Jim Tomlinson
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a writer's journal
Saturday, May 3, 2008
When you write fiction set in an historical period, much of what you read seems to relate to the problem at hand: how to create characters who seem real...characters of and for their time.
This from a Henry James letter, as quoted by John Updike in the May 5, 2008 issue of The New Yorker:
"You may multiply the little facts that can be got from
pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like—the real thing
is almost impossible to do, & in its essence the whole effect is as nought.
. . . You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman,—or
rather fifty—whose own thinking was intensely-otherwise conditioned, you
have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force—& even then it’s all
humbug."
Thursday, May 1, 2008
A pleasant surprise in the mail today, from Kathy Pories at Algonquin Books, my Advance Readers Copy of New Stories from the South, 2008, which includes my "First Husband, First Wife." (The cover art and reviews aren't on any of the book websites yet, but they should be appearing soon.) This year's edition, guest edited by ZZ Packer, is filled with great fiction from the region. I'm especially delighted to see that "Theory of Realty," a coming-of-age story by my talented friend Holly Goddard Jones, is first in the book. You'll also find wonderful stories by Pinckney Benedict, Jamie Poissant, Kevin Brockmeier, Mary Miller, Kevin Moffett, Ron Rash and many others.
The National Endowment for the Arts has put up new pages on their website, one for each 2008 NEA fellowship recipient. They did a most classy job, as you might expect. Here's mine.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
I have set aside work on the novel for a few weeks to work on revisions to the short story collection. It has generated strong interest from a publisher or two. I've intended to make a few changes for some time and recently I've had most helpful and supportive feedback from outside readers, which will strengthen the work. And, as always (or so it seems), I'm looking to add one more story.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Reading material piles up while I'm writing. The bookcase is overflowing. Beside my chair are books I've bought and started, books to which I'm planning to return. There are magazines (Time, The New Yorker, Poets and Writers) turned open to stories and articles. At some point, I'll grant myself a few days off from writing (or staring at the laptop screen) and get caught up with all this. There never seem to be enough hours.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Last week I had the pleasure of reading at an Author's Brunch sponsored by the American Association of University Women. Jackie Burnside and Anne Shelby, two wonderful writers from the area, also read. I talked about my mother's influence on me as a writer and read a brief excerpt from TKTLB. Afterwards I signed books and enjoyed talking to several readers.
Great news this week in a letter from Kathy Pories, editor at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. My story, "First Husband, First Wife" was selected by guest editor ZZ Packer for New Stories from the South, The Year's Best, 2008. Here's a link to the 2007 edition. It is especially gratifying because I've been a big fan of the New Stories from the South series for many years and of the wonderful writers whose stories have appeared there.
Friday, February 1, 2008
I'm reminded again, working on the novel, how different an animal it is, compared to the short story. Short fiction is all about characters in a moment and everything on the page is pruned to serve that moment. The novel, on the other hand, seems to be more about progression from moment to moment. It's about complications and serial chains of events ending somewhere not foreseen (or foreseeable) at the start. They're often still obscured midway though. Yet it all needs to look somehow inevitable when the last page is turned.
All of which reminds me of a quote from novelist Alex Chee about the experience of the novel for the reader being quite orderly, and how little that resembles the sometimes chaotic experience of its creation for the writer. That's where I'm at these days.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
I'm wondering about language, what is the best level of language to use in the novel, H&H. With an historical setting and characters, the writing calls for some sense of the language of that period. My concern is how best to do that for a twenty-first century readership and have it seem authentic and yet not off-putting, i.e. reader-friendly. I'm not sure I've hit the right balance yet.
Another concern is rendering something of the consciousness of that time period. Writing about the limits of research in historical fiction in the latest Poets & Writers magazine, Aaron Hamburger writes::
"Historical research can help a writer recreate the past for today's readers, but not the way the past was thought of and experienced by its contemporaries. This is why Henry James, in his famous 1901 letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, claimed that the real job of the historical novel--recapturing an out-of-date consciousness--is almost impossible to pull off."
Still, the illusion for the reader has to be, 'Yes, that is what it must have been like, living in those times.' Everything in the novel should support that sense of authenticity, including a seemingly "realistic" and palatable version of language.
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