Capote Classic ‘In Cold Blood’ Tainted by Long-Lost Files

Posted on February 10, 2013 by James Ament

From The Wall Street Journal, the opening paragraphs:

Truman Capote’s masterwork of murder, “In Cold Blood,” cemented two reputations when first published almost five decades ago: his own, as a literary innovator, and detective Alvin Dewey Jr.’s as the most famous Kansas lawman since Wyatt Earp.

But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote’s claim that his best seller was an “immaculately factual” recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse. It also calls into question the image of Mr. Dewey as the brilliant, haunted hero.

On Worry

Posted on December 10, 2012 by James Ament

From The Browser—FiveBook Interviews: The author, Steven Amsterdam, “tells us about books that have anxiety at their heart, ranging from obsessional love and chronic neurosis to conspiracy theory paranoia and existential angst.”

What. me worry?

An Open Letter to Fiction Writers

Posted on October 2, 2012 by James Ament

From The Huffington Post, by Yael Goldstein— the opening paragraph:

Fellow fiction writers,

Let’s be frank: we’re not the healthiest-minded bunch. If we were we’d spend our days doing something more pleasant than writing fiction. But lately we seem to have taken a turn for the worse. We look out at the shifting landscape of publishing – e-books rising, big publishers quaking – and obsessively ask, both publicly and privately, Is the novel dead? Is it all Fifty Shades of Twilight from here on out? Are we going the way of the poets, soon to be read by only each other?

Everything is Fiction

Posted on August 17, 2012 by James Ament

About writing fiction, from The New Yorker. Best line:

I have no idea what I’m doing.

Review of My Novel, Waiting for Zoë

Posted on July 27, 2012 by James Ament

Book review from The Story Girl, who sounds like an interesting person.

More Ray Bradbury

Posted on June 8, 2012 by James Ament

From long-gone Holiday magazine, an uplifting essay about Disneyland and the possibilities of robots: The Machine-tooled Happyland, by Ray Bradbury—October 1965.

And from The Paris Review, an interview with Ray Bradbury on the art of fiction.

Why fiction is good for you

Posted on May 7, 2012 by James Ament

From Boston.com, the opening remarks:

Is fiction good for us? We spend huge chunks of our lives immersed in novels, films, TV shows, and other forms of fiction. Some see this as a positive thing, arguing that made-up stories cultivate our mental and moral development. But others have argued that fiction is mentally and ethically corrosive. It’s an ancient question: Does fiction build the morality of individuals and societies, or does it break it down?

This controversy has been flaring up — sometimes literally, in the form of book burnings — ever since Plato tried to ban fiction from his ideal republic. In 1961, FCC chairman Newton Minow famously said that television was not working in “the public interest” because its “formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons” amounted to a “vast wasteland.” And what he said of TV programming has also been said, over the centuries, of novels, theater, comic books, and films: They are not in the public interest.

‘Books: The Great Leader, by Jim Harrison’

Posted on October 29, 2011 by James Ament

Okay, I have to read this author—Books: The Great Leader, by Jim Harrison—found at GuelphMercury.com. The hook?

He might cringe at the thought, but Harrison is both a moral and a spiritual writer who sees decency in living honestly and holiness in the pleasures of the flesh.

Continue reading →

Writing and Ruined Families

Posted on October 18, 2011 by James Ament

A Chicago Tribune article titled, What if dad thinks he’s Dostoevsky, is really a book review of Fiction Ruined My Family, by Jeanne Darst. An excerpt:

Maintaining that arch, slangy tone — referring to those who suffer from seriously debilitating psychiatric maladies such as depression and alcoholism as being “nuts” — helped Darst survive. The wisecracking, ultrahip but ultimately tragic voice in “Fiction Ruined My Family” — part stand-up comedy, part “Lie Down in Darkness” — is fetching and fast and fun, and it’s only after you fully understand the trauma at the heart of her family, the neglect that bordered on child abuse, that the sadness kicks in. By then, Darst has moved on to another joke.

Family memoirs are a dime a dozen these days, but Darst’s is different because she organizes it around art and the flamboyant dreams of self-transformation that accompany it, the fortune and immortality that always seem to be just around the corner. We tend to give our creative artists license to be sullen, selfish jerks — if you doubt it, check the biographies of Ernest Hemingway or Pablo Picasso, or “Reading My Father: A Memoir” (2011) by Alexandra Styron, her solemn, anguished account of volcanic daily life with the novelist William Styron — because we believe their work is too important for them to be distracted by the petty strictures that rule the rest of us: honesty, decency, fidelity, temperance.

Andrew Miller presents a strong case for creating convincing characters

Posted on October 16, 2011 by James Ament

From How to create fiction: andrew Miller on creating characters, a Guardian article:

First, a note of caution. To slice up fiction into categories such as “plot”, “voice”, “point of view” or “character” is to risk presenting it in a way that neither writer nor reader normally experiences it. The suggestion might seem to be that the writing of a story or a novel is a strongly segmented or layered activity, something orderly, dry and technical. But stories, when they come, come in organic gobs, as though gouged out of the living fabric of world – character tangled with plot, plot with setting, setting with scraps of language embedded and so on. But laying that aside, that large proviso, there are a few remarks that might be usefully attempted under the heading of “character”.