Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: Raymond Carver

I just finished Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk, which I’ve mentioned briefly before, but which I would like to write about again, in a way, because of many topics covered in the book to which I responded.  For example, Pamuk writes in several places about returning later in life to books he read in his youth and about how his reactions to those books changed.  Inspired by Pamuk and other writers who talk about reading the same novels and stories over and over again, I, too, have recently begun rereading the books that made me want to write or that have inspired me to continue doing so.

With that said, there are some books I cannot bring myself to return to out of fear.  In my late teens, when I was trying to figure out which direction I would be going in life, On the Road was one of the half-dozen novels I read that pushed me in the direction of literature.  And yet, a decade later, I’m afraid to open it again, because I am almost certain that I will no longer enjoy it.  I’d rather leave it on the shelf and keep the memory of what the book meant to me.

Another author that I re-approached with trepidation was Raymond Carver.  I was turned on to his collection of short stories, Where I’m Calling From, by a professor during the time between the completion of my undergraduate work and my decision to apply to graduate school.  (Tangent: This story deserves its own post, but for context, I will just say that I took a graduate writing course during the summer with this professor, who helped me in so many ways that it was not until I met him that I made the decision to pursue an MFA.)

As I prepared the stories that would make up my application to graduate school, it was the stories of Carver that I turned to for inspiration when I got stuck or when I woke up in the morning and didn’t feel like writing.  In the years since, I’ve turned to the writers that Carver looked to for inspiration—Dostoevsky, Chekhov—and I hadn’t read a word of Carver in over a year, when, suffering from my recent bout of writer’s block, I decided to return to the book that had brought me out of past funks.

One of my maxims for short stories is that you should always write what something is, rather than what it is like.  Put another way: it is always better to say ‘she had blue eyes’ rather than ‘her eyes were the color of the churning sea’ or some such nonsense.  This is especially true of a short story, which, unlike a novel, requires such a specific focus that it cannot afford tangents or digressions.  What one often finds in amateur writing is that a story will have an interesting situation or character in place but will lack consistent focus; good material, or a fine style, can only carry a story for so long.

As I prepared for graduate school—and again recently, when, to my delight, I found his stories to be just as I left them—I learned that when my work lost the necessary level of focus, reading a few pages of Carver’s lean and direct prose would always help me to regain perspective. Of course, I recommend him for non-writers as well.