Tin House: The Writer’s Notebook

Tin House just put out a collection of essays with writers on writing, called The Writer’s Notebook. Many essays came from the Tin House Writing Workshops, and some were gleaned from elsewhere. Brilliant stuff, and not at all the hackneyed tired advice you find in so many writing books.

For instance, I really appreciated Aimee Bender’s essay “Character Motivation.” She discusses how the temptation is to provide singular motivations for your character, a one-to-one relationship between motivation and action. But, she argues, actions in real life often have a multiplicity of motivations, or we don’t understand our motivations, or perhaps we have no motivation at all:

I think part of this desire comes from mainstream film, which has a tendency to link an action directly to a reason, to make motivations really clear, and, as a result, the characters are fleshed out too quickly. Some of it also comes from reading books about writing, which often tell you that you should know what your characters want. John Gardner says that in The Art of Fiction; Ray Bradbury says that in Zen and the Art of Writing; it’s a common statement. For many writers, it’s probably a very useful comment, but I find it trips me up, because I don’t always know what a character wants. I know some things about the character, but to know what he or she wants feels like the final answer, why I’m writing in the first place.

One of the funniest essays comes from Steve Almond (no surprise) writing an essay about how to write sex scenes, titled (I kid not): “Hard Up for a Hard-on.” He gives mind numbingly bad examples, he gives swooningly good examples, he gives hilarious examples spoofing the bad ones. Aside from advice like “read the Song of Songs,” and how sometimes we need to write non-erotic sex scenes to get at emotions other than lust, he offers this:

If you don’t feel comfortable writing about sex, then don’t. By this, I mean writing about sex as it actually exists, in the real world, as an ecstatic, terrifying, and, above all, deeply emotional process. Real sex is compelling to read about because the particpants are so utterly vulnerable. You mustn’t abandon your characters in their time of need. You mustn’t make of them naked playthings with rubbery parts. You must love them, wholly and without shame, as they go about their human business. Because we’ve already got a name for sex without emotional content: pornography.

Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation is serializing another excellent essay in the collection, Susan Bell’s “Revisioning The Great Gatsby.” Part I, Part II.