Observations on Writing from Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore (Photo: Linda Nylind)
In the current issue of Tin House, Hope/Dread, Michelle Wildgen offers up "A Conversation with Lorrie Moore" about a writer who's inspired her for many years. In the interview, they discuss the midwest, humor, teaching, and her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, published in September 2009 by Knopf. Here are just a few of the gems:
On the problem of stiff characters--and the solution of roughing them up a bit:
Sadly, all my characters are alive for me. Even the ones that seem like zombies to others. So it's not me they must come alive for. But if characters seem dead on the page, they simply need to say or do more. Or they need to have a really interesting thought. Even a thought so banal it's interesting. Or they need to be killed or maybe not killed but just roughed up a little or they need to be driven out of town on a rail, an expression I've never used before and so am not highly confident about its meaning. Also? I never talk about sensitive matters with my kid while driving. I think that's not a good idea. We listen to the radio and bounce around or else fall into silence. The car is part disco, part church. But I never turn it into therapy. I made the mistake of buying a car with a moonroof, which could be used as an exit if sensitive topics were being broached. There is a writing lesson in there if you look hard.
If you can glean the writing lesson at the end of that passage, let me know!
Then, on paying attention to the place where you're living while writing (for her, Wisconsin) and what it offers:
I live in America's diaryland and breadbasket, and the way food has become both politics and art is really breathtaking. But when you live where food is grown it should be part of the world you write about, it seems to me. There are times that we eat in a way that people on this planet never before have--on the deliciousness scale, I mean. I was interested in a character whose dad was providing food to restaurants she herself couldn't afford to go to. I had that meal in mind from the very start of the book: that somehow she would finally have to go and taste her dad's potatoes in that fancy place. When I finally got to that scene I probably put too much food in it. I was so excited.
A Gate at the Stairs
As a lover of food and cooking, that comment set my mind racing. More remarks on writing from this acclaimed novelist and short story writer can be found in the interview. So, too, are Wildgen's awestruck observations about Moore's prose:
Her work is also so particular and so singularly observed that a reader can recall these images years later: a teenage girl noting that her mother's shaved armpit resembles a prickly fruit, the fingerlings potatoes lopped off at their bumpy little knuckles, the tiny mouse heart packed in snow that is a blood clot in a baby's diaper. But while any decent writer can turn a phrase, Moore's language reaches beyond describing. It isn't about guyssying up the page, but is the evidence that the writer preceives, in almost unbearable detail, the moments most of us wish went undetected in our bodies, our conversations, our reachings toward and failures at connection.
I'm running off to get the book....
Moore is the author of several books and story collections, including Birds of America: Stories, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, and Self-Help.
Share on Facebook