Wordcraft --Resolutions for writers, in brief

The thing that makes New Year’s resolutions so hard to keep is their too frequent vagueness. Or maybe it’s their habit of being just too open ended. Or too painful. It doesn’t have to be so. One year I resolved to kiss my loved ones and tell them every day that I loved them. I recommend it. And for this last post of 2013, I’ll list a very few resolutions for writers that are short, sweet and joys to keep.

Number One -- Get a library card! To write, we need to read. And we need to nurture other readers. So don’t just get a card for yourself, but for every member of your household.

If you’re an adult living in my town--Dallas, Texas--all you need to get a library card is a current government-issued photo identification and proof of Dallas residency, which can be as simple as a utility bill. If you’re applying for a card for a child, you as guardian, will need your photo ID and proof of Dallas residency, or the child’s school registration (within the city of Dallas) and/or ID. Teens may apply for their own library card with a current Dallas school or government ID. In some cases, you may even get a Dallas library card for limited use if you’re not a city resident (although you should check with your local library about its requirements). For specifics, see http://dallaslibrary2.org/about/libraryCards.php/.

Number Two -- About that reading thing. . . . The more I wrote, the less time I thought there would be to read. But in Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he notes that he reads sixty or seventy books yearly. If King, who releases a new book practically every hour, can find that time to read, can’t we? Consider shoehorning in reading time with audio books, which King likes as much as I do.

And (although this is anticipating resolution number three) consider keeping a record of books read. Since I sometimes feel uncomfortable about not having read whatever the book of the hour is, I fall back on the wisdom of my newly favorite author, Pierre Bayard and his How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Bayard marvelously organizes reading in cultural contexts. And speaking of cultural contexts, I’ll be searching for new reads from around the globe, via
http://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/.

Number Three -- Keep a record of progress. Writing is hard lonely work. If we don’t keep track of our milestones, who will? So, let’s keep logs of stories, poems and articles we’ve written. And of stories, poems and articles published. If we write blogs, notice how many posts we write and how our writing improves along the way.

Number Four -- Make a collection that doesn’t cost anything, which in some ways is also a record of progress. I have a tiny notebook of first sentences from books I love. Or we can collect last sentences, such as the lyrical passages Cormac McCarthy typically ends with to compensate for his blood-soaked prose. Or worst sentences, to make us laugh. Whatever we collect, it should be something that gives us joy, such as this short and lovely first sentence from my recent reading, “It began to snow.” (The Samurai, by Shusaku Endo). (RIP, Leonard Elmore. Sometimes it’s okay to write about weather.)

Adventure classics -- Endo’s autobiography of faith

The Samurai

by Shusaku Endo

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In 1613, a group of samurai, merchants and shipwrecked Spanish sailors set out from Tsukinoura in northern Japan on an unlikely embassy. Accompanied by Franciscan priest Luis Sotelo as interpreter, the group may have intended to establish trade ties with the then-Spanish territory of Mexico. It was a journey that would take its chief envoy, a samurai named Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga, around the world by way of Mexico, Spain, and Rome as a possibly unwilling convert to Christianity, only to find on his return home in 1620 that his efforts had been in vain, as Japan closed itself to the outside world.

“So little is known about this embassy that both Japanese and Western historians have all but ignored it,” Van C. Gessel wrote in the postscript to his 1982 translation of The Samurai, one of the last novels by Nobel nominee Shusaku Endo. Although Soleto (the model of Father Velasco in the novel) left a report, he “seems to have been every bit the scheming zealot described by Endo. . . Leaving us to our own devices to determine why the embassy was ever organized in the first place. . . .”

As we are left to our own devices in determining the end of Hasekura, who died in 1622.

Did he abandon the Christianity he had assumed only for expediency? Did he stay true to his new faith, for which he may have been ordered to die? Did he renounce Christianity publicly but continue to practice it secretly?

In an interview soon after the 1980 publication of The Samurai Endo described it as “in some ways an autobiographical novel. . . I was the first Japanese to study abroad after the war (World War II), the first to travel to Europe. . . The descriptions of the ocean in this novel are based on my experiences then, and in the life of Hasekura and the manner of his death I have expressed my present state of mind. . .”

It was an ambiguous state of mind whose expression some believe caused Endo’s fellow Catholics to block his chance at the 1994 Nobel Prize. Baptized as a Catholic in childhood at the instigation of family converts, his writings, in the words of Caribbean writer and Endo fan Caryl Phillips, “continually restage the problematic encounter between Japanese and western understandings of self and God, an encounter which, as Endo’s work develops, comes to be increasingly characterized by . . . the word, ‘betrayal.’”

Before Hasekura begins his voyage, one of his overlords tells him, “In the land of foreigners, the ways of life will probably be different from those here in Japan. . . If that which is white in Japan is black in the foreign lands, consider it black Even if you remain unconvinced in your heart, you must wear a look of acquiescence on your face.”

And so Hasekura does, only to find the rules turned upside down when he arrives back in his country.

“You had the ill fortune to be caught up in the shifting tides of Government,” his lord tells him upon his return. “‘I know how painful this is for you. This old man here understands your pain better than anyone else.’ The samurai raised his head and stared into Lord Ishida’s face. In that seemingly gentle voice, that seemingly gentle face, he
sensed a lie. . . (He) could see snow falling. The swirling flakes seemed like the white swans of the marshland. Birds of passage which came to the marshland from a distant country and then departed for a distant country. Birds which had seen many countries, many cities. They were he himself. And now, he was setting off for another unknown land. . . .”

Endo’s works are widely available. Although English translations usually list family names such as Endo, last, Gessel’s translation of The Samurai follows the Japanese tradition of listing the family name of the protagonist, Hasekura, first.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics opens a January of true adventures with Barbara W. Tuchman’s history of the first month of World War I, The Guns of August.)