Tag: Mark David Gerson

‘The House of the Spirits’

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

“When I start I am in a total limbo. I don’t have any idea where the story is going or what is going to happen or why I am writing it. I only know that—in a way that I can’t even understand at the time—I am connected to the story. I have chosen that story because it was important to me in the past or it will be in the future.” – Isabel Allende

I am re-reading The House of the Spirits for the first time since it came out in English in 1985, most likely from the copy I read then. Allende is one of my favorite writers (perhaps above all others) because the stories she tells resonate with me as does the fact she begins each of her books–and I’ve read most of them–without knowing where the story is going. The House of the Spirits didn’t disappoint me in the mid-1980s, and yet, I was afraid to go back to it for fear the most perfect novel would have become imperfect over time like a first lover you don’t dare meet again after both of you have grown up.

I can’t imagine knowing where a story is going when I start writing it and fear that if I did, I wouldn’t be able to write it, or that if I wrote it anyway it would be less true. As I re-read this magical realism novel, I’m not disappointed the second time out and I feel inspired now as I did over thirty years ago; I see again that the story unfolded as it had to unfold because it was (and is) all of a piece that existed in and of itself before Allende wrote the first line: “Barrabus came to us by sea.”

“I think that the stories choose me,” she has said.

When I chanced across author Mark David Gerson’s book The Voice of the Muse in 2008, I was surprised to find a book for writers that acknowledged the truth that stories exist untold until we find them and/or until they find us. As I wrote in my Amazon review of his book, “Gerson believes stories pre-exist, waiting hidden away in dreams to come alive. But while I’ve worked more or less as a blacksmith hammering them into this world, he provides ways to tune into the ‘muse stream’ whereupon life flows onto the page like a warm sweet river.”

I suspect Allende knows this to be true. Otherwise, she couldn’t have written this:

He could hardly guess that the solemn, cubic, dense, pompous house, which sat like a hat amidst its green and geometric surroundings, would end up full of protuberances and incrustations, of twisted staircases that led to empty spaces, of turrets, or small windows and could not be opened, doors hanging in midair, crooked hallways, and portholes that linked the living quarters so that people could communicate during the siesta, all of which were Clara’s inspiration.

I’m relieved to discover that I’m still in love with this novel and that life might have been better if I hadn’t stayed away from it for so many years.

—Malcolm

My stories come upon me out of nowhere and that’s for the best.

43 Writers’ “Rules for Writing”

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writers, writing2 Comments

Most writers have their own special “rules for writing,” even if they don’t talk about them. I find other writers’ rules fascinating, even when I don’t agree with them. A lot can be learned by reading about other authors’ approaches to writing.

The New York Times and The Guardian have published famous authors’ answers to this question on a number of occasions. The Guardian has a very long, disorganized article that collects many of the rules, which you can read here. This article is an attempt to organize that collection and to link to other authors’ rules as well, including more recently published authors’ rules on writing.

Source: » 43 Writers’ “Rules for Writing”

I’m of the same mind about this subject as author and writing coach Mark David Gerson (The Voice of the Muse). His writing mantra is There are No Rules. I agree. Rules for writing seem to me about as relevant as rules for enjoying a sunset or a kiss.

For those who, like the author of this article, find the rules of famous writers to be fascinating, this post by Emily Harstone in “Authors Publish” is the mother lode of rules. You’ll find Elmore Leonard, George Orwell, Neil Gaiman, Jack Kerouac, and even Nietzche. Nietzche’s rules begin with “Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.” I have no idea what that means.

Enjoy or be driven to drink, depending on your point of view.

—Malcolm

Allowing your story to happen

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing5 Comments

“Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.” – Franz Kafka, from his Zürau aphorisms

When I first read Kafka’s temple ritual aphorism in high school, I was enchanted with logic. I believed that including the leopards either suggested that the ritual was meaningless and/or that the leaders were simply lazy and expedient. In high school, we were taught to plan, outline and research our fiction and nonfiction in advance to ensure that we said what we meant. Stray leopards in our prose might suggest otherwise.

Over the years, intuition and a love of apparent chaos have replaced logic in my life–and in my writing–as the primary inspiration behind what I’m doing and saying. Now, when I see Kafka’s aphorism, my thought is that the leopards had, in fact, been missing from the ceremony from day one.

Had the temple leaders maintained security and vigilance, the leopards couldn’t have gotten into ritual. The same is true, I think, for writing. Too much logic and too much planning can keep out the very things your story needs. Needless to say, if you allow something to enter and decide it really doesn’t help the story, you can edit it back out.

Author  Diana Gabaldon once mentioned during a research discussion on a writers’ forum that while doing research about ABC she would inadvertently stumble across XYZ. Once she investigated XYZ, it turned out to be vital to the plot and theme of her book even though she had never considered it before. Was her discovery magic, synchronicity, a butterfly-effect phenomenon, or an example of her subconscious mind “knowing” the material was there and leading her to it?

I’m not sure. And really, I’m less likely to stumble over the leopards trying to get into the temple if I don’t worry about how they found the temple or managed to appear at the proper time.  So, I leave my work open to chance. In his book Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, Mark David Gerson suggests that the stories we tell are already out there (don’t worry about where), just waiting for us to listen. If we don’t listen, we won’t hear them or, perhaps, if we do hear them, we’ll censor out the leopards because they weren’t included in the original plan.

Over the years, I’ve come to think that events and ideas that seemingly come out of nowhere are often the most meaningful. And, they can send our lives and our stories off on the most surprising pathways. In her post How an African Intruder Taught Me a Lesson on Magic and Writing, author Smoky Trudeau Zeidel wrote about a guineafowl that wandered into her neighborhood. She named the bird Gertie. Its appearance there was probably just as unlikely as a leopard in the local temple.

“All sorts of Gerties have popped up in my Work In Progress (WIP), The Storyteller’s Bracelet. Not guineafowl, these Gerties, but surprises that seem to have materialized out of nowhere,” she said. (She and I were content to label the appearance of a Gertie of any kind as magic.) Her view is that “when magic enters your life, be it through an unexpected visitor from another continent or through your words, it is best to go with it.”

I agree. Going with it is part of allowing your story to happen.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of magical realism and contemporary fantasy novels, including “Sarabande.”

Our Stories Make Good Conversation

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing5 Comments

“We’re all natural storytellers, sharing our stories every time we communicate with someone — whether it’s a casual water-cooler chat or deep conversations with a close friend.” — Mark David Gerson in “When Was the Last Time You Told Your Story?“

I read Mark David’s post about our natural inclination for sharing our stories with each other right after getting home from a weekend trip for visits with friends and family. Family visits often include updates about what people we used to know are doing now, leading often to “remember the time when” accounts of things that happened a quarter of a century ago.

Visits with friends begin with “what’s been going on lately?” and, as the evening gets late, morph into childhood stories that come forth as one topic leads to another topic through a myriad of diverse pathways. Saturday night, we ended up talking about pivotal moments, events that had a large impact on our life’s work and our points of view. We learned, among other things that our good friend Gordon had had near brushes with death as a child: these were stories we’d never heard even though we’ve known him and his wife Joyce since the 1970s. It just never came up before.

When I was going to graduate school at Syracuse University, my father quite naturally began thinking about his work as the acting dean of the journalism school there when I was several years old. As I haunted the streets he used to know, he began to think of old stories, things that just never came up during dinner table conversations back home. Every week or so, I received a typewritten letter of several pages not only relating tall tales about Syracuse in the old days, but incidents in his life in Quincy, Washington, Ft. Collins, Colorado and the Colorado Rockies, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

These letters painted a picture of what my father’s life was like as a child and also as a young man the same age I was at the time I read them. Unfortunately, during the summer term, we had to vacate the graduate student apartment building to provide living space for summer session students, and this meant storing a lot of stuff in the locked units in the basement. When I came back to Syracuse that fall, I discovered that in spite of the locks, many of the units had been broken into and the contents had been stolen.

I lost a good pair of “roper’s boots” purchased several years earlier in Browning, Montana, and I lost a briefcase where I had stored my father’s letters. Some scum–in my estimation of the people who committed the burglary–was wearing my boots and maybe even attending classes in the same buildings I was using my briefcase. The letters were, no doubt, tossed in the trash.

Today, those letters would be sitting in a computer and could be printed out again. As it was, there was no way to replace them or even to remember the stories they contained.

I thought of this last night when Gordon spoke of putting some of his stories into a book. No doubt, they would mean a great deal to his sons even in e-mail form. But they would have a wider audience for they’re not only interesting–simply as good storytelling–but they contain details about another time and place…what it was like to work in a steel mill or for the long-gone Nickel Plate Railroad.

As a writer, I see Gordon’s stories and my late father’s stories first as the way they might appear as written accounts–prospective essays, articles short stories and novels. But there’s more to them. For a family, they’re history and legacy; for friends, they’re a sharing of experiences.

Our stories not only make good conversation, they forge deeper friendships. So I ask, as Mark David asked in his post, when was the last time you told your story?

—Malcolm

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