Tag: writing

Writer’s Desk: Be Happy with Just Creating

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David Byrne, Minneapolis 1977 (Michael Markos)

Like a lot of celebrities, David Byrne has given a commencement address. Unlike a lot of celebrities, he had a lot to say beyond empty “you can do it!” exhortations.

Per Rachel Arons, Byrne’s 2013 address to the graduating class of the Columbia University School of the Arts was in many ways, a downer. He referenced something that actor and theatre director Paul Lazar once told him:

‘You know, there’s no guarantee of making a good living, moneywise, in [the art] world, so if that’s what you want—you know, monetary success, if that’s where the value lies—maybe you made a wrong choice quite a few years ago…

All true. Most people in the creative field—whether music, writing, art, or making gigantic papier-mâché puppets—will not and should never expect to make a good or even sustainable living through that alone.

But while delivering this cold-water splash of reality, Byrne did not aim to turn people off from the arts, merely to let them know how to adjust their expectations:

I believe that there is a way to have a very, very satisfying, enriching and creative life in the arts, but it depends on what criteria you use to look at that. But I would say that if you’re being creative, with happiness, satisfaction, all that—you’re succeeding…

Yes, an audience is preferred, as well as high amounts of remuneration. But sometimes, good work alone is all the necessary reward.

It’s more than most people can expect in this life.

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Be an Artist

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How seriously can writers take themselves? The answer, clearly, is extremely seriously. Maybe the real question is: How seriously should writers take themselves? The unsatisfying answer? It depends.

H.G. Wells had a definitive view on the subject. A spouting font of words, he produced everything from his still-beloved science fiction work to biographies, comedies, essays, you name it. Unsurprisingly, he did not want (or have time) to be too fussy about things.

In his Experiment in Autobiography, Wells declares himself proudly not an artist but a “journalist”:

If sometimes I am an artist it is a freak of the gods. I am journalist all the time and what I write goes now—and will presently die…

This may be a bit much for some people, who are not used to the ephemeral nature of journalism (copy today, fish wrap tomorrow). A more easily digestible declaration comes right after:

I write as I walk because I want to get somewhere and I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there…

Henry James might disagree. But getting from Point A to Point B with a minimum of fuss is never bad advice.

Writer’s Desk: Get into Character

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When trying to get into the spirit of the characters from his new novel Crook Manifesto (incredible, by the way), recurring Writer’s Desk source Colson Whitehead decided he needed to learn as much as he could about the setting of Harlem in the early 1970s.

Since his main character, Ray Carney (also the star of the preceding novel, Harlem Shuffle), was a furniture salesman who also fenced stolen goods out the back door, Whitehead told the New Yorker‘s David Remnick he learned what he could about both professions, first:

From primary sources, memoirs of gangsters, Bumpy Johnson he was a Harlem gangster in the ’50s. His wife wrote a memoir … She broke down how numbers operation works. Numbers operation is an unofficial lottery in different neighborhoods. She broke out how the numbers runner works and the bank and how they transfer the money and where else do you go but to the source. A lot of it is slang. I love getting authentic nouns and verbs, whether it was from slave narratives for Underground Railroad or for this, William Burroughs’ first book Junkie is about being a hustler in Harlem, Upper West Side, and downtown in the ’50s…

Then:

[Finding a ] Sears catalog. It’s just great language that I steal the same way I steal language from a memoir … Champagne finishes on the arms of couches and chairs…

Lest you think this involved a lot of delving through dusty archives, Whitehead reassures Remnick that he never leaves the house:

I never leave the house. Too many people outside. Yes, whatever your interest is, someone has put it on Pinterest…

Writer’s Desk: Read and Learn

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The novels of Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith) have a typical milieu (Victorian, sensual, layered) that require a high degree of research. Her characters are always lively and well-drawn but the worlds they move through have to be very carefully constructed.

But according to Waters, learning to write as she does is about more than research. It’s about reading not just for material but for tactics:

While you’re writing, read like mad – but read analytically. You will never be able to put a book together without an understanding of how other books work. I suspect that this is more a matter of instinct than anything else – but you can nurture that instinct by looking at other texts and thinking, ‘What’s successful here? What’s failing? And why?’

If something worked for one writer (a plot twist, a manner of description, a way of getting readers to side with an unlikeable protagonist), there is no reason to think it won’t work for you.

Writer’s Desk: Be a Collector

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Writers like A.S. Byatt are not the kind who simply get an idea and start banging away at the keys. They study, accrue, and consider.

In this interview, the elderly Byatt, still recovering from a recent hospitalization but full of ambition about new projects, talked about her process:

You collect the things and then you study them. And I collect ideas and then I study them. And I collect people’s lives and then I study them. And because I don’t write autobiographical fiction, I need more than one life, just as I need more than one glass ball, all the different patterns, in order to see what is the same, what is different. I feel that about real people and people in books, and people in biographies. It’s the human desire to know things…

Study leads to knowledge leads to more fully realized characters and invented stories that can feel as real as what you had been studying.

Writer’s Desk: Be a Fool

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The ever-punning fantasy author Piers Anthony has written, oh who knows how many books? A lot. So many that entire shelves at some used bookstores are given over to his well-read work. Not all of it is for the ages. But the man just loves to put words on paper.

So who better to give would-be writers some advice? Here’s what he had to say about the fools who decide they have it in them to write a whole novel:

Consider the first card of the Tarot deck, titled The Fool. There’s this young man traipsing along with a small dog at his heel, toting a bag of his worldly goods on the end of his wooden staff, carrying a flower in his other hand, gazing raptly at the sky—and about to step off a cliff, because he isn’t watching his feet. A fool indeed. Does this feel familiar? It should. You’re doing much the same thing. What made you ever think you could bat out a bad book like that, let alone write anything readable?

Yes, in the end he comes around to describing why it’s still a good idea. Because the world is made livable by its fools.

Writer’s Desk: Prove Them All Wrong

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Writers know that to get anywhere they generally require at least a few people to support what they are trying to do. Teachers, publishers, parents, spouses; everyone needs backup.

Conversely, writers also know that to get anywhere, they also have to fight their way through the opposition. August Wilson, who was well into his thirties by the time he started making real progress in his soon-to-be-stellar career, encapsulated the struggle thusly:

Your belief in yourself must be greater than everyone’s disbelief in you…

Writer’s Desk: You Are Talented

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Onetime Greenwich Village bohemian and longtime Minnesotan Brenda Ueland published one of the great writing manuals in 1938. Unfortunately, very few people read If You Want to Write; after all, that was a time when the profession was seen as far harder to break into then it is today.

The people of 1938 were missing out:

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express. Try not expressing any thing for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst…

Writer’s Desk: Do the Opposite

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Director, playwright, and poet Jean Cocteau straddled worlds. His movies were like phantasmagorical dreams, his limpid writing flowed like filmstrips. For a few decades, his work defined much of what people meant when they talked about the avant-garde.

In other words, Cocteau was not an artist like most others. Because of that, he had very specific advice for those just starting out in their careers, which applies to writers as much as any artist:

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like—then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping…

Writer’s Desk: Challenge Yourself

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The highly prolific R. F. Kuang has in just a few short years published multiple knockout successes. From her bestselling fantasies Babel and The Poppy War series to the publishing social media satire Yellowface, she has delivered one success after another. At the same time, she is still pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale.

Rather than seeing her studies as something that gets in the way of her writing, though, Kuang seems to take that part of her work as a boost to her fiction. She told Clarkesworld:

Academia is fun because you’re constantly being challenged by smarter people to revise and reinvestigate your opinions. Stories have to come from somewhere; for me, they come from whatever research questions are bothering me at the moment. Reading critical theory makes my fiction better because good, interesting fiction is mired in precisely the stuff critical theory addresses. Whatever depth or profundity makes its way into my work comes straight from people much smarter than me. I also just really enjoy research on its own terms…

Being surrounded by people and ideas that challenge your assumptions is often seen as the kind of thing that spurs sharper thinking, but not necessarily sharper writing. Try it out.

See what you might be wrong about. Dive into something new. Write about something entirely different.

Writer’s Desk: Take Some Time Off

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Some writers live by the routine. Others abhor them. Both are correct.

Charles Yu, the imaginative stylist of Interior Chinatown and the series Westworld, told PBS that he appreciates the importance of non-writing time:

What I do is try to frame a question or idea in a useful or interesting way, set my subconscious to work on it, and then check back later to see if there’s been progress,” Yu said. He likens the process to when a computer has programs running in the background — you might not see the central processing unit in action, but every once in a while you might get an update from the progress bar. The same thing happens when he takes time away from writing, he said: “Ding, update from your brain: ‘here’s a sentence that might be interesting.'”

Writer’s Desk: Forget About It

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When the novelist Lauren Groff (who wrote the inimitable Matrix) has writer’s block, she thinks there could be a few different issues going on. It could be impatience or maybe a fear of imperfection.

There is also the block caused by what she calls the canary in the coalmine. This is your unconscious telling you something is off, potentially structural. Groff’s solution to this is brilliant in its simplicity:

… you may need to put your work in a drawer for a few months and reread it with fresh eyes when you’ve forgotten a good deal about it. During that time away, be in your chair every day, but be there by reading everything you can get your hands on, and you’ll find a solution in the hundreds of thousands of words you’ve read.

Put it away. Forget. Read. Get back to it.

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Think, Just Write

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In between his poetry, journalism, and deciphering of the grand mystery that is Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg also made the occasional attempt to figure out what is this thing called writing.

In one of his more insightful pieces, “Trying to Write,” he looked back at the time he interviewed Babe Ruth (because it was the 1920s and that was what journalists of his stature could do and then humble-brag about later). Sandburg asks the Bambino what it’s like to always have people seek his system for hitting home runs. Ruth responds:

… all I can tell ‘em is I pick a good one and sock it. I get back to the dugout and they ask me what it was I hit and I tell ‘em I don’t know except it looked good.

Which is maybe some of the greatest writing advice around. Don’t worry about how it looked good, just make sure you can identify it when it happens.

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Think About It

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Cormac McCarthy has appeared more on this site than most other writers. And for good reason. But I am going to go back to him one more time in honor of his passing this week at the age of 89.

Though sometimes very long-winded on the page (rarely in a bad way, see Suttree for an example of him at his most wonderfully prolix), McCarthy was a man of few and preferably no words when it came to talking about his craft.

In 2014, some high school students wrangled a quick email interview with the reclusive McCarthy. Asked about his “process” of turning ideas into words on the page, McCarthy said only this:

Writing is very subconscious and the last thing I want to do is think about it…

Writer’s Desk: Keep at It

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For a Danish Baroness who did not necessarily need to write, Karen Blixen took the vocation seriously. Publishing under the pen name Isak Dinesen, she wrote poetic prose, memoir (Out of Africa), and lovingly crafted Romantic-styled short stories (Seven Gothic Tales).

She didn’t feel the need to do things the standard way. As she related to The Paris Review:

During the German occupation of Denmark I thought I should go mad with boredom and dullness. I wanted so to be amused, to amuse myself, and besides I was short of money, so I went to my publisher in Copenhagen and said, look here, will you give me an advance on a novel, and send me a stenographer to dictate it to? They said they would, and she appeared and I started dictating. I had no idea at all of what the story would be about when I began. I added a little every day, improvising. It was very confusing to the poor stenographer…

Her oft-quoted recipe for success was quite simple:

I write a little every day, without hope and without despair…