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roman-writing · 4 days

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roman-writing · 17 days

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Anne de Marcken, from It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over [ID'd]

#hey buzzy look

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roman-writing · 20 days

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“I’ve come to love your silences. I surrender myself like a ransacked city. You take the nails but leave the hammer.”

— Hala Alyan, from “Wife in Reverse” published in The Believer

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roman-writing · 24 days

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“we eat each other’s, words, hearts, what’s the difference?”

Two-Headed Poem; ii, Margaret Atwood

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roman-writing · 1 month

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#mrs danvers fr tho

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roman-writing · 1 month

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“W.H. Hudson says that birds feel something akin to pain (and fear) just before migration and that nothing alleviates this feeling except flight (the rapid motion of wings.).”

— Lorine Niedecker. Between Your House and Mine.

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roman-writing · 1 month

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Introduction to The Iliad, Emily Wilson

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roman-writing · 2 months

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And here’s to the Congressman for sending you my way. You’re the first Vietnamese I’ve ever met. Not too many of you in Hollywood. Hell, none of you in Hollywood. And authenticity’s important. Not that authenticity beats imagination. The story still comes first. The universality of the story has to be there. But it doesn’t hurt to get the details right. I had a Green Beret who actually fought with the Montagnards vet the script. He found me. He had a screenplay. Everyone has a screenplay. Can’t write but he’s a real American hero. Two tours of duty, killed VC with his bare hands. A Silver Star and a Purple Heart with oak leaf clusters. You should have seen the Polaroids he showed me. Made my stomach turn. Gave me some ideas, though, for how to shoot the movie. Hardly had any corrections to make. What do you think of that.

It took me a moment to realize he was asking me a question. I was disoriented, as if I were an English as a second language speaker listening to an equally foreign speaker from another country. That’s great, I said.

You bet it’s great. You, on the other hand. You wrote me another screenplay in the margins. You ever even read a screenplay before.

It took me another moment to realize there was another question. Like Violet, he had a problem with conventional punctuation. No—

I didn’t think so. So why do you think—

But you didn’t get the details right.

I didn’t get the details right. Violet, hear that. I researched your country, my friend. I read Joseph Buttinger and Frances FitzGerald. Have you read Joseph Buttinger and Frances FitzGerald. He’s the foremost historian on your little part of the world. And she won the Pulitzer Prize. She dissected your psychology. I think I know something about you people.

His aggressiveness flustered me, and my flustering, which I was not accustomed to, only flustered me further, which was my only explanation for my forthcoming behavior.

You didn’t even get the screams right, I said.

Excuse me.

I waited for an interjection until I realized he was just interrupting me with a question. All right, I said, my string starting to unravel. If I remember correctly, pages 26, 42, 58, 77, 91, 103, and 118, basically all the places in the script where one of my people has a speaking part, he or she screams. No words, just screams. So you should at least get the screams right.

Screams are universal. Am I right, Violet.

You’re right, she said from where she sat next to me. Screams are not universal, I said. If I took this telephone cord and wrapped it around your neck and pulled it tight until your eyes bugged out and your tongue turned black, Violet’s scream would sound very different from the scream you would be trying to make. Those are two very different kinds of terror coming from a man and a woman. The man knows he is dying. The woman fears she is likely to die soon. Their situations and their bodies produce a qualitatively different timbre to their voices. One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else’s pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual. In this country, for example, someone fleeing for his life will think he should call for the police. This is a reasonable way to cope with the threat of pain. But in my country, no one calls for the police, since it is often the police who inflict the pain. Am I right, Violet?

Violet mutely nodded her head.

So let me just point out that in your script, you have my people scream the following way: AIIIEEEEE!!! For example, when villager #3 is impaled by a Viet Cong punji trap, this is how he screams. Or when the little girl sacrifices her life to alert the Green Berets to the Viet Cong sneaking into the village, this is how she screams before her throat is cut. But having heard many of my countrymen screaming in pain, I can assure you this is not how they scream. Would you like to hear how they scream?

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. Okay.

I stood up and leaned on the desk to look right into his eyes. But I didn’t see him. What I saw was the face of the wiry Montagnard, an elder of the Bru minority who lived in an actual hamlet not far from the setting of this fiction. Rumor had it he served as a liaison agent for the Viet Cong. I was on my first assignment as a lieutenant and could not figure out a way to save the man from my captain wrapping a strand of rusted barbed wire around his throat, the necklace tight enough so that each time he swallowed, the wire tickled his Adam’s apple. That was not what made the old man scream however. It was just the appetizer. In my mind, though, as I watched the scene, I screamed for him.

Here’s what it sounds like, I said, reaching across the desk to pick up the Auteur’s Montblanc fountain pen. I wrote onomatopoeically across the cover page of the screenplay in big black letters: AIEYAAHHH!!! Then I capped his pen, put it back on his leather writing pad, and said, That’s how we scream in my country.

- The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen

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roman-writing · 3 months

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