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Publisher’s notebook 002
Write what you know? Bollocks!
By Geoffrey Dow
Some 35 years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote that “writers take tours in other people’s lives.” He meant that it is a mistake for a reader to presume any story is autobiographical, or that a writer’s “real” self or opinions can be gleaned from a work of fiction.
In recent decades it has become a conviction in some “serious” literary and critical circles that the adage, write what you know be treated as a Commandment rather than just quite sensible advice that a writer pay close attention to the world and people around them. This advice turned ideology has led to a great outpouring of well-written but mostly pretty tedious stories about writers and their suffering.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with such an approach to fiction or drama, but there is everything wrong with the insistence that all fiction and drama should take that confessional road to story-telling.
Truth is, most writers prefer to look out, rather than in, and so do most readers. And, looking out, writers must be forever “taking tours in other people’s lives”. To put it in more contemporary terms, they imagine the other.
Or you could just say, they make stuff up. Readers are blessed by the works of Jane Austen and Alistair MacLeod, but we need our Tolstoys and Tolkiens too.
Carl Dow is a writer of the second school, smelting character and story from the mines of his own lived life, but just as much from the lives and experiences of others. In his new post, Thinking Like a Woman, Carl explains one way that the act of creative empathy can come about.
The Old Man’s Last Sauna
E-book edition only $1.99 for a limited time only!
Thinking Like A Woman
Imagining the other
Jeanetics: A New Theory of Evolution
Carl’s famous blue jeans Holes In My Pants
The Hole Truth About Blue Jeans and the Secret to Becoming a Fashion Plate on a Cautious Budget!
Publisher’s notebook 001
Introducing the author: Carl Dow blogs
By Geoffrey Dow
Carl Dow, the man behind the BumblePuppy Press’ first book, and the editor and publisher of the online news magazine True North Perspective, has adding blogging to his repertoir. To celebrate, we are offering the e-book version of the Old Man’s Last Sauna for the special low price of only US$1.99!
Click below to visit Smashwords, where you can buy the book in whichever format you prefer. (Or click here to order an autographed copy of the paperback.)
Carl’s first blog is an account of a singular dinner party, at which Socrates was certainly not in attendance. Clicking here to read The Silence of Sounds. And please check back next week for another!
The Silence of Sounds
They talked but no one listened
By Carl Dow
Portrait of the author, by the late Lena Wilson Endicott, 1995. It was a private dinner for four. A doctor, an architect, a machinist, and me.
We had worked our way through the appetizer and were into the main course.
The doctor, a specialist in psychiatry, held her end of the table.
“I really shouldn’t be saying this. Confidentiality and all that. But since you don’t know him, and I’m certain, will never meet him, I feel I can speak openly without actually breaking our privacy code. (more…)
The Old Man’s Last Sauna
Stories that will move, amuse and even shock
in their subtle explorations of the human spiritFrom odes to loves lost and loves found; from a clear-eyed look at what it takes to destroy a strong man to the web of love between a mother and her son; from the greed that drives a man to murder to a father’s understanding of the difference between his son’s imagination and the lies that lurk in the minds of his grandparents, Carl Dow’s stories introduce a powerful voice for the 21st century, one born of the turmoil, violence and struggle for justice and understanding that marked so much of the 20th.
A limited number (under two hundred) copies of The Old Man’s Last Sauna are still available directly from the publisher. Each will be autographed by the author and when they’re gone, they’re gone!
Copies of the second edition can be ordered through your favourite online vendor.
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