Category Archives: Writing

A culture of readers

[Cate Bush] was skeptical about the value of [the workshop] method, and said that teaching writing can’t really be done except by teaching reading. There’s a need to create a culture of readers.

—Keith Oatley

omg, yes. IMO, the top three things you can do to “learn” to write:

1. Read a lot, and widely. Don’t just read what you know you like; take risks. It’s not a lifetime commitment; it’s a book (or a story). Read in your genre and outside of it. Read stuff you don’t like. Read stuff you don’t think you’ll like (but maybe you will). Read stuff you know nothing about before you start reading. Read stuff that’s “hard” and stuff that’s “easy,” etc. Read, read, read.

2. Edit other writers’ work. Join a writing group, volunteer as a reader for a journal. I know it takes time. But you know what? If you give up some of your time for other writers, it will come back to you. Learning to identify the flaws in other people’s writing makes it so much easier to see them in your own. So when you come back to your own work, instead of floundering around, knowing something isn’t right but unsure what exactly isn’t working, you can edit with purpose.

3. Write.

You only need to tell your story

My writing students have been bringing family images to my memoir class for 20 years. They are mainly women, painfully eager to know how to use writing to make sense of their life narrative–who they are, who they once were, what heritage they were born into–and they are immobilized by the size of the task. Where to start? Where to stop? What to put in? What to leave out? How to find the story’s proper shape and sequence? How to deal equitably with all that is still unreconciled…

I sympathize with their despair; there’s just much too much stuff in the cluttered attic of memory. I can only offer one word of salvation: Reduce! You must decide what is primary and what is secondary. You’re not required to tell everybody’s story; you only need to tell your story. If you give an honest accounting of the important people and events in your life, as you best remember them, you will also tell the story of everybody who needs to be along on the ride. Throw everything else away.

—William Zinsser

Not Writing

Writing is hard—writers say this all the time, and I think probably only other writers believe it. But it’s not nearly as hard, in my experience, as not writing.

During my should-be-writing years, I thought about my novel all the time. Increasingly, these were not happy or satisfying thoughts.

…

I woke one night in the midst of a minor panic attack. It wasn’t unusual for me wake in the night, anxious and scared—and I always knew the source of the panic right away. But it was rare for my heavy-sleeping husband to wake at the same time. And instead of reassuring him and letting him get back to sleep, I told him the naked, humbling truth. I told him that if I didn’t finish my novel, I thought my future happiness might be at risk. He wiped his eyes and yawned and said, “OK. Let’s figure out how to make this happen.”

It didn’t happen overnight, but the tide of my life shifted.

—Susanna Daniel

A necessary part of life

[People’s] differences give rise to disagreements, and the combination of these disagreements can give rise to even greater misunderstandings. As a result, sometimes people are unfairly criticized. This goes without saying. It’s not much fun to be misunderstood or criticized, but rather a painful experience that hurts people deeply. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from others that they’re able to create their own independent selves. … Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

—Haruki Murakami,
What I Talk About When I Talk About Writing (p. 19)

Empowering the writing self

Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer’s main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.

—Ted Solotaroff

Every Word I Write

And so this morning, I went for a ride, trying to find that freedom, trying to think of nothing, and I passed Barney, standing miserably at the end of his driveway, the best part of his life over, nothing but suffering and sadness ahead, the crows circling overhead waiting for him to die—and I thought of my mother. I thought of the way she used suffering as a form of control, of how guilty I feel even today for wanting nothing more than to simply express myself, of how much I have been made to worry, still, that every word I write and every thing I say will only cause her pain.

And I thought, Fuck you, Barney.

I pedaled away, my lungs filling with breath, the tires humming beneath me, and for the next two hours, thought of nothing.

—Shalom Auslander

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?

—T. Scott Plutchak

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.

—Kate Monahan

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!