“Well, here’s the thing,” [a travel magazine editor] told me. “Many of our readers don’t actually want to travel. They just want to think of themselves as travelers.”
Wow. They don’t want to travel… they just want to pretend.
I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised. Many people say they want to write a book, but most of them don’t follow through. Maybe some of them don’t want to write—they just want to call themselves a writer. They want to have written a book.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Might as well dream a little!
But if you really want to do something—not just dream about it—then you have to go beyond reading travel magazines or thinking about the book you’re not writing. You can’t be an impostor traveler. You can’t live your life through the lens of aspiration.
Category Archives: Quotes
the finish line
The finish line at the end of a career is no different from the finish line at the end of a match. The objective is to get within reach of that finish line, because then it gives off a magnetic force. When you’re close, you can feel that force pulling you, and you can use that force to get across. But just before you come within range, or just after, you feel another force, equally strong, pushing you away. It’s inexplicable, mystical, these twin forces, these contradictory energies, but they both exist. I know, because I’ve spent so much of my life seeking the one, fighting the other, and sometimes I’ve been stuck, suspended, bounced like a tennis ball between the two.
So. Real. I don’t think it’s ‘inexplicable’ or ‘mystical’ though. Isn’t it obvious what pushes you away from the finish line? Once you cross it (unless you’re in a position to rest on your laurels for the rest of your life, which most of us are not), you have to find a new goal, start over. Starting is always hard, but it’s even more so when you’ve been focused on a major goal for a really long time. And when you’d like to something different than what’s seen as the natural next step, the decision can be fraught.
I’m not done my dissertation draft, but I’ve officially reached the point at which I would have a 12- to 15-page paper the night before it was due (all-nighters ftw). Which means for the first time in this process I can see the finish line. Realistically, a few more weeks and I will be sticking a spork in it. I’m… relieved. Maybe the thrill will come later, after I’ve finished formatting it (so not looking forward to that), or after the feedback process, or after the defense, or after the official “yes, you are graduating” notice, or… well, let’s just say, I’m not one for counting my chickens before they’re hatched. But a weight lifted this week.
not writing
Many of the successful published writers I hear talk on panels at conferences make it sound as if they are writing machines, as if they haven’t taken a day off from writing in years. Part of my success as a writer was not writing. If I hadn’t spent all those years teaching and reading and editing the work of other writers, I am certain I wouldn’t be the writer, and person, I am today. There are infinite ways to be a writer with a capital W, just as there are infinite ways to tell a story.
making memories matter in the present
Stuart [Dybek] surprised me when he told us on the first day of class that writing was about memory—making memories matter in the present. Writing, description in particular, was a matter of translating personal obsessions into words. When you write you explore your own mind, a process that is largely intuitive and unconscious.
the disappointment of losing
Graduating … means you have experienced success already. And some of you – and now I’m talking to anyone who has been dumped – have not gotten the job you really wanted or have received those horrible rejection letters from grad school. You know the disappointment of losing or not getting something you badly want. When that happens, show what you are made of.
writing has a pattern
The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn’t. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.
I subscribe to The New Yorker fiction podcast and one of the recent ones was “Paul Theroux reads Elizabeth Taylor.” Elizabeth Taylor? hmm, weird. Sure enough, there’s another Elizabeth Taylor, an English novelist. This quote is on her Wikipedia page (and elsewhere), but no one seems to cite the original source.
radical revision
For the same reason that most businesses fail slowly (by focusing on small details instead of big-picture stuff), most writers can’t get their work better than a certain level of passable mediocrity because they’re “optimizing” the small stuff before they hit on a project that’s worth optimizing. They approach revision by thinking about word choice and commas and cuts and line breaks, but those things can only make a poem or a novel or whatever 1-5% better. A radical revision that completely rethinks the scope or the flow or what have you could make it twice as good.
work worth doing
“I can tell you what I believe is the secret to a happy life,” [Sandra Day O’Connor] said.
“What’s that, Justice?” I asked. … “What’s your secret?”
“Work worth doing,” she answered firmly.
“What about relationships?” I asked. …
“No,” she said. “Work worth doing, that’s all you really need.”
—The Secret to Happiness, in Three Words,
According to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
you don’t have to go very far
LTM: What do you say when people make excuses for not traveling?
PT: It’s like people who say, “I don’t have time to read.” It’s just an excuse, and it’s a pretty lame excuse. I can understand why someone might not have enough money to travel to distant places, but you don’t have to go very far to travel. You can find difference, and something to see, anywhere.
LTM: What do you bring with you wherever you go?
PT: I really wouldn’t go anywhere without a book to read. Also a notebook and a pen.
the incredible fragmentation of things
Rebecca Scherm: What might we be surprised to see in your first drafts?
A.M. Homes: The enormous number of pieces of paper, the incredible fragmentation of things. Fragments and half-sentences that I don’t put together for a long time. Hundreds of pages of notes, and then I build the story from that, like knitting or sewing. Increasingly, I work by hand, with pencil and paper. I get better connectivity that way, but then I have to type it up really quickly because I can’t read my handwriting.
The Remainder Table 