Free indirect style is not the same as a limited third person point of view because in that style we tend to only hear the thoughts, feelings and opinions of our protagonists, but with free indirect style, we might briefly enter the perspective of a minor character for the briefest second. Wood uses the example of the opening passage of James Joyce's short story The Dead, in which young Lily, the house maid, is "literally" run off her feet. In this moment, the narration borrows Lily's word "literally" which isn't to tell us her feet our raw and overworked, but instead that this figure of speech is borrowed from Lily's vocabulary. In this way, the use of free indirect style can be incredibly subtle and I'm sure not always intentional on behalf of the author.
Next, I read Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. The tone of Hugo's book is friendly and casual, and I feel as though I'm sitting around a table in his classroom as I read these essays. The book contains reworking and revisions of poetry based on certain strategies he has learned to employ in his writing and revision processes, as well as more general and abstract offerings on how writers can build their daily practice and the role of creative writing departments in academia. My favorite line of the book:"When you write you are momentarily telling the world and yourself neither of you need any reason to be but the one you had all along." Here is another gem:“Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry
about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.”I would recommend Hugo's essay to anyone interested in writing, whether you are particularly interested in poetry or not.
Lastly, I sought out Charle's Baxter's Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction because it seemed so many of the concepts I'd been discussing with other writers came from this book. In terms of the book's voice. Baxter seems to fall in between Hugo and Wood, meaning while he relies on readers' background knowledge rich in literary criticism and contemporary fiction, he is still funny, provocative and thoughtful, particularly in his obinions about how fiction if impacted by political attitudes and culture:“There is such a
thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say,
'Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound
like a weasel.” Some of his essays I enjoyed and learned more from than
others. His essay on melodrama is still a bit confusing to me. After reading some short stories referenced in these craft books (or listening to them on the archives of The New Yorker's Fiction Podcast), I am currently reading Alice Munro's short story collection Dear Life, and have just finished these two novels:
- Lorrie Moore's Anagrams
- Indicative of Moore's virtuosic funny-sad female voice. Experimental style and the novel is a set of differing "anagrams" of the same story/characters.
- Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane
- Supposedly written for adults, but I could see a younger audience enjoying this supernatural ghost story more than I did. I think I'm simply not a Neil Gaiman fan, but the book did read quickly.
