writing

Freddie deBoer: Discouragement for Young Writers

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In what may be one of the most cynical but tell-it-like-it-is posts I’ve ever read, Freddie deBoer offers some “Discouragement for Young Writers”. It’s a must-read, in my opinion. First, a cautionary note:

A third of this is tongue in cheek. You’ll have to decide which third yourself.

I’m not a writer; I’m just someone who reads and writes a lot. So you may take all of this in a “credit only to the man in the arena” sense, and I wouldn’t blame you. But I’ll tell you: there are advantages. Not being a writer is a wonderful salve for your writing. I sometimes read things that writers have written and say to myself, if only s/he wasn’t a writer, s/he’d be going places.

I don’t think this is the one third that’s meant tongue in cheek:

You probably can’t make it as a writer. That’s the very first thing you should understand. Start every day by looking into the mirror and saying: I’ll never write that novel. I’ll never write that novel. I’ll never write that novel. Hopefully after you’ve gotten it through your skull you can get to work on something that will put money in your pocket. (Spoiler: it won’t be a lot. Within a rounding error of $0 is a nice, conservative assumption.) You might, if you aren’t too hung up on writing that novel, write a novel. There’s a small chance someone will buy it, once you’ve written the one that isn’t the one that you think about writing that gets in the way of your work. There’s even a remote possibility it’ll be good. Even really good. But probably not.

But this most likely is:

Buzz is nothing. Getting your name out there is nothing. All of the positive mentions and trackbacks and Facebook hits from that piece you did for somebody’s vanity project website are nothing.

The best thing to do, sometimes, is to ignore the vapid advice. Spot on:

It’s a fact of life that writers, who always aspire to speak with specificity and go in fear of abstraction, tend to give the most vague, useless advice on writing. “Use concrete language! Write about what you know! Listen to criticism!” Thanks, coach. They mean well. They really do. But “be specific in your writing” has as much content as “make a profit in your business” or “score more points in your football game.” Useless. All useless.

This part is definitely tongue in cheek. Some people do care.

Nobody gives a shit that you used to cut yourself. Nobody gives a shit that your parents divorced. Nobody gives a shit that you have cancer. Nobody cares.

But this is a good sound-off. I do think writing is worth trying (I’ve tried and failed):

So do it for awhile and if you don’t make it find something else that’s good enough. Then you can get all nostalgic about when you tried it out. I’m a romantic at heart, and it’s a beautiful thing to attempt.

Again, a must-read. Especially if you need a dash of reality to go with all that enthusiasm you’ve been inhaling.

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(hat tip: @fmanjoo)

RIP Roger Ebert

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That is what death means. We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know.

It is with a heavy heart that I learned of Roger Ebert’s death yesterday afternoon.

Thanks to Cheri Lucas for highlighting this blog post titled “I Remember You” Roger wrote about one year ago (which I read for the first time yesterday):

Memory. It makes us human. It creates our ideas of family, history, love, friendship. Within all our minds is a narrative of our own lives and all the people who were important to us. Who were eyewitnesses to the same times and events. Who could describe us to a stranger.

The passage below brought tears to my eyes, because in a hundred years we will remember, Roger.

Early one morning, unable to sleep, I roamed my memories of them. Of an endless series of dinners, and brunches, and poker games, and jokes, and gossip. On and on, year after year. I remember them. They exist in my mind–in countless minds. But in a century the human race will have forgotten them, and me as well. 

If you read one thing today, make it this.

Brian Doyle on Hearts and Lifetimes

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“Joyas Volardores” is an essay published in 2004 in which Brian Doyle considers the heart:

No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside…

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Beautiful.

On Quizzes, Movies, and Vladimir Nabokov

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Edward Jay Epstein, in a piece for The New York Review of Books titled “An A from Nabokov,” recollects the fall of 1954 when he took a course at Cornell with Vladimir Nabokov as the instructor:

He [Nabokov] then described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected—Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson—would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.

It’s a great story of how a pop quiz led Epstein to a side job watching movies and conversing with the great author.

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One of my all-time favorite books, listed in the Classics page on this site, is Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

Chinua Achebe on Writing Stories

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I learned today of Chinua Achebe’s death. His novel Things Fall Apart was one of the best books I read when I was in high school.

From this great 1994 Paris Review interview, Achebe shared what got him into writing:

I think the thing that clearly pointed me there was my interest in stories. Not necessarily writing stories, because at that point, writing stories was not really viable. So you didn’t think of it. But I knew I loved stories, stories told in our home, first by my mother, then by my elder sister—such as the story of the tortoise—whatever scraps of stories I could gather from conversations, just from hanging around, sitting around when my father had visitors. When I began going to school, I loved the stories I read. They were different, but I loved them too. My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel. I was the fifth of their six children. By the time I was growing up, my father had retired, and had returned with his family to his ancestral village.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp . . . Fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal.

Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not . . . they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.

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(via @longform)

Elizabeth Gilbert on Writing

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In this Paris Review piece published at the end of 2012, Julian Tepper writes about some (uncharacteristically caustic) writing advice he received from Philip Roth:

I would quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.

This week, Elizabeth Gilbert countered with a brilliant post on Bookish.com, a site that was unveiled this week:

Because, seriously–is writing really all that difficult? Yes, of course, it is; I know this personally–but is it that much more difficult than other things? Is it more difficult than working in a steel mill, or raising a child alone, or commuting three hours a day to a deeply unsatisfying cubicle job, or doing laundry in a nursing home, or running a hospital ward, or being a luggage handler, or digging septic systems, or waiting tables at a delicatessen, or–for that matter–pretty much anything else that people do?

Not really, right?

In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and share a little secret about the writing life that nobody likes to admit: Compared to almost every other occupation on earth, it’s f*cking great. I say this as somebody who spent years earning exactly zero dollars for my writing (while waiting tables, like Mr. Tepper) and who now makes many dollars at it. But zero dollars or many dollars, I can honestly say it’s the best life there is, because you get to live within the realm of your own mind, and that is a profoundly rare human privilege. What’s more, you have no boss to speak of. You’re not exposed to any sexual abuse or toxic chemicals on the job site (unless you’re sexually abusing yourself, or eating Doritos while you type). You don’t have to wear a nametag, and–unless you are exceptionally clumsy–you rarely run the risk of cutting off your hand in the machinery. Writing, I tell you, has everything to recommend it over real work.

In fact, maybe that’s why established authors complain so loudly about their tormented existences–so nobody else will find out how great writing actually is, and take their jobs away. (Kind of like those people who come home from amazing holidays, and then lie to their neighbors about how terrible that remote Mexican beach was, just to make sure the place remains undiscovered and unruined forever.)

Or maybe it’s just vanity that makes authors gripe so much about their ordeal. Maybe writers have simply come to believe themselves to be so very special, and their work so very important, that they can’t imagine anybody else capable of doing it: You, little one, could never possibly create what I have created, or withstand all that I have withstood, so you’d best not try at all.

I recommend reading the whole response here.

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(via Explore)

On Details, Imagination, and Living

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A wonderful post on details and imagination from James:

When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first thing you do? For most of us, it’s shutting off the alarm, which is often on our phones now. If you already have your phone, in hand, you will probably at least be tempted to check your texts, or facebook, or the weather. If you don’t do it then, you will almost certainly do it when you turn on your laptop in the cold morning light. Even before the digital age, we consumed information, first, even before we consumed food or other necessities. Growing up in the Northeast, I spent many winter mornings bathed in the soft glow of my old, titanic Mitsubishi tube television. It towered over me as I sat there, like a religious supplicant, waiting for its divine judgment. Two hour delay, or wait, wait CLOSED, victory! During those tense minutes watching the list of schools in my area scroll by along the bottom of the talking heads, I never felt hungry, or thirsty, or even tired in the cold dawn on all those winter mornings. I needed one thing, and one thing only. Details. I needed data, information, about how my day was going to play out. I needed to know. And I had discovered one of the strongest, and potentially most dangerous of human desires.

This is an interesting point, and I think it comes about for two reasons: 1) fiction is more readily available to us today, now than anyone in our real lives 2) it takes a certain amount of vulnerability to become invested in someone on a proactive basis, and so we choose to go with the easier world of fiction:

But it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’ve become filled with pseudo-emotions. People often seem more invested in fictional families, friends, and lovers, than their own.

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(hat tip: Cheri Lucas)

On Effective Opening Sentences

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What’s the best way to begin a blog post or an essay? Perhaps not with a question mark.

This great post summarizes useful techniques for a strong opening sentence: 

You can start with a blanket statement. Chapter Nine of Sol Stein’s excellent How to Grow a Novel begins with: “A writer cannot write what he does not read with pleasure.” Chapter Fourteen begins with: “All fiction writers are emigrants from nonfiction.”

Sometimes you can just be stark-blunt about what you intend to do. Chapter Eight of Stein’s book, on “Getting Intimate with the Reader,” starts out: “This is a chapter about opportunities.”

If you’re writing a blog post about unequal pay of women and men, you can start with: “This post is about unfairness.” Just tell the reader what the subject is.

If you’re writing about a difficult subject (for example, rape), you can begin: “Rape is not easy to write about.”

Make an exaggerated statement, then tone it down. “In Prohibition days, alcohol could be purchased illegally on every street corner. Actually, that’s an exaggeration, but in fact it’s true that . . .”

Involve the reader in a bit of conjecture. “Suppose you were faced with the choice of living with cancer every day, or obtaining treatment that may or may not work, at the cost of becoming bankrupt and homeless.”

Sometimes you can start with a statistic. “This year, over two hundred thousand Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer.”

Summarize the current state of affairs, then tell how it’s changed recently. “Until recently, new MBA graduates could count on getting a job straight out of school. That’s no longer the case.” 

Put up a straw man and knock it down. “The conventional view of [XYZ] is [ABC].” (That’s the straw man.) “But it turns out the conventional view is wrong.” (That’s knocking it down.) Naomi Klein often uses this technique.

Read the entire post here.

A Reflection on Loving a Schizophrenic

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This is a beautiful reflection by Kas Thomas on how he met and has fallen in love with a woman suffering from schizophrenia:

I stay with her not only because I understand her problems and want to be there for her, but because I’m totally taken by her (a polite way of saying I’m madly in love with her) and have been since the day we met. She’s truly a beautiful person inside and out. Guileless, straightforward, self-aware, good-hearted, open-minded, always truthful, always kind; the type of woman I’ve always wanted to meet and fall in love with. I could never say anything bad about her. (How could I? There’s nothing bad to say.) I could never do anything but love her, and want to take care of her. And I want what we have to last forever. 

I’ve told Sally many times, I never want to go on a first date ever again. I’ll never be interested in another woman. I’ll throw myself in front of a bus for her if she wants it. I’ll run naked through the streets if she says to. (I pray she never becomes that crazy, of course.) There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Sally.

Such courage to write so openly. Highly recommend reading in entirety.

Silas House on Writing Every Waking Minute

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Silas House teaches at Berea College and Spalding University’s M.F.A. program in creative writing. In this post, he offers the following advice to aspiring writers: “Write every waking minute.” By that, he means immerse yourself in thinking about your writing, your characters, your plot:

I live a few blocks from the campus where I teach. Every morning, I ride my bicycle to work. Along the way, I’m focusing on the cars speeding by me, seemingly intent on making the life of a bicyclist as miserable as possible. But I am also thinking about the main character in the novel I’m writing now.

The book is set in Key West, so naturally he rides his bicycle all over the Florida island. When pumping those pedals toward my office, I am not myself on an orange-leaf-strewed campus. I am my character, pedaling down to the beach after a long day of working as a hotel housekeeper. I see the world through his eyes. I imagine what he is thinking. I use that brief time to become him.

I transform the mundane task of grocery shopping into a writing exercise by studying my fellow shoppers through the eyes of my character, a man who is on the run from the law.

I eye each one with suspicion and dodge any cop who might be trotting along with a grocery basket in hand. I sometimes steal a quirk from a woman nearby to apply to one of my female characters in the book. I am multitasking, but there is stillness at work here.

This is excellent writing advice and I hope you read the whole thing.