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.
Category Archives: Writing
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.
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.
What Writing Is Really Like
I was kind of burned out after the Great Lit Journal Move of 2014 so for this month’s Absolute Blank article I decided to try something different: What Writing Is Really Like.
showing up
This time, I never promised myself that would speak Spanish. I just promised myself that I would practice every day. … I feel like the path for my Spanish work had been set in a lot of ways by my yoga practice. For me yoga has never been about how flexible you are, or whether you can stand on your hands. It’s about showing up. In a way, almost anything that’s worth doing is just about showing up. Not worrying about the big goal but taking baby steps, every single day and trusting that you’ll get there.
We made things.
George [McWhirter] stressed that Creative Writing was not an academic subject. We did not study things. We made things. Before I’d met George, no one had ever told me that writing poetry was practical, but this approach demystified the creative process. I began to look at writing as a constructive, physical act. Writing became the artful arrangement of words. There was no teary-eyed emotional or mystical dimension to making better work. The words you used either worked or they didn’t. And if they did not work, there were steps that could be taken to fix them.
This.
If you wait to finish everything else on your to-do list first, it’ll never happen. You’ve got to make time to write. Put in on your calendar!
Speaking of which, TC’s spring writing contest is coming up. The spring Three Cheers and a Tiger Writing Contest is a 48-hour mystery contest and this year runs the weekend of March 21-23. Mark it on your calendars and get ready to write!
Ira Glass on Storytelling
I ran across this earlier this week and it reminded me of of the “why are you telling me this?” quote I posted a while back.
The I-don’t-have-5-minutes-to watch version:
- A story has two key building blocks 1) an anecdote and 2) a moment of reflection.
- An anecdote is a sequence of actions.
- Start with the action! Raise a question from the beginning. Keep raising questions. If you raise a question, it implies you’re going to answer it at some point. This is what keeps people watching/listening/reading.*
- The moment of reflection is the point of the story. It’s the “why are you telling me this?” part.
- You need both!
- In a good story, you flip back and forth between the two.
*I agree this is what gives a story momentum, but at the same time I don’t think all questions need to be explicitly answered in stories. In fact, I prefer if they aren’t. You’ve got to leave something for your audience to figure out on their own / argue about for decades 😉
this vocation is not a sprint
Postal submissions taught writers that this vocation is not a sprint. Writing is a series of marathons separated by long respites, where we regain breath and build strength. It is time for writers to slow down again, so that our performance in the next race can be better, more meaningful, and if we are lucky, closer to the eternal, mysterious rewards of art.
The Remainder Table 