He said he feels kind of guilty for being such a hermit. “I tend to really cut myself off. It’s not a good thing. You wind up getting sort of crotchety and pissy. Your friends call up and just want to get together for dinner and it’s like, ‘oh Jesus,’ and you feel so put upon. You get really obnoxious and particular about your time.”
Wells Tower talking about himself in talking about writing fiction, in a New York Observer story earlier this year entitled “Wells Tower, Fiction Writer, Is Looking for Joy” (which sounds a little ironic, when you’re looking at this snippet only.) But yeah, I know this/these writers.
Associatively, I hear Neil Young’s song start up in my head: …”I have a friend I’ve never seen, he hides his head inside a dream, someone should call him and see if he can come out, try to lose the down that he’s found…”
Categories: Creating · misc · read
Oh, Mr. Benfey, of this that you’ve written,
The short story is a genre in which, for mysterious reasons, Americans–along with Russian and Irish writers–have excelled. Perhaps it is because these are countries that, in their ragged and unsettled histories, have maintained oral storytelling traditions in tightly knit rural communities. It has often been pointed out that the American South, with its agrarian past and its experience of military defeat and occupation, has produced an unusually strong crop of short stories. At the same time, the writing of stories seems to be a talent, like a knack for chess or mathematics or lyric poetry, that lives and dies with youth. In the years before her death, O’Connor felt the well running dry; she wrote no new stories in 1962. “I’ve been writing eighteen years and I’ve reached the point where I can’t do again what I know I can do well,” she lamented, “and the larger things that I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.”
I’d ask, in response, you’ve heard of Tobias Wollf, surely?
But Tobias Wolff, who is one of our great contemporary masters of the short story, says that the difficulty of the short story is its own reward…
Categories: read · write
Tagged: American masters of the short story, contemporary master of short story, creativity, Flannery O'Connor, misconceptions about short story writers, short story, Tobias Wolff, writing
