Aha - So This Sort of Thing is Possible

Weather a novel by Jenny Offill, has opened my writer's eyes and renewed my writer's hope.

Sometimes my increasingly insistent "Voice" and my slow but stubborn developing "Craft" have loud arguments with each other. They fight, they sulk and walk away, sometimes they wake the neighbours. 

"This is the right way to do it," Craft says, "You know the contest editors will tell you that was the wrong way." 

"Ah, but it's not me," Voice says, "It doesn't produce the, I don't know, the tone, the emotional reaction, the ambiance, the something-or-other I'm after. I know it's awkward, but it's true, and for right now it's the best I can do."

Here is a typical positive comment about Weather from Goodreads:

"I loved every minute of Weather. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, thanks to the choppy style, specific brand of humour and refusal to deliver conventional narrative movement, but I thought it was brilliant."

And a not-so-positive one:
"I don't think this is a bad book at all, I want to make that clear right away.  I think Jenny Offill is a talented writer, and that she achieves everything she set out to achieve with this little book . . . But with that said... I didn't particularly like it?  I mostly found this book incredibly forgettable . . . and there was nothing about Lizzie's story in particular that justified to me why this was the particular story that Offill chose to tell."

And one that, I suspect, represents the broader world of creative storytellers and reviewers:
"This is not an easy book to review . . . 
My guess is that readers will either appreciate and enjoy it ...
Or ....
They won’t."

My point for newish and renewing writers is not to grab a copy of this particular novel -- it may hold zero inspiration for you -- but that out there somewhere there may well be an example of something you have been wandering around in circles, striving for, but not being able to explain what it is. To others or even to yourself.

When, suddenly, there it is. Maybe not exactly but close enough. An example of the possible.

In short, keep writing, yes. But keep reading too.

Bob’s 2020 Twenty Five Favourites for a Desert Island

Selection Guidelines

• This is writing I would want to take to a desert island. Not “Best Writing”. I couldn't identify “best” writing if it fell on my head.

• The list is cumulative, from 1813 to so far in 2020.

• As I reviewed my selections, I must confess some inclusions surprised me. I mean, really, how long can a person hang onto Salinger's work even given its impact on a young man's imagination all those years ago? And, I must admit I have included Robertson Davies mostly because I wasn't aware there were any Canadian writers until I read him. But, on a desert island, the re-discovery of that memory would make me smile.

• None of my writing colleagues are here. Many deserve to be. I am routinely impressed, educated, humbled, and encouraged by their work. Between you and me, I will confide to you I plan to sneak two or three bags of their writing onto my desert island. In plain brown wrappers.

• There is also an extensive list of authors and their works that I found painful to exclude. What a wonderful problem! What a rich world of the written word we live in.

1. Andre Alexis Fifteen Dogs – novel 2015
2. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice – novel 1813
3. Lord Byron (George Gordon) So We’ll Go No More A-Roving – poem 1830
4. Billy Collins Fishing on the Susquehanna in July – poem 1998
5. Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy – Fifth Business 1970 and two other novels – 1975
6. Charles Dickens Great Expectations-- novel 1861
7. Emily Dickinson A Bird Came Down the Walk – poem 1891
8. F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby – novel 1925
9. Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – nonfiction 2015
10. Ernest Hemingway Death in the Afternoon – nonfiction 1932
11. Stephen Leacock My Financial Career – short story 1910 (from Literary Lapses)
12. James Henry Leigh Hunt Jenny Kissed Me – poem 1838
13. Alice Munro Lives of Girls and Women – interrelated short stories/novel 1971
14. Simon Rich The Ride Back to Beersheba – flash fiction 2007 (from Ant Farm . . . Situations)
15. J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye – novel 1951
16. Julie Schumacher Dear Committee Members – novel 2014
17. William Shakespeare Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet 116) poem 1609
18. Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – novel 1960
19. J. R. R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings – novel (six books published in three volumes) 1954/55
20. John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces – novel 1980
21. Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – novel 1885
22. Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five – novel 1969
23. Mo Willems Waiting Is Not Easy – picture book 2014
24. Kevin Wilson Nothing To See Here – novel 2019
25. W. B. Yeats When You Are Old – poem 1893

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