Author Archives: Theryn

A blog doesn’t seem to have any literary merit at all

Paul Theroux really doesn’t like blogs:

You could say blog-like, but I think “blog-like” is a disparaging term. I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It’s something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn’t seem to have any literary merit at all. It’s a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.

—Paul Theroux

Oh, PT. I do love your writing, but I think you’re conflating form and content. There are plenty of books that could be described as “illiterate,” “hasty,” “babbling,” and without “any literary merit” (see, e.g.: any book “written” by a reality show personality) but somehow I doubt you loathe books or think calling something “book-like” is disparaging. Am I right?

What storytellers are supposed to do

Being anxious is very much like being watched – by another, by your partner, by the world, by yourself. Anxiety is about sprinting ahead, spinning tales and stories and the long, long train of endless possibilities. It’s what storytellers are supposed to do; useful during the act of writing, not so useful in the living of a non-panicked life. Anxious people are in search of a scroll; a scroll that can be rolled out to tell us the meaning of all that has already happened and warn us of what is to come. We are imaginative people who carve something out of nothing and yet we’re still in search of the Oracle. No wonder we’re a little bit unsteady, a little bit on edge.

—Emily Rapp

Those who stay and those who leave

During the panel “The Art of the Novel” on Sunday, novelist Susan Straight said that while writing her new book she learned there were two types of people: those who stay and those who leave. … Straight’s novel portrays characters who migrate back and forth between California and Louisiana, in efforts to escape the past and find a future.

—Chris Daley

Good Things

One day, a month or so ago, when I was reading through my feeds, there happened to be a bunch of posts with a similar idea behind them:

This confluence of posts inspired me to re-start the Friday FUM. Here’s today’s.

I love making lists (my favorite apps are probably the list-making ones). So satisfying. The idea of making lists not to cross things off, but to be mindful of the good things from your day? Brilliant. But I think the reason it so resonated with me is because mentally I’d already been doing this.

In writing, we speak of missing the forest for the trees, i.e. getting so caught up in the details of a sentence or paragraph that we forget the overall story. But in life, I think sometimes we miss the trees for the forest. That is, whatever big thing’s going on in your life has a tendency to overwhelm everything else. So if whatever’s going on is bad, the impulse is to think everything in your life is bad. Which it isn’t. It doesn’t matter how overwhelming the big picture, there are always little things for which to be appreciative. True, the good things may be very little things compared the Big Bad Thing. But they are still good things. Even if they are little. A hot shower after a run. That first cup of coffee in the morning. Waking up to a sunny day.

Whenever someone remains positive despite tragic circumstances, people marvel. To a healthy person, the cheerful dying person is an enigma. But after the past while, I think I understand. Feeling sorry for yourself feels like crap. No one wants to be cast in the role of victim.

I have a long-standing policy of refusing to worry about things I have no control over. You know how people are always griping about gas prices or taxes or other things that the average person has no power to change? And then they wonder why they feel angry and frustrated and put-upon all the time? I can’t see the point. Agonizing about such things isn’t going to change them. Venting might make you feel marginally better briefly, but in the end, it just makes you feel worse.

Choosing to appreciate little good things in the face of a Big Bad Thing is empowering precisely because you’re making a choice. You’re taking control, saying, “Ok, I have no control over X. I do, however, have control over a, b, and c. So instead of spending my time being angry about X, which won’t change anything anyway, I’m going to spend it appreciating a, organizing b, and doing c.”  And on a micro-level, that feels good (even if the big picture is bad). So you keep doing it, because when it comes down to it, everyone wants to feel good (especially when they’re feeling bad).

From the outside, it might seem ridiculous to think that someone could be simultaneously grieving and yet still taking pleasure in life. But you only get one. It’s your choice what to do with it. Even when it doesn’t turn out like you expected.

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.  —Randy Pausch

Some things worth watching/reading:

The slow death of logical thought

In recent years I’ve tutored students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism whose writing is disorganized almost beyond human help, but they seldom mention “writing” as what they came to the school to learn. … They return from a reporting assignment with a million notes and a million quotes and no idea what the story is about.

The reason, I assume–and I don’t expect a Nobel Prize for this deduction–is that people now get their information mainly from random images on a screen and from random messages in their ears, and it no longer occurs to them that writing is linear and sequential; sentence B must follow sentence A. Every year student writing is a little more disheveled; I’m witnessing the slow death of logical thought. So is every English teacher in America.

—William Zinsser

What must happen

[Friday Night Lights]’s sole focus is on the episodes themselves, resisting what has become standard in TV marketing – online franchising in the form of tabloid features, extensive merchandising, and audience participation via wiki fan sites.  … It’s a crucial decision, if you think of FNL (and I do) as well-crafted art.  The serial narrative – in both TV and literature – when offered up to fans as participants, can become vulnerable.  …  The creators of FNL are not interested in what fans want or need to happen to the characters, but rather about what must happen to them, in the world they’ve created.

—Sonya Chung