The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

by Norman Mailer

Book Overview

"Writing is spooky," according to Norman Mailer. "There is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the blank page each morning, and you never know where your words are coming from, those divine words." In The Spooky Art, Mailer discusses with signature candor the rewards and trials of the writing life, and recommends the tools to navigate it. Addressing the reader in a conversational tone, he draws on the best of more than fifty years of his...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812971280
• ISBN13: 9780812971286
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The horse's mouth

It has been many years since I have read Norman Mailer. He made a sensational literary debut with the publication of his World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead in 1948. Since then he has been among the most celebrated writers, and by his own estimation one of America's greatest novelists, although I believe he still realizes that he has yet to fulfill his life-long ambition to write the so-called Great American Novel. (Actually I think Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain preceded his efforts here with respectively, The Scarlet Letter and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.) This is not the first time Mailer has written on the art of writing. During a period beginning after the publication of his third novel, The Deer Park in 1954 until he returned to the form in 1965 with An American Dream, Mailer wrote nonfiction almost exclusively, and in my opinion became a literary star because of the transition. I recall his first book-length nonfiction venture, Advertisements for Myself (1959), in which in addition to shamelessly tooting his own horn, Mailer also gave advice on how to write effectively, and of course on how to be a literary lion. I thought at the time it was his best work. In a sense he is like others of his time--Gore Vidal comes to mind--literary men who made the transition from novelists (a dying male breed because of a dying male readership) to interpreters and critics of the mass culture even while remaining true to their first love. Mailer followed up his successes with dozens of books, including more novels along with the various nonfiction works about people (Marilyn Monroe, Picasso, Lee Harvey Oswald, etc.), things and events (Of a Fire on the Moon; The Executioner's Song), especially political events, Miami and the Siege of Chicago; The Armies of the Night, etc. As always his work is characterized by a terrific energy and an obsessive devotion to Words on Paper. I seem to recall reading somewhere that he only felt really comfortable with himself as a writer when he had written 10,000 words that day. I can tell you from personal experience it is very difficult to write ten thousand words in one day; but the really hard part is to do it on consecutive days or indeed to keep up with anything close to that production for any length of time. Yet, for the real writer who cannot help but write--and Mailer was and is such a writer--the meditative euphoria that comes with being lost in one's work so completely is wonderful and quite addictive. Here Mailer writes about writing of course, concerning himself with things like writer's block, and how to build character and whether to use the first person or the third, or how to use real people in your fiction. He gives tips to young writers, as a writer in his eighties might, and certainly he is a writer to be listened to. He advises on how to use your subconscious in writing. He notes that if you declare that you are going to be at your desk the next morning to write, your s

A credible swansong

Mailer surveys his own career and aims to give advice about writing to young writers. Many of the concerns he has are unique to his own project in writing. His concern with presenting a vast social panorama and being the first cultural influence on society as a whole is in one sense ambitious and admirable, and in another idiotically grandiose. Mailer is always a strange mixture, a mixture of brilliance and absurdity , of great writing with self- indulgent stupidity. Here too there is much mix - up but there is less of the senseless profanity and vulgarity that sometimes made his showmanship, and advertising for himself objectionable. Mailer is a serious craftsman, a hard- worker who has much to say about the technique of writing, especially novel - writing. He seems obsessively concerned with his own place on the literary pantheon, and like Hemingway before him seems to be measuring himself against the competition. Harold Bloom would be happy with this kind of 'Beat old Turgenev but was whipped by Old Tolstoy today stuff' Summing it all up is difficult for him and difficult for his long- time readers also . The great early promise of ' Naked and the Dead' the series of disappointments which followed, the dramatic comeback with the novel as journalism 'Armies of the Night' and the ongoing obsessions with the Great Novel, American Social Justice, the meaning of Manhood, the nature of Criminality and Extreme Behavior, end in some way where it begun in the craftsman considering the craft of writing. Mailer in my poor judgment could have done a little better had he thought more about the meaning of human goodness and kindness even in writing. But he is what he is one of the giants of twentieth century American literature and this book contains enough brilliant paragraphs and passages to prove it.

A Sharing and a Grand Scale

-Mailer's latest is, as some reviews have charged, a bit scattershot, but that's part of the attraction: you can open it anywhere and enjoy, based on length, based on interest at the moment, or, using the well considered index (a very nice touch to an anthology of essays), based on the question around which you may be currently dabbling. I do not find Mailer at all arrogant, forward yes, but not arrogant; and the forward personality, aside from having been so often prophetic, seems just that, a character aspect - defect or quality - a function of the overwound compulsion, naked, chin forward, almost looking for a roundhouse on his own choppers: it is honest. A rare commodity these days, either in politics or literature. Mailer has survived the postmodernist internecine cannibalism, actually says decent things about the competition (eg Vidal, Bellow), and wrings true on his regrets about today's literature failing to set the milieu in the larger sense as did the great novelists in the past. He does not ascribe the shortcoming to the distractions and seduction of electronic media alone, but looks instead at the most likely candidates for having achieved that larger representation, critically, but respectfully. And when one begins to survey the variety and grandness of Mailer's own various projects over the years, and set that against his sharing of self doubts and confessions of both modest beginnings and premature celebrity, a deeper respect for the larger sense of the whole to which the man has, in retrospect, evolved becomes, cumulatively, unavoidable in the fair-minded eye. If nothing else, you feel the sense of world-concerned angst, acceptance of a "writer's responsibility," and inevitable sleeve-worn values and self-exposing vulnerability. You feel the paradoxical solitariness of a steaming writer holed away to write while vividly invested in the world around him. He makes you feel in his own temperature the danger and excitement and doubts and frustrations of his brand of wrestling with his metier. Elsewhere as he talks about the writer-reader relationship, you discover for your first time that this headlong writer, this runaway pace of his voice, actually rides often better for the reader at slower, more deliberate speeds: that his stylistic and logical structures wring then more considerately taken, wear more deeply and thicker woven. No, Mailer won't go away. Despite the hopeful assessments of many. For one thing, his driven tone, its urgency, is too contemporary. He wields an unexpected quasi confirmation as he indulges historic referents in consideration of the American literary past, almost refreshingly earnestly childlike in its respect in this day of now. But more, the sheer volumetric range of his esthetic, cultural, and political scans is too large, and the socially grounded roots of his positions too perceptively and morally deep-set. In the closing pages of "Spooky Art" Mailer muses further whether one can think of this or that

The Mike Tyson of Literature Gives Tips on Training

Mailer does not discuss technique or craft in detail. He offers insights of an inspirational, philosophic nature on writing. He's interesting even when he rambles, and the book is full of aphorisms that are encouraging and incisive. The book is worthwhile. It's the thinking and advice of one of the Twentieth Century's literary masters about his field of expertise. There's also plenty of advice about fields beyond his expertise, but Mailer eventually makes it all relevant to writing and, more important, to living the kind of life he feels necessary to produce great or very good writing. Mailer is like a great coach in this book, inciting the reader to be braver, to work harder, to want more, to cultivate appetite and a certain recklessness that is an antidote to what he calls the "paranoid perfection" imbued by writing programs. I think Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird is a kinder, gentler counterbalance to Stormin' Norman's inspiring hectoring to step up to the plate--in life and in writing--and is also an excellent book on writing. Where Lamott is compassionate, gentle, a chamomile tea-offering, hand-holding tutor, Mailer is a grizzled veteran exhorting us to throw ourselves into the mix, to take chances, to aspire to more than we may ever achieve. Good advice from someone who's lived it, and produced some of the most influential writing of the last century.