I've spent some time at the
Paris Review website reading interviews that span six decades. These interviews share insight into The Art of Fiction through authors like Faulkner, Hemingway, Wilder, and Capote, Welty, Vidal, Shaw, and Steinbeck, Kerouac, Updike, White, and many more.
As writers, we can learn from these masters, these idols. In his interview, William Faulkner stated that he read Don Quixote once a year. Faulkner named a few of his favorite writers. Then, he made this remark "I’ve read these books so often that I don’t always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you’d meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes."
We can cozy up to our favorite characters by practicing Faulkner's habit of reading, again and again, the books, scenes or characters that move us, inspire us, motivate us, teach us. My list of books to read for 2009 includes two I've read before:
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and
On Agate Hill by Lee Smith.
My re-reads for 2010 include:
Sufficient Grace by Darnell Arnoult
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Father and Son by Larry Brown, and
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
Each of these reads have well written scenes and characters. I've used a pencil to mark my favorites. And will "roll them around in my mouth like marbles" as
Darnell Arnoult suggests in her blog,
Dancing with the Gorilla.
Make a list of books you can reread next year. Mark your favorite passages so you too can return, as Faulkner did, to visit with your friends and hang out in familiar places. Cozy up to characters by reading and reading again. It's a great way to learn and improve your craft. Any questions?
