Hard to Pronounce Literary Names Redux: the Definitive Edition

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August 26, 2006 | 3 books mentioned 38 3 min read

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Thanks to some friendly advice from LanguageHat, and seeing competing pronunciations flying around in the comments of the previous pronunciation post, especially for that pesky Goethe, I decided to go to the library and to do a little more Internet research to try to get some definitive pronunciations for these names, specifically printed references where available.

At the library I took a look at Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature (EoL) – pronunciations aside, a very cool reference book – which was very helpful in giving me pronunciations for most of the names on our list. The problem is that the pronunciations are given using symbols that are not easily expressed in HTML, and thus are impossible to convey on this blog. Another problem is that the book was published in 1995, and thus leaves out some of the contemporary authors on this list.

However, with some further digging online, I was able to find some sources, including Merriam-Webster Online (M-W), which uses simplified, Internet friendly notation. You can refer to the M-W pronunciation guide for help if you need it. I also looked at the online version of the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition (AH), whose pronunciations I’ve only linked to rather than copied because it uses images to convey pronunciation symbols, and I can’t easily replicate them here on the blog. Best of all, these two sources include audio pronunciations, as well. Very helpful. Finally I also looked at Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names (PD), some names from which somebody has posted here.

When none of those sufficed I used references from newspaper and magazine articles, hoping that their writers did the research and found out the correct pronunciations, ideally from the authors themselves.

  • J.M. Coetzee – kut-‘see, -‘see-uh (audio via M-W)
  • Paul Theroux – both PD and EoL have it as thuh-ROO
  • Henry David Thoreau – thaw-‘roh (audio via M-W, via AH). The “Pronouncing Thoreau” sidebar on this NPR story goes into some further detail.
  • John Le Carre – luh-ka-ray (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Dan Chaon – I’m going to stick with my friend Edan’s pronunciation – “Shawn” – since she had him as a teacher.
  • Pulitzer – ‘PULL it sir’ (see #19 in the Pulitzer FAQ, audio via M-W and via AH, which also offers the “PEW” pronunciation as an alternative.)
  • Donald Barthelme – There seems to be some disagreement on this one. AH has it with a “th” sound – see pronunciation and audio – while the EoL has it with a hard “t” sound. Not sure which is right.
  • Michael Chabon – “Pronounced, as he says, ‘Shea as in Stadium, Bon as in Jovi,'” according to this profile, though other news sources pronounce the last syllable ranging from “bun” to “bawn” to “bin“
  • Thomas Pynchon – ‘pin-chuhn (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Rainer Maria Rilke – ‘ry-nur Maria ‘ril-kuh, -kee (audio via M-W, via AH. AH does not offer the “long e” at the end as an alternative pronunciation, nor does EoL.)
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Unfortunately not much of a definitive answer here. M-W prefers saying it with more of an “r” sound ‘ge(r)-tuh (audio), but offers ‘g[oe]-tuh as an alternative. AH prefers the latter, note the the subtly different audio. EoL has both of those but it calls the “r” sound “Anglicized.” It also has a “long a” sound in the first syllable listed as Anglicized.
  • Ngugi wa Thiong’o – His first name is pronounced “Googy,” according to UC Irvine, where he teaches, while his last name is presumably pronounced phonetically.
  • Eoin Colfer – The Seattle PI and Guardian both say the first name is pronounced “Owen.” The last name is phonetic.
  • Seamus Heaney – ‘shay-mus ‘hee-nee (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Jorge Luis Borges – ‘bor-“hays (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Vladimir Nabokov – nuh-‘bo-kuff (audio via M-W, via AH. Both AH and EoL offer alternative pronunciations with a stress on the first syllable.)
  • P.G. Wodehouse – ‘wud-“haus (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Chuck Palahniuk – Lots of sources, including USA Today, say “Paula-nik.”
  • Michel Houellebecq – LA Weekly and many other sources say “Wellbeck.”
  • Jeffrey Eugenides – “yu-GIN-e-dees” according to the Houston Chronicle.
  • Jack Kerouac – ‘ker-uh-“wak (audio via M-W, via AH)
  • Colm Toibin – most sources, like the SF Chron have it as “toe-bean,” but the Boston Globe says “Column to-BEAN.”

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created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

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Kill Your Darlings: Five Writers on the Cutting Room Floor

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August 11, 2015 | 3 books mentioned 6 min read

As Edan Lepucki pointed out, writers are a self-flagellating bunch: difficult to satisfy, prone to swinging wildly between absurd faith and intense self-criticism. (Or is that just me?) So you can hardly blame us for wanting to hold tight to our darlings — the favored image, the pet sentence — when we finally get them on paper. And yet, and yet — writers from Anton Chekov to Stephen King agree that one’s most precious writing often has to be cut, either because of the fact of its preciousness or because it doesn’t serve the larger work.

Having killed more than a few darlings myself—including an entire novel—I asked five contemporary writers about the most painful time they cut a piece of writing. The truth is that the kill-your-darlings phenomenon is a little bit like a lust-driven love affair: no matter how painful it is to say goodbye, I’ve heard few people say that it wasn’t the right choice, or even that they truly miss their darling once it’s gone. But I keep a graveyard document on my computer just in case. You never know when a dead darling will be called upon and brought to life again.

1. Judith Claire Mitchell, author of A Reunion of Ghosts
I’ve had to kill plenty of darlings over the years, but though the deletions may come with fleeting twinges of pain, I’ve mostly taken pleasure in making my work leaner. This is what professional writers do, after all: they edit, they revise, they trim. Once, though, I had to cut a simile from a story I was working on, and the fact that I still remember those four little excised words — my despondent protagonist described herself as “negligible as an eyelash” — reveals how much it hurt to give them up. But before I’d finished my own story, I read a newly published story by a writer I admired, and there in one of her perfect paragraphs was my simile, word for word. She’d not only come up with the same exact metaphor, she’d come up with and published it first.

I tried to convince myself we could both use the simile. It wasn’t as if I’d stolen it from this other writer, not even subconsciously. And the chances that anyone in the world (where literary short fiction is not exactly giving Harry Potter a run for his money) would read both our stories, much less read them in such temporal proximity and so darned carefully they’d notice we used the same simile was…well, as negligible as an eyelash. In the end, though, I knew I’d lost the race, and I did the right thing, erasing the four words from my story. I have been churlish and bitter about it ever since.

2. Rebecca Dinerstein, author of The Sunlit Night
The first draft of my novel went heavy on Norse mythology. Even though my male protagonist Yasha was a 17-year-old Russian boy, I thought of him as a version of Thor. I wanted Yasha’s father, Vassily, to resemble Thor’s father, Odin, the All-Father of the Norse universe who famously rides an eight-legged horse and walks around with a raven on each shoulder. I hoped to connect the fabulous, exotic heroes of those myths to my humble, bewildered characters. But I wound up with a total mess. I had hammers and horses all over the place and I couldn’t say why. It started to feel like scaffolding, or a gimmick, that my book needed to shed. In my second draft, I let Yasha be Yasha and cut back on the Thor. But I strengthened Yasha with Thor’s sensibility: I kept that mightiness, that inspiration in mind as I steered Yasha through his dilemmas and into moments of bravery. And happily, the Norse gods did make it into one climactic scene: a midnight funeral at a Viking museum.

3. Tanwi Nandini Islam, author of Bright Lines
When it came time for me to revise my novel, I killed all the darlings in Part II, 150 pages worth. Instead of reckoning with my characters’ loss and the aftermath of an intense family trip, I had flashed forward a decade, absolving myself of the inner work that was necessary for telling this story. My editor saw the heart of Bright Lines: a triad of POVs that connects the experience of two daughters, one adopted, one biological, and a father confronting his weakness. I cut some of the more dramatic turns in the novel — characters killed, lecherous uncles, good-for-nothing dads — these were shorn. The rough-hewn forms of these ideas took shape, and what resulted was a process of fine-tuning, excavating, and exploring my characters’ inner desires in the span of one year. During this time, I was in acting classes, too. I suppose this was a respite from writing as well as a way to strengthen my storytelling. In class, we’d ask: Where are you coming from? Where are you going? And as I finishing revising my novel, the choice to kill my darlings led me to write a fully-realized story that looks to a historical past, with an unspoken destination that comes decades later.

4. Rufi Thorpe, author of The Girls from Corona del Mar
For me, the hardest darling to kill was in my first novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar. In it, one of the characters is hit over the head with a gnome statue, enters a coma, and upon awakening is obsessed with the genocide of the American Indian. In the original version of the book, there was an entire 40-page section that followed that character into her coma where she went on a kind of guided vision quest regarding the nature of cruelty. It was supposed to be both a historical recap of the less clean parts of American history, as well as a meditation on those wrongs we commit that cannot be taken back or set right, even as there is a moral imperative to at least try.

My agent insisted it must be cut, I argued it could be trimmed, but in the end, I agreed with her and cut the whole thing. Still, it completed the book thematically and symbolically in a way that was painful to lose. Don’t even talk to my husband about it. “It was a tragedy!” he shouts whenever it comes up. “That was the best part of the book!” And even though it wasn’t the best part of the book, I love him dearly for saying so.

5. Marian Palaia, author of The Given World
When I was first asked if I might write a short piece on having had, at some point, to jettison a favorite character (to kill off one of my darlings, in the parlance), I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head, but figured I could come up with something. Then I sent an early draft of my new novel to my agent. Ha! The joke is on me. The universe aligns, and it is looking as though I am needing to cut, from a so-far 175-page manuscript, about 1/3, in the form of Cam. He is not only a main character, but “Cam” is the first word in the book; he is the first person we meet, aside from the narrator, who introduces him to us. The reason he needs to go, or to at least not be a main character anymore, is because he is — not to put too fine a point on it — one tragic figure too many, in a book already full (enough) of tragic figures. And he is Haitian, meaning he has an accent, and he suffers from PTSD and (probably) Gulf War Syndrome (from our first adventure there), and then there is the matter of the earthquake occurring in the course of the book’s time frame, and the fact that he is Haitian in Missoula, Mont., and, well, maybe you can see where this thing could go completely off the rails and he could become somewhat cartoonish, which would just add more tragedy to the whole affair.

The thing is, I knew he was risky when I first began to write him, but there he was, and he was pretty insistent on being there, shy guy that he is, and he is a real person, in an alternate sphere, and his story is so compelling it won’t leave me, but it is for another time, I think. For another place. Or maybe it is his story alone — compelling in the way real life can be, and not transferable to fiction — and I have no business sharing it. We’ll see. And I will miss him. Unless he moves to San Francisco and meets up with my protagonist there, and is not such a fish out of water, but there will still be the same issues, so we will just have to see. Meantime, I am going in. And changing the first word of my book. I will find out what sort of cascading effect that has. I have just arrived in Montana, the place I seem to want every morning to get up and write, and have all summer, unless we catch on fire, to finish this draft. Better get started.

Image Credit: Flickr/Maarten Van Damme.

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38 comments:

  1. Hate to be pedantic ( well, actually, I don't) but it's Houellebecq. It's because of that e that it's pronounced well…, otherwise it would be hool…

  2. After all that trouble, I'm felled by a lousy spelling error… Thanks for pointing it out. I've fixed it.

  3. How about Dai Sijie? First name's pretty obvious, but I can't figure out the last.

  7. hi. i'm a bit embarrassed to ask this coz i'm not as intellectual as all the other bloggers posting comments on your page but my friend and i have been debating on how to properly pronounce the name Johann if given for a guy's name. one says it with a yo-han and the other says it with a jo-han. which is the correct one?

  8. I wouldn't bet on Anonymous ever coming back to see this reply after two months, but Johann in German is pronounced "yo-han."

  10. One of my thesis advisors at UCLA once told me as a child Donald Barthelme spent the night at his house. He couldn't remember the circumstances or tell me how his father had known DB, but he did remember that his name was definitely pronounced "BAR-tuhl-mee" with a hard T. This particular professor is not hard of memory, well under the age of 50, and exercises regularly.

  11. I remember embarrassing myself once when I pronounced Albert Camus (Kam-oo) as Albert Kam-ah-s, infront of a group of philosophy buffs. Oh how my face turned red when I found out…

  12. Does anyone know how to pronounce Paule Marshall's name? She was born Valenza Pauline Burke. I'm not sure if Paule is short for Pauline and should be Paul-lay, simply Paul. Any ideas?

  14. Did the late Americanized intellectual historian George Mosse pronounce his name MOSS or the Germanic MOSS-UH? (And the first name?)

    I went to a slightly snobby undergrad university and although most people gave Walter Benjamin's name an English first name pronunciation but did the vaguely Germanic Ben-yuh-meen for the last. I am returning to grad school and wondering what the current thing is?

    Tom [email protected] (let me know at that address also if you don't mind — I tend to forget where I post things)

  15. Anyone know how to pronounce Des Esseintes, the name of the main character in 'Against Nature' or 'Against the Grain' by Huysmans?

  16. I don't know the Huysmans work but a standard French pronunciation would be close to dez-es-sent or des-es-sant. There are exceptions but usually you do pronounce the S before a vowel (unlike the way we say Des Moines, Iowa.)
    Now, how do you pronounce Huysman?

    By the way, I finally asked (by e-mail) the chairman of the history department where Mosse last worked before his death and he said Mosse used an Americanized "Mossy".amkunstwerk

  17. I may be repeating others, but here are my contributions:

    Huysmans is apparently "H'WEES'maan." At least I somehow feel comfortable saying it that way.

    Cioran is TCHAW-rahn (according to the Times obit), but I will never feel comfortable pronouncing his name.

    Walser is Valser, and I pronounce his book "Jakob von Gunten" as "YAH-cub von GOO-tin" — please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong because this is my favorite novel!

    I picked up "Ben-ya-MEAN" as an underground but still use the "W" in "Walter."

    I always pronounce Bataille "Buh-TIE" and Blanchot "BLAN-show," hopefully correctly.

    I hear Musil is M'EEOO-zil.

    I've heard "ZAY-bald" for W.G.Sebald (from people who know German). Presumably I don't have to pronounce the "W" and "G" in anything other than my annoying Philly ACK-sent.

  20. If we don’t mind diving into genre, China Mieville might be a good addition to the list? Wikipedia has a pronunciation in IPA, but I’m not sure what its source was.

  21. Pingback: Library News and Literary Links « Nicole, Worcester
  23. Pingback: Things Like Other Things « Odd Lots
  24. Pingback: put the well in houellebecq « a sisyphean task

  26. I am so glad someone else wants to know how to pronounce China Mieville’s name. That was my first thought when I saw the headline. I even speak french, but those sounds don’t want to come out right for me!

  28. Pingback: How Do You Pronounce That Writer’s Name? « BIG OTHER

  29. Borges has no long-A sound. It’s Bor’ hess – with a short e as in let. The long vowels of English have no counterparts in Spanish except long e which corresponds roughly to the Spanish i as in lindo – leen’ doh. So, Quesadilla is not Kay sah dee yah, it’s keh sah dee’ yah – impress your latino friends.

  31. Anonymous:
    It is ok to pronounce Albert Camus’ last name as “Kah-mahs”, or “Ca-moose”.
    Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant and I will slap them down in any knowledge or IQ test in existence.
    They are mediocre pieces of rubbish who try to bolster themselves culturally by learning the original pronounciation of a few words or names, but have no more knowledge than that.
    People who correct you on Camus’ last name will generally be cultural backwater. Try it out. Be a prick and mispronounce his name in front of an a-hole on purpose and if he corrects you, say something like: “Ah, you must be someone of learning and refinement, someone who must also know about art history, literature, the humanities and the sciences. Let’s talk about them now since I want to learn and you seem to imply by such a refined correction that you are knowledgeable. I cannot wait to be enlightened”.
    Or, say something similar but less of a mouthful.
    People who correct Camus’ pronounciation also eat with chopsticks but don’t know of the conventions of the Japanese woodcuts that influenced Van Gogh.
    Just ignorant rubbish. Sad, really.
    Sorry, but it really irritates me to hear of mediocre ignorant people hanging onto one correct pronounciation as if it makes them cultured. Useless.

  33. Pingback: Cherries and Clay » Blog Archive » Michael Chabon Hits Town

  34. Contrary to the version given above (which as how I was pronouncing it before hand) the actual pronunciation of Huysmans is ‘OUS-mans’ with a completely silent H.

    This is according to a friend of mine who is fluent in French.

  35. ok, I am bilingual in French and English, and in English, Huysmans is pronounced something like “weess-MAWSS.” That’s the closest I can get.

  36. Just ran across your query about how to pronounce R. G. Vliet’s name. Since I’m his widow let me reassure you that his mother pronounced it 5 different ways and that hardly anyone gets it right. The name is Dutch, was Van Vliet, so that Van Fleet was the correct pronunciation. Dropping the Van made it difficult to believe, but the voiced F (v) is the accepted Americanized way, hence the one-syllable, long e, Vleet. Most people try to insert a vowel between the V and L or use a French pronunciation or variants thereof–absolutely wrong. Vleet. is your best bet, but you probably know that by now.

  37. Hi Ann,

    Russel was my great uncle and everyone in my family tells me how much we would have gotten along / how I remind them of him. I am the son of John Vliet, who is the son of my estranged grandfather, Ron. If by some chance you get this I would love to email you sometime about his career as a writer / know some other things about him. His writing has always resonated with me in a very odd, spiritual like way, as if him and I have some strange, esoteric sort of characteristics in common somehow. I am also intrigued by your explanation of how to pronounce Vliet- as I have been raised to pronounce it “Vuh-leet,” whereas you are saying the most accurate pronunciation is “Fleet”? Very interested in anything you have to say about any of this as I have long been curious of my Dutch origins, the otherside of my family lineage being Finnish. Cheers!

    Josh

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Books as Objects Notable Articles The Future of the Book

The E-Reader of Sand: The Kindle and the Inner Conflict Between Consumer and Booklover

Books as Objects Notable Articles The Future of the Book
August 15, 2011 | 3 books mentioned 61 9 min read
It occurred to me that Borges would have been thrilled and horrified in equal measure by the Kindle. In fact, in a weird way, he sort of invented it.
Books as Objects Notable Articles The Future of the Book
| 3 books mentioned 61 9 min read
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Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency

Lists
July 14, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 6 5 min read

Not long ago, I finished my first novel.  When I began to actually write it, i.e., to put complete sentences in a semi-coherent order, a strange thing happened: I could not read other people’s fiction.

Whenever I picked up a novel, I would become anxious and unhappy; my mind would race.  I don’t have a better explanation than self-consciousness or maybe envy, but anyway that’s what happened.  So after a post-collegiate lifetime of reading mostly novels, I became for a while a militant reader of everything but fiction.

I emphatically did not read any books about writing fiction, because those have pretty much always made me anxious and unhappy.  Instead, I read non-fiction books that I thought might indirectly tell me something about fiction, even though they were really about something else.  That, it turns out, made all the difference.

Someone told me once that books present themselves when we need them most, and if there’s a happy ending here it’s that the (best) non-fiction books I read taught me exactly what I needed to know to write that novel. These are the books I needed most, and this is what they taught me.

Duc de St-Simon, Memoirs

From the Duc de St-Simon, I learned the power of scale.  His canvas was vast — he must touch at least briefly on the better part of the French aristocracy who were alive at the time, and in his hands this slice of life gathers such momentum and has so much raw life-force that it comes to feels like a memoir of an entire culture, and maybe even of the entire world.

St-Simon was the 8th-ranking duke at the court of Louis XIV.  He knew everyone and nearly everything, and what he didn’t know he speculated about in the most infectious way possible. It’s gossipy, in the best sense, but it’s also a sort of oral history of that special kind of depth and appreciation of complexity that may still go by the name of sophistication.  Here’s St-Simon on an elaborate scheme by a member of the King’s family (Monsieur le Prince) to enrich a friend by means of an advantageous marriage:
They unearthed the hereditary Duchesse de Piney’s daughter by a second marriage…the girl was appallingly ugly, like a great vulgar fish-wife in a herring barrel, but by the elimination of the children of her mother’s first marriage she would be immensely rich, and appeared…to offer an ingenious method of endowing Bouteville with a peerage.
Emerson says somewhere that no orator can compete with someone who gives good nicknames; it might also be true of the teller of anecdotes, especially if they can sustain the narrative for more than a thousand pages.

 

George Lukács, “The Intellectual Physiognomy” from Writer & Critic

If anyone were to read just one piece from this list, it should be this.  Lukács showed me that a truly lifelike character is only possible if that character’s understanding of his or her larger social situation is authentically transparent to the reader:
The basis of great literature is Heraclitus’s common world of men “awake”, the world of men struggling in society, struggling with each other, acting for and against each other and reacting actively, not passively, to each other.  If there is no “awake” consciousness of reality…no character can achieve…the full vitality of individuality.
I personally struggle with this particular thing; I sometimes think that clear objectives in a character are sort of disappointing.  I tell myself, in these dark moments, that I’m aiming to convey something less tangible about characters than that they must stay alive in a river full of alligators or find the briefcase with the magical light it or defeat He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Lukács’ response to this line of thought would almost certainly not be polite.  I think he would argue that, above all, transparency of the character’s thought process is absolutely non-negotiable, especially in a main character.  No amount of good writing or lively dialogue, he explicitly says, can compensate for a character’s lack of a clear “intellectual physiognomy” as Lukács calls it. Which seems like a cold-eyed and important thing to remember.

 

Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life

Braudel taught me to think more expansively about what we include in a novel’s fictional world.  Why are the houses shaped the way they are?  Who does and does not say grace at dinner, and why?  Why might the protein content of grass matter to the owner of an island farm?

In 1929, two French historians founded a journal for academic historians called Annales. The “Annales School” focused on elements of history previously dismissed as the mundane data of the world — family structures, the geography of towns, primary data from courts and municipalities, and (later) the specific mentalities of its subjects.  Braudel was not of that founding generation, but from the next one — he was a consolidator of its legacy, and this is arguably the masterpiece of the entire school of thought.

The Structures of Everyday Life examines, in minute detail and with ingenious data, the material conditions that have informed human choices made nearly everywhere over the last 500 to 1,000 years.  Here is Braudel, in a typical passage, swinging from miniature to epic register in describing the long-term ramifications of the invention of the horse collar:
In the twelfth century, [horses’] performance suddenly improved, like an engine increased to four or five times its power…Until then they had been animals of war; thereafter they played a very large part in harrowing, tilling and transport.  This important transformation was one of a series of…factors in the rise of northern Europe.
 

Mary Douglas, “The Abominations of Leviticus” from Purity and Danger

This is a denser piece than some, but for me its technical lesson is simple: an effective way to intensify and clarify the actual story is to put the surrounding world in opposition to it.

Douglas takes an often skipped-over part of the Bible — Leviticus’ extensive rules on purity and defilement — and intuits a whole worldview about the connection between what is holy and what is mundane.  It is a tour de force.
[For the Israelites], the dietary laws would have been like signs which at every turn inspired meditation on the oneness, purity and completeness of God. By rules of avoidance, holiness was given a physical expression in every encounter with the animal kingdom and at every meal.
Our everyday habits, Douglas suggests, are also small gestures of holiness in a profane world, and also forms of ritual defense against whatever there is around us that might be predatory.  We have in Leviticus a guide to holiness, then but also a strong reminder that what’s in the Levitican background is constant warfare and persecution and also the inevitable dirt and difficulty of many people (i.e., the Israelites) living in in the wilderness.

I take that as a reminder to put good characters among bad, rich among poor, and to remember above all that light is always brightest next to shade.

 

Lee Strasberg, Transcripts from the Actors Studio

Reading Strasberg, I found the connection between acting and writing fiction to be more direct than I’d suspected.  The Method, as Strasberg’s approach is often called, is even today often parodied as a form of self-indulgence and caricaturist acting.  What I found in this book was an almost Emersonian approach to art as fundamentally aiming for vitality, surprise — for “life”:
…the actor can be helped really to think on the stage, instead of thinking only in make-believe fashion.  Once the actor begins to think, life starts, and then there cannot be imitation.
More technically, something Strasberg returns to over and over is that any vagueness in a performance, any cliché at all, is not in the first instance so much a failure of imagination or talent, as a lack of preparation.

So by Strasberg’s logic, any revision of a story or novel should first and foremost set out to flag sentences, paragraphs, characters, and plotlines of low energy and then work backwards — away from the manuscript — to see where the world has been insufficiently imagined.  This line of thought, along with some comments from an old friend, caused me to do an extra year of work on this novel’s manuscript when I rashly had thought it was already done.

If we do this work of preparation right, Strasberg suggests, it helps us push our performances — our books — to a place where they are more internally coherent, more alive, and above all more reflective of ourselves, for better or worse.

Image: Wikipedia

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