have been a lot of successful films made since then, and at least two books: From Here To Eternity and The Naked and the Dead. But who has written a bestseller about the Vietnam War?
Dreams are a fertile source of material for writing. Years ago I read a book by John Dunne called An Experiment with Time. (1924). Dunne was an English physicist, and he observed that his dreams referred not only to past but also to future events. However, the future material, since it often seems trivial and irrelevant, will not be remembered unless it is written down. This got me into the habit of writing dreams down, and I have done this for about thirty years. I began writing dreams down long before I started to write. I have, over a period of years, turned up a number of future references; but much more important is the number of characters and sets I have obtained directly from dreams, and at least forty percent of my material derives from dreams. When I contact a character, I start building up an identikit picture. For example, I meet a character in a dream; then I may find a photo in a magazine that looks like the character, or I may meet someone who looks like him in some respect. Usually my characters are composites of many people — from dreams, photos, people I know and quite frequently characters in other writing. Over a period of years I have filled a number of scrapbooks with these identikit pictures.
Finally, I will examine the connections between so-called occult phenomena and the creative process. Are not all writers, consciously or not, operating in these areas?
One more thing: Sinclair Lewis said: ‘If you want to be a writer, learn to type.’ This advice is scarcely necessary now. So then sit down at your typewriter and write.
Creative Reading
Having given courses in creative writing, I have come to doubt whether writing can be taught. It is like trying to teach someone how to dream. So I now teach creative reading. A few comments or quotations can turn a receptive student onto a book, and learning to read with discrimination is a crucial step towards learning to write. Creative reading demands the active participation of the reader, and the first step is critical evaluation.
Matthew Arnold formulated three questions for a book critic to ask and answer:
1. What is the writer trying to do?
2. How well does he succeed in doing it?
3. Is it worth doing? Does the book achieve what he calls ‘high seriousness’?
So what is the writer trying to do? Many critics disparage a writer because they don’t like what he is trying to do, or because he is not trying to do something else.
Ask the second question and you are well on the way to creative reading and the useful exercise of putting what the book is about into one or two sentences. Take Jaws: Menace posed by great white shark eating the bathers and endangering the tourist trade.
Menace poses challenge. Man meets challenge. Menace is removed by protagonist. What is The Great Gatsby about? Poor boy loves rich girl. He loses rich girl to rich man and meets a violent death trying to turn back the clock and realise ‘the last and greatest of human dreams.’ What is Lord Jim about? Honor lost. Honor regained.
Now the third question poses itself. Is it worth doing? Art makes us aware of what we know and don’t know that we know. Our conscious awareness, our ego, has been compared to the tip of the iceberg that appears above water. Fitzgerald shows us more of the iceberg, more of the hidden depths than O’Hara. He is literally a deeper writer. Gatsby touches us in a way that the protagonist of O’Hara’s Appointment in Sumarra does not
Some other questions the creative reader can ask are: Does the writer have an ear for dialogue? Many good writers don’t. Fitzgerald’s characters are delineated more by his descriptive prose than by what they say. His dialogue tends to be wooden, with occasional flashes of brilliant insight as when Gatsby says about Daisy’s
Dreams are a fertile source of material for writing. Years ago I read a book by John Dunne called An Experiment with Time. (1924). Dunne was an English physicist, and he observed that his dreams referred not only to past but also to future events. However, the future material, since it often seems trivial and irrelevant, will not be remembered unless it is written down. This got me into the habit of writing dreams down, and I have done this for about thirty years. I began writing dreams down long before I started to write. I have, over a period of years, turned up a number of future references; but much more important is the number of characters and sets I have obtained directly from dreams, and at least forty percent of my material derives from dreams. When I contact a character, I start building up an identikit picture. For example, I meet a character in a dream; then I may find a photo in a magazine that looks like the character, or I may meet someone who looks like him in some respect. Usually my characters are composites of many people — from dreams, photos, people I know and quite frequently characters in other writing. Over a period of years I have filled a number of scrapbooks with these identikit pictures.
Finally, I will examine the connections between so-called occult phenomena and the creative process. Are not all writers, consciously or not, operating in these areas?
One more thing: Sinclair Lewis said: ‘If you want to be a writer, learn to type.’ This advice is scarcely necessary now. So then sit down at your typewriter and write.
Creative Reading
Having given courses in creative writing, I have come to doubt whether writing can be taught. It is like trying to teach someone how to dream. So I now teach creative reading. A few comments or quotations can turn a receptive student onto a book, and learning to read with discrimination is a crucial step towards learning to write. Creative reading demands the active participation of the reader, and the first step is critical evaluation.
Matthew Arnold formulated three questions for a book critic to ask and answer:
1. What is the writer trying to do?
2. How well does he succeed in doing it?
3. Is it worth doing? Does the book achieve what he calls ‘high seriousness’?
So what is the writer trying to do? Many critics disparage a writer because they don’t like what he is trying to do, or because he is not trying to do something else.
Ask the second question and you are well on the way to creative reading and the useful exercise of putting what the book is about into one or two sentences. Take Jaws: Menace posed by great white shark eating the bathers and endangering the tourist trade.
Menace poses challenge. Man meets challenge. Menace is removed by protagonist. What is The Great Gatsby about? Poor boy loves rich girl. He loses rich girl to rich man and meets a violent death trying to turn back the clock and realise ‘the last and greatest of human dreams.’ What is Lord Jim about? Honor lost. Honor regained.
Now the third question poses itself. Is it worth doing? Art makes us aware of what we know and don’t know that we know. Our conscious awareness, our ego, has been compared to the tip of the iceberg that appears above water. Fitzgerald shows us more of the iceberg, more of the hidden depths than O’Hara. He is literally a deeper writer. Gatsby touches us in a way that the protagonist of O’Hara’s Appointment in Sumarra does not
Some other questions the creative reader can ask are: Does the writer have an ear for dialogue? Many good writers don’t. Fitzgerald’s characters are delineated more by his descriptive prose than by what they say. His dialogue tends to be wooden, with occasional flashes of brilliant insight as when Gatsby says about Daisy’s
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