Scott Momaday: It's important to me because I am who I am. I have a certain temperament. I was born with certain potentials and possibilities, and I have been fortunate in realizing some of those possibilities. I was inspired to write at a tender age by my mother, who was a writer. I was fortunate to that extent, and I did follow in her footsteps and develop a voice, the voice of a writer. That's what a writer does. I tell young people often, "Don't worry about having a distinctive voice right now, it comes with experience and practice. You will develop a voice." Someone once said to me "Don't worry about imitating someone, that's how you learn." And eventually you will verge out and go on your own voice. I simply kept my goal in mind, and persisted. Perseverance is a large part of writing. So what success I have achieved has come about because of that, simply following the line.
Challenge: When Joyce Carol Oates describes the novelist's process of bringing elements like tributaries into a river to form the finished novel, she is also assuming that the novelist accomplishes this by using their own language and style. Their writing is powerful because it is in their own original voice. N. Scott Momaday, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, encourages young writers to work on developing their own voice but not to be discouraged. It takes time and experience. He suggests that imitating other writers is one way to learn both 1) how to manage the tributaries on their way into the river and 2) how to write in an original and true voice.
Outcome: Select a novelist's work that you admire. Review the novel looking for your favorite parts. Choose one segment or paragraph. Maybe it's the description of the setting, a character, an event, or a moment of conflict. It might involve dialogue. Using this as a model write your own description for a story you would like to tell.
Project #2: The Novel and Technology
Curriculum Focus: Technology
Rita Dove
Former Poet Laureate of the United States
Challenge: Technology has definitely had an impact on how people write their novels and how and where they are published. New electronic books, internet self-publishing sites and more have opened the doors to writers who are no longer using the same writing tools nor are they planning to see their books printed in the usual way. The times for novelists and their readers are changing.
Outcome: Research the different ways technology has changed the way we read and write novels. Find out the Internet resources that can be used to publish an author's work. What opportunities would be open to you as a young writer? Create a plan for a three-page web site that presents this information to aspiring writers.
You can look at the Internet and now you can see that there are all sorts of
fan fiction out there and people who are writing furiously into their computers so
it's not that the written word is going to stop. My heart bleeds when I
think of pages actually not being turned anymore when you have a computer that looks
like a book and you just press a button and the page will, you know switch. That
breaks my heart but I think it's coming.
