Raymond Chandler: Literary Genius Is All About Hard Work
Sent in by Zen In Darkness, this article written by Robert McCrum of The Guardian: Raymond Chandler: Literary Genius Is All About Hard Work. It's an interesting article, with revealing quotes from Raymond Chandler's letters. Some quotes from the piece:
"I write when I can and don't write when I can't ... "
"The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point."
So, no plot outlines for Chandler. He just goes at it, letting character and situation take him where they will. Famously, he said somewhere that when in doubt you could always bring a man through the door with a gun in his hand. Those are the words of a man writing for The Black Mask, but Chandler's letters have a hardboiled sweetness that also tells us he was an artist at heart.
"When a book reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature," he writes. "That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball."
You should pay attention to craft, but you can't teach it (whatever the writing schools tell us), and you certainly can't give advice when it comes to words on the page. What you can pass on is a love of reading, and the shining example of a really good book (novel, memoir, or collection of poems).
So, all this from a writer who for a long time had fallen into disrepute and been pooh-poohed by critics and so-called "better-writers"; seems like Chandler-love is now coming back into vogue.
"I write when I can and don't write when I can't ... "
"The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point."
So, no plot outlines for Chandler. He just goes at it, letting character and situation take him where they will. Famously, he said somewhere that when in doubt you could always bring a man through the door with a gun in his hand. Those are the words of a man writing for The Black Mask, but Chandler's letters have a hardboiled sweetness that also tells us he was an artist at heart.
"When a book reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature," he writes. "That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball."
You should pay attention to craft, but you can't teach it (whatever the writing schools tell us), and you certainly can't give advice when it comes to words on the page. What you can pass on is a love of reading, and the shining example of a really good book (novel, memoir, or collection of poems).
So, all this from a writer who for a long time had fallen into disrepute and been pooh-poohed by critics and so-called "better-writers"; seems like Chandler-love is now coming back into vogue.
posted by pgenrestories at 4:18 AM
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