Category Archives: Writing

A sense of enjoyment

When I write I make a conscious effort to generate a sense of enjoyment–to convey to my readers that I found the events I’m describing more than ordinarily interesting, or unusual, or amusing, or emotional, or bizarre. Otherwise why bother to describe them? I also try to convey the idea that I was feeling great when I did my writing–which I almost never was; writing well is hard work. But readers have a right to believe that you were having a good time taking them on your chosen voyage.

—William Zinsser

So Rainy!

[N]o one needs to watch the news every night, unless one is married to the anchor. Otherwise, you are mostly going to learn more than you need to know about where the local fires are, and how rainy it has been: so rainy! That is half an hour, a few days a week, I tell my students. You could commit to writing one page a night, which, over a year, is most of a book.

—Anne Lamott

Once you set the pace, the rest will follow

To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed—and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

—Haruki Murakami
in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008, p. 5)

So I have this thing where I’ll see/hear Someone Who is More Well-Known than Me (which is to say, pretty much everyone) doing or saying something that I’ve been doing or saying for eons, and I’ll be “Wait, what? I said/did that First!” Sometimes I think I’m secretly an innovator—except I never realize what I’m doing/saying is bleeding edge until someone else scoops me. (This is why I will never be rich ;-)) Or maybe this is a common thing. Let me know.

Anyhow. Please note the date on my article, “Starting Will Always Be Hard: What Running Taught Me About Writing.”

Probably the most important thing that running has taught me is that no matter how long you’ve done something and how much you love it, starting will always be hard. Start anyway. If you don’t, you’ll never get to experience that moment when everything clicks and you’re sailing: your feet are flying across the pavement or your fingers are smoking over the keyboard. And afterward, when you’re done? Well, that feeling is sheer euphoria.

Genius Inhabits You

[Genius] comes in flashes and then leaves, because you don’t possess genius—not even if you happen to be declared one. Instead genius inhabits you, enables you, fills you. I think the creative world would be better off by far—perhaps less selfish and competitive—if we embrace a concept of genius that envisions it as free-floating and collective, rather than bound up in the individual. Genius is something that strikes us, something we occasionally tap into unaware. We should be more concerned with this timeless, incomprehensible force that inhabits writers than with the accolades we use the genius word to bestow.

—Steven Wingate

A very small story

I had a lot to say and no one to talk to. So I wrote a story, a very small story, to send to friends and family.
…
Writing a novel is long and lonely. … I’ve been either off somewhere doing research or at home peering into art gallery catalogues for five years. So I fell out of touch with many people. If I saw anyone they’d ask what was going on with the novel. A hard question to answer, that.
…
New vocabulary was a bonus. From a friend living in Japan: “It’s great to hear about your progress, even if it’s a kolekutibu iimeeru.” (collective e-mail)

—Katherine Govier

Like they were notepads

Before I worked in publishing, and learned about things like first editions and galleys, I treated books like they were notepads, scribbling lists and phone numbers into them, stuffing articles between pages to read later. It’s these lists I flip back to now to remind me of who I was years before—a journal of sorts. … What will eventually become of these books with their treasure trove of notes and inscriptions? Electronic books are just pixels on a screen. These personal connections to the past make physical books so much more than that.

—Megan Alix Fishmann

I like finding ephemera that others have left behind in books. I love the idea of using a printed book like a notepad, a journal. I think that’s why I liked The English Patient so much.

And yet, I don’t underline or scribble in the margins of my own books. I don’t tuck things inside them to be found years later. I think this is mostly habit.

I didn’t actually own a lot of books as a child, so the ones that I did have I read over and over. Keeping those books note-free made each reading its own, uninfluenced by past readings. Most books came from the library, and of course, writing in library books was not allowed (never mind that lots of people do it anyway!). Later, when I’d run out of library books to read, I’d buy books from the used bookstore, read them, trade them back for store credit, buy a new set of books, and so on. Obviously, the better condition the books were in, the more credit you got. And things that were tucked inside would be lost (or become someone else’s).

By the time I started buying books and keeping them I was stuck in my not-writing-in-books ways (I also don’t turn down corners or anything like that).

Wooden tables with green lamps

[T]he fact of not going to the library [as a kid] never bothered me much until as an adult I found myself in one. It was a bit like a religious experience. Tall ceilings, imposing windows, rows of books, wooden tables with green lamps that loomed like ancient scholars bent over their ancient work. And silence, silence, everywhere silence. It was then that I realized that libraries are not just about the books. Yes, they are about the books, about voices from around the world that invite you into to slip between their covers, voices from the places one has not heard about, from people one could not have imagined. But it was the silence – being away from voices of one’s family, friends, inner voices of home-bound concerns, things to do, being away from voices that fills one’s mind so persistently and steadily that one mistakes them for one’s own – it was the silence that shocked me into listening, very hard, for faint whispers of a voice of my own.

—Maja Djikic

The rest of this quote is nice, but the sentence that got me was: “Tall ceilings, imposing windows, rows of books, wooden tables with green lamps that loomed like ancient scholars bent over their ancient work.” You mean there are actually libraries like that in the real world?!

Chalk this one up as one of the Great Disappointments of my youth. Every time I walked into a new library, I imagined it would be The One with the “[t]all ceilings, imposing windows, rows of books, [and] wooden tables with green lamps.” I spent the whole summer before junior high dreaming about the library, imagining it would be like this.

Why did I expect libraries to look like this? Because this is how libraries were depicted in books. And movies. But especially books.

When the junior high library turned out to be the usual—drop ceilings, metal shelving, Formica tables and plastic chairs, uncomfortably bright fluorescent lighting)—I was crushed. It was then gave up my dreams of wooden tables with green lamps. I still held my breath a little when going into a new library, but never in quite the same way, all wide-eyed anticipation unmitigated by cynicism.