Last Sunday in  the L. A. Times book review section, Susan Salter Reynolds reviewed Ron Carlson’s writing book – Ron Carlson Writes a Story: From the First Glimmer if an Idea to the Final Sentence  The review and the quotes she used from the book were so good, I ordered it right away.  A few months ago on this blog in a post entitled “Stay in the Room” I quoted Carlson from an interview as saying, “A writer is a person who stays in the room. So you do your work, and when you’re tempted to leave, you don’t. You push on, even if it’s for just a few minutes.”  In the book he expands on this idea:  “No one among us suffers the radical appreciation for coffee that I do. It calls to me, but I have learned not to listen.  All the valuable writing I have done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I’ve wanted to leave the room.”  (Italics are his.)

Also in his book is this so true idea of what he calls “the outer story.”  The setting that all five senses of the reader pick up. The outer story is “evidence that will convince us that the story could actually happen….(It’s) the motor, and the inner story is the freight.”

The reviewer writes this about Carlson: “He came to believe that craft, vision and the idea for a story come together in the very act of writing. What sinks a lot of books about how to write is their utter lack of humility. Carlson’s fiction has so much humility, such raw respect for his readers, his characters and the efforts of human beings (fictional or not) to live whole, decent lives that his advice, which is always concrete, has a quiet grace and authority.”

Amen.

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Again, for those of you who live in Minneapolis I’m back again on the radio there this Friday night at 2:00 am on the Brad Walton show. (Midnight in Santa Monica and it will be amazing to simply be awake at this hour, let alone talking.)

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And for those of you who are female and no longer wear your jeans four inches below your belly buttons, check out this website for a new book of essays by women writers about their bodies and growing older. For Keeps, edited by Victoria Zachheim. (Coming out in December.)

http://www.victoriazackheim.com/forkeeps.htm