Ten Recommendations from Lydia Davis

December 13, 2019

Adapted from “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” in Lydia Davis’ new collection Essays One, here’s a sample of ten recommendations. The one about taking notes is my favourite, but the whole thing is full of gems:

“Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting, or writing. Trust your own interest. I have a strong interest, at the moment, in Roman building techniques, thus my notation above, taken down in the Cluny Museum in Paris. My interest may pass. But for the moment I follow it and enjoy it, not knowing where it will go.

“Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write about, be tested by time, not by other people — either real other people or imagined other people.

“This is why writing workshops can be a little dangerous, it should be said; even the teachers or leaders of such workshops can be a little dangerous; this is why most of your learning should be on your own. Other people are often very sure that their opinions and their judgments are correct.”

The third recommendation in particular, to be mostly self-taught, validates my own approach (not that I couldn’t use a good writing workshop now and then):

“There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you. I have found that pursuing my own interests in various directions and to various sources of information can take me on fantastic adventures: I have stayed up till the early hours of the morning poring over old phone books; or following genealogical lines back hundreds of years; or reading a book about what lies under a certain French city; or comparing early maps of Manhattan as I search for a particular farmhouse. These adventures become as gripping as a good novel.”

December 13, 2019

Life is Not Lived by Metaphors

August 22, 2019

This interview with Lydia Davis from a few years ago got me thinking about metaphor:

“Do I not use metaphors? I don’t consciously avoid metaphors, or similes for that matter. If they don’t happen in my writing, it may be because I find the thing I am writing about compelling enough without comparing it to something else. Maybe I don’t want to introduce some completely different world or image. … If I avoid metaphor, and if I have to think of a reason why, it may be that I don’t want to distract from the one thing that I’m concentrating on, and a metaphor immediately does that. It introduces some completely, even incongruous, other image and world. And it can work very beautifully, but maybe I don’t want to leave the scene of what I’m describing.”

James Wood on metaphor in How Fiction Works: “Metaphor is analogous to fiction, because it floats a rival reality. It is the entire imaginative process in one move. … I am asking you to imagine another dimension, to picture a likeness. Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story.”

Wood describes his favourite kind of metaphor as one that “estranges and then instantly connects, and in doing the latter so well, hides the former. The result is a tiny shock of surprise, followed by a feeling of inevitability.”

Metaphor shows up in Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li, a novel which is essentially a conversation between a woman and her son Nikolai following his death by suicide.

“You make my head swim, I complained. I have to write your words down to understand their meaning.

“You’re being silly, like English teachers always asking us to look for metaphors in the text, Nikolai said.

“Life is not lived by metaphors, we said together. He had heard that first when he had to sit through my teaching for five hours. He was four, and lay under a long table, slowly but persistently rolling from one end to the other and then back. The next day he said I had been mean when I said, Sometimes nothing is wrong with a story but that it’s boring.”

Later:

“Each box I opened let out memory that no space could contain. Each box that remained sealed retained its power to trip and trap. To throw or not to throw the dice: It makes little difference. In a game of luck, luck is already determined.

“Since when have you become an avid consumer of inane analogies and inept metaphors? Nikolai said.

“The adjectives you indulge yourself with, I complained.

“At least I’m consistent. I’ve never said anything negative about adjectives. But you, you’ve been dismissive of analogies and metaphors.

“I’ve started to understand the point of them, I said. They take up space, they distract, they make the difficult less difficult, they even fluff things up a little. And they can be a shortcut, too, the ladders, you know.

“You’re becoming a bad writer.

“Does it matter? I said.”

Finally, on a much lighter note, from Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn: “I hate adjectives. I also hate similes and metaphors, just can’t do them, never have been able to. Anyone who wants to write about food would do well to stay away from similes and metaphors, because if you’re not careful, expressions like ‘light as a feather’ make their way into your sentences, and then where are you?“

August 22, 2019