Senior Writer's Thoughts #7
Seventh in a series of reflections from our writers aged 70 and up, The Permanent Press presents: "Senior Writer's Thoughts"
From K.C. (Chet) Fredericks: I’m flattered to be in the company of such
eloquent, passionate witnesses to the
hard and immensely satisfying craft of writing, no matter what their ages. Doing this stuff for so long, I never
thought of myself as an older writer, or
older person, for that matter; but somehow, story came after story, novel followed
novel, and suddenly, it seemed, I was over seventy. Funny how that happens.
It’s always
been a miracle, looking back at my earliest notes for a fiction, that already
latent in those obscure scratchings was a
complex entity that would some day breathe and move. To make it happen, though, meant using every
tool in the tool box as well as every instrument in my little orchestra. When the fiction’s done a sense of ending
goes along with the feeling of achievement: this thing is finished, it doesn’t
have to be done again, let’s try something new. But then there’s the blank page. Next time around you have to start as a baby, learning to speak all
over. Each novel can be a lifetime—doesn't that complicate how writers calculate their ages?
There’s
something bittersweet about a life of writing. Faulkner said it as well as anyone. I can’t find the quote but somewhere he talks about his career as a
series of partial satisfactions: OK, he’d think, that novel was pretty good,
but it could have been stronger, that one had its moments, I think I can do
better; until one day he looked at the whole bunch and realized that what he had was a pretty
fair achievement. At the same moment,
though, he saw that the years he’d spent calling into being this wonderful
fictive universe had only brought him closer to the point of final
silence. Typical Faulkner, right? Turning even his astonishing accomplishment
into an occasion
for brooding.
He may have got
that right. There’s no way to fake that
ending. But fiction writers philosophize
mostly when they’re not writing. Caught up
in the heat of yet another fiction, we acknowledge only the clock that controls
narrative time. As for those other
clocks and calendars, the philosopher who put it best was Lawrence Berra with
his yogic declaration that “it ain’t over till it’s over.”
K.C. Frederick lives in the Boston area with his wife. Born in Detroit, he’s taught at Michigan, Cornell and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. His novel, Inland, won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Prize for Fiction in 2007.
Look for his next novel Looking for Przybylski coming October 2012 from The Permanent Press!
"Saddle up for PI Jared McKean's welcome second appearance. While successfully juggling a complex cast with numerous minidramas, Terrell never loses focus on a case about troubled teens, which he writes with sympathy"
"Knopf's tale is suspenseful from the get-go, with an intellectual, yet visceral, vigilantism coursing through the pages. In a major change in direction, the author of the "Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mysteries" (Black Swan; Hard Stop) never misses an angle and manages to weave a bit of humor into a storyline that could have been purely dark. This bodes well for a really good series"
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