Giulio Mozzi on “Why You Have to Love Some Writers and Hate Others”

This post is a guest blog by the celebrated Italian writer Giulio Mozzi. For a full bio of Giulio, please see below.

Whenever a writer is interviewed, it’s almost a given that they’ll be asked questions like:

“What books or writers have shaped you?”

“Who are your favorite writers?”

“What books are always on your bedside table?”

Giulio Mozzi

The writer’s answer is usually a sort of declaration of love for a certain book, or a certain writer. Of course, the answer is also a way of positioning oneself in an imaginary literary landscape. If you say you were shaped by Joyce/Musil/Proust, that’s not the same as saying you were shaped by Stevenson/Poe/Lovecraft. Tracing your influences to Perec/Queneau/Robbe-Grillet isn’t the same as saying your literary lineage goes through Tolkien/Herbert/Le Guin, etc. That assumes that these trios—I don’t know why, but they often come in trios—have meaning and an internal consistency. In some circles, James Joyce is the coolest, but he’s mocked by other groups. Another example: Stephen King is the Great Master in some circles, and simply ignored by others.

But I’d like to ask the opposite question: “What or who are the books or writers you just can’t stand, the ones that make you think, ‘I’d like to write a bit like everyone, but definitely not like them’”?
 
The history of literature, especially the history of modern literature, can be seen as the story of every generation's revolt against the previous one. The revolt of the naturalists against the sentimentality of the romantics, the revolt of the symbolists against the naturalists, the revolt of the futurists against everyone, the revolt of the new narrative writers against the rebellions of the neo-avant-gardists, the revolt of the postmodernists against the new narrative writers, etc. Generations follow one another; sons kill their fathers; daughters search for their mothers: it’s a continuous progression.
 
So: I believe that in the formative history of every writer, it’s important not just to love certain works but to hate others.
 
In the years when writing first hovered around me or within me (your choice!), and I hadn’t yet written much but was about to, my love for Marco Lodoli’s short story collection Grande Raccordo or—and to a lesser, though decisive extent—Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Separate Rooms—were both undoubtedly important for me. But equally important was my hatred, my truly furious hatred, for Andrea De Carlo’s Techniques of Seduction.
 
It's easy to dislike writers whose books are just bad, sloppy, or commercial. By commercial, I don’t mean mere entertainment—that’s something different. It’s all too easy to tear apart the writing of a romance novelist like Rosamunde Pilcher, for example. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the hatred that can arise toward a true writer, whose seriousness, artistic quality, technical ability, and historical importance can’t be denied; but is someone whose work is not only unbearable to you—they serve almost as a reverse fetish.
 
I’ve always wondered why I can't stand male English novelists (I mean English-English: Irish and Scottish are another matter entirely). Of course, there are exceptions (Henry Fielding! Charles Dickens!), but in general, when I try to read those writers, after a while I say to myself: “I just can’t do this.” Among contemporary writers, for example, I read Ian McEwan (who, despite his last name, isn’t Scottish) and I say to myself, “He’s so good! And such a pain in the ass!” Not to mention the Victorian writers en masse (and the related films by James Ivory). On the other hand, Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, etc.—I like them all.
 
Among the obligatory granddaddies of today’s Italian writers, I see Alberto Moravia and Italo Calvino mentioned over and over. It gets on my nerves that those two are talked about so often. I no longer know what to do with Calvino: it seems downright scandalous to me that a writer with such a modest, narrow, and stunted idea of literature was such a powerful editor. His American Lectures is an amazingly unimportant book. As for the Moravia, I appreciate his revolt against D’Annunzio-ism (even though I love Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetry). But I confess that Moravia’s most celebrated novels (especially The Conformist) have always seemed obtusely ideological to me and nothing more. The Moravia who forgets he’s Moravia, on the other hand, as in Roman Tales, is very, very beautiful.
 
Please note: these are not critical judgments. They’re my reactions in a particular mood, my character traits. I don’t claim any validity for them. I would never argue that Calvino and Moravia should be removed from anthologies. Just the opposite! But maybe for the anthologies, I wouldn’t choose the usual pieces.
 
I believe that when you start to become what you are, you also become that through opposition. Through what you reject. Through hatred, even.
 
I’m a little frightened, for example, by certain students of mine, who seem to universally love all great literature. “Is that even possible?” I’d like to ask them. “Is it possible that between the classic Italian epic poets Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, you like them both exactly the same? Is it possible that you love Leopardi as much as Manzoni?” I can’t. Tasso is beautiful, but I love Ariosto. Leopardi wrote a few sublime poems, but I love Manzoni. Reading Morante’s Lies and Sorcery or her Arturo’s Island is a wonderful adventure, but I love Balestrini’s Tristano!

So, ask yourself: if you write, when you write, against whom or what do you write? What or who do you want to be absolutely different from?

Giulio Mozzi has published more than 25 books—as editor, fiction writer, and poet—with leading Italian presses such as Einaudi, and Mondadori. His first short story collection, This Is the Garden, won the Premio Mondello. One of his stories appears in Mondadori’s anthology of the best Italian stories of the twentieth century. Giulio Mozzi has taught at several universities, and in 2011 he founded his own school for writers, la Bottega di narrazione (The Story Store).

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Richard Chiappone on Why I Write Fiction, and How I Read Fiction

This post is a guest blog from author Richard Chiappone, whose most recent book is a collection of short stories, Uncommon Weather, now available for preorder from University of Alaska Press.

Richard Chiappone

“The person, be it gentleman or a lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid.” —Jane Austen

 

I agree with Jane Austen that novels (or in my case, more often short stories) can bring great pleasure. But being neither a lady, nor much of a gentleman, and having no fear of being called intolerably stupid (I’ve heard it said!), I can report that—for me as a writer—great books can bring me great pleasure, but also propel me into fits of despair at the thought of ever writing another word myself.

Which brings me to the subject of why I write in the first place. I’m sure Jane would find my soul-searching unmanly, and would judge me an unsuitable suitor for any of the Bennett sisters. But here goes.

I think that after thirty years, I understand now that I write fiction to find out what’s important to me, what I value. I do that by putting fictitious characters in fictitious situations that cause them to act and reveal something about themselves in the process. What that reveals, I’m finding more and more, is that these characters are almost always—like real people—in need of something they don't yet have, or they are trying to hang onto something they fear they might lose.

 

One quote I like a lot is: “A man is what he desires…” which was said by the Theosophist Annie Besant. (Note: Theosophy is not the study of guys named Theodore.) And what do humans desire? They want to be treated decently, they want to be respected, and with luck maybe even loved. The want companionship. They want loyalty from their friends and families. Simply put, they want to be wanted. (I know that sounds like a Peter Frampton song.) And what I’ve learned about myself is that I care for my characters and hope they get what they want, and I’m a little sad when things don't work out for them. I think that’s called empathy.  

 

But I don't write just to prove that again and again by producing scenarios that confirm my own theories. I also write to see how that empathy can be generated by nothing more than words on a page. I’m astounded by the miracle when it occurs. Because, more than anyone, I know intellectually that my people don't exist and never have. What interests me is the challenge of making myself—and hopefully my readers—come to actually care about them, in spite of that.

 

And that’s how I read now. I read looking for clues about how other writers convince their readers (and me) to care about fictitious people. What makes us weep for self-destructive Emma Bovary or exult in the pluckiness of young Jane Eyre or Huck Finn?  And I read books to steal everything I can from them.

 

That results in two things:

 

1) I avoid books that are not character driven, even great authors who are more interested in form or language than in their own characters. I studied experimental writers when I  was a student—Donald Barthelme, John Barth, William Gass, Robert Coover, and others—and I still admire their spectacular accomplishment. But I’m just not interested in writing those kinds of stories (nor smart enough to do them well). And, of course, I don't read plot-driven books that reveal little or nothing about the inner life of their characters.

 

2) Basically, I just don't read fictions for pleasure anymore. In fact, I don't actually read fiction; I study fictions.

 

I don't read for pleasure anymore because I’m almost always aware of the writer behind the words on the page. If the writing is good and the characters are interesting, I may suspend disbelief and get caught up in the story at times, but only briefly. Then some word or some structural choice or narrative strategy catches my eye, and I’m thinking about how effective it is or isn’t. It’s a curse. I can never be truly entertained by books. I treat them like objects to learn from. For that reason, I can't read badly written books. I believe that you’ll never write books any better than the last book you read. Which is why I avoid books I wouldn’t want to put my name on. It’s like trying to eat food I’d be embarrassed to serve to guests.

 

Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that reading great books will make a reader into a great writer. If that were true, every William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, or Alice Munro scholar would be a Nobel Prize-winning author. But it will make each of us the most empathetic writer we can be. And I guess, in the end, that’s what’s really important to me.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Translating George Sand

I’ve always admired the French writer and activist George Sand (1804–1876). She was a prolific author and a dedicated advocate for social change who fought for the rights of women and workers. 

George Sand

Currently Sand is far better known in the English-speaking world for her audacious life than for her writing. Sand had many lovers, both men and women, including the composer Frédéric Chopin; bad-boy poet and playwright Alfred de Musset; and Prosper Mérimée, author of Carmen. George Sand was notorious for cross-dressing as a man in order to attend the Paris theaters that were only open to males.

George Sand:  Prolific Author

Sand (whose real name was the Baroness Amantine Lucile Aurore Dudevant) was a workhorse as an author. Also highly social, she entertained guests during the afternoon and evening, then wrote most of the night. There is a story about George Sand, perhaps apocryphal, that she finished writing one novel halfway through the night, and not willing to lose valuable time, she started another one without a pause. Whether this anecdote is true or not, it says a lot about her reputation as a hardworking author.

George Sand painted by her friend Eugène Delacroix

Finding the Right Work to Translate

I was, to be frank, more than a little in love with George Sand. Not owning a time machine, I decided the best way to get close to her was to translate one of her works. But which to pick of her 100 novels, plays, and memoirs? I couldn’t read them all. Most of her plays were untranslated, so I started there. But I soon realized that the theater in nineteenth century Paris was a lot like network television was before streaming. It was a popular form of entertainment where the standards were fairly low, and not much revision or planning went into the throwaway scripts.

Many of George Sand’s most renowned novels had already been translated either during the first wave of interest in her work in the nineteenth century, or during the recent feminist revival. The majority of her prose works felt dated to me, sentimental portraits of virtuous peasants. The fact that she was renowned in France as a great stylist, the mentor of Gustave Flaubert, a writer’s writer, was not coming across to me. I started to wonder if there was a translation project involving George Sand that would make sense for me.  

Searching for Clues When Looking for a Work to Translate

I was combing through various biographies of Sand, looking for a glimmer of a translation project. I came across a reference to an obscure novel of hers titled Horace. The biography mentioned that Sand’s publisher had absolutely refused to accept the manuscript when she presented it to him in the early 1840s, despite the fact that Sand was then a best-selling author. That sparked my curiosity.

I did some more digging and found another interesting clue. The French publisher Éditions de l’Aurore, which was undertaking a major project to reprint most of Sand’s works, chose Horace as the second book in their series, ahead of almost all of her most famous novels. I immediately ordered the French edition of the book.

When I read George Sand’s Horace, I found it charming, witty, and amazingly farsighted politically. It reflected the real world that Sand lived in: the banter in aristocratic Paris boudoirs, and the arguments in gritty Left Bank student garrets about overthrowing the corrupt monarchy. I knew I had the book I wanted to translate, and even better—it had gone untranslated into English since Sand had essentially self-published the book 150 years before.

Finding a Voice That Sounds Right for a Nineteenth-Century Novel

I immediately went on a sort of literary diet in order to get into my mind the voice of a nineteenth century woman novelist. For two years, while I was creating the first draft of the translation of George Sand’s Horace, I read only novels by English women writers. It was a delicious bubble bath of books, including Persuasion by Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, and Mary Barton by Edith Gaskell. Reading all of those books helped me to get the right diction, tone, and viewpoint for the translation. Somehow, though, none of those novelists quite reminded me of George Sand’s sardonic Paris salon humor. It wasn’t until I read William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair that I found a voice in English that matched Sand’s urbane and urban voice in Horace.

I created a first draft of the translation in a style that was as close as I could get to the diction of a nineteenth century novel. I sent the book to someone I trusted, Tom Christensen, then editor in chief at Mercury House, a fine literary publisher near where I lived in San Francisco. Tom accepted the book, but he asked to meet with me about the translation.

“The translation is fine as far as it goes,” Tom said, “but it’s stilted, it’s stiff. You can’t write this as if you lived in the nineteenth century.” I realized Tom was right. I had fossilized George Sand’s language in diction that wasn’t natural to me, an idiom that didn’t exist any longer.

I completely rewrote the translation, using phrasing that was much closer to contemporary English. When I was reading the nineteenth century novels, I had compiled a list of contractions that were actually in use during that time, such as can’t and don’t. In the new version of the translation, I used those contractions every chance I could, both for the narrator’s voice and for dialogue. Proudly I brought my revision to Tom Christensen.

His reaction wasn’t what I was hoping for. “It sounds too contemporary,” he said. “You need a voice that seems like the nineteenth century, but actually uses some modern phrases. There has to be a balance.”

My third draft was somewhere in the middle—neither purely contemporary nor completely archaic. I only used contractions for the dialogue and very sparingly in the narration. That middle version satisfied Tom.

How the Translation of Horace Was Received

I was fortunate that my translation of George Sand’s Horace was the first to appear in English after the release of the popular movie Impromptu, a George Sand biopic starring Judy Davis. Horace got written up twice in ten days in the New York Times, and the first printing sold out in eight weeks, almost unheard of for a translation of an unknown nineteenth century novel. The English translation of Horace remains in print more than thirty years later.

A Favorite Passage from Horace

Here’s a favorite passage from the novel, where George Sand talks about students and how they become less radical as they grow older and more cautious:

“…we regard as youthful foolishness those courageous theories that we once loved and professed; we blush at the thought of having been a Fourierist, a Saint-Simonian, or a revolutionary of any stripe; we hardly dare recount what audacious motions we put forward or supported in political groups; and finally, we are astonished that we ever hoped for equality with all its consequences, that we loved the people fearlessly, that we voted for the law of brotherhood with no amendments. And after a few years—that is, when we’re well or poorly established—whether we be right smack in the middle, royalist, or republican, of the shade of opinion of the Débats, the Gazette, or the National, we inscribe over our doorway, or on our diploma, or on our license, that we never, in all our life, intended to commit any offense against sacrosanct Property.”

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Reading What You Want to Write

One of the best ways to put yourself in the right mind frame to create a certain type of writing is to read works in that same mold. For instance, if you plan to write formal poetry, read formal poetry. If you plan to write a novel in the voice of a female, first-person speaker, read books that have a similar narrator. The advantage is not just that you have a model to imitate. I believe it actually affects your brain to read certain types of literary works.

The so-called “Mozart Effect” was announced by researchers in a letter to Nature magazine in 1993, claiming to show that the IQs of test subjects spiked upwards after listening to ten minutes of Mozart. I believe from my own experience that listening to complex music such as classical or jazz can energize the creative sectors of the brain. I also feel that my own ability to write in a literary way increases when I read or listen to good books. There may well be biochemical changes that happen in our brains when we read or listen to certain kinds of writing.

I experienced the benefits of this myself when I was trying to translate George Sand’s novel Horace from French to English. 

George Sand

It took me about two years to translate this remarkable novel, written in the 1840s, and so far ahead of its time in its treatment of the rights of women and working people. During the two years I was working on that translation, I read almost exclusively novels by nineteenth century authors, mainly women. I was trying to get into my head an English voice that I felt would be an equivalent to George Sand’s narrative.

What an amazing education and privilege that was, to read Persuasion by Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, (who took part of her pen name from Sand), The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and other books. Oddly enough, though, none of those writers reminded me of the wry, urbane George Sand. The English Romanticism of the Brontës or George Eliot is more earnest and less urban than Sand’s Horace. Austen is similar—she's also a comic writer, but her world of rural Regency England is so much more innocent than the Paris of George Sand during the Romantic era of the mid-nineteenth century. The book written in English that most sounded to me like the voice of the novel Horace was William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, with its satiric look at London society.

It is possible to overdo reading what you want to write. When I was translating George Sand’s Horace, I became so immersed in Victorian diction that every sentence I wrote in English felt as though it was choking on a tightly knotted cravat. I had to back away and rewrite the translation in a more contemporary voice, and then merge the more modern version with the draft that was written in old-fashioned and formal diction. I was very much helped and guided in this process by my editor at Mercury House publishers, Tom Christensen, an accomplished author and translator, who is also a fellow editor at Catamaran Literary Reader.

But in general, I think reading what you want to write is a good rule of thumb. So unless you plan to write blogs, this is probably the place for both you and me to stop for now!

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop, Part 2: The People Who Want You to Write Like Them

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I once taught a creative workshop in a high school where there was a talented young senior I'll call Jules. Jules was all of seventeen but he could write up a storm. But being a teenager, he hadn’t figured out yet that the world would not fall apart if others wrote differently from the way he wrote. He loved fantasy and elaborate imaginary worlds. Jules could create them with great detail and humor. But if anyone else brought in a story that had a realistic basis in her or his life, say a story about a girl taking an airplane by herself for the first time, Jules would suggest tossing in an alien with a phaser, definitely a flying saucer, and maybe a little time travel to the thirty-first century. After a few weeks of this we all just good-naturedly cracked up when Jules made a suggestion, because the subtext of his comments was always, “Why don’t you write this the way I would, and not the way you would?” Jules represents an extreme end of the spectrum.

When you receive a comment in a writing workshop, one of the things that you do have to pay extremely close attention to is whether that person is asking you to write the way he or she would, rather than asking you to bring your own vision to its sharpest focus. But how do you tell the difference? You have to be as savvy as a Jane Austen heroine, sorting out who is the Mr. Darcy who really loves her for who she is, and who is the Mr. Wickham out to persuade her to join in with his own nefarious scheme. It’s not always easy, but it’s necessary, and it can be fun, if you view it as a plot of its own.

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

How to Get Published

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer