And it’s impossible to imagine ever returning to a life in which I treat my writing like a frivolous hobby or prioritize writing about other people’s novels over working on my own.
Category Archives: Writing
Want to understand
I like to write journal entries in the voices of my characters. I sometimes even do it for people who have hurt me deeply in real life. The challenge is that you have to discover something new about the person or character. If your exercise reveals only what you came to the page with in the first place, then you have not tapped into the empathy you are going to need to write the story you want to write. You really to have to want to understand that person, which means you may have to let go of that anger.
Do not care
My parents will not consider me a real writer in a way they can truly understand until they can go to Barnes & Noble and find something I’ve written, not in an anthology, but with my name alone on the spine. My writing career is the least relevant thing about me when it comes to my family and friends. It’s not that they don’t care but honestly, they do not care.
To know that secret
He liked to watch me on my laptop, how my face changed depending on what I was doing, how sometimes I laughed like I was reading about the best secret, how he wanted to know that secret. Sometimes, he would take my laptop from me and stand on the coffee table and hold it over his head and I would pretend to be angry and then he would run to another room and hide the laptop and when he came back I would give him my undivided attention. He liked that too.
Go, read the whole thing.
How you go from a blog to a book
BlogHer is about talking about how you go from a blog to a book, and how us writers, us people who live inside our heads, how we tap in to our own experiences to use for our writing and if maybe those experiences are too close, too hard to tell, too hard to share, we then turn our own experiences in to fiction, so that even though others might read it and not know those were our own childish eyes watching these events, we will know, and we will remember, and in the telling we will heal.
Value in print
I know that lots of interesting stuff is happening online, with short fiction in particular, but I don’t read it. Something about the internet makes my attention span shut off. And as a writer, there is such value in print. Online publication seems lesser to me. Though I’d like to be proven wrong about this, if only for the sake of the trees.
I guess I’ll just go shoot myself now. j/k.
Writing is my thing
[W]riting is my thing. When it is all said and done, I want to write. There was a panel at BlogHer where International Activists spoke about their writing and my heart charged with inspiration and what I write has never been as noble, will never be as potent, but I was reminded that I do have a voice and I can use it for good. I’m feeling inspired.
More or less completely at sea
I think what I’m ultimately trying to say is that it’s dangerous to say too much too definitively about craft in the abstract. If you feel absolutely overwhelmed by a project – that’s good. If you have absolutely no idea how or where to begin – that’s good too. No matter where one is in one’s career, a writer, it seems to me, ought to feel more or less completely at sea as they begin to approach the question or the subject they hope to address. There are two kinds of repetition. There is the kind we find inside our work, the themes that burble up lava-like from our subconscious again and again, and which we cannot resist and should not, I think, criticize in others. And then there is the repetition that ought to be resisted, that which gives us a program, a strategy that can be applied to any subject. This we should criticize in others. Art should never be the result of habit, it should strive eternally for the fresh and the new even when we work in forms we did not invent. Craft, we should vigilantly remind ourselves, means to make something absolutely new where before there was nothing at all.
A book is much more personal
Books and blogs are very different things. You write a blog every day, it’s super-topical, you communicate with your readers – and you can assume your readers have a certain level of knowledge, even that many are geeks. A book is much more personal. It’s more personal to write, and it’s a quieter, more personal, intimate experience to read a book. I didn’t want the book to be dated next week. And in the book I wanted to express something that’s under the surface in the blog – that cycling makes me happy. In the book I wanted to say that overtly.
Now this is interesting. Lately I’ve been thinking the changing expectations of/by readers might be the key to my dissertation and I think this ties into that. No one expects a reader of a book to email the writer and announce that they’re reading the book or that they’re on page 182 or that they like it or hate it or that they’re done. I mean, sure, some readers do that. But it’s not expected. You’re not called a lurker or creepy or a stalker if you just read a book w/o notifying the writer that you’ve done so.
But if you just read a blog, you risk being called all those things. As a blog reader, the expectation seems to be that you will announce that you’re reading (in some fashion). Reading blogs (& other online writing) privately is seen as suspect. Case in point: The first mentions I saw of Twitter’s new “fast follow” feature (allows people to follow via sms w/o joining Twitter) yesterday called it creepy and stalkerish. Really? Keep in mind that people can already read Twitter pages (unless private) w/o following and/or follow via RSS. So, what’s the difference? I don’t think there is a substantive one. I think it’s just that it reminded people that they don’t like it when they can’t “see” everyone who is following them.
I think part of it is a writers vs. people-who-write thing. I think the writers tend to be cool with not knowing who all is reading their writing (because they view it as “writing,” i.e. something that they have made/created). But it tends to make the people-who-write uncomfortable because they don’t view what they write as being a creation (separate from self) but a transparent reflection of self. So, looked at that way, it makes sense that they want their readers to be their friends (or at least acquaintances). And that they don’t want “secret” readers.
On the readers’ side, I think when one has been used to considering reading a private activity, this expectation of being social at every turn is a hard adjustment to make, harder than seems to be taken into account. Especially when the most ardent readers tend not to be known for their gregarious personalities. And there’s also the weirdness of being made to feel bad for reading. Just reading. When did readers start to get labeled with terms formerly reserved for deviant (m-w def: deviating especially from an accepted norm) behavior? And does that mean that just-reading (as opposed to “participating in the conversation”) is now deviant? (ooh.)
And then there’s the whole flip side of this reader/writer thing, and that’s distance. Book writers know they have readers, of course (or they hope they do/will), but those readers are distant (not always any more, but in general). So, as Weiss says so elegantly, the book is more personal because it is more individual. Less influenced by the audience. Whereas blog readers (at least some of them, the conversators) are close. They’re in the blogger’s face, cheering or booing as the case may be. So the audience gets entwined in the narrative.
Folk-art tradition in writing
In visual art, there is respect for folk-art, and a market. There is the equivalent of this in self-published on-line pieces, [Ania Szado] said. Perhaps we are developing a respectable folk-art tradition in writing, which may mean that creative writing programs become less important.
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I kind of love the idea that Lulu is the writing equivalent of Etsy.
The Remainder Table 