Slow at most everything

[Peter Farruggio <pfarr@cal.berkeley.edu>]

Posted on Susan Ohanian's website...

Slow at most everything

Conversations with novelist Richard Ford in the 
New Yorker and Ploughshares reveal important 
principles about the speed reading and speed 
writing that schools demand of students today. 
Standardistos should tattoo these bon mots on 
their foreheads, so as to be visible when they 
endlessly gaze in the mirror for curricular revelation.

by Susan Ohanian

http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=6493

New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman 
<http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/060828on_onlineonly02>talks 
to Richard Ford about his new novel The Lay of 
the Land, noting that the three books featuring 
Frank Bascombe have each come about a decade apart.

Treisman: Is there any significance to that gap? 
Is that how long it takes for you to want to go back to Frank?

Richard Ford: I?m slow at most everything. It 
just took me that long to accumulate material to 
make this book. I might?ve taken longer, but I 
was probably afraid that nobody would remember 
the other books. Or that I might just croak.


I'm slow at most everything.

Ford's Independence Day won both the Pulitzer 
Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

In 
<http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleID=4087>About 
Richard Ford: A Profile (Ploughshares, Fall 
1996), Don Lee captures a wonderful picture of Ford's editing process:

In his final revisions of Independence Day, he 
twice read aloud the entire seven-hundred-page 
manuscript to detect any rough spots. Then he 
went through two more drafts with his editor at 
Knopf, Gary Fisketjon. Then, as the book was 
about to go to press, his British editor gently 
commented, really as an afterthought, that there 
seemed to be quite a few -ly adverbs in the 
novel. Ford looked, and agreed. ?In weak 
moments,? he says, ?a writer will use an -ly 
adverb when the verb isn?t strong enough.? He 
went through the manuscript yet again over the 
next two weeks, striking out every -ly adverb he 
could part with, and strengthening the 
accompanying verbs. ?It seemed there were about four thousand of them.?



Ford doesn't regard his mild dyslexia while 
growing up as a handicap. ?Being a slow reader 
admitted me to books at a very basic level­word 
by word. That doesn?t seem like bad preparation 
to me, if writers are people who essentially live in sentences.?


In an 
<http://www.identitytheory.com/people/birnbaum37.html>Identity 
Theory interview, Ford tells Robert Birnbaum, 
"But being a novelist, it is important to average 
your days. It's like Olympic diving. You throw 
out the high score and the low score. I threw out 
the low score yesterday. . . ."

That used to be how we did it in teaching--took 
the long view of student work--over time. Good 
days and bad days. Now everything depends on the test day.

­ Richard Ford quotes, ed. by Susan Ohanian
New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Identity Theory
2006-08-25
<http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/060828on_onlineonly02>http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/060828on_onlineonly02