Sunday, October 26, 2008
One of the great conventions--and also one of the virtues--of the old novel was its suspensefulness. Suspense seems to make us ask "What will happen to Tess next?," but really it emerges from the writer's conviction of social or cosmic principle. Suspense occurs when the reader is about to learn something, not simply about the relationship of fictional characters, but about the writer's relationship to a set of ideas, or to the universe. Suspense is the product of teaching, and teaching is the product of mastery, and mastery is the product of seriousness, and seriousness springs not from ego or ambition or the workings of the subjective self, but from the amazing permutations of the objective world.
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From "Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means"
Cynthia Ozick
You keep taking down poems before I can digest them... so, like a lizard with a snake dangling from my mouth, I enter this Monday, newedenless.
I should probably explain that--you'd probably be amused by it. Ever since I've been writing and posting using this blog, I've started to develop a dependence on it to judge how I feel about final drafts. It's become a kind of objectifying machine: write something, is it worth keeping, well, post it, see how it looks, and if you don't think it's a keeper, take it down. Silly, I know.
But I should also say that I don't want to follow that last poem of yours with anything but top-shelf stuff. You set a pretty high standard there.
That poem is actually the opening monologue of a film that is currently in production. I wrote it all like a poem . . . and the guys behind the camera are trying to shoot it like a poem . . . much of it will be translated into Italian. It will be a triumph or a disaster. I'll post the cover image.
Again, as usual, I'm amazed. Make sure to post a Youtube link to it when it's finished, so I can watch it.
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