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Interesting paean to Amy Hempel and the minimalist approach to writing in The LA Times.

To demonstrate minimalism, students sit around Spanbauer’s kitchen table for 10 weeks taking apart The Harvest. The first thing you study is what Tom calls “horses.” The metaphor is — if you drive a wagon from Utah to California, you use the same horses the whole way. Substitute the word “themes” or “choruses” and you get the idea. In minimalism, a story is a symphony, building and building, but never losing the original melody line. All characters and scenes, things that seem dissimilar, they all illustrate some aspect of the story’s theme. In The Harvest, we see how every detail is some part of mortality and dissolution, from kidney donors to stiff fingers to the television series Dynasty.

The next aspect, Spanbauer calls “burnt tongue.” A way of saying something, but saying it wrong, twisting it to slow down the reader. Forcing the reader to read close, maybe read twice, not just skim along a surface of abstract images, short-cut adverbs, and cliches.

In minimalism, cliches are called “received text.”

In The Harvest, Hempel writes, “I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.” Right here, you have her “horses” of death and dissolution andher writing a sentence that slows you to a more deliberate, attentive speed.

Oh, and in minimalism, no abstracts. No silly adverbs like sleepily, irritably, sadly, please. And no measurements, no feet, yards, degrees or years-old. The phrase “an 18-year-old girl” — what does thatmean?

In The Harvest, Hempel writes, “The year I began to say vahzinstead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.”

Instead of some dry age or measurement, we get the image of someone just becoming sophisticated, plus there’s burnt tongue, plus she uses her “horse” of mortality.

See how these things add up?

What else you learn about minimalism includes “recording angel.” This means writing without passing any judgments. Nothing is fed to the reader as fat or happy. You can only describe actions and appearances in a way that makes a judgment occur in the reader’s mind. Whatever it is, you unpack it into the details that will re-assemble themselves within the reader.

Amy Hempel does this. Instead of telling us the boyfriend in The Harvestis an asshole, we see him holding a sweater soaked with his girlfriend’s blood and telling her, “You’ll be okay, but this sweater is ruined.”

Less becomes more. Instead of the usual flood of general details, you get a slow drip of single-sentence paragraphs, each one evoking its own emotional reaction. At best, she’s a lawyer who presents her case, exhibit by exhibit. One piece of evidence at a time. At worst, she’s a magician, tricking people. But reading, you always take the bullet without being told it’s coming.

Raymond Carver was the most famous celebrated of this style, though after his death there has been some controversy regarding the influence of his editor, Gordon Lish. Overbearing or much needed - you decide. James Lasdun, for one, is in no doubt that the longer Carver is less impressive than the shorter. Read his essay analysing the impact of Lish’s stringent editing in The Guardian. Charles McGrath, Carver’s editor at The New Yorker, contrasts himself with Lish, but puts this in the context of Carver’s growing maturity as a writer and self-editor.

This excerpt from one of Carver’s letters makes it clear that Carver himself was ambivalent.

You have made so many of these stories better, my God, with the lighter editing and trimming. But those others, those three, I guess, I’m liable to croak if they came out that way. Even though they may be closer to works of art than the original and people be reading them 50 years from now, they’re still apt to cause my demise, I’m serious, they’re so intimately hooked up with my getting well, recovering, gaining back some little self-esteem and feeling of worth as a writer and a human being.

and this from Joshua Harmon:

Gary Lutz’s talk in the current issue of The Believer… offers both an autobiographical account of how Lutz “came to language only late and only peculiarly,” as well as a discussion of how Lutz reconsidered his idea of the sentence based on the remaindered Knopf books Lish edited (this same category of literature was also an influence on my work). From that point, Lutz offers an inspired craft lesson on sentences (and anyone who’s read Lutz knows that his sentences are masterful):

The sentence is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not. The sentence is a situation of words in the most literal sense: words must be situated in relation to others to produce an enduring effect on a reader. As you situate the words, you are of course intent on obeying the ordinances of syntax and grammar, unless any willful violation is your purpose—and you are intent as well on achieving in the arrangements of words as much fidelity as is possible to whatever you believe you have wanted to say or describe. A lot of writers—many of them—unfortunately seem to stop there. They seem content if the resultant sentence is free from obvious faults and is faithful to the lineaments of the thought or feeling or whatnot that was awaiting deathless expression. But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than that for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art. They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words.

James Campbell writes about the hoo-ha in The Times.