Nope. I mean, I can write… I’m just… not writing. Sure, I am working slowly on some poems towards my next book, but can I sustain the narrative and voice needed for this monstrous 700 pages fantasy novel (currently nearing page 400)? No, I cannot. It’s not normal. It’s upsetting. And it’s what I’ve got right now. Amy Sackville commiserates.
In the last weeks I’ve taken up, and put aside, woodcutting, drawing, German. I’ve cooked and painted walls and baked. Several weeks in, I caved and made a sourdough starter. (It really does seem miraculous, the raising of bread, though I won’t go on about it.) Watched the lilac, then the climbing rose, then the honeysuckle bloom. Planted sweet peas and watched them sprout. I know I am fortunate. Sat in the small, overlooked garden, for which I’ve never been more grateful, with a book unread in my lap, picking up and putting down my phone, listening to building works and the radios of neighbours, staring into this fragrant, sunny, confined space. I can’t settle to anything.
I work at a university and the last months have been the busiest I’ve known, as we respond and support and adapt and plan. This is not about having an excess of time on my hands to be idled away, and wondering what I might do with it. It’s about what I’ve been doing in the time that I do have, when I’m not doing that job; and whatever that has been, it is not writing. This is all just distraction. From everything. From what’s beyond the flat, the garden, and from this sudden circumscription to those bounds. From writing, and the fact that I am not writing. Because I have not done any writing. (Writing this, here, is terrifying.) Why can’t I write?
Can literary talent be inherited? This article at the BBC looks at three examples of mother-to-daughter blood-based transmission of poverty and heartache writing as a career choice. Obviously its mostly kids learning these future-crippling behaviours from their parents. My son, 17, is also currently engaged in writing a fantasy novel in his spare time (which is whenever the options of video games, socially-distanced picnics with friends, and making sandwiches at odd hours have been exhausted). Will it be any good? Who knows. The ideas are good, for sure. Over time, if he sticks with writing and reading he’ll get better at the writing part. I am a decent writer, but that’s partly because I have some talent and partly because I put in 25 years at it. He perhaps could have inherited an artistic eye (though I think that’s learned as well), but the rest he’ll have to make up on his own if he wants to go follow this inadvisable career path calling.
from BBC
The art of novel writing isn’t often a family business. The combination of talent and perseverance required, plus the good fortune to be published, are rare indeed. Even rarer are literary generations of mothers and daughters. But there are three notable pairs of mother-daughter novelists throughout literary history who share the gift of language and the same storytelling talent – and suggest that talent can be inherited, either through natural ability or through careful nurturing. An author mother can be a path opener or a role model for her daughter, or both, and help shape her literary destiny.
So that letter from last week, eh? Woof. Anyway, here is some analysis of why none of these rich, White, over-privileged people are not being “cancelled” along with a defence by one of the signatories.
“Cancel Culture” is a scam perpetuated by people who don’t want to do the work of helping to change things because it would not allow them to continue hurting others, whether on purpose or as inadvertent consequences of their selfish behaviour;
How, when and why did novels start? Conventionally, people used to say two things, in the main: that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was a game-changer; and the novel started in the “long” eighteenth century. Only Don Quixote was published in 1605, and in critical circles Cervantes’s giant may have eclipsed Defoe’s marooned mariner as the most influential book-that-might-be-called-a-novel there has ever been. Don Quixote holds in his bony hands the “romance” stories of love and chivalry he believes in, the ones he inherits from earlier centuries; but these outré influences are vulnerable to certain corrosive satirical scepticisms based in the stony reality of the Castilian landscape. Romance, satire and realism make the novel; they are already seething nicely in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688).
Sometime in or before the First Century CE a new kind of book appeared that promised to address the scroll’s shortcomings. The evidence is sparse but telling: archaeologists have discovered a few key scraps of papyrus whose text unexpectedly continues from the front to the back, and whose neat margins one might expect to find in a paged book. And that is exactly what these fragments are: they are leaves from the first paged books the world had ever seen. We know that the Romans called this new kind of book the codex (from caudex or tree trunk, because of its similarity to their wooden writing tablets), but how the codex came to be in the first place is shrouded in mystery. The first written mention of the codex appears in the words of a Roman poet named Martial, who encouraged his readers to buy his books in this new, paged format:
“You who long for my little books to be with you everywhere and want to have companions for a long journey, buy these ones which parchment confines within small pages: give your scroll-cases to the great authors – one hand can hold me.”
Written between 84 and 86 CE, Martial’s sales pitch tells us not only that paged books were known of in the First Century CE but also that some of them, at least, were made from a new material called parchment. This alternative to papyrus, invented in a Greek city-state some centuries earlier, was made from cleaned, stretched animal skins by means of a bloody and labour-intensive process, but its smoothness and strength made it an ideal writing material. Archaeologists have since confirmed Martial’s claims via fragments of parchment codices dated to the First Century – and yet, these few tantalising finds aside, we still know very little about where or why the codex was invented, or who might have done so. Even the question of whether the first codices were made of papyrus or parchment has never been satisfactorily answered.
It’s Friday, folks. You’re here again. Still alive. Shit went down this week, you survived it. I hope you nailed assholes and bigots to the wall this week and will congratulate yourself with something sinful this evening.
Should you be worried that Jr. just wants to read the same damn book every day? No. Unless the book is something like Mein Kampf or anything by “Donald Trump” or Norman Mailer, et al., it’s fine. While this tiny advice column article addresses younger readers, my 17-year-old has always read and reread his favourites. The last few years he’s done this with the first two books of the legendarily-late-to-complete Patrick Rothfuss fantasy series, The Kingkiller Chronicle (in which no king has yet been killed, I might add). I’m okay with that, since I’ve also read those. Though the conspiracy theories about what’s behind the Doors of Stone are getting a bit stretched, I tell you. Anyway, point being, he’s decided to become a writer based on his love of this one series (not his poet dad and novelist/screenwriter step-mom), and for that I have to give Patrick Rothfuss credit where credit is due and say, “Screw you, nerd, he could have been a scientist.”
Kids love repetition—watching the same movies, singing the same songs, and, yes, reading the same books. They’re hard-wired to prefer familiarity, probably an evolutionary thing that helps keep babies close to their caretakers.
But repetition also helps kids learn. One study showed that hearing the same words in the same story helped more than hearing the same words in different stories.
Bookninja 