Filling up the writing well

The well goes dry quickly. Maybe a couple hours. Those dudes who write all day are amazing. For most writers it is a few hours and the day is finished. All you can do is gas up for the next day. And you really cant cheat it. Internet has to be cut. Problems avoided. Reading increased. Early to bed and you better not drink or the well water slops all over the floor. You have to pull in your antenna and parcel out what little you have like a miser. Even writing this takes some, but this is after the fact.

Writers only have so much psychic energy. So much zap. So that is why it is best to write in the morning before making a living and life takes everything out of you. I used to like to write at dusk with the world quieting down and I could hide in my garret. But that was before wife and kids and mortgage and bills. Life was simpler then so I took to the mornings.

The well is precious and little things can drain it. Too much drama in your life. Lack of sleep. Not eating right. Sickness. Not reading well. Psychological hangups. A pestering friend, lover, wife, husband, who wont respect your right to disconnect from the world. All you are after is a little dance with the Gods for an hour or two and then a long slow period of resting up to do it all again.

Not so much to ask.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Novel as Social Commentary

I think it was Gore Vidal who proclaimed the novel dead. He said it was dead as a form of relevant social commentary and that responsibility had been passed on to film. He and others felt that the form wasn't relevant enough, that it could not take on the fast changing stream of the world today. Muted in its form and stuck in it's history, how could  a  novel take on what changes in a nanosecond today? Only the Internet can give us our up to the minute interpretation of the world as we want it. Right?

This was Tom Wolfe's complaint. That nobody writes about today, the big novel of social relevancy. Well maybe. Film is a more flexible medium. It would seem novelist need more time to put the world in order and then spit it back. Franzen's Freedom is a record of America that has already passed is one example.The world he gives back to us is a few years back. I am still working through the book so I can not speak to how much of our world he captures, but safe to say he will not be commenting on the Chilean miners being brought to the surface or Christine O'Donnell.

But of course this brings up the role of the novel. It is not the Internet, it is not film. For the novel to succeed it has to have staying power and say something timeless about an era, a moment, a movement in history. The Great Gatsby is great not because of it's moment of twenties bacchanalia ,but because Fitzgerald pegged something about the dark side of the American dream. Maybe he just pegged something about America. And that story stands in history as a moment that is not tied to any moment.

So I think the great social novel is alive and well. It may not reflect back to us what we want at that moment, but for someone else, it might just give them a glimpse of the hell and the heaven we went through in a frozen moment of time. In that way it might be our last chance to see who we really are.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall.
www.billhazelgrove.com

That strange book in the library with your name

It happens when you go looking for a book and enter the old suburban libraries circa 1970 with the same women with support hose and brogans. They look at you the same way even though you are an author with many books as you ask them for a particular title. Oh just look under the authors name it should be there. Same as when you were twelve, the same look of faint disapproval, definitely a sign you should be looking for something other than the book you asked for.

So you descend into the stacks slightly musty. I was looking for an old Tom Perotta novel and started clicking off through the P's and of course I missed his name and had to go back to the Sergent at Arms to show me the way. She quickly went right to the title like a savant and handed it to me wordlessly. Wow. I must have walked by it ten times. Uh huh. A push on the reading glasses and she's gone leaving me with Tom Perotta and the rows and rows of books I used to browse as a boy.

And  that's when you turn to go but your eye drifts over to the H's. Well, it could be there. Let's see. So you count off the names and walk past it ten times and then you see it. You pick it up and examine the clear plastic library cover. Someone has written inside it in pencil. Strange numbers on the title page. It smells old and well, like a library book. There is no one around and so you open it and give it a quick read. Just the first page, the first paragraph. Not bad. You open it to the middle and read some more. You can't really remember writing that scene and you read it like someone else.

Finally you put that first novel back in the stacks and look back a few times. It's not a bad book. Not bad at all for a beginner and you think back when you discovered a new author in the library.  You walk out into the darkness, leaving just a little bit of yourself behind.

WEH 2010 http://www.billhazelgrove.com/