First the book, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteredge because I wonder if this happens to anyone else. Do you read passages of prose that are so sharp and true that it sends you immediately to your computer, thinking you have found the secret to writing? Does it immediately inspire your "voice" to start speaking. This happened to me with the second story of this novel in stories. It practically brought me to my knees in adulation. I liked her other two books very much but I think this one may be in a class by itself. Two good movies, too. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation deals with the crackdown on Communists in Brazil in 1970, setting it against Brazil's bid for the World Cup. The Visitor deals with the U.S. crackdown on illegal immigrants after 9-11. Neither government comes off looking very good, sad to say. Both lovely movies though. Isn't it great when literature can move you?
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Do you read passages of prose that are so sharp and true that it sends you immediately to your computer, thinking you have found the secret to writing? Does it immediately inspire your "voice" to start speaking.
I tend to put the book down and say: If I live to be a hundred I can never write as well as that. Doesn't inspire me, I'm afraid, just gives me a reality check.
There's a great SCENE IN A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR where a bunch of writers are at a funeral listening to a Yeats (or Keats?) poem being read and they're all sad because they know they can never write that well.
I remember that scene! And I admit I sometimes get to my computer and then feel like you say when the magic has somehow failed to flow from the writer to me. But once in a while.....
I react more in the way JD described. Most recently, it happened when I read Mary Gaitskill's work.
Mary Gaitskill is terrific.
Mary Gaitskill is terrific.
Mary Gaitskill is terrific.
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