I watched a three-hour interview with Shelby Foote on Book TV this weekend. The interview was shot a couple of years ago at Foote’s home in Memphis, TN. I wrote down a few things he said and wanted to share them with you:

He writes with a fountain pen that he dips. Why? “Because it makes me take my time,” he said. “I don’t want anything mechanical coming between me and the page.”

He was asked about his philosophy of the sentence. He said that using different lengths of sentences is more important than we know.

He also read Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust nine times, which is what influenced the way he thinks about sentences.

And he quoted George Lucas: “Talent is always a writer’s deviation.”

Shelby Foote died last week. He was in his late 80s.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted anything, so lest you feel I’ve abandoned my blogging post, I wanted to post a little something, say hello, and tell you I’ve not gone anywhere. In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting Q&As by authors, so there will be fun new stuff soon.

But it’s the fourth of July and today will find us at my sister-in-law’s home on a cul de sac in Costa Mesa, CA, where there will be a water slide, bounce house, cotton candy machine, and a dunking booth. Travis is looking forward to the dunking booth. He can’t wait to be dunked. Ho-kay….. Me, I’ll watch. Never been dunked, never want to be dunked.

First, though, I need to work on my novel. I will be thinking about it all day if I don’t. It’s 7:37 a.m. The house is quiet. Brian didn’t get home from a gig in Temecula until one a.m. or so, so he’ll be out for a while. Travis will be asleep for a while more, too; he was up watching the “Miami Animal Police” and the cooking channel until late (his two favorite stations are the Food Network–especially “Iron Chefs”–and Animal Planet).

So right now I’m going to leave you and go to my fictional world. Are y’all getting any writing done today?

There’s a piece in today’s New York Times

about mystery author Janet Evanovich, and how she went from being a writer who once burned her rejection letters on the curb to a very successful author.

She’s not just a writer–she’s an industry. She hired a co-author and they turn out books often–too often in my view. Yes, she’s found a way to be successful as an author and that is admirable. But what about the writing? She admits her writing is formulaic, but she says that’s what readers want.

I suppose it all comes down to the standards we set for ourselves. My standards make me constantly trying to improve my writing (and constantly depressed about it).

Years and years ago, before I ever had anything published, my brother tried to talk me into writing romance novels–mostly because he thought they would sell. Of course romance is the hottest selling genre. But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t read romance and the thought of spending time on a genre that I wasn’t personally invested in … well, I couldn’t.

That’s not to say if you can, you shouldn’t.

But the writing I’m interested in, that fascinates me, is writing that the author has crafted, spent time on–not just churned out.

I’d have more money and live in a better house if I was more commercially-minded. But money has never been my primary goal in life, in art, in anything, really.

What do you think?

Now, I don’t have an MFA and so maybe that’s why I especially like the article I’m about to talk about. MFAs are okay–especially if you want to teach or if you want to be in a writing environment for a couple of years–but they are just not necessary if you want to be a writer. I known so many writers who, when they don’t get into the MFA program of choice, believe, if only for a little while, that they’ve failed, somehow, as a writer. What is necessary for a writer is not an MFA but the cultivation of that esoteric thing called voice.

In the July August issue of Poets & Writers, James Frey, author of My Friend Leonard

, talks about voice.

Writer Daniel Nester says, “One thing that occurred to Frey was that most of the wriers he loves–Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Celine, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac and Bukowski–taught themselves how to write. ‘They didn’t go to school for it, they didn’t have mentors who explained to them how to do things or now,’ he says. ‘They just sat down and started working. They kept working until they were able to do what they wanted to do.'”

And…

“But Frey didn’t want to be just a writer–he wanted to be unique. ‘I read all these people and I started thinking about what they all had in common,’ he says. ‘And the most obvious thing was that, when their books came out, there was nothing like them that had preceded them’…. And so Frey reasoned, he needed to find a style of writing that was new, fresh, unlike anything that had come before. It took years to find that voice, he says.”

Check out the entire article. It’s a good one. I’d post the link to the piece if there was one, but it’s only excerpted at www.pw.org. You gotta go out and buy the magazine, or stand in the bookstore and read it.

He’s coming on my show on 6/30 at 5:30 p.m. PT. In my view, he’s a writer’s writer. You can listen online at www.kuci.org. (The side panel on this page has a link that connects to the KUCI-FM Web site.)

Here is the other thing about Harriet Doerr’s work and why I’m a fan: As I read Consider This, Senora, I found myself appreciating life more–the things which might be considered the simple things. Laughing with my son at comedians–George Carlin, Henny Youngman, Joan Rivers–on vintage Johnny Carson tapes from the library. The sun on the magenta bougainvillea. The morning air filled with a misty rain. The Mexican seller of vegetable plants, flowers and cacti at the Farmer’s Market down the street. The bamboo wind chimes hanging outside our front door. Loyal friends. A ball of violet yarn. The UPS man dropping a package–most likely a book–on my front stoop. My husband.

And the title, Stones for Ibarra, has always puzzled me. What could it mean? I love that I had to reach the end of the book to find out.

Yes, I am a major Harriet Doerr fan.

Curious who strikes y’all that way, what author(s) illuminate your life in some new way.

I’ve been studying Spanish (I’m in a little private class with three others) and it’s made me seek out novels that have to do with Mexico or something Spanish, and so I came across one author’s books on tape whom I’ve known about for years and have even written about in my book, but never read.

Harriet Doerr didn’t even get a BA till after she was 60 and she was around 73 when she won the National Book Award for Stones for Ibarra

. In the library I found Consider This, Senora

on tape, which came after Stones and I checked it out. Such beautiful writing, and with a third person, omnicient narrator, which I tend to find too distant. But Doerr pulls in close and has just the right touch.

The book is made up of several connected stories about American ex-pats living in Mexico. The book is worth her metaphors and similes alone. (It’s so hard coming up with fresh ones…)

Then I picked up Stones for Ibarra, her first novel, and again, such great writing, and that close third person omnicient narrator. Which is another reason to check out this book: Omnicient can be done well, which Doerr proves in this book. No wonder she won a major award for this book.

She’s also proof that, in the world of letters, age matters little, if any. In the end, it’s the writing that counts. I love that.