Read the book, not the summary.
Write the piece, not the prompt.
Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.
Colson Whitehead, ladies and gentlemen.
Writer’s Desk: A.I. is Too Easy
Tag: authors
Writer’s Desk: Hard is Not Impossible
One thing writers always want more of is time. We often think that if we only had long stretches of uninterrupted, unencumbered hours stretching out before us like a rapture-worthy landscape, then all of our work could get done. There is some truth to this. It’s hard to knock out a novel while working fourteen-hour days.
But hard is not impossible. Also, as Maggie O’Farrell says, obstacles can actually help:
There is nothing so dangerous to good writing as having too much time, too much liberty. You need the filtration system of being kept from your work. You need to reach the keyboard in a state of hunger, of desperation. You need to sit down at your desk with a desire to unleash all that you have been mulling over, all those solutions and permutations and reframings…
Interruptions are the devil and can break up your flow. But interruptions are also life, which you cannot put on hold just to get more pages done.
Writer’s Desk: Break the Rules
According to Oscar Wilde, the formula is very simple:
A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
Screening Room: ‘Nova ’78’
One of the must-see documentaries at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival was Nova ’78.
My review ran in The Playlist:
Backstage at the Nova Convention, a three-day gathering in late 1978 ostensibly to celebrate the work of William S. Burroughs, an organizer worries that audience members will be upset by the news that Keith Richards has cancelled, as rock stars do. About to mount the stage, Patti Smith agrees to deliver the bad news, saying with the grinning nonchalance of a bohemian gunslinger (or neo-punk Bob Dylan), “if they’re going to give anybody shit, let them try to give me shit.” It’s a barely buffed-up little diamond of a moment in Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’ “Nova ’78,” a gratifyingly non-exhaustive documentary filled with them…
Writer’s Desk: Keep Them Coming Back
The late Martin Amis had a simple and attractive philosophy of reading:
I’m very committed to the pleasure principle. You read literature to have a good time. Or why else would people go on doing it?
It’s very easy to get caught up in what you want to say, how to say it, and your larger themes. But no matter how dire the subject or serious the intent, writing can still give pleasure.
Writer’s Desk: Enjoy It
In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Richard Wright laid out how Native Son and its iconic protagonist were constructed. Towards the end, he describes not just the process but the joy of writing:
I don’t know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don’t know if the book I’m working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don’t care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody…
Have fun.
Writer’s Desk: Pay Attention
In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James gave the example of an English novelist who was asked how she was able to depict the lives of French Protestant youth so vividly and true to life. Her response was that it all boiled down to once looking into a room:
Once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, [she] passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her impression, and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French; so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality…
James uses this example to argue that experience is crucial to writing but that experience can be just about anything. Even a glance. In short:
Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
Writer’s Desk: Write What You Don’t Know
In Walt Hunter’s inspiring new essay “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are,” he describes the value of pushing his students in an American literature class to write without the safety net of what they know. He references a line from W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz:
Once a fluent and successful writer, Austerlitz suddenly falls into a crisis of faith about the sentence, which becomes “at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.”
Running with that concept of “writing into the darkness,” Hunter challenges his students to knock out a quick essay about their difficulties reading, providing them with prompts:
One was: “Write about a moment in an Emily Dickinson poem that you don’t understand.” Another was: “Write about your morning routine, but in the style of Faulkner.” I didn’t want to create 32 new Faulkners. I wanted the students to experience the moment when their own style broke through the imitation, when the attempt to write like Faulkner failed and revealed, as a kind of photonegative, their own emergent voices. John Keats called this state of being “negative capability,” a condition in which the writer leans to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty. If it was really true that the students couldn’t read, then it was up to me to put the books in their way and make them deal with them…
Try this approach yourself. Think of something that makes no sense to you, that you have failed to understand. Describe that feeling. Write through it.
See what you find.
Writer’s Desk: Is this Picture a Story?
What’s going on in this picture? You could use an image search to figure it out. That’s one way to solve the question. Or you could write a story about it, trying one of the following approaches:
- Three-page dialogue scene.
- 300-word monologue from the perspective of the woman in the picture.
- Short narrative description of who she is, where she is going, and what befalls her in five years.
What you write can but does not have to resolve, feature an inciting incident, or contain any great shock or surprise.
But it does need to be a story.
Writer’s Desk: Do the Best You Can
One of those leading lights of the bookish world, Dave Eggers can always be counted on say the true thing and to identify what matters about this art, business, and life of word making that some of us have committed ourselves to.
Eggers was interviewed by The Harvard Advocate back in 2000, before McSweeney’s really hit its stride and he was still considered an enfant terrible, one of those tongue-in-cheek Gen Xers who wouldn’t know sincerity if it was an ad that came on during The Real World. But in a voluminous reply, Eggers put his cursor on what really makes it all worthwhile:
What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say…
Make the best book, poem, screed, fan fiction that you can. And if somebody offers you a spot on a teen soap opera, by all means, take it.
Writer’s Desk: Be Honest, But Within Reason
In the preface to his pointedly titled Unreliable Memoirs, critic Clive James laid out his approach to writing about oneself:
Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel. . . . So really the whole affair is a figment got up to sound like truth. All you can be sure of is one thing: careful as I have been to spare other people’s feelings, I have been even more careful not to spare my own. Up, that is, of course, to a point…
You want to be honest with the reader. That’s where the good stuff is. But at the same time, remember to hold things back. That’s where the artistry is. It’s a memoir, not therapy.
Writer’s Desk: Let Yourself Go
Even though the late, great playwright and script doctor Tom Stoppard was known for dense, gorgeously ornate works that tangled with politics, philosophy, physics, and eternity, he did not go in for self-examination or navel-gazing.
Instead, he once told The Guardian, he preferred just letting himself rip on the page:
A writer ought to be the best possible source about their work, but the writing instinct doesn’t come out of self-examination. That part of yourself in your work is expressed willy-nilly, without your cooperation, motivation or collusion. You can’t help being what you write and writing what you are…
Writer’s Desk: Get a Cat
Per one of the characters in Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington, concentration correlates to having a cat around:
Alone with the cat in the room where you work, I explained, the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk-lamp. The light from a lamp, I explained, gives a cat great satisfaction. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious…
Writer’s Desk: Building Your Book
The books of Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves, especially) are complex, dense, and thrillingly visual. He tells BOMB that his process is a lot like construction:
Writing is so much about laying down brick after brick, and yet you can’t just stack bricks, because then you’re making a tomb. There has to be this mortar, and that mortar, as we can see for ourselves, right now even, is the space between words…
Writer’s Desk: Coffee, Roaming, and TV
Patti Smith on her morning writing routine:
I get up and if I feel out of sorts I’ll do some exercises. I’ll feed my cat, then I go get my coffee, take a notebook, and write for a couple of hours. Then I just roam around. I try to take long walks and things like that, but I just kill time until something good is on TV…
Good ideas come when walking. Or watching shows, preferably ones with detectives. Thinking of better ways you could have solved the crime might be self-flattery but it also gets ideas percolating.
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