Francine Prose at Strand

November 27th, 2006

Francine Prose / photo: sarahana

Strand Bookstore
828 Broadway at 12th Street
November 15, 2006

Francine Prose was at Strand to read and discuss her newest, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Loves Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them. The book demonstrates how careful reading of great writers is an effective way of learning to write, but it also appears to be her long-due tribute to these masters. Though Prose is a prolific author with 14 novels, 4 non-fiction titles, and several children’s books published to date, she does not hold an MFA; “Can Creative Writing Be Taught?” is the question with which she opens her book. She explains that though great line-editing skills can be picked up from a fiction workshop, as can the feeling of a community, a writing class was not where she learned to write; it was from reading books that she polished her craft, and it is this way of learning for which the book provides encouragement and guidance.

Several chapters of the book are grouped by structural elements of fictional narrative, such as words, sentences, paragraphs, narration, character and so on, followed by two special entries under “Learning from Chekov” and “Reading for Courage.” The discussion of each topic is propelled by personal stories and exemplary excerpts. Prose first read from “Sentences,” sharing with delight a 181-word long sentence that opens Virginia Woolf’s essay “One Being Ill.” Someone at a previous reading at Barnes and Noble had wondered if the sentence could not have been easily split into several shorter ones, at which Prose had commented that Woolf was a “fabulous show-off.” She followed up with Hemingway and read from “Narration” and “Dialogue” before opening up for a Q&A.

Several excerpts in the book are from authors who did not write in English, such as Isaac Babel, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Someone asked how Prose felt about translations. She recounted that one of her students was a Russian translator who pointed out several discrepancies between the original and the translation of Babel’s work. Prose said that she couldn’t be entirely sure of what was being taught when translations are involved, but that it is really a work of collaboration, and there are many bad translations. Prose lists translated titles with specific translators in the list of “Books to Be Read Immediately” attached at the end of her book. She pointed out with some regret that, from what she could remember, the number of titles translated into English in America, including scientific works, was under 400 as of two years ago.

Francine Prose / photo: sarahana

A question was raised on how she felt about literary theory, specifically the work of someone like Wayne Booth. Prose said that she did not think of Booth as being so much of a literary theorist, but she began to narrate how she once asked a class to bring in a paragraph filled with jargon and translate it into English. Referring to works much more contemporary than Booth’s, she said that it doesn’t mean anything half the time and in it she found painful contempt for the writers. Prompted for clarity by the questioner, Prose confirmed she did not have any qualm with Wayne Booth’s work itself.

Prose has spoken of this at previous readings, and she was asked once again about how to get yourself the courage to write. She thinks that the trick is in imagining who the story is being told to, a friend, or a certain kind of a character, and start telling the story while convincing yourself that you have not just sit down to specifically write. She also finds it easier to have the editor in her mind shut up while she pours out the first draft uninterrupted. Another asked if she enjoyed writing or found it torturous, and Prose said that though everyday was not pain-free, she loved writing, and that if it really were torturous, she could think of several other easier ways of making a living.

Some were curious about how much importance grammar had, especially in reference to lengthy sentences like the one recited from Woolf’s essay. Prose felt that grammar was key in holding such a complex structure of the sentence together without compromising on clarity. She said that grammar existed as a rule for a reason, which was that proper grammar promoted clarity, and that (according to her friend) it could be thought of as the etiquette which comforts the reader as proper behavior would a guest invited to your house. She claimed she had been raised on a heavy diet of grammar and had no patience to read something if a lack of clarity stopped her from understanding it.

When asked what importance she attributed to creative writing classes, she re-iterated what she has expressed in the book—the availability of readers of your work in a class, the learning of line-editing, the making of friends, the enforcement of discipline can be some of the benefits; but that its importance in the skill of writing itself was zero, that writing was for the most part a solitary act. Similarly, when someone asked about what Emily Dickinson is supposed to have said about writing from the body, moving from the head to the more sentient, Prose said that she felt her writing was more closely linked with her mind, that she found herself out of touch and uncoordinated in many ways, but sometimes, as all writers do, she would create a character out of her mind in solitude and find that person later in real life. As for changes in workshops she has taught, which someone else asked about, she said that in the recent years she had mostly been teaching reading classes, in which she found her students to have become smarter and more precise, though she wasn’t aware of any patterns or trends in general.

One of the emphases Prose makes, and this is linked to her disavowal of formal teaching of creative writing, is on how different approaches work best for different writers. She was asked about the legitimacy of writing with hand, and she said that she knew people who did that though she herself used a computer. However, she felt that using a stone tablet was as legitimate given the diversity of writer habits and how little value there is in a set of instructions that tells you what to do and what no to.

Finally, she was asked how important she found definition of voice to be. She answered that it was extremely important, but that it depended on each story. She added that all narrative elements, word choice, language, etc., are what the voice comes out of and what define how you choose to tell the story. She reminded with emphasis: words are the writer’s medium.