Les Brown It 39;s Not Over Until I Win Transcript

[Eloisa Stawasz]

EGordon Gee: Before I introduce Mr. O'Brien, I want to applaud the work of Beth Taylor, one of our rising faculty stars, for organizing this conference (applause) - I didn't even get the words out, Beth, before they applauded - congratulations! Ladies and gentlemen, when I pondered how to start this evening, I had to ask myself the question, which I think, in my business, one often does ask, and that is how does one introduce an acclaimed writer like Tim O'Brien - what does one say about any writer is probably the question. We might say that writers are single-minded and focused, living in their imaginations with the companionship of a host of fictional characters. We may say that they are driven by their craft to give life to this imagination, ideas creating story-truths, as Tim O'Brien calls them, so that we might see the happening-truths, as he says, in a different light. The lesson we learn from talented writers like Tim O'Brien is that writing is a passion; done well, I would submit to you that writing is an art, and Tim O'Brien has proven that he is, indeed, an artist.

His award-winning novel, The Things They Carried, has been calledone of the finest volumes of fiction bout the Vietnam War, and StewartO'Nan, in his Vietnam Reader, called The Things They Carried "a mysterious blending of the real and the imaginary." O'Nan said itmakes us feel the loss of friends and innocence, and the resultingconfusion that gives the war a deeply personal resonance. Growing up in asmall town in Minnesota, the son of an insurance salesman and anelementary school teacher, Mr. O'Brien was a self-professed dreamer and aself-taught magician. He once said that he was inspired to be a writer byhis father's personal account of Iwo Jima and Okinawa which had beenpublished in the New York Times. He could not have known, then, readinghis father's clippings, how close he had come to what would be theultimate truth of his life. He was drafted into the army and sent toVietnam as an infantryman; he spent the tour of his duty in Quang Naiprovince and was stationed in My Lai one year after the My Lai massacre. From a small Midwestern town to Vietnam is, we can imagine, a very longjourney, and somewhere on that journey, the writer inside Tim O'Brien wasfreed. But he was more than merely a witness to the tragedy of the Vietnamwar. He was hit by shrapnel in a grenade attack and awarded the PurpleHeart. Like his father, he had written and published personal accounts ofthe war which had made their way into Minnesota newspapers. When hereturned from Vietnam, he studied for his doctorate at Harvard's KennedySchool, and while doing so, he experienced his personal accounts into abook which would be, of course, his first. So with the publication of If I Die in a Combat Zone (Box Me Up and Ship Me Home), he began hiswriting career.

If the test of the writer is to create emotions as well as convey ideas,then Tim O'Brien passed the test with this very first book. He's a keenobserver of people, a storyteller, a chronicler, a thinker, a poet, areporter, he writes hard and his words can be bold, cutting, and as sharpas his perceptions and wit. Perhaps that is why he became a reporter forthe Washington Post where, he says, he learned the virtue of tenacity. Butafter only one year as a journalist, Tim O'Brien decided to turn full-timeto writing books, a decision for which, I might note, that we're all verygrateful. It is said that Tim O'Brien is a meticulous craftsman, workingmany hours every day, often tossing out hundreds of pages, to find the fewwhich meet his artistic standard. After completing In the Lake of theWoods, the novel he considers his finest work, Tim O'Brien stoppedwriting, saying that it had drained him emotionally. He has noted abouthis own work, "In every book that I have written, I have had the twins oflove and evil. They intertwine and intermix; sometimes, if they're hookedthe way balances are hooked together, the emotions in war and in ourordinary lives are, if not identical, damn similar." To answer ourquestion, then, what do we say about writers like Tim O'Brien? We say hispassions are raw, his words are profound, his imagination is rich, and wehope that he will never again stop writing. It gives me indeed agreat-great pleasure to introduce a dreamer, a magician, a soldier, ajournalist, an award-winning novelist, one of America's most talentedwriters, Tim O'Brien. Ladies and gentlemen-

Tim O'Brien:Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,it's a pleasure to be here tonight. I've got a really bad cold-both of myears are stopped up; I can barely hear my own voice. I've got people inthe audience kind of going like this and like this (gestures withhands) to kind of modulate my volume. When I began preparing thislittle talk, I was very quickly reminded that one of the reasons I becamea fiction writer is I don't know anything. I don't mean this in a falselyhumble sense. I mean, quite literally, that I have very little to offeryou in the way of abstraction or generalization; the sort of thing thatcan be communicated in a President's Lecture. I'm not a literaryhistorian, I'm not a critic, I'm not a teacher. I spend my days, and agood many of my nights, writing stories. And I don't devote a lot of timeor a lot of energy worrying about the hows or the whys of it all, insteadtaking a kind of lazy man's conviction in the belief that stories requireno justification; they just are. It's a conviction, too, I suppose, thatabstraction and generalization are precisely the reverse of what I do as astoryteller. Abstraction may make your head believe, but a good story,well told, will also make your kidneys believe, and your scalp and yourtear ducts, your heart, and your stomach, the whole human being. In anycase, after, I don't know, twenty aborted attempts to compose a lecturefor tonight, I finally gave it up, and decided to spend my time with youdoing what I do best, which is to tell stories. I did, however, save a fewnuggets from my original efforts at a lecture. I just want to share themwith you; it'll only take about four seconds:

Number one: writing never gets easier, it gets harder. You can't repeatyourself. Unlike, say, a professional surgeon, you cannot performprecisely the same operation with the same protocol in case after case,and even for a surgeon, this would be risky, if one's first patienthappened to end up in a mortuary. Number 2: use active verbs. Avoidridiculous similes. For example: do not write, "her neck was like aswan's, long and graceful." Instead write, "she honked." Three: avoidunintentional puns. Do not write, "she came in a Jeep." Four (I did thatin the Atlantic monthly, believe it or not): Four: avoid alliteration. Donot write, quote, "The red, rollicking river of his tongue rubbed me thewrong way." Instead write, "He kissed me with conviction," or, perhaps,more simply, "He kissed me. I gagged." Finally, as my last salvageablelittle jewel, I thought it might be helpful to begin by stating theobvious, or what should be obvious, a writer must, above all, write.Joseph Conrad, in a letter to a friend, describes his daily routine: "Isit down religiously every morning. I sit down for eight hours every day,and the sitting down is all." Note Conrad says he sits down to write everyday. Saturdays, Sundays, religiously, he says. Beyond anything, it seemsto me, a writer performs this sitting-down act primarily in search ofthose rare, very intense moments of artistic pleasure that are as real intheir way as the pleasures that can come from any other source - the rushof endorphins, for instance, that accompanies the making of a nice littlebit of dialogue. And this isn't to say that writing isn't painful - and itis, most of the time - but at the same time, there is no pleasure withoutthe pain. As much as writing hurts, it carries with it, at times, content,satisfaction, which, in part, I think, is what Conrad is getting at whenhe says, "The sitting down is all." In my own case, I get up at aboutsix-thirty, seven o'clock every day, try to be at work by eight, workuntil about one o'clock in the afternoon, work out for a couple of hours-. Uh, lifting weights is my hobby, but even when I'm doing that, I'mstill writing in my head, going over a bit of dialogue, kind of mumblingaloud, or trying to come up with just that right word that's been eludingme during the morning hours. Take shower, go back to work, and writeuntil about six o'clock at night. I work on Christmas, I work at NewYears, my birthday, my girlfriend's birthday - it's all I do. And yet, asmonotonous as it might sound to you, it gives me great, great pleasure.

Now, what I thought I -. That's sort of the end of the little preparedthing I'd done. What I want to do with you now is to do - is to tell you,basically, two stories. Uh, the pair of stories are kind of weddedtogether by the common theme, that I hope will sort of soak through byosmosis. I grew up, as President Gee said, in a small prairie town insouthern Minnesota, population, what, nine thousand or so? If you look ina dictionary under the word "boring," you will find a little pen-and-inkillustration of Worthington, Minnesota, where I grew up. On one side oftown, of the highway coming into town, you'll see soybeans, on the otherside of the highway, fields of corn. It's a place that gives new meaningto the word flat. The town, for reasons unknown, took pride, and to thisday still takes pride, in calling itself "The Turkey Capital of theWorld." Uh, why they took pride in this I'm not quite sure. EverySeptember in my home town, on September fifteenth there is an event called'Turkey Day." And what Turkey Day consists of is the farmers will puttheir turkeys in their trucks, uh, drive them into town, dump them infront of the Esso gas station on one end of Main Street, and then they'llherd the turkeys up Main Street, and we, the citizens of Worthington, willall sit on the curbs and watch the turkeys go by (laughs). Andthen we'd go home. That's our big day! Well, you can imagine what the restof the days are like.

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