The sprawling mess of life is why we need stories, a fleeting sense of order so we return to life with the unproven but irresistible conviction our mistakes and emergencies matter, so life might make sense too.
Author Archives: Theryn
Tell a Story
Every piece of writing should tell a story. This is as true for a report for my boss … as it is for an essay that I may be preparing for print, or a tale about Josie that I post here. Same thing for any kind of a presentation that I might do for a conference: What’s the plot? Who are the characters? Where’s the dynamic tension? How do I want the audience to feel when they’ve come to the end?
What you’re working on will take longer than you think it should
From a post titled “How NOT to get discouraged with writing projects”:
Assume that what you’re working on will take longer than you think it should. The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop suggests that “the schedule for any project you undertake should probably be expanded by 50 percent over what you think is right.” By allowing yourself more time to work than you may need, you’ll reduce stress, enjoy the process more, and you won’t get overwhelmed by last minute details.
Essentially, this is saying if I think a project should take me a day, I should allot 1.5 days to work on it. To which, I laugh. If that were all, I’d be golden. In other words, I’m either grossly under-estimating project length, or I’m taking way too long to do stuff. Probably a bit of both. All I know is something’s gotta change!
Be in it for passion
If you love writing or making music or blogging or any sort of performing art, then do it. Do it with everything you’ve got. Just don’t plan on using it as a shortcut to making a living.
The only people who should plan on making money from writing a book are people who made money on their last book. Everyone else should either be in it for passion, trust, referrals, speaking, consulting, change-making, tenure, connections or joy.
The deep river was running
There are a number of mysteries in [Penelope Fitzgerald’s] life, areas of silence and obscurity. One of these has to do with “lateness”. How much of a late starter, really, was she? She always said in interviews that she started writing her first novel (The Golden Child) to entertain her husband, Desmond Fitzgerald, when he was ill. But, like many of the things she told interviewers, there is something a little too simple about this. At least one story was published before that first novel, and her archive reveals how much was going on in her interior life before she started publishing.
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Fitzgerald’s years of teaching – it’s evident from her letters – were often hard grind, exhausting and frustrating, in that staffroom full of “exhaustion, worry and reproach”. There is a poignant note inside the back cover of her teaching notebook for 1969, a long time before she started to publish: “I’ve come to see art as the most important thing but not to regret I haven’t spent my life on it.” Yet the conversations she was having with writers in her teaching books show that she was always thinking about art and writing: they show how the deep river was running on powerfully, preparing itself to burst out.
Climbing into other lives in other worlds
I never had the goal of being rich, and I have never been super-ambitious. A newspaper’s big enough for me. As long as I was able to make a living from my writing, I was happy. My ambition was to have people consider my writing truly great. Look, I need to be writing because you can’t be more alive than when you’re climbing into other lives in other worlds, whether it’s the Galapagos Islands or the Arctic circle. I’ve felt rich from the beginning – from the day I split the $40,000 advance for my first book.
You learn by failing
I don’t think of myself as an author. I think of myself as a writer, because writing is what I do. I’m always taken aback when others refer to me as “famous” or a “celebrity.” What a weird idea. The concept has no real application. It doesn’t serve a writer to start thinking of herself in those terms because it interferes with the work. Writing is an internal process. Success is external and not something we can control in any event. I foster that disconnect because it keeps me grounded.
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My big gripe about newer writers is they’re not willing to put the time in. Somebody’ll write one book and they’re asking me who my agent and my editor are, and I’m thinking, Don’t you worry, sweetheart, you’re not any good yet. Give yourself time to get better. Writing is really hard to master. You learn by failing over and over, but a lot of people don’t care for that, thanks.
Insecurity, rejection and disappointment
The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. … They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn’t reward persistence, that doesn’t see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn’t trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: “So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?”
The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry — always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media — has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.
Study history or mathematics or sociology or engineering
I am occasionally asked what you should study in uni (or “college” as USians call it) to prepare for a career as a writer. Should you major in creative writing?
In a word: NO.
The best preparation for a writing career are saleable skills in some other area. If you want to go to college study history or mathematics or sociology or engineering or whatever else takes your fancy. Variety is good. Anything, really, other than creative writing.
What adults read now
I think there’s a worry that if [literary fiction is] funny then perhaps there’s something slight about it. That it’s not as important as a deeply researched, earnest, historical novel, or a kind of humorless tale of contemporary life. I think there possibly was a moment in the ‘60s and ‘70s when the serious books tended to be pretty funny. I don’t know if that’s as true these days. … I think it’s being done, but it’s not as front and center, not as widely read as it used to be, fiction that does that sort of thing. Maybe it’s also linked to readerships, how they’ve changed over the years. Or maybe it all got eaten up by Harry Potter and Twilight. I think, more and more, that’s what adults read now. All the people we’ve talked about are people who write hilarious, heartwrenching, and often horrific fiction, and they wrote for grown-ups. Maybe there aren’t enough grownups who want to read that sort of thing anymore.
The Remainder Table 