BLOG   ABOUT   MY-BOOKSHOP   ALL POSTS  MORE   

John Baker's Blog

Reflections of a working writer and reader

I never talk about what a new book is about as it will leave me. There is a story in Chinese where a man goes to a magical place and is overwhelmed by the beauty and the peace. He has to leave and they tell him that if he tells anyone where this place is he will never find it again. That is the metaphor for writing. You are in a secret place and discovering it but once you tell people it is gone. Amy Tan

Latest Posts

— Four Walls and One Passion

In The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather draws attention to Alexandre Dumas, père’s claim that in order to make a drama, he needed only four walls and one passion.
In context, Dumas’ was comparing his own method with that of Victor Hugo:

Hugo was lyric and theatrical; I was dramatic. Hugo required for his effects the introduction of organ music and chorus, of tables covered with flowers and black draped coffins. He needed elaborate scenery, costumes, stage effects, secret doors and stairs, rope ladders and traps. I needed only four walls, four boards, two actors and one passion . . .

Cather considered Dumas’ statement as one of the elementary principles that guided her own output as an artist, a version of minimalist modernism which is still being developed and refined in areas of contemporary theatre. Beckett’s Not I comes to mind.

Being reminded of all this, I find myself wondering if old Dumas didn’t overstate his method a little. Do we really need those four walls, for example, or isn’t the passion itself all that is required?

Willa Cather expanded her thesis a little when she said:

“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself”

Table of contents for Learning To Write

  1. Learning to Write I
  2. Learning to Write II
  3. Learning to Write III
  4. Learning to Write IV
  5. Learning to Write V
  6. Learning to Write VI
  7. Learning to Write VII
  8. Learning to Write VIII
  9. Learning to Write IX
  10. Learning to Write X
  11. Learning to Write XI
  12. Learning to Write XII
  13. Learning to Write XIII
  14. Learning to Write XIV
  15. Learning to Write XV
  16. Learning to Write XVI
  17. Learning to Write XVII
  18. Learning to Write XVIII
  19. Learning to Write XIX
  20. Learning to Write XX
  21. Learning to Write XXI
  22. Learning to Write XXII
  23. Learning to Write XXIII
  24. Learning to Write XXIV
  25. Learning to Write XXV
  26. Learning to Write XXVI
  27. Learning to Write XXVII
  28. Learning to Write XXVIII
  29. Learning to Write XXIX
  30. Learning to Write XXX
  31. Learning to Write XXXI
  32. Fictional Character
  33. How Many Plots Are There?
  34. Making Metaphors
  35. Four Walls and One Passion
Previous in series

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to my RSS feed

— The World’s Smallest Poem?

Jim Murdoch has some ideas about what it might be. Following a trail through Japanese and Scottish Haiku, he arrives at . . .
Well, you’ll have to go to his site to find out.
In the meantime:
If you’d asked me before I started working on this article what the world’s shortest poem was I would have [...]

Must reads

Out Stealing Timber I
Looking to be understood?
A Writer’s Notebook I
(La Peste) The Plague by Albert Camus - a review
Saddest Books Revisited
The Glass Menagerie - a review
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Bhagdad Burning
Five things Feminism has done for me
Learning to Write I
Read extracts from my novels

Recent Comments