It’s painful to write. It’s painful to take a clear look at your finances, at your health, at your relationships. At least it’s painful when you have no confidence that you can actually improve in those areas. I would not speak for anyone else, but most of my distractions … are traceable to a deep-seated fear that I may not ultimately prevail.
Category Archives: Quotes
Only slightly less morally repugnant than serial killers
In movies, writers are only slightly less morally repugnant than serial killers (unless the writer is a serial killer). According to Hollywood, writers are either parasites (Deconstructing Harry, Barton Fink, Capote, Misery); perverts (The Squid and the Whale, Adaptation, Wonder Boys, American Splendor); addicts (Permanent Midnight, Barfly, Leaving Las Vegas, Sideways), or sociopaths (La Piscine, Deathtrap, The Shining). They have monstrous egos and tiny, wizened hearts. Their moral compasses are permanently cracked; their personal relationships are cynically contrived to produce “experience,” which they feed to the insatiable maw of their craft. They are creatively constipated. They practice poor personal hygiene. They are not lovely to look at. It almost goes without saying that they are almost always male.
A particular reader’s relationship with a particular book
Reviews are not for authors. They’re not even about authors. You do not need our permission to write about our books. Because once they’re published they cease to be ours.
Reviews are for other readers. A review is about a particular reader’s relationship with a particular book.
8 Tips for Feeling Happier During an Unhappy Time
- Remind yourself of reasons to be grateful.
- Remember your body.
- Do something fun.
- Take action.
- Look for meaning.
- Connect with friends and family.
- Make something better.
- Act toward other people the way you wish they’d act toward you.
One side of the story
[N]o matter how confessional a writer might seem, you are only seeing what they want you to see. You know what they want you to know. There are few things more controlled, to my mind, than a personal blog. It’s easy to believe you know everything about a person when you follow their blog or their writing online but you don’t. … Were holding up a mirror to ourselves but are controlling the angle.
…
You also only get to see one side of the story when you read a personal blog. … You see one side of the story, my side … You see the side of the story I choose to show you[.]
A Small Variation
When people ask me if I think poetry is dying because of the new technologies, my response is—Our art survived even the invention of writing! Next to that the invention of the computer seems like a small variation.
The point of the place
A few years ago I used that passage in my memoir-writing class to suggest how to write about a place. Mere facts, I said, aren’t sufficient (“our house was on Spruce Street,” “the neighbors had a dog named Spot”). The task is to find the point of the place—its identifying idea. It may be waiting for you to find it. Or you may have to impose on the place some larger idea of your own.
Something that might endanger
[W]e’re bringing up generations of writers who think of [reviewing] as something that other people do, far away, or something that might endanger their fellowship, their recommendation, their job application, their grant application, their ability to get blurbs or to receive the coveted invitations to this or that conference, residency, or institute. This makes me uncomfortable, and it also makes me kind of lonely. I still think the writers are the smartest, most interesting, funniest, weirdest people in any given room. I miss hearing their voices.
This book has an owl in it
[Reviews that] don’t bother to provide the reader with an accurate description of the books’ formal or verbal properties [are untrustworthy]. To say that something is “boring” is not a statement about a book, although the speaker may think that it is; it’s a statement about the reader’s poverty of equipment. … The marks of a trustworthy review, therefore, have a kind of doubleness: the reviewer manages to assert somehow that the book under discussion is of some importance for one reason or another; and second, a good review provides a formal description of the book’s properties, so that you could reconstruct it from the reviewer’s sketch of it. This description is not the same as a plot summary, although a plot summary may figure into it. What a formal description does is to show what a book is about in relation to the form in which the subject matter has been shaped or located. In order to write such a review, let’s say of a novel, you have to have a basic idea of how novels are constructed; you have to have the technical knowledge that allows you to stand back from the book and to say how a book is put together. By these criteria, quite a few book reviews are worthless. They are made up of what I call Owl Criticism. With Owl Criticism, you have statements like, “This book has an owl in it, and I don’t like owls.”
Portable Things
I find [a] portable existence often quite enjoyable, (even though it exists in opposition to my need for a permanent home). I have always been drawn to (read: obsessed with) portable things, campers, suitcases, compact living spaces, yurts, teepees, etc. So I suppose it fulfills something in me that yearns for a kind of “lightness”, spontaneity, and adventure (living in the unknown). And I’m fascinated with how it actually helps and impacts my books in many ways. The work becomes influenced by the randomness of the location indirectly.
The Remainder Table 