Category: Writing

Writer’s Desk: Write Like You Read

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Virginia Woolf (1902)

One of Virginia Woolf’s more famous essays is “How Should One Read a Book?” And rightly so. It’s a loving and vigorous defense of not just reading itself but how to approach it with both a judicious and wide-roaming eye. She insists, in short, on reading whatever you please:

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none…

Use the same approach when writing. Hear people out, seek their counsel, take what makes sense. As Woolf says about reading:

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions…

Write freely, but not thoughtlessly.

Writer’s Desk: Bridge the Divide

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A Rhodes Scholar who left Oxford to join the Marines in 1968, Karl Marlantes served one tour of duty in the Vietnam War before returning home and spending the next few decades trying to understand what happened over there and how to communicate it to anybody else.

In “Why I Write,” Marlantes described being surrounded by protestors once in 1970:

They shouted obscenities and jeered at me. I could only stand there stunned, thinking of my dead and maimed friends, wanting desperately to tell these students that my friends and I were just like them: their age, even younger, with the same feelings, yearnings, and passions…

So he spent the next 30 years writing Matterhorn, a wrenching masterpiece which is just about the only Vietnam War novel that deserves mentioning in the same breath with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

Marlantes did this to tell his story. But he also wanted to bridge that gap he felt back in 1970:

Ultimately, the only way we’re ever going to bridge the chasms that divide us is by transcending our limited viewpoints. My realization of this came many years ago reading Eudora Welty’s great novel Delta Wedding. I experienced what it would be like to be a married woman on a Mississippi Delta plantation who was responsible for orchestrating one of the great symbols of community and love. I entered her world and expanded beyond my own skin and became a bigger person…

Put the words down. Build a world. Get the reader out of their own skin, even just for a moment. It’s one of the great rewards of writing.

Writer’s Corner: Learn and Share

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Nikki Giovanni (Elsa Dorfman, c.1980)

The late Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024) was a poet who did a lot of things most people don’t expect poets to do. She started her own publishing company. She recorded an album with a gospel choir. She even interviewed James Baldwin on television.

She also gave good advice to those willing to listen:

I know some writers say you must write every day, but I believe you should read every day. Learn something every day.

Even if it’s only something new to cook or to eat. Even if you just sit in your backyard and watch the birds or the squirrels. Give yourself over to something new.

Embrace the possibility. Why? Because you have to have something to talk about. Something you can connect for yourself and for your readers.

Writing is about sharing. Be sure you are in a giving way…

You never know, that recipe might come in handy for your next story.

Writer’s Desk: Start Cutting

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Sometimes when stuck for inspiration, or just as a way of jump-starting things, William S. Burroughs liked to use something he and his friend, painter Brion Gysin, developed called the “cut-up method.” It’s not difficult, per Burroughs:

Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like…

Is that cheating? If you listen to most media theorists, we have been in the age of collage for a few decades now. Give it try. You never know what might come through.

Writer’s Desk: Do Something, Then Write

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In an interview with Guernica, Jamaica Kincaid dismissed the idea that writing is a real profession, no matter how much people try to make it into a career:

The thing about writing in America—and I just recently understood this—is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it’s the wrong thing. It’s not a profession. A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can’t do anything else, and then you have another job. I’m always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something. If you just sit there, and you’re a writer, you’re bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals. Writing is not a profession. It’s a calling. It’s almost holy…

Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘A Minnesota Book(ish) Miscellany’

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I worked with the good folks over at Rain Taxi Review of Books to celebrate the unique literary culture of Minnesota with a new chapbook. A Minnesota Book(ish) Miscellany is a collection of trivia, ephemera, and quotes about the state’s rich ecosystem of bookstores, booksellers, and generally passionate book people, such as:

  • Memorable quotations from over a century of sources (Dylan to Dessa and beyond)
  • Curated lists that assemble a prismatic picture of Minnesota’s wide-ranging attention to the book
  • The stories behind the people behind the bookstores, from the biggest chains to the scrappiest indies
  • Key dates in state literary history
  • Picks for a Minnesota Writers Hall of Fame

You can order this nifty little edition from Rain Taxi here and soon also at local bookstores.

Writer’s Desk: Get Your Paradoxes Ready

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In Angela Carter’s introduction to the writing guide Death is No Obstacle, she mock-accuses genre-spanning fantasist Michael Moorcock of “giving everything away.” This may be taking it too far, because it’s hard to see how many writers even if they follow his advice to a tee could churn out novels in under a week as he famously did.

Most of Moorcock’s lessons to writers for writing with economy and speed was planning ahead. Among those was stockpiling ideas for future use so you don’t get stuck for inspiration along the way.

Here’s one:

You need a list of images that are purely fantastic: deliberate paradoxes, say: the City of Screaming Statues, things like that. You just write a list of them so you’ve got them there when you need them. Again, they have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other…

Try listing five or ten of those right now. File them away. Use as needed.

Writer’s Desk: Fill the Blank Space

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Twyla Tharp (Ken Duncan, 1981)

In Twyla Tharp’s 2003 book The Creative Habit, she boiled her whole artistic self down to this:

The blank space can be humbling. But I’ve faced it my whole professional life. It’s my job. It’s also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.

Get started. It’s time to make something where now there is nothing.

Writer’s Desk: Who / What / Why

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David Mamet has written across just about every genre possible, from plays to screenplays, novels, short stories, and even whacked-out science fiction scenarios (Wilson). Along the way he’s also knocked out a bevy of pieces on the craft, whether acting, directing, or writing.

While show-running The Unit (one of those War on Terror series from the 2000s), Mamet sent a memo to his writing staff that broke down what he saw as foundational to good writing.

In it, Mamet inveighs against exposition-dump scenes (which readers of Michael Crichton are very familiar with), since they are inherently non-dramatic:

Any time any character is saying to another as you know, that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit…

This is crucial but may be less useful to people not writing dialogue. One nugget Mamet provides that has more universal utility is his three-part breakdown of what each scene requires:

  • Who wants what?
  • What happens if [they don’t get it]?
  • Why now?

Stick to that and readers will keep turning the page.

(h/t ScreenCraft)

Writer’s Desk: Identify With All Your Characters

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Amos Oz, 1965 (Moshe Pridan)

Because many of the novels and stories written by Amos Oz dealt in some ways with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they were frequently read as statements about one thing or another. Oz always rejected that formulation. His stories were grounded in history but they were about humans.

In 2016, Oz talked to The Believer about this:

Each time I have the urge in me to make a statement or send a message or to issue a manifesto, I don’t bother to write a novel. I write an article and publish it in a popular newspaper…

Referencing D.H. Lawrence’s thoughts on the subject, Oz also made a point of resisting the urge writers (and often readers) have to take sides with their characters:

He said, in writing a novel, the writer must be able to identify emotionally and intellectually with two or three or four contradicting perspectives and give each of them very a convincing voice. It’s like playing tennis with yourself and you have to be on both sides of the yard. You have to be on both sides, or all sides if there are more than two sides…

If you choose sides, you shortchange the other character or characters. They all have stories and perspectives worth hearing.

If not, why are they in your book?

Writer’s Desk: Stay Open, Stay Confident

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When he was interviewed by The Atlantic in the summer of 1958, Erskine Caldwell was just about the biggest author in America. The interviewer notes that Caldwell’s novel God’s Little Acre had sold over eight million copies, “more than any other novel written in our century.” An incredible achievement, especially for an author whose work does not appear on nearly any syllabi or even many greatest books of the twentieth century lists these days (excepting perhaps Tobacco Road).

Still, given those numbers, Caldwell had reason to be confident:

It’s not that I don’t welcome criticism from a publisher or a reader or an editor, it’s just that I think I know more about it than he does…

And he was probably right.

Stay open to feedback. We all need it. But always remember there’s a chance that you may actually know what you are doing.

Writer’s Desk: Write with Conviction and Humility

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In a recent piece for the New Yorker that ranged from George Orwell’s Why I Write to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book The Message, Jay Caspian Kang grapples with a problem that can bedevil some of us who make words as a vocation: How much does our writing matter, and should it?

Writers, dramatic and vain by nature, seem particularly ill-suited to offer wisdom. Perhaps there are some lessons to be gleaned from a lifetime of reading and typing, but if they exist they’ve mostly hidden themselves from me. Call me a cynic, but I’ve grown to see writing as a vocation that should be performed dutifully, with ample amounts of irony and self-deprecating humor. This isn’t to say that writing can’t influence politics or provide hope, but I am not sure that anyone can really set out to achieve that goal. Our job is to type…

Kang is not arguing that writing cannot be used to advance a larger purpose. Drawing on a talk he once heard from George Saunders, Kang posits that when writing, “you type, tie it together, and hope that, more often than not, something resonates.”

The trap that writers can set for themselves, Kang believes, is setting expectations for their work which exceeds their abilities:

I do not think it is the job of writers to “save the world,” nor do I think they should set out to do so—not out of any objection about the sanctity of art for its own sake but, rather, because the pressure to always be political, significant, or weighty leads to leaden, predictable prose…

Do good work. Hope that this will resonate and connect with readers in a way that enriches them and even broadens their perspective.

Just do not expect to change the world.

Writer’s Desk: Residency in Red Wing

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Anderson Center at Tower View, near Red Wing, Minnesota

Near the town of Red Wing, Minnesota is the estate of Dr. Alexander Pierce Anderson, who made some millions by creating things like Quaker Puffed Wheat. Since 1995, the Anderson Center has hosted residencies for artists from around the world.

It costs $30 to apply. Selected writers will have two- or four-week residences at the Center with beautiful accommodations, work spaces, meals, and even transportation to and from the airport if you are coming from out of town.

Here’s a video about the application process:

Writer’s Desk: Do It, Don’t Talk About It

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In her book Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers, Carolyn See has a lot to say about how to survive and even thrive in the writing life.

In part, she does this by keeping it simple. She includes practical asides about what will be demanded of you, though what she says does help (“A thousand words a day—or two hours of revisions—five days a week for the rest of your life”).

See also reminds writers what not to do:

You know the last thing in the world people want to hear from you, the very last thing they’re interested in? The fact that you always have wanted to write, that you cherish dreams of being a writer, that you wrote something and got rejected once, that you believe you have it in you-if only the people around you would give you a chance-to write a very credible, if not great, American novel…