The intent is to write about why you continue to write " despite rejection, lack of recognition, or other challenges." Of course I wondered, at that point, why do I write? Could I get past the abstracts ( a common answer is "because I have too") and actually define what drives me to write?
      I immediately thought of a time a few years ago when I was on vacation with my family. My parents had followed us to Fredericksburg, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C. We were staying in a hotel that had a large open atrium with an indoor pool. Every morning the hotel served hot breakfast, and I would get up before everyone else and go down to the atrium to write. One morning my father came down and joined me. He asked what I was writing, and I muttered my way through a generic explanation and closed the notebook. I told him that I was trying to write so well that if it was raining in my story, that the reader would here the rain hitting the roof and feel the temperature drop as the moisture filled the air. He nodded, and said that would be good.
     Later that year I began reading Hemingway, starting with "A Moveable Feast". I was surprised to see that Hemingway himself had stated the same thing: he wanted to write so well that what he had written became real to the person who read it, and as such, became part of their memories as if it had really happened to them.
     Of course everyone who writes should want to write well, but is that the defining reason why I write? I've often declared that what I am trying to do with a story is write something that is true to anyone who reads it. I want to capture the texture of life and emotion into a story so completely that it's better than watching a movie. But this is just a goal of writing, not a motivation to do so. Perhaps, for now, I'm still stuck with "because I can't not write."   

Workshops page

Just added a page about workshops, etc. First on the list was Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which, according to their website, is "one of America's most valuable literary institutions." Check out those rates- I don't know for sure what you get out of the experience, but I would love to hear from anyone who has ever attended a Bread Loaf conference. If you prefer not to post a comment, send an email. Meanwhile, I am going to google search other blogs that might pertain to the Bread Loaf conference. I'll add a new entry to that page frequently.

Writing fiction

Writing fiction is truly one of the hardest things to do. You struggle along with words and sentences trying to capture an idea, a sound, a texture, convey emotion. You do this without the aid of pictures, and this seems unfair because a picture is worth a thousand words, they say, but words only get singular value. A thousand words could take an hour to compose or a week, and even then the quality of those words is subjective. If you are serious about it you want to write about everything. If you are good at it you produce a picture that a painter works his whole life searching for. Then it is worth doing.