Highlights - RICK BASS - Author & Environmentalist - “Why I Came West”, “For a Little While”

"Be specific. Show, don't tell. And it comes back to the five senses. If it's something we can touch, taste, scent, see, hear, then we're going to engage more deeply in the dream. And if it's an abstraction like beautiful or terrible, that's a kind of shorthand, and we lose a little bit of our connection with the reader every time we use an abstraction because beautiful is going to mean something slightly different to every different reader. And then you put another abstraction on that, terrible say, that's going to mean something different. Abstraction by abstraction, a degree at a time, two or three degrees at a time, finally you're 180 degrees away from the reader. Whereas if it's something specific, a yellow-handled phillips screwdriver with a bit of oil and the handles worn smooth from where the protagonist's father had done kitchen repair in their home 75 years before, falling off a ladder at the age of nine and breaking his neck...

The specificity allows us to believe in the dream of the story. And that's what we as writers want the reader to be. We want to believe in the dream of the story. When we're not being specific as writers, it's because we are groping and grasping for the story. I think the best writing is the most specific writing, and there's this phenomenon as a writer when your story sags and you can't quite figure out what's gone wrong. You go back and look at it and wherever your best writing is, that's where the secret heart of the story is. That's where the story was trying to come up from below. And when you subconsciously were most engaged with it, you could see it, you could taste it, you could smell it, you could feel it, you could hear it.

William Carlos Williams said, 'No ideas, but in things.' He said in five words what I just spent five minutes blathering about. No ideas, but in things. Don't tell me what something is. Show it to me. The meaning and the idea is in the image or in the sound, or in the taste."

Rick Bass, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his memoir Why I Came West, was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana's Yaak Valley for almost three decades. His short fiction, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous times in Best American Short Stories, has earned him The Story Prize, multiple O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes in addition to NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.

He’s an organizer and speaker at Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest, a fundraiser event to benefit the grassroots environmental movement of Protect Ancient Forests & The Montana Project. Featuring Maggie Rogers and more great performers and speakers. The evening will advance the efforts to protect the Black Ram forest by designating the region as the nation’s first Climate Refuge. Portland, Maine, on Sunday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. ET, at the Merrill Auditorium. Tickets available at the Merrill’s box office and online at PortTIX.com.

www.rickbass.net
www.protectancientforests.org
www.montanaproject.org
www.PortTIX.com

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