We’re approaching the start of NaNoWriMo 2015. What are your plans, Mason Novelists?
You can learn about the event at the National Novel Writing Month website. All Mason Novelists should sign in on the Official NaNoWriMo website and contact UES President Michelle Webber to let her know you plan to participate.
Check in here every day in November for advice for how to complete and revise your novel.
Calling all Mason novelists: who came away with a novel? What was the experience like? Please post responses here.
In contrast to her often severe-looking author photos, Donna Tartt in person is warm and vivacious, speaking with a lingering twang leftover from a childhood in the small town of Grenada, Miss. Her second novel, “The Little Friend,” was based on that childhood spent amid eccentric great aunts who shared an invented language and wore white gloves at DAR tea parties, but it was Tartt’s first book, “The Secret History,” published in 1992, that made her name. “The Secret History” was written while Tartt was an undergraduate at Bennington College in Vermont, and it remains one of the most indelible college novels of all time; the fascination commanded by that novel alone assures that Tartt can publish a book every decade or so and never worry that readers will have forgotten about her.
Tartt’s new novel, “The Goldfinch,” has been hailed by Stephen King on the front page of the New York Times Book Review as a “triumph” and “a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind.” It’s the story of Theo Decker, a boy who loses his adored mother in a terrorist bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and somehow wanders away from the scene with the painting that gives the novel its title. The picture (currently part of a visiting exhibition at the Frick Collection in Manhattan), is one of the few surviving works by the Dutch master Carel Fabritius; the painter was killed and most of his oeuvre destroyed in 1654, when a gunpowder warehouse next to his studio in Delft exploded.
“The Goldfinch” is a meditation on beauty and love, two things equally fragile and enduring, but above all it’s a marvelous feat of storytelling, reminiscent of the great 19th-century novels Tartt grew up reading. I recently met with her (in restaurant not far from the Park Avenue enclave where Theo finds brief shelter after his mother’s death) to find out more about the novel and its author.
What drew you to the work of Fabritius and “The Goldfinch” as fictional subjects?
It was just a gift, when I read about the history of the painting. He died young. Insofar as we know him, he was revolutionary. He was Rembrandt’s most famous pupil, the great painter of his day. If you look at “The Goldfinch,” it’s that quality of daylight. It’s Rembrandt’s technique, but not that golden, lit-from-within quality of Rembrandt. Fabritius used it to paint sunlight. Vermeer picked up on that. The quality of daylight that we love in Vermeer, he got from Fabritius. He was the link between Rembrandt and Vermeer.
Read the rest of this post on Salon.com
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time – or the tools – to write. Simple as that.”
– Stephen King
by Anne Carson
I find my seat on the train, stow
my bag, sit, wait. Windows
black, underground tunnel.
A big red-haired man comes
down the aisle. Big red beard,
red plaid shirt, tight barrel chest.
He enters the toilet, shuts
the door. Train business
continues, aisle traffic, baggage,
reading lights, announcements
about smoking and luncheon.
Read the rest of the poem here.
“You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf… You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired – it’s hard work.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/tom-clancys-advice-to-writers-2013-10#ixzz2gsM1ra00
Welcome to the George Mason University National Novel Writing Month site and blog. Check here every day in November for essays on writing and inspiration from writers.
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