Bad Advice
Bad Advice Wednesday: Beginnings
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 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.
.
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?
Henry Miller’s Commandments
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 17 comments
A photo of a page from a yellowed book has been going around Facebook: it’s Henry Miller’s commandments, just a note he jotted to himself while living and working in Paris, c. 1932. It’s collected in a New Directions paperback called Henry Miller on Writing. And he was a guy who had a lot to say on the subject. [here's a great interview with him in The Paris Review] Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Memory Game
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 17 comments
Bill and friends, August, 1972
#
One of the many curious things about the act of writing is the way it can give access to the unconscious mind. And in the hidden parts of consciousness lie not only hobgoblins and neurotic glimmers, but lots of regular stuff, the everyday stuff of memory. The invisible face of your grade school bully is in there, somewhere, and the exact smell of the flowers on vines in your grandma’s Continue reading →
Read Local!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
I was sitting here musing the other night, and mulling (my friend Peter Campion told me on the same night that mulling refers to the medieval practice of heating an iron rod or poker white-hot and plunging it into your alcoholic beverage—instant boil, and instant vaporization of the alcohol, and so an efficient delivery of your musing fluid), that is, I was sitting here somewhat mildly fluthered (Irish for shitfaced, which I realize is a kind of absolute—I mean, what could “mildly shitfaced” actually mean?), anyway, sitting here pondering among and amid my bookshelves, and I thought, Think how far these books had to come to get here! Published all over the world, printed even moreso, Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Jack Yourself Up! (Through Rituals)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
There are those who think it’s hard to write every day. Maybe. I’m of the camp that it’s harder to write once in a while. The rituals of daily-ness are built to contain a writing life in a way that the formlessness of the occasional is not. And for most of us who have chosen to make knocking words around our life, there are rituals a-plenty. Mine include getting up early, stretching my back (chronically bad since I was a teenager), drinking a cup of tea for calm before starting in on coffee for intensity (I am currently on day 11 of no coffee for the first time in many years so I apologize if my prose is sluggish), keeping note of my hours at the desk on a chart, listening to music (different albums for different drafts—The Talking Heads Stop Making Sense, for instance, for rolling along on first drafts), and, later in the day, long walks by the Cape Fear river armed with a microcassette recorder (and later still, notes in my journal armed with a beer.) Right off I notice that there are a lot of liquids involved in my rituals which seems right since there is an element of communion, and ablution, in the whole thing. Like most daily rituals mine was never planned but rather evolved, and did so for the single purpose of getting words on the page.
At the moment I am teaching a graduate class called The Writing Life, and some of you might remember that I posted the syllabus last year (I’ll paste this year’s revised syllabus below). The class starts, fittingly, with Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and as I re-read that book I noted that her rituals were more extreme than my own, and seemed geared toward creating an intensity far beyond the everyday. She writes: Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday (Creative Nonfiction: What Kind of Roast Chicken IS This, Anyway?)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
Eat This Image!
Andrea Zeeman, a very sweet and gentle friend of mine was, back in the day, a food stylist. Not a chef, not a cook, not a sandwich maker. What she did was prepare food to be photographed—whole menus for food magazines, sample dishes for cookbooks, convincing chef’s creations for Hollywood. She was brilliant at her work and made a good living because she was indispensable. And the reason the likes of Gourmet Magazine couldn’t live without her was that even the most beautiful, most appetizing dishes photographed as they were, fresh out of the oven, no matter how renowned the chef, looked . . . plain. And sometimes ugly. Or even sickening. Roasted chickens—plump and Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Spend a Week with Bill and Dave
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
So today’s bad advice is really bad advice:
Come spend some time in the mountains writing and drinking with Bill and Dave.
(Quick disclaimer: the following may sound like an advertisement but I’m hoping you’ll see it as more invitation than ad.)
The invitation is to spend a week with us, with Bill and Dave, in the mountains of Western North Carolina. We have recently been invited to co-teach a master class from June 17th to June 23rd at Doe Branch Ink, a mountain retreat 30 miles north of Asheville in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I taught there last year and it was great. Great food, great people, great hikes, great (brutal) bikes rides up nearby mountains, great talk about writing, great spaces to write in woods (and at desks). These sorts of weeks are usually about building a small community, something we have tried to do in a virtual way at this site, and often it is the time away from class that proves most valuable. And there are other benefits too. For instance you’ll be able to see Bill try to out-prance the local clog dancers.
Don’t let the fact that we call it a “master class” scare you too much either. The idea is to get a bunch of people together who really care about writing and are committed to the writing life. Here is the copy that Bill wrote for the Doe Branch website: Continue reading →
10 Bad New Year’s Resolutions for Writers (Bad Advice Wednesday: The Holiday Edition)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
1. Stop writing this year. Just quit. You can do it. Writing’s an addiction.
2. Stop reading. No media. Nothing. Listen to the rain.
3. Quit your job and roam the planet going broke. Continue reading →
