Tag: author

Writer’s Desk: Short, Shorter, Shortest

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A poet of many talents, including an icy wit and a cross-disciplinary verve, who tends to generate a high degree of excitement in a certain kind of literary enthusiast, Anne Carson is often asked about writing. Rarely does she pretend to be have any great wisdom to impart.

In this interview, though, when prompted about how her terse answers indicated she preferred brevity, Carson proves just that, illustrating her point with one of the greatest sentences in the English language:

Short Talk on Brevity… try to leave the skin quickly, like an alcohol rub. An example, from Emily Tennyson’s grandmother, her complete diary entry for the day of her wedding, 20 May 1765: “Finished Antigone, married Bishop.”

Writer’s Desk: Let the Words Come to You

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The late Jim Harrison cast the kind of shadow across the literary landscape you don’t much see anymore. A writer more arguably associated with a kind of lyrical American wilderness and wildness than any since Theodore Roosevelt (perhaps Cormac McCarthy), he flung his talents widely across fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He was also a gourmand of exquisite tastes and occasional overkill (“Hangovers have all the charm of a rattlesnake cracking its jaws as it swallows a toad”).

Though prolific, Harrison took his time when working on a piece. He was more likely to let the characters mill about in his head for a time, take a walk, be patient, and then strike when the moment was right:

You can’t go to it. It has to come to you.  You have to find the voice of the character. Your own voice should be irrelevant in a novel. Bad novels are full of opinions, and the writer intruding, when you should leave it to your character…

Good advice but of course easier for some than others. Following this method, Harrison wrote Legends of the Fall in nine days and submitted it after only changing one word. Hard act to follow.

Writer’s Desk: Figure it Out Later

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In a famous 18th century parable, Rabbi Jacob ben Wolf Kranz (better known as the “Dubno Maggid”) relates a fantastic story about the creative process:

Once upon a time, I was walking in the forest and I saw all these trees in a row with a target drawn on them, and an arrow right in the center. At the end of the row I saw a little boy with a bow in his hand I had to ask him, “Are you the one who shot all those arrows?!” “Of course!” he replied. “How did you hit all the targets right in the center?” I asked. “Simple”, said the boy, “first I shoot the arrow, and then I draw the target”.

This may sound vaguely familiar because singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek used it as the inspiration for her album Drawing the Target Around the Arrow. Polacheck’s phrasing gets it just right: Fire off your idea first and then figure out what you were aiming for later.

Also important: insisting that that was your plan all along.

Literary Birthday: Martin Amis

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In the time before the Internet, Martin Amis (born today in 1949) was a favored author of a certain type of cold-hearted literati. Novels like London Fields (1989) were scabrous, pitch-black satires of soulless urbanites that took no prisoners.

But Amis was almost more scathing as a critic. He once pronounced that “all writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart,” which can be argued sets a high standard in a world where the publishing business was briefly kept afloat by sales of Fifty Shades of Grey. Amis’s opinions were so hotly felt that he and his friend Salman Rushdie once disagreed violently enough about the merits of Samuel Beckett that Rushdie asked Amis to step outside to resolve the matter.

Writer’s Desk: Use That First Draft

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Back in 2015, when he was promoting his novel Nora Webster, Colm Tóibín talked about the advantages of growing older, from a personal standpoint:

That’s one of the things you learn as you grow older. That if you don’t like someone, you never like them, and they never like you. It’s not something you grow out of, no.

While this might suggest a somewhat relaxed worldview, Tóibín in fact approaches his work like he’s on a clock:

I mean, well, there are writers who do drafts, knowing there will be later drafts, and that works for them, but I don’t do that. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be later drafts, but I write as though I will never get another chance.

This might not work for some who prefer to write long then cut. But it’s hard to argue with the practicality of putting it all down as you intended in one blaze and then moving on. Life is short. Books take a long time.

Writer’s Desk: Put in the Effort

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In this interview, Minnesota author Charles Baxter explains how he knows he is on a good streak:

I work during the morning. I pace; I stare out the window. I sit with my head in my hands. If I can feel myself breaking out into a sweat, particularly from my underarms, and if I give off a noticeable body odor that even I can smell, I know the writing is going well…

If it feels too easy, maybe give your last few pages another look.

Literary Birthday: Ayn Rand

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Born today in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Ayn Rand (birth name: Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum) came to America in 1926 and quickly decamped for Hollywood. Even though her philosophically iconoclastic novels like Atlas Shrugged (1957) would later make her a libertarian icon, Rand started her creative career knocking out scripts for Cecil B. DeMille at $25 a week.

Years later, the rabidly anti-Soviet writer (Bolsheviks had taken her father’s store in the revolution) returned to the movie industry in different way: Writing a pamphlet for a group called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Screen Guide for Americans advised filmmakers on ways that they could keep their work All-American. Its many handy tips ranged from advice on selection of collaborators (“Do not hire Reds”) to artistic choices (“Don’t present all the poor as good and all the rich as evil”). 

Literary Birthday: Norman Mailer

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When not heaving out controversy-grabbing articles and books, Norman Mailer (born today in 1915) was making a big stink of showing up at protest marches, running for office, or gabbing out of both sides of his mouth on some talk show. His books and articles were often reflections of that garrulous gasbag personality.

His 1967 novel, Why Are We in Vietnam?, is a case in point. A stream-of-consciousness rant from a high unreliable narrator that draws from the Beats, Philip Roth, and Mailer’s own slurry of impressions of a degraded and violent America, the book baffled more than a few readers, who did not understand why a book set almost entirely on a father-son hunting trip in Alaska did not even make any overt connection to its title until the famous last line: “Vietnam, hot damn.”

Literary Birthday: Isaac Asimov

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The first works published by Isaac Asimov (born today in 1920, a date now marked as National Science Fiction Day) both appeared when he was just 19 and could not have been more different.

One was his Columbia University thesis, “The Kinetics of the Reaction Inactivation of Tyrosinase During Its Catalysis of the Aerobic Oxidation of Catechol.”

The other was “Marooned Off Vesta,” published in the pulp science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories (which a young Asimov had read at the newsstand at his family’s candy store, despite his father’s disapproval).

Asimov received a doctorate in chemistry but writing proved more enticing. He ultimately published 400 to 500 books (accounts vary). Some were nonfiction works on science, math, history, and literature. But many of the rest were science fiction tales like his now iconic “I, Robot” and “Foundation” series, exactly the kind of thing his father had once tutted over his reading.

Writer’s Desk: Get Away from Yourself

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Twilight by Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith’s plays are often discussed in light of their signature method of presentation: No matter how many characters are in the piece, and regardless of their gender or race, they are all played by the same actor. Usually Smith.

Smith builds that shapeshifting of perspective and personality on a foundation constructed from hundreds of hours of transcripts. She interviews people herself and then puts their words on stage.

Why does she do it this way, traveling around the world to meet with people and listen to them for hours? Not just for verisimilitude, though that is part of it:

I’m very aware of travelling and being with the people and being in the place, away from my home, chasing that which is not me.

The further away you get away from yourself, the more clearly you can see everybody else. Go and find that which is not you.

Writer’s Desk: Terrence McNally

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The recently late Terrence McNally wrote many many plays. Some were great (Love! Valor! Compassion!) and some others were good but less than great (Ragtime, The Visit).

In any event, McNally — who passed away this past week from coronavirus-related complications — did what vanishingly few writers have ever done: Make a living on Broadway.

And he did it without making much of a fuss about the writing itself. A few years back, he provided some tips for the writing life:

What time of day do you get your best work done?
No particular time. I just turn on the computer and do the work.

What’s the first thing you do when you sit down to write?
I don’t have any rituals. I just put my fingers on the keys. It’s like second nature. I don’t think about brushing my teeth or shaving—it’s just something I do.

What’s the secret to being so prolific?
I live in a fascinating city at a fascinating time in history. When people say they have writer’s block, I say, “Go take a walk around the block! Read the paper! Open your window!” How can you have a block when there’s so much going on? I love what I do, so I don’t think of it as a job that you finish. It’s like breathing.

When you can say that you write like you breathe — and be telling the truth — it is safe to say that you are the envy of the great majority of writers who have ever drawn breath.

Writer’s Desk: Be More Than a Writer

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There are people who have known all their lives that they wanted to be a writer. That’s a lot of us, to some degree. Then they tend to face that chasm between the want and the real. Is it a book deal? Getting an agent? Self-publishing and hoping a publishing house notices it? Being one of those strange tables at the publishing convention selling just one book that everyone stays away from?

The comparison between filmmaking and writing isn’t exact, of course. The former is far more collaborative and way more expensive. But filmmaker Mark Duplass made a worthwhile point when he said this:

It’s really hard, and particularly hard for screenwriters, because nobody wants to read your script. It just sucks. Until you’ve made something, until you’ve proven yourself, you’re basically a nuisance to everyone that you’re trying to get your script to, so you have to find a way to make yourself valuable. I know the first response is, “Well, I’m not a director, and I’m not an actor. I’m just a writer.” And my basic response is, “Then you’re going to be stuck.” I’m sorry, if that’s the way you think about it, you’re kind of going to go nowhere…

Don’t be afraid to be a nuisance. Get out there. Bring your book everywhere. Show it to anybody who will glance. Do what you have to do.

Unfortunately, being a writer takes more than writing.

Writer’s Desk: If You Cannot Sleep…

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Leonard Cohen, 2008 (Rama)

Sometime in the 1960s, Leonard Cohen inscribed one of his early poems (or at least the title) on the wall of a cafe in Montreal.

“Marita, Please Find Me, I Am Almost 30” is a beautiful, heartsick piece that threads the love of creation through a desolate sadness. In other words, it expresses precisely the type of temperament that people normally ascribe to melodramatic artistic types.

But take note of this:

but when I couldn’t sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me

and just try not feeling and seeing yourself in that moment of joyful, rending creation.

Writer’s Desk: Give Yourself a Chance

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According to a talk Colson Whitehead gave in Amsterdam in 2018, as a young boy he thought that writing would be a pretty cool gig because “you didn’t have to wear clothes or talk to people and could spend all day making stuff up.”

While that remains true, especially the not always having to talk to people thing, it turned out to be a little more complicated. So here are some of the hints for new writers that Whitehead provided:

  • Give yourself a chance to learn: “Write a crappy story and then the next one will be better.”
  • Write what scares you, but find a way to make it fun.
  • Learn how to deal with rejection: “It didn’t matter if no one liked what I was doing, I had no choice so I got back to work and it got better.”

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Worry About Being Original

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All writers want to stand out. How do you make a name otherwise? But it’s also easy to tie yourself up in knots worrying about it.

Poet Derek Walcott, who was never anything but original, dismissed such worries in his essay “The Muse of History“:

We know that the great poets have no wish to be different, no time to be original, that their originality emerges only when they have absorbed all the poetry which they have read, entire, that their first work appears to be the accumulation of other people’s trash, but that they become bonfires, that it is only academics and frightened poets who talk of Beckett’s debt to Joyce… We are all influenced by what we have read…

Own it, but earn it.

Do as Walcott says, and make a bonfire from the trash of the greats.