Tag: authors

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Writing1 Comment

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…

Writer’s Desk: Epiphanies are Cheating

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Photo by Ritika Roy (licensed under CC-CC0 1.0)

Novelist and writing professor Charles Baxter was reading a Best American Short Stories volume when he realized something: Every story seemed to end the same way:

I kept coming upon final pages in which there was a moment when a character stopped and looked off into the distance, and then a sentence the equivalent of ‘Suddenly she realized…’ appeared…

For Baxter, this seems like cheating:

If you’re trying to write a story with a beginning, middle, and end but haven’t found a way of tying it up dramatically, an epiphany will do the job. But it often ends up feeling like a shortcut, and besides … I’ve had so god-damned few epiphanies in my life that I’m suspicious of them…

Beware of the easy conclusion.

Writer’s Desk: Look Outside

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Built-in desk at Fallingwater

Anne McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern series) moved from America to Ireland, where she enjoyed, among other things, the “lovely vistas.” It’s not something that most writers can manage, of course. But she made a good point about the importance of having something to look at:

I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale…

Writer’s Desk: Design It Yourself

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Writing1 Comment

When J.D. Salinger saw the Signet paperback cover for his novel The Catcher in the Rye, with a very literal painting of Holden Caulfield wandering the sordid streets of New York, like many authors, he was displeased. Unlike many authors, he took matters in his own hand.

One of the more famous of the book’s many covers was its mass market Bantam edition, featuring the very familiar stark white design and rainbow stripes cutting across the upper left corner.

According to LitHub, Salinger designed it himself.

Most authors have very little control over how their books are presented. But whenever you have the opportunity to make any decisions about design, marketing, or anything else involved in the packaging of your work, seize it.

Who knows? You might design a cover that could last for more than a half century.

Writer’s Desk: Work to Create

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Philip Glass (Nancy Lee Katz, 1992)

In the 1970s, Philip Glass had become an American composer to watch. Celebrated and also vilified, his minimalist work got attention. But it didn’t pay the bills. In fact, Glass lost money pretty much every time he took his ensemble on tour. So how did he get by? The son of Baltimore immigrants, Glass did whatever he had to do. Working a crane at a steel foundry. Driving a New York cab in the Taxi Driver days. Running his own moving company (sometimes advertised in the Village Voice as Prime Mover). Also being a self-taught plumber.

Which led to this encounter when Glass was installing a dishwasher in a Soho loft sometime in the 1970s:

While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish…

The very obvious moral of this story? Some artists have sponsors. They are the lucky ones. For the rest of us, do what you have to do to pay for paper, toner ink, and the electric bill.

Even if that means installing an art critic’s dishwasher.

(h/t Ted Gioia)