Recipe for Conjuring Up a Story
For an upcoming story about the nature of dreams, I’m writing about an adjunct professor at a strange college in the South. The recipe is as follows, always remembering that without love, inspiration, and discipline nothing in this world is more than merely edible:
1 character from my imagination and memories from university, conjured up from the thought of someone leaving the Natural History Museum in disgrace
1 torn-out Harper’s article on subsistence food made from glue and boots (Stalingrad defenders)
1 torn-out Harper’s article on the calcified ashes of prisoners (recently discovered)
1 book on the Natural History Museum, cataloguing all of its eccentricities
3 photocopied pages of various techniques or maneuvers carried out by John Le Carre (in particular, one page demonstrating how to create subtle differences between two characters, one page showing how to manage progressions in a scene, and one page with an interesting way of showing deafness).
Add a dash or two of:
Let boil for three or four weeks, and it’ll come out of the oven hot, compact, and delicious (although you might have to have an acquired taste for ink and papyrus). Serves anywhere from one to a couple hundred thousand, depending on your good or bad fortune.
January 11, 2009 at 2:10 pm
This sounds like a great melange of ingredients. By the time you’re done, your diners won’t necessarily recognize each flavor individually, but they’ll love the taste.
I love that stunning and pricey Library of Dust book. I’ve thought before that someone could turn it into fiction, but in a more straightforward fashion than you’ve described above. LIke a Robert Olen Butler thing, where each photo inspires the story of the poor incarcerated psychiatric patient who wound up in a can. There’s something compelling about imagining each person’s idiosyncratic psychoses influencing the visible pattern of decay on each container.
Not that you ever seem to need fodder for more blog posts, but I’d be interested in reading more about those LeCarre pages, or at least getting page citations.
January 11, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Which le Carré?
January 11, 2009 at 2:18 pm
David–Smiley’s People and The Russia House. I think The Russia House is vastly underrated.
James–I have taken copious and careful notes from my Le Carre readings. I plan on doing an Amazon post on his work that looks at it from the perspective of what readers take from it–and mirror that with a post here that talks about each book from a writer’s perspective. I’ve rarely encountered such a high level of quality across so many books as across Le Carre’s. He has his flaws–usually the same flaws, which matter more or less depending on the shape of the particular book–but his virtues are often astonishing to me. (But all of this must wait until after the 60 in 60 posts.)
Jeff
January 11, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Especially between the Fortey and John le Carré, it sounds awesome. Want.
January 11, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Needs salt!
The museum book is beautiful, been poking around the shops here for a while on the off chance a copy winged its way across the pond.
January 11, 2009 at 5:49 pm
If someone had read, oh, no Le Carre whatsoever, where’s a good place to start?
January 11, 2009 at 5:55 pm
People like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, but the final act is a little stagey.
I’d say start with The Looking Glass War, which is brutal in its dark humor and uncompromising in its ending. Then move on to A Small Town in Germany, another of my favorites, skip The Naive and Sentimental Lover, and go right to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. After that, in order of publication through to the end (although I’m only on The Secret Pilgrim now. I think A Perfect Spy might just be his best, because of the amazing depth of characterization, but I love most of them. The Honourable Schoolboy needed some editing, though.
Jeff
January 11, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Thanks! I’ll see if I can get hold of The Looking Glass War immediately.
January 12, 2009 at 12:46 am
See, Honourable Schoolboy’s my favorite, but that might partly be because I’m a setting junkie. I haven’t read Russia House since it was new; I should give it another try.
I’ll be interested to hear what you think of his later books when you get to them. He’s still worth reading, but I think he started to go downhill somewhere toward the end of The Night Manager, as his source material got more abstract. (Also his May/November romances start to get a little squicky — though I was more charitably inclined toward The Constant Gardener after seeing the movie. Rachel Weiss can take care of herself.)
January 12, 2009 at 7:21 am
David:
Oh, I loved lots of HS, but I felt he had to do a lot of maneuvering to get the old HS to his final rendezvous is all.
Yeah, I heard that, too, re Night Manager on–although I also heard the new one is amazing.
Jeff