How to write an autobiographical novel / Alexander Chee
5
I felt sometimes like a camera, shocked when people noticed me. I was a little in love with him and his friends, young men of sixteen or seven teen, a year or two older than me, all beauties, and I wanted to know everything I could,
6
Before the girls’ arrival, they would sit together, arms around each other, handsome and easy, and from where I sat I could feel everywhere their skin touched, as if the heat of it could be felt with my eyes.
12
On the road trip back to Tuxtla, Nick was gluey with sleep, his head tipped over, lips apart. I sat next to him, awake with the thrill of being close to him, and the knowledge I had of his body from all of those hours of swimming. I wanted nothing more than to slip a kiss on his mouth right then, but it was only pure lust, not affections, and the imagines scene of it turned in my mind like a worry stone as we passed again along the road’s dangerous curves.
7
the sun had turned us completely brown, except for the space barely covered by our swimsuits. I went along with it because Nick never mocked me, and I enjoyed looking at him. When he took off his Speedo or put it on, his tan line flashed white in the changing room, so bright it was like a camera flash.
13
There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing. I think of this as one of the most important parts of my writer’s education - that when left alone with nothing else to read, I begun to tell myself the stories I wanted to read.
14
In the United States, if I said I was mixed, it meant too many things I didn’t feel.
22
I had left for college bristling still with grief after the death of my father - the numbness and shock had worn off and I could see everything at once.
23
I bought the car : I felt too much like a character in a novel, buffered by cruel turns of fate. I wanted to feel powerful in the face or my fate. I wanted look over the top of my life and see what was coming. I wanted to be the main character of this story, and its author. And if I were writing a novel about someone like me, this is exactly what would lead him astray.
32
You can’t give yourself the impersonal reading you need. It’s much like writing an essay it including autobiographical content in fiction - to succeed, it requires an ability to be coldly impersonal about yourself and your state, so as not to cloud what is there with what you want to see.
42
So I don’t want you trying to imitate me. I don’t want you to write like me. And she paused there. Then she said, I want you to write like you.
Some people looked guilty when she said this. I felt guilty too.
43
(学校にて)
We were always to keep in mind that it might not be possible to follow rules or guidelines because of what the writing needed.
47
(Her lectures, aka, lists)
Don’t ever use the word “soul”, if possible. Never quite dialogue you can summarize. Avoid describing crowd scenes, especially party scenes.
51
You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.
We were to avoid emotional language. The line goes gray when you do that, she said. Don’t tell the reader that someone was happy or sad. When you do that, the reader has nothing to see. She isn’t angry, Annie said. She throws his clothes out the window. Be specific.
51
You might think that your voice as a writer would emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you’d be wrong. What I saw on the page was that the voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy. Even, and in my case most especially, amnesiac. And that it has to be cut free.
52
Now look at them. Have you used the right verbs ? Is that the precise verb for that precise thing ? Remember that adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb. Verbs control when something is happening in the mind of the reader. Think carefully - when did this happen in relation to that ? And is that how you’ve described it ?
53
Talent isn’t enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science; it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between me and them is that I’m writing.
Talent might give you nothing. Without work, talent is only talent - promise, not product.
72
Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask.
79
The men I wanted to follow into the future are dead. Finding them had made me want to live, and I did. I do. I feel I owe my survival. The world is not fixed, and the healing is still just past my imagining, though perhaps it is closer than it was. For now, the minor characters are left to introduce themselves, and take the story forward.
83
写真
122
When you’re a waiter, clients usually treat you like human furniture. The result is that you see them in unguarded moments - and that I liked.
171
I had come to this garden much like what I found in it. I was a mess, a disaster in need of a reckoning. That backyard was my perfect mirror, and the dream of the garden was in its own way a dream of myself.
174
Pain is information, as I would say to my yoga students at the time, and my writing students also. Pain has a story to tell you. But you have to listen to it. As is often the case, I was teaching you what I also needed to learn.
192
there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write.
Time is our (writes’) mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writes of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.
202
I tell my students all the time : writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit - an exercise in finding out what you really care about. Many student writes become obsessed with aesthetics, but I find that is usually a way to avoid whatever it is they have to say. My first novel was not the first one I started. It was the first one I finished.
109
and when she asked when I’d started writing, I answered that I started late, in college. She laughed a little into the car door as I said this and then straighten up. “I didn’t start until my late thirties,” she said. “I consider that starting young”.
109
If you don’t want to be a writer, no one can make you one. If you need an attendance policy to get through, then go- don’t just skip class, go and never come back. Wiring is too hard for someone to force you into it. You have to want to run for it.
111
Deborah drew lines around what was invented, and what was not, with a delicate pencil, and patiently explained to me how what we invent, we control, and how much what we don’t, we don’t- and that it shows. That what we borrow from life tends to be the most problematic, and that the problem stems from the sun at we’ve already invented so much of what we think we know about ourselves, without admitting it.
113
Listening to their critiques forces you past the limits of your imagination, and for this reason, also past the limits of your sympathies, and in doing so it takes you past the limits of what you can reach for in your work on your own. Fiction writers’ work is limited by their sense of reality, and workshop after workshop blew that open for me, through the way these conversations exposed me to other people’s realities.
113
I will never forget the classmate who said to me in workshop, about one of my stories, “Why should I care about the lives of these bitchy queens?” It angered me, but I asked myself whether or not I had failed my characters of my story hadn’t made them matter to someone disinclined to like or listen to them - someone like him. A vow formée in my mind that day as I listened to him, which has lasted my whole career: I will make you care.
118
255
It was easier to believe that we were. Wrong than to believe what writes around the world believe : that we matter, and that it is our duty, to matter.
Students often ask me whether I think they can be a writer. I tell them I don’t know. Because it depends, first and foremost, on whether you want to be one. This question is not as simple to answer as it seems. The difficulties are many, even if you truly want to be a writer. What seems to separate those who write from those who don’t is being able to stand it.
256
Talent mattered much less than it was made to seem to matter.
(中略)
Most of what Annie had taught me was about habits of mind and habits of work. As long as these continued, I imagined, so would be the writing. I will always want my students to know that if what you write matters enough, it makes no difference where you write it, or if you have a desk, or if you have quiet, and so on. If the essay or novel or poem wants to be written, it will speak to you while the conductor is calling out the streets. The question is, will you listen ? And listen regularly?
257
Why does the talented student of writing stop ? It is usually the imagination, turned to creating a story in which you are a failure, and all you have done has failed, and you are made out to be the fraud you’ve feared you are.
I discovered I needed to teach not just how to write, but how to keep writing.
264
What would you read to someone who was dying ? Annie Dillard had asked our class.
274
The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can’t imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn’t matter. It isn’t. much the way you don’t know what a writer will go on to write, you don’t know what a reader, having read you, will do.
274
But books were still to me as they had been when I found them ; the only magic.
274
To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it.
275
If you don’t know what I mean, what I mean is this : when I speak of walking through a snowstorm, you remember a night from your childhood full of snow, or from last winter, say, driving home at night, surprised by a storm. When I speak of my dead friends and poetry, you may remember your own dead friends, or if none of your friends are dead, you may imagine how it might feel to have them die. You may think of your poems, or poems you’ve seen or heard. You may remember you don’t like poetry.
Sometimes new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, nor yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine.
All my life I’ve been told this isn’t important , that it doesn’t matter, that it could never matter. And yet I think it does. I think it is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it’s the same reason that when fascists come the power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing.
276
And the paradox of how a novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can’t.
276
It was when I turned my back on the idea that teaching writing means only teaching how go make sentences or stories. I needed to teach writing students to hold on - on themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future. And to the country. And to do so with what they write. We won’t know when the world will end. If it ever does, we will be better served when it does by having done this work we can do.
