The title for this post is something of a “Well, duh” kind of title. For a story to work well, it’s the characters who have to take over and knock the author from his perch.
I’ve been reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough, and he says that he almost called his book Writing Better Character-Driven Fiction, until he realized it was rather redundant. “All good fiction is character-driven,” he writes. He’s not big on outlines, plotting, character sketches, erecting signposts, or anything else that might smack of planning. Instead, he says, “like real life,” he says, “authentic fiction is not planned. Like real life, authentic fiction unfolds naturally.”
Stanbrough has an acronym for this – WITD, or “Writing into the Dark.”
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
I’m not sure how to describe Robert Schultz. Poet. Novelist. Photographer. Artist. All of the above.
He’s written one novel, The Madhouse Nudes, the story of an artist who, in painting women, is trying to seem them truly. He’s co-authored an art book, War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials, which also became an exhibition, and We Were Pirates: a Torpedoman’s Pacific War with James Shell . He’s written four poetry collections. His most recent work is Specimens of the Plague Year: notes and art, the “plague year” being 2020, the year of COVID. He’s also helped translate Wonderland: New & Selected Poems by Sarwat Zahra.
What I’ve first turned to is one of his poetry collections, Into the New World(2020). In a word, it’s stunning.
The first time I was in St. Paul’s Churchyard was May of 1983. My wife and I had traveled to London to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. On a Sunday afternoon, she was resting in our hotel room, and I’d hopped a tube train to visit the newly opened Museum of London before walking around St. Paul’s a few blocks to the south. At 3 p.m., I was standing in front of St. Paul’s when the church bells began to peal. It was one of those “just stop and listen moments.”
Last fall, we were once again in the churchyard, visiting the Temple Bar exhibition just to the north of the church, and then a few days later we toured the cathedral itself. We walked around the churchyard, visited a gift and souvenir shop, and took our “standing in front of the cathedral” tourist photos. We knew the basic history of the cathedral – Sir Christopher Wren rebuilt the church followed its destruction in the Great Fire of 1666. And we knew that the area around the church had been heavily bombed during World War II; the church itself took one major hit but was protected by the firewatchers stationed on the roof and nearby.
In medieval times, the yard was host to speeches and sermons. The Reformation, Counter-Reformation and New Reformation were argued and fought here. The yard witnessed a few executions. Once the printing press was invented, printers set up shop in this area, mostly printing religious tracts and documents. They eventually evolved into book printers and publishers, both in St. Paul’s Churchyard and nearby Paternoster Row. Publishers branched out into selling books directly to the public, becoming the cradle and center of Britain’s book publishing industry.
Willes tells this fascinating history well. The chapters on the Great Fire (and how printers thought they could secure their stocks inside the church itself) and the rebuilding by Wren are especially good. She provides detail in just the right amounts. The people come alive, and their stories become the stories of the churchyard.
Margaret Willes
Willes is the former publisher at the National Trust who now writes books on cultural and botanical history. Her works include Liberty over London Bridge, The Curious World of Samuel Pepys & John Evelyn, The Gardens of the British Working Class, The Making of the English Gardener, Reading Matters Five Centuries of Discovering Books, The Domestic Herbal, and Scenes from a Georgian Life.
The story of St. Paul’s Churchyard ends when the thriving society and industry around it ended – with the blitz of World War II. Other than the cathedral itself, much of the surrounding area was destroyed. But as Willes tells it, what had been there was a wonder.
I used to read the literary magazine Guernica but stopped for an unremembered reason (probably being overwhelmed with too many subscriptions). But I enjoyed it; it had some well-written and interesting stories and articles. This past week, the magazine found itself caught in a political ringer. A moving story about Oct. 7 in Israel and what happened was published. Volunteer editors resigned, and the literary world went nuts. Naturally, the editors caved and withdrew it. And apologized. Oddly, the story is archived on Guernica’s site (at least for now).
I first read the story in my hometown newspaper: According to the annual survey of the American Library Association, the number of book challenges skyrocketed in 2023. Well, not exactly. What happened is that the number of challenges slightly declined (affecting less than one percent of the nation’s libraries), but the ALA redefined how it reported the numbers. Naturally, no newspaper or other legacy medium questioned the report.
There was a time, as recently as a decade ago, when I believed I could generally count on the reporting by the Associated Press, even if newspapers and television news seemed to be binging on preconceived narratives. That changed, and AP has seemed to be going out of its way to make up for lost time. I think I began to notice this when I’d see reports of changes in AP’s Style Guide for reporters, which is what I trained on way back when. And now the stories, or at least the ones used by my hometown newspaper, and opinion pieces masquerading as news reports, and sometimes not even bothering to masquerade. This week, two chains, Gannett (as in USA Today and other newspapers) and McClatchy, announced they were dropping AP, not for content reasons, but likely because of fundamentally changed business models.
If you write on Substack, and a lot of writers have flocked to it, you’d do well to pay attention to the recent change in terms of service. And you may find your writing is not welcome, if you espouse particular viewpoints.