Tag: authors

Writer’s Desk: No Shame in Writing Fast

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In his enthralling new biography on William F. Buckley, Sam Tanenhaus says the following about his subject’s approach to his work:

Like so many writers he loathed the act of writing, but like very few he did it with speed and efficiency…

Buckley spent a career making use of that efficiency. For many years, he wrote multiple columns a week while editing the National Review, hosting Firing Line, and publishing dozens of books (sure, some were padded collections of columns and letters, but still), not to mention swanning around high society affairs, going yachting, and generally engaging in the life of a gentleman. He accomplished this through efficiency. Not messing around. Knowing what he wanted to say before firing up the word processor.

In 1986, Buckley took to the pages of the New York Times to make an argument for fast writing. A scold over at Newsweek had snarked that Buckley sometimes spent a mere 20 minutes on his newspaper columns, which was apparently too little time for serious writing. Buckley responded in indignation:

It is axiomatic, in cognitive science, that there is no necessary correlation between profundity of thought and length of time spent on thought … I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition. I asked myself the other day, Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time? I couldn’t think of anyone. And I devoted to the exercise 20 minutes…

See what you can get done in that much time. Hold yourself to 20 minutes. Then do it again the next day. And the next.

You might be surprised.

Writer’s Desk: Sondheim on Quantity

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Stephen Sondheim at work

Some people work and work even if nobody else can understand why. Interviewed not long before he passed away in 2021 at the age of 91, Stephen Sondheim talked about productivity:

George Bernard Shaw kept writing plays until he was ninety-four. Of course, the last fifteen years they were terrible plays, but he did write them…

One could always just watch TV, of course. But in the end even writing a terrible play (or novel or poem or agitated essay about the state of modern literature) will make you feel better than most other things.

Writer’s Desk: Attention is Good

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If a writer publishes and nobody notices, did it actually happen? To the writer, absolutely. That’s weeks, months, or years of gnashed-teeth labor in those pages. But to the rest of the world, not so much.

Ron Chernow’s mammoth new biography of Mark Twain shows how the great American humorist, sentimentalist, lecturer, anti-imperialist scold, and failed entrepreneur got people to read what he wrote. First, he lived a hell of a life:

Mark Twain discarded the image of the writer as a contemplative being, living a cloistered existence, and thrust himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, capturing the wild, uproarious energy throbbing in the heartland…

Brimming with material, Twain then grabbed the nation by its lapels:

A protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick, he courted controversy and relished the limelight. A ferocious bargainer and shameless self-promoter, he sought fame and fortune without hesitation and established the image of the author as celebrity…

There are limits to this approach, of course, as any writer whose publisher has anxiously inquired about their social media reach knows.

But what Twain knew is that people are busy. They have a lot of things they would rather do than read what you wrote. Harlan Ellison wrote stories in bookstore windows.

Do what you have to do.

Writer’s Desk: Keep Going, Even When It’s Terrible

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Junot Diaz spent five years trying to write a novel. Five. But try as he did every single day, nothing worked. It was stuck at the 75-page point and refused to budget.

So he decided to give it another go. He dug out the manuscript and tasked himself with finding something, anything, good in it that he could salvage. What happened?

Spent the whole night reading everything I had written, and guess what? It was still terrible. In fact with the new distance the lameness was even worse than I’d thought…

With nothing else to do except became what he calls “a normal” (no bookstores, no hanging out with writer buddies, definitely no reading the Times Sunday book section), Diaz just went back at it:

There were no sudden miracles. It took two more years of heartbreak, of being utterly, dismayingly lost before the novel I had dreamed about for all those years finally started revealing itself. And another three years after that before I could look up from my desk and say the word I’d wanted to say for more than a decade: done.

Sometimes dedication and time are all you have to throw at the book. But eventually it can work. Dedication will win out, not a burst of inspiration.

Keep going.

Writer’s Desk: There Are So Many Worse Jobs Out There

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Mike Royko, the Chicago columnist who set the template for pugnacious yet thoughtful commentary and deft political satire, wasn’t sure what he wanted to be when growing up. In his March 16, 1990 Chicago Tribune column, “Why Be a Writer? Think of Your Feet” (collected in One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko) he described being a seven-year-old and helping his dad at work:

Watching my father dashing up those steps at 5 a.m., sweat pouring down his face, I learned two things: 1. Being a milkman was hard work. 2: I didn’t want to be a milkman.

Royko learns about other professions like house painting (“Housepainters drank a lot. My grandfather and his cronies said that was because fumes from the paint were hazardous but shots and beers were an effective antidote”) and many other menial jobs (bowling alley, landscaping, machine shop). Rather than declare that this was the true and honest kind of labor, he came to a simple conclusion: “They made my flat feet hurt.”

Then Royko read an article about Ernest Hemingway’s typical day:

He would arise, have a bit of breakfast, and write until about noon. Then he and a pal or two would get in his cabin cruiser and spend the rest of the afternoon sipping tall cool ones and fishing … This impressed me as a sensible way to earn a living, and that was when I began thinking about becoming a writer…

We don’t all get the Hemingway life. But no writer ever said their work was murder on the knees or involved inhaling toxic fumes.

Writer’s Desk: Get Out of the Way

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It’s hard for writers to avoid making themselves the subject. They do, after all, spend most of their time with just themselves and the page. Theoretically, they think of the reader. But they’re not around. The writer is. Always.

This can cause you to be just a little too present in the work. Noticeable. Drawing attention. John McPhee had some thoughts on this, which can be guessed from the title of his piece, “Omission“:

When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between the subject and reader, get lost…

The reader might like you. They may even have chosen your work because of other things you have written. But fundamentally they are there because they want to know what you have to tell them.

Get to it.

Reader’s Corner: The Didion Box Set

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The new Joan Didion Collection from the Library of America is a monster, but in a good way. It packs together an incredible seventeen works, ranging from her best-known collections of essays and reportage (The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem), novels (Run River, Salvador), and later works (The Year of Magical Thinking). It’s pretty much all here, really only missing her and John Gregory Dunne’s screenplay work (which is fine) and her early film criticism for National Review (not fine, somebody needs to collect those).

I wrote about the collection for the Spring 2025 print edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books:

If there is any disagreement that we are at Peak Didion, the November 2024 publication of the Library of America’s three-volume Joan Didion Collection should settle it. This is the kind of hefty doorstop that announces An Important Writer You Should Have Read, but unlike some such LOA sets, this one presents one classic after another with virtually no padding, giving the full sweep of Didion’s career as it evolved across decades of American ferment, imperial overextension, and social entropy…

Writer’s Desk: It’s Your Book, Find It

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Booker-winning novelist Ali Smith believes you don’t have to worry about the reader in the end:

All a writer can do is work with language to get the story right.  Full stop.  & I’ve always believed that what readers feel is readers’ own business…

This is liberating. But it is also a challenge; a gauntlet thrown. Because it means that there is nothing else for the writer to worry about.

Nobody else can or will write the book that you can write…

It’s up to you.

Writer’s Desk: Stay Flexible

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There’s nothing wrong with planning out your writing. Some people need it. Organizing things can keep you from introducing things in your first chapter that can kill plot possibilities for the conclusion if you’re not looking ahead.

Also, knocking out a detailed outline is a fantastic way to procrastinate getting any real writing done.

But avoid limiting yourself.

Roddy Doyle explains:

Change your mind. Good ideas are often killed by better ones…

Writers sometimes worry they have a limited amount of material and shouldn’t waste it. This isn’t true. If you’re meant to be a writer, the ideas will come. If you think of a better one, go with it.

Writer’s Desk: Go Out on a Limb

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(Elaine May, 1959)

The legendary improv comedian, screenwriter, and underestimated director (yes, standing up for Ishtar) Elaine May had a motto which has been repeated in different iterations for decades:

The only safe thing is to take a chance.

According to her long-time comedy partner Mike Nichols, this wasn’t as contradictory as it sounds:

If you stay safe, and don’t take a chance—don’t do something that’s different from the last thing, something that makes you nervous and holds dangers—if you keep trying to do the thing that worked last time, the encrustations of mannerisms begin to take you over. And pretty soon you’re no good at all—and therefore not safe at all…

Avoid those encrustations of mannerisms at all cost.

Writer’s Desk: Listen to Everything

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(Bikram Bezbaruah)

Part of a writer’s job is capturing the world around them. This includes paying attention to physical things from landscape and weather to clothing and food.

But it also means listening to people. All of them.

  • Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket): “Eavesdrop and write down what people say. You think you’ll remember everything you hear, but you won’t. So write it down.”
  • Josh Sippie: “There is nothing that you overhear someone saying that can then become “unrealistic” dialogue, or an unrealistic way to speak. It’s as real as it gets.”
  • Christopher Isherwood: “I am a camera, my shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

Go ahead and eavesdrop. It’s research.

Writer’s Desk: Tell the Truth

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Mary Karr’s breakthrough memoir The Liar’s Club was not just a brilliantly written book, pulsing with dark wit and cutting insight, it was also pretty unsparing about herself. Years later, she wrote in The Art of the Memoir about how she started The Liar’s Club on the assumption she’d be telling the story of her father leaving her. But when she really looked at what happened, the opposite was true:

I’d spent decades discussing his abandonment in therapy, and it was true he’d drunk himself off a barstool when I was just twenty-five. But the view that he’d ever left me was tacit hogwash – a convenient lie I’d told myself to salve my own guilt about leaving him…

In an interview with The Writer, Karr talked about the necessity of confronting the truth, even if doing so might not cast you in the best light:

The reader will forgive you anything except lying.