I haven’t made it through the list to read “True Names,” yet. I did, however, enjoy reading an excerpt from the Locus interview you did in 2005. I look forward to reading your work.

Also — on your website bio I saw your response to the old “If you do not absolutely have to write, spare yourself this misery” advice and really appreciate it. I’m not an obsessive writer, but I want to develop skill as a writer for the effect it has on me — similar to my experiences playing music or composing in-camera or drawing, writing changes the way I think and experience the world around me. That, in itself, is pleasurable and reason enough to fight against a blank screen.

Thanks again.

mechanics: Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin

Hrm… curiously hard to find in the USA. Might have to track down a copy from the UK.

-Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio -James Joyce’s Dubliners -Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House -Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women

Michael Ondaatje is probably still my all-’round favourite poet & prose-writer, but he’s not long on short fiction, I’m afraid.

Anyway, that’s really neither here nor there in regards to the subject of your comment.

Poe is an early favorite, and “The Cask of Amontillado”, in particular was always one of my favorites. The Fall of the House of Usher was also very vivid to me, but years later Amontillado sticks with me more. Maybe more successful for being less grotesque, and less chained to symbol? Anyway, I seem to have misplaced my copy of him—or maybe I abandoned it because it reeked of mildew. Thankfully most all of his works are available online.

His Philosophy of Composition I remember from grade-school. I have planned on tracking it down and just haven’t gotten around to it. At some point I came across some criticisms that he was just kind of making his theories up and they seem to have relatively little to do with how he worked as a writer. I didn’t look far enough into it to see if it was a valid criticism or just gnashing of teeth. In general I don’t look at criticism or theory to take sides, but in pursuit of ideas, which, like the main character in Foucault’s Pendulum, I find are often pleasing for being incongruous and syncopated against each other.

What I’m after right now is really just an understanding of structure, however rudimentary. I’ve spent my life as a reader, focused on the stories, the ideas, the emotional impact, and the atmosphere, and not paying much attention to the writing itself. I have an appreciation for a beautiful line of prose, but am much less aware of the general dynamics of a work. I’m not too worried about being a robot at this point… just need a bit of a push. I’m also perfectly content not to ever be published—my only goal is to rescue my imagination which is seems to be less and less used the older I get. It feels like a kind of death, frankly.

As for Sci-Fi—I’m not well read in it. “Hardware” sci-fi leaves me cold. I seem to prefer Eastern European writers to Western ones—Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky Brothers stand out, but I discovered both of them by way of Tarkovsky’s film adaptations of their works—Solaris from Lem and Stalker by way of Roadside Picnic by the Strugatskys. Lem, in particular is strong. Solaris was very good. Pirx the Pilot is fun. I’m afraid The Cyberiad was just way beyond my level of comprehension, though.

I just picked up a copy of Vance’s Dying Earth novels. And I’ve been a fan of Gene Wolfe for some time, though I have yet to completely finish Book of the New Sun. I’ve read through the first 2 books twice now, and the 3rd I’ve read once. I really want to read through them in entirety, and then back through it again. More than any other author I know Wolfe pays for repeated readings.

Asimov I haven’t read since high school. I want to say that I’ve read “Last Question” but I can’t recall the details at the moment. I’ll be sure to look it up and read it.

Do you have an account on LibraryThing?

First, a caveat: Neil Gaiman once said — responding to a fan question; the video is available online, I believe — that he happened upon Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces” and after 5 minutes into it, had to put it down because it was as though someone had tapped into Gaiman’s unconscious creativity and fished out every single “original” thought Gaiman had about plot, character development, symbolism, and so on. This is just to say there’s a fine line between trying to become a better writer by learning mechanics and becoming a writing robot. Writing is a craft, no doubt, a skill that has to be learned and can be improved; but sometimes your improvement can also hamper your creativity and foster inhibitions. Charlie Kaufmann’s “Adaptation” is a wonderful movie about this topic.

That said, I’d recommend reading the following: Poe’s tales (in particular “The Cask of Amontillado”) and his short treatise “The Philosophy of Composition”. Poe’s works will teach you everything you need to know about how to write a story told by an unreliable narrator. At the other end of the spectrum, we have Hemingway, whose stories are equally great, but completely different (except for their economy); he’ll teach you how to be subtle, how to write seemingly inconspicuous prose that is yet evocative.

As far as Sci-Fi is concerned… it depends on how “philosophical” you want to get. If you want to write a sort of sci-fi allegory, I’d recommend Asimov’s “Last Question”. It’s a great story, and also has a lot to say about how to frame and structure a story. I haven’t really read that many “non-philosophical” sci-fi stories. I think the genre is better suited to longer works, because you need the space to build your universe.

Off course it’s easier to focus on the nuances of languages if you’re fully bilingual (applying these observations properly in a novel is another matter entirely). Simply speaking one language, I think, many assume that for every word or phrase there is an equivalent, though that’s not always the case. I’m sometimes frustrated that there is a word or phrase in English that has no proper Afrikaans equivalent, or vice versa. I’m sure it’s even more-so with the older languages. Some of the made-up words I use in my novel have no real English (or Afrikaans) equivalent because ‘the real world’ lacks the context they move in (context being ‘magic’). Actually, translated to English the words mean the same thing, ‘inheritor’, which is something of a linguistic joke I pulled from an observation concerning the three biggest Afrikaans church denominations. Their names are impossible to translate accurately because it can only be accurately translated as “Dutch Reformed”.

One of the things that I find brilliant about Gene Wolfe is that all of his made-up sounding words are legitimate words with a history.