It’s important to have space in which to think. Yesterday, I overheard someone complain, “I left my Blackberry at home, so I was so bored during my cab ride home. I just had to sit there.”
There are few things that I love more than looking out the window of a car, train, or bus. One day, when I was gazing out of a bus window, I was struck by a thought: “What do I want out of life?” “Well,” I thought, “I want to be happy.” … If I’d been checking my emails, I might never have had the idea for the happiness project.
Category Archives: Writing
Hatched from an egg
But first, my rule. I will never, ever ask a writer where she gets her ideas. I don’t care. I don’t care if the work is autobiographical, divined by magic, or hatched from an egg. The answers to these questions are rarely illuminating about the works themselves as much as they tell us what we want to know about an author. And just because we want to know doesn’t mean that it does us any good to do so.
After No Work
Anne Lamott calls them “the shitty first drafts”. Nancy Slonim Aronie writes “great work comes after good work which comes after lousy work which comes after no work. remember that order.” please do.
Workcrastination
You know how sometimes you read something and it’s like, wait, did I write that?
[Workcrastination] is when you blow off your novel for important stuff that needs doing, not fun stuff, but neccesary stuff. For example, right now. I know I need to be working on my novel, but I am doing things like grading student papers. (It must be done! It’s my job!), paying bills (It’s the first of the month!), etc.
Drunk, mad, sex-obsessed geniuses
“Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well enough alone? Why aren’t the books enough?” Julian Barnes poses these questions in Flaubert’s Parrot, his fictional biography of Gustave Flaubert. Perhaps, as readers, we enjoy the amateur detective work that literary biographies offer. We like to excavate the lives of famous authors and uncover the experiences that might have shaped their stories.
The problem is, writers’ lives don’t always make for great cinema. If writers are any good, it’s usually because they spend weeks alone, in a room, with a computer (or paper if they’re old-school).
Literary biopics usually cater to the fantasy that writers are drunk, mad, sex-obsessed geniuses inspired by the holy spirit (50% proof).
Own your one star reviews
I think it’s useful for all us writers to remember no one work pleases everyone, and you can’t make anyone like it if they don’t, and you can’t keep them from telling other people what they think of it, even if they hate it… and that’s fine. Learn to deal with it. Otherwise it doesn’t matter how much success or praise or satisfaction you earn through your writing, you’ll still obsess over those one-star reviews and it will eat away at your joy. That’s no way to live.
So: own your one star reviews, don’t let them own you. And once you own them, let ‘em go. You’ll feel better, and you’ll worry less about them going forward. Try it for yourself. You’ll see.
The way people speak without listening
How to define the timeless, seductive allure of Chekhov? Part of it lies in his elusiveness, subtlety, adroit dialogue, precise descriptions and confident use of understatement. Unlike Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, there is no sermonising, no extremes. He never tells us what to think. There are no heroes. There is little action. Chekhov instead makes telling use, as Eudora Welty once noted, of the way people speak without listening to each other. No one grasps the relevance of the untidy present better than Chekhov.
Toasted Cheese
Toasted Cheese 10:1 is up (we have a surprise for our readers! check it out!) with hey, look! a Snark Zone by me!
(Could there be any more exclamation marks in this post?)
By-products
I was having a conversation with a writer the other day, and he stated that the best things are always by-products. Happiness is a by-product, and I loved that he said that. You can plot your journey to success or happiness or wealth or whatever it is you’re looking for, but if you’re too focused on the end result, you’re going to miss anything good going on around you.
A part of the story
[C]reative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and, often, more accessible.
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In creative nonfiction, writers can be poetic and journalistic simultaneously. Creative nonfiction writers are encouraged to utilize literary and even cinematic techniques, from scene to dialogue to description to point of view, to write about themselves and others, capturing real people and real life in ways that can and have changed the world. What is most important and enjoyable about creative nonfiction is that it not only allows but also encourages the writer to become a part of the story or essay being written. The personal involvement creates a special magic that alleviates the suffering and anxiety of the writing experience; it provides many outlets for satisfaction and self-discovery, flexibility and freedom.
The Remainder Table 