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Ghost of RAYMOND CHANDLER here
WE WRITE
WE WRITE
AS WE LIVE …
ALONE.
Roland is still sleeping on the floor in the cool vacant apartment lent him. I have snatched his electronic gadget and come here to his stifling apartment to talk of writing.
I’ve just finished a book I took down from his shelf, POINT OF NO RETURN by John P. Marquand. Strange that such good writing should leave me with so little feeling of having read anything of any importance.
A man has no right to write that well and in the end say so little.
Who cares about the people who always say, do, think, and wear the right thing … and yet are vaguely conscious that it is only the right thing because people of money say it is.
So many modern books are like that :
sad but not too sad, romantic in a lifeless way, beautifully detailed observations ... and the total effect of a steel engraving with no color at all. I guess God must have made such writers on a wet Sunday.
I look at such books and ask, ‘Where is the heart, the soul, the marrow in the bone?’
Certainly, not in the dialogue of those books.
The dialogue. That is where they usually go wrong.
If the dialogue is not peppered with the profanity of truth, of life as it is truly felt, then you paint in grays.
Take out the real in a novel, and you neuter Chekov into the artificiality of Mansfield. Better to drink water than near-beer. So many authors know the lyrics but not the music.
Dialogue done well renders life to a novel. In Dostoyevsky, there is such a burning trueness to the prose that it changes you as you read.
We write to express ourselves, to record the reactions of our personalities to the world in which we live. Every writer dips his brush into his own soul and paints his own nature into his prose.
We look into the mirror, but we do not see the person others see. No. To others we are not ourselves but an actor in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.
In like manner, so is our prose. Others read into the mirror of our words what they know of themselves. Only if our words strike the tuning fork of their souls will they keep on turning the pages.
How do each of you try to make each page in your novel real enough to strike that tuning fork? Tell me. I am a curious ghost.
Yours most sincerely,
Raymond Chandler
Roland is still sleeping on the floor in the cool vacant apartment lent him. I have snatched his electronic gadget and come here to his stifling apartment to talk of writing.
I’ve just finished a book I took down from his shelf, POINT OF NO RETURN by John P. Marquand. Strange that such good writing should leave me with so little feeling of having read anything of any importance.
A man has no right to write that well and in the end say so little.
Who cares about the people who always say, do, think, and wear the right thing … and yet are vaguely conscious that it is only the right thing because people of money say it is.
So many modern books are like that :
sad but not too sad, romantic in a lifeless way, beautifully detailed observations ... and the total effect of a steel engraving with no color at all. I guess God must have made such writers on a wet Sunday.
I look at such books and ask, ‘Where is the heart, the soul, the marrow in the bone?’
Certainly, not in the dialogue of those books.
The dialogue. That is where they usually go wrong.
If the dialogue is not peppered with the profanity of truth, of life as it is truly felt, then you paint in grays.
Take out the real in a novel, and you neuter Chekov into the artificiality of Mansfield. Better to drink water than near-beer. So many authors know the lyrics but not the music.
Dialogue done well renders life to a novel. In Dostoyevsky, there is such a burning trueness to the prose that it changes you as you read.
We write to express ourselves, to record the reactions of our personalities to the world in which we live. Every writer dips his brush into his own soul and paints his own nature into his prose.
We look into the mirror, but we do not see the person others see. No. To others we are not ourselves but an actor in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.
In like manner, so is our prose. Others read into the mirror of our words what they know of themselves. Only if our words strike the tuning fork of their souls will they keep on turning the pages.
How do each of you try to make each page in your novel real enough to strike that tuning fork? Tell me. I am a curious ghost.
Yours most sincerely,
Raymond Chandler
***
As I read Roland's adventures of Victor Standish, it occurred to me that he could be played by that Taylor Lautner young man. See? Even ghosts can dream :
