Writing, Language & Books

Writing What I Believe, Writing What I Love (Part 2)

Posted on by David Rodeback

This post continues my thoughts on writing what I believe and writing what I love. In the first part I explained that it includes reading what I love, and that includes long novels. This is partly an artist’s manifesto – that term is still too grand – and partly a look behind the curtain or under the hood. It is the back story of stories I have written, am writing, and live.

This is the second of three parts.

What I Believe

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that what I want to write is born of and sustained by what I believe, not just what I love. Among the many things I believe, here are the ones I most want to write about.

I believe there is good in virtually everyone. Likewise, there is a measure of evil in virtually everyone. “God and the devil are fighting,” said Dmitri Karamazov, “and the battlefield is the [human heart].”

I believe that good can and often does triumph in an individual heart and in the world at large, and it will continue to do so in the future, more often than not.

Based on long and varied experience with people I didn’t think were interesting at first, I believe there is something interesting in everyone – something worthy of our notice and reflection, and often enough our admiration.

Writing What I Believe, Writing What I Love

Posted on by David Rodeback

A few years ago, I had some thoughts I wanted to test and refine about the fiction I’m writing. So I wrote them out. I didn’t share them beyond my critique group. Lately I returned to that writing and updated it into this essay. It’s partly an artist’s manifesto – that term seems too grand – and partly a look behind the curtain or under the hood. It is the back story of stories I have written, am writing, and live.

I’m posting it here in three parts. This is the first.

Am I?

Whatever you write, from fiction to commercial website copy – insert your content marketing joke here – someone has probably told you, “Write what you believe.” If not, allow me to be the first.

Write what you believe.

I don’t mean that we writers should focus all our time and energy on nonfiction which expounds and promotes our personal belief systems in political, religious, or philosophical terms. There’s a place for that. I do some of it. But today we’re talking about fiction.

I certainly don’t mean that our fiction should be tendentious and moralizing. Fiction is a well-traveled road to truth, but it loses traction when it slips from inviting us to think into telling us what to think, when the author keeps intruding to preach to us.

My New Year’s Bookbuying Resolution — Join Me!

Posted on by David Rodeback

On Saturday, on my way out of Home Depot in American Fork (Utah), I saw something which surprised and delighted me: a Barnes and Noble bookstore. I had never seen it there before, and technically it’s not there now, but I wasn’t hallucinating. It’s “coming soon,” opening in “winter 2024.” This inspires a new year’s bookbuying resolution or two, in which I’d love for you to join me.

I welcome the new arrival. Like the arrival years ago of Home Depot in American Fork and Lowe’s across the street in Lehi, its proximity means I will expend less time and fuel traveling to Orem or wherever else. That means, in theory, more money to buy books and more time to read them. There’s a tiny environmental impact too.

Barnes and Noble American Fork - Bookbuying Resolution

However, silver clouds have dark linings. For me this silver cloud has two: one from the past, nostalgic and not very useful in the present, and one for the not-too-distant future, which you and I can do something about.

Hence my resolution. You’re welcome to share it, once I’ve explained, which is after some related chatter, er, context.

That Teetering Stack of Books I Read in 2022 and 2023 (ish)

Posted on by David Rodeback

I love reading books, and I learned at least in time for graduate school to love writing about the books I read. My intention, these last two years or so, was to keep blogging about the books I read, as I had done sporadically for a while, then more methodically here, here, and here.

Those posts were fun to write, and they were well received, and the routine was simple enough. When I finished a book, I stacked it in a particular place until I had written about it here. Well, the stack has grown too large. I haven’t taken time to write about the books since September 2022, and I was playing catch-up then.

So today we catch up. I’ll list some books in passing but stop to chat about most, knowing full well I won’t do justice to any of them. Sixteen are fiction and grouped accordingly. Seventeen are nonfiction and separated into books about writing and others.

Books I Read Lately – Winter 2022 Edition (in September)

Posted on by David Rodeback

When I finish reading a book, I stack it on a certain shelf near my desk in my home office, away from but in sight of the UCRC, my Unconscionably Comfortable Reading Chair. There it sits until I write of it in a “Books I Read” blog post such as this one.

The stack is now 24 books. It’s getting precarious. And I should long since have written this post and two or three more like it. Such is life.

Here are five books from that stack. I’ll tell you where I found them, unless it was Amazon. I’m trying to reduce my dependency on Amazon. I’ll never overcome it entirely, I suspect, but I do love a good brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I’ll write about the others later. Ideally, sooner.

John Steinbeck - Travels with Charley in Search of American - Books I Read Lately

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America

I enjoy telling people about one of my sons, who grew from a precocious early reader immersed in Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series to a mature mind preferring thick history books and great novels. One of his acquisitions was a passion for John Steinbeck’s writing.

He gave me this book as a gift. It is memoir, not the fiction for which Steinbeck is more famous, and it charmed and delighted me, page after page. It is a rambling account of his rambling journey across the United States with his dog Charley, who is surely one of the best-written canine personalities in prose. They traveled in a custom camper Steinbeck christened Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse.

Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, My Two Favorite Authors, and Mother’s Day

Posted on by David Rodeback

I recently added a small canvas print of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (Madonna di San Sisto) to the wall of my study. (The original is nearly nine feet tall; my print is sixteen inches tall.) Much of its appeal to me is its connection to my favorite nineteenth century author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and my favorite twentieth century author, Vasily Grossman. (I studied Russian literature quite seriously for a while.) What this has to do with Mother’s Day … we shall see.

Where We Do Difficult Things:
Good AF Writers

Posted on by David Rodeback

Writing is often a solitary activity, well suited to introverts. We thrive in a sort of solitude where we rarely feel alone, thanks to the people or creatures, historical or imagined, who fill our stories and books. But several essential writerly activities require us to interact with contemporary, fellow humans in challenging ways. Three of these happen over and over again at the twice-monthly meetings of a local critique group, Good AF Writers. (AF is for American Fork, Utah. What were you thinking?)

Different critique groups operate in different ways, but most have three nerve-wracking activities in common:

  • reading an excerpt of your writing aloud
  • hearing others’ feedback on your writing
  • giving others your feedback on their writing

Recent Reading: 10 More Books and a Memory

Posted on by David Rodeback

The more I read, the more I want to talk about what I read — and I’ve been reading more lately. I don’t mean more than I’ve ever read before. There was graduate school at Cornell — in Russian literature, a landscape of giant novels (which I still love), countless poems and short stories, and sprawling artistic manifestoes. Long before that were nineteen days at my grandparents’ farm in April 1975.

Do you mind very much if I remember for a few moments before I list the books?