Bad Advice
Bad Advice Wednesday: Luck and Pluck and WTF (Revisited)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Bill at his desk, October 1959
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I’m still thinking about how much of any career is luck and accident, especially a career in the arts. You get an idea or you don’t. You meet the helpful person or you don’t. You listen to good advice or fail to. You ignore bad advice (or Bad Advice) or don’t. You connect with a mentor or you don’t. You move here, you move there. You’re hired, you’re not. You get a little affirmation, you get a little discouragement, or a lot of one or the other, despite simply being who you are all along. Slowly you learn what you’re good at, but always you insist on trying things you’re not good at, on doing the thing you can’t do, on reaching higher. It’s the Peter Principal applied to the arts, though it’s entirely self-imposed. Call it the Bill-and-Dave’s-Cocktail-Hour Principal: we grow and grow till we get to a place we can’t grow out of. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Make Like Shakespeare, or at Least Spalding Gray
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Alas, poor Dave! I knew him, Horatio.
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Write a monologue.
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Yes, that’s it. Today’s bad advice is to write a monologue. This is not just for writers, but for everyone. Though if you’re a writer, it’s a magical exercise. A monologue is one character (or even just a regular person) speaking directly to an audience. It’s different from a soliloquy, which is a character speaking to himself, audience be damned, though they’re listening in. It’s how playwrights used to get a character’s thoughts out to the world (filmmakers use flashbacks). A dramatic monologue? That’s a character speaking to someone else who’s usually sitting or standing uncomfortably nearby onstage. An apostrophe is a kind of dramatic monologue, but Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday All-Star Guest Post: Whistle While You Wait
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
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To be a writer is to be a waiter, and I’m not talking about tables. Waiting. It can be the most excruciating part of the whole process. You spend years working on a book, pounding out a first draft, sweating over the revisions, doing everything you can to bleed your heart out onto the page. When you finally declare yourself done – or at least done enough to hand the manuscript over for a verdict — that’s when it begins. Even if your first reader is just a friend whose opinion you value, it can be brutal. One day ticks by, then two, then a week. Has she started reading yet? Was it so boring that she couldn’t get past the first page? Does she hate it so much that she needs Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Give Yourself the Gift of a Writing Week
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Doe Branch Ink is a writers’ retreat located on 50 acres nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Just 30 miles north of Asheville in lovely Madison County — “The Jewel of the Blue Ridge” — the retreat takes its name from a spring fed stream that flows from high in Pisgah National Forest into the French Broad River, a protected National Scenic Waterway. This June, from the 17th to the 23rd, Bill Roorbach and David Gessner will be at Doe Branch.
Recently Bill and I talked about the week.
Dave: The whole idea behind Doe Branch is to have a week where you put your writing first. A gift to yourself I guess. It’s a gift that sounds very appealing to me at the moment, caught in the swirl of schoolwork and blogging and fresh from filing taxes. The fact that you get to focus on your writing while living in a great setting, deep in the mountains, is a big part of it too.
Bill: The timing’s perfect—end of the school year, beginning of the summer. In fact, we’ll be celebrating solstice together, always a time of new beginnings.
Dave: In our blog we talk a lot about ways to protect your writing time. Usually that means a couple of hours a day, squeezed in between the pressures of daily life. This is different. Not little nibbles. A feast.
Bill: I still date a real turn in my life my writing and even my career to a week at a writer’s retreat. I’d been looking for a break from real life, and I certainly got that. But I got so much more, too, something I hadn’t expected. Suddenly, time Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Decision Time, MFA
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 21 comments
My Alma Mater, Graduate, at least
I remember waking in the middle of the night, mid-April 1986, wondering where my life was going to go. I’d applied to five MFA programs all around the country, no great logic in my choices (which were strongly geographical, but one) and swung between total confidence and total despair. I was 33 and the idea was to change my life. The letters came in one-by-one. Okay, Montana! I’m in. I’m going. That would be wonderful. I knew Montana well. Or, holy shit, Arizona, which came next. Okay, definitely Arizona, though it was Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Guest Contributor Joshua Bodwell
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
This Won't Hurt A Bit
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This piece by MWPA director and all-around good guy Joshua Bodwell appeared originally in Maine Ahead, and speaks directly to business leaders, nice idea: Hire a writer! And of course Bill is available for any type of surgery. Bring your own hospital gown. Bill has a Leatherman and a hack saw. Dave is in charge of anesthesia. Rates are competitive with the best garages.
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Please, Hire a Writer
My pal Bill Roorbach is an exceptional storyteller. He is descriptive yet concise on the page, and perfectly meandering when he shares a story over a beer. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Circuit
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 23 comments
An Early Circuit
Part of the writing day for me is a circuit. This has been true no matter where I’ve lived, and I’ve lived a lot of places since I started writing seriously. The country circuit is the one I’m on now–every morning out on skis at this time of year, or walking in the summer, or maybe riding a bike, sometimes swimming. The idea is a similar or the same route each day, preferably a loop (no backtracking), one that takes me through my thoughts as surely as through the woods or through the streets of whatever given city. The first twenty minutes are often a tumult of spare Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Beginnings
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
Today’s guest post is by Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory (Stories). He’s at work on The Sexual Lives of Missionaries (a novel). And he’s an all-around good guy. Like Bill, he works all night.
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Beginnings
I. Bad Advice
At Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, when someone offers “bad advice,” the advice that follows is usually pretty good advice. The phrase “bad advice” is armor, because you know how it goes. First, you offer good and useful advice, and then somebody gives you the one example of why the greatest story anyone has ever read would be a terrible story if the writer followed your good and useful advice. And then somebody else puts on a black beret and lights a cigarette and talks about how all true art is boundary-breaking, and all true artists would never accede to the tyranny of conformity. Then the open mic night begins, and somebody starts beating the bongos, and somebody else yells abstractions into a microphone and uses the word “poetry” a lot. Three friends in the front row say, “This performance really flows,” and the four drunk guys at the bar watch the basketball game, which is, let’s face it, the better of the two shows. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Thisness of a That
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 16 comments
My mind at work
Metaphor is the elemental condition of language. English teachers forever have been saying, “A simile is a comparison using like or as, and a metaphor is a comparison not using like or as.” That’s simple and plain, but it’s not quite right. I’ll buy the old definition for a simile, but a metaphor—wow!—a metaphor is something enormously greater than allowed for by Mr. Bottomlifter back in ninth grade. First of all, a simile is just a kind of metaphor. A symbol is a Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday, Superbowl Edition: VINCE WILFORK, C’EST MOI
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 11 comments
Monica Wood is today’s special guest star. She is the author of Any Bitter Thing, Ernie’s Ark, My Only Story, Secret Language, the Pocket Muse series for writers, and the forthcoming When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine.
VINCE WILFORK, C’EST MOI
Football, like all sport, teems with metaphor, boasting a long, tedious tradition of Teaching Young Men About Life. Agony, ecstasy, teamwork, character-building, yadda-yippity-yadda. But for those of us who are a) already built, characterwise; b) old enough to have absorbed our allotted portion of agony, thank you; or c) female, football is all about the glam and glitter of the offense.
Behold the snap, the hike, the bullet pass flying straight to the steely midsection of a wide receiver! Behold the gorgeous spirals! The gazelle-like runs! The circus catches in the end zone! No wonder these guys get all the glory, all the press, all the endorsements, all the girls. The quarterback and his posse: bestsellers of the Astroturf. For them the crowd chortles, it caws, it spills its beer, it waves many misspelled signs. What’s not to love?
