DISCOVERIES

Ron Carlson Writes a Story

From the First Glimmer of an Idea to the Final Sentence

Ron Carlson

Graywolf Press: 112 pp., $12 paper

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RON CARLSON has come to trust the process of writing a story, “a process involving radical, substance-changing discovery.” When he began teaching some 25 years ago, he taught the craft, “because it was teachable.” (“Vision, of course, is not teachable. . . . What a person chooses to write about is not teachable. The passion a writer brings to the page is not teachable.”) He came to believe that craft, vision and the idea for a story came 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.

First, don’t leave the room, no matter how pressing the errand drawing you from the page. “No one among us suffers the radical appreciation for coffee that I do,” he writes. “It calls to me, but I have learned not to listen. All the valuable writing I’ve 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.” Then there’s “Write, don’t think.” Slow down when writing dialogue: “I’m not at all sure dialogue is meant to advance the story; I know that sometimes it is the story.”

Carlson believes in what he calls “the outer story.” His fiction is set in places the reader can see, hear, smell, almost touch. The outer story is “the evidence that will convince us that the story could actually happen.” It is “the motor,” he writes, “and the inner story is the freight.” Carlson takes us through his process in writing the story “The Governor’s Ball” -- where the ideas came from and how he worked (he completed the draft in a day). “Every story is a kind of puzzle,” he claims. “If we’re really writing we are exploring the unnamed emotional facets of the human heart. Not all emotions, not all states of mind have been named. Nor are all the names we have been given always accurate. The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always -- if ever -- capable of articulating their condition.”

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Coming Through

Three Novellas

David Helwig

Bunim & Bannigan: 234 pp., $22

DAVID HELWIG, born in 1938 and raised in Ontario, was the recipient (like Alice Munro, Robertson Davies and other remarkable Canadian writers) of government grants that allowed him to pursue his fiction. These three novellas illustrate his stylistic range -- so vast one almost fears for his personality. “The Man Who Finished Edwin Drood” is a Joycean ramble through the love life and literary aspirations of a country lawyer who calls himself the Wicked Uncle and calls his wife the Dutchess. “The Music of No Mind” is a triptych of lectures delivered by a pretentious and irritable professor of 19th century literature; the very evocation of names like Petrus Christus, Ernest Thompson Seton and Delacroix creates a shower of memes, a rainy-afternoon Googlefest. “A Prayer to the Absent” is the most straightforward and moving story: A Toronto policeman rents a remote cottage after his wife’s death and falls in love with the proprietor of a local junk shop. All three tales are full of voices, echoes, surprises. The narrators address no one in particular -- a faceless audience, the eager reader.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com