Bad Advice Wednesday: It’s All About the Gaga

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Precisely one-third of the way into the first day of Composition II, Kent, a fresh-faced college junior, interrupted my course introduction and blurted out, “This is the best English class I’ve had since seventh grade!” My immediate response was a rush of deep pleasure.  Could I possibly be the world’s greatest teacher?   Did students really want to write papers?  Could it be the best kept secret on every American college campus?  But then I got a little nervous.  This was a throw down, unsolicited, unplanned and stated before the entire class.  Could I live up to Kent’s expectation?  Could I be the best English class since seventh, or ninth, or fourth grade? Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Steady as she Goes!

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Don’t get your hopes up.

My long-time agent and old friend Betsy Lerner has often offered wise counsel.  For some reason (perhaps to be revealed at a later date), tonight I’m remembering a time before the turn of the millennium, my first novel (The Smallest Color) about to sell after its protracted season of rejections.  I was on the road, in a motel somewhere near Palm Springs, CA, quail running everyplace. Phone booth in the sun, door open for the heat, children playing in an emptied pool.  And news: Dawn Seferian, a senior editor at Counterpoint, had expressed an interest in the book, and was taking it to her board.  I’d have to wait two weeks to hear what turned out to be good news.  But in that moment Betsy said, “Don’t get your hopes up, but don’t get them down, either.” And that’s what allowed me to breathe in the breach. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Research Creatively (and Empathetically)

categories: Bad Advice

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Larry Bird

A broom

We don’t use sports metaphors here at Bill and Dave’s.  Well, we try not to.  Or at least one of us tries.  But the other one (me) has frequent lapses and it so happens that I feel another one coming on now.  Please bear with me.

It was right before the 1981 NBA finals, Larry Bird’s first.  The Celtics were playing the Houston Rockets, which meant that they were facing two giants (for more on giants see  Life Among Giants) in Hakeem (then Akeem) Olajuwan and Ralph Sampson.  Sampson, at 7’4”, would sometimes be guarding Bird and, as I remember it, the sports writer Bob Ryan reported that one day he walked out to find Bird taking dozens of baseline jumpshots over a man who was holding a broom up as high as he could.  The broom, of course, was meant to simulate Ralph Sampson’s outstretched arm.  The takeaway from the story, according to Ryan, was that Bird even practiced more creatively than other people.

Why did this pop into my mind?  Not only because I like to annoy Bill by using lots of sports metaphors.  But also because I have been in the research phase of my new book, and I have been thinking about ways that I can research more creatively, and effectively.   I have heard stories about writers who see research as a period of happy procrastination, who love to hole up with their notecards and files and new pens and spend hours in the library reading every book and manuscript they can about the development  of the cattle industry in southeast Texas.  If these stories are true, I am happy for the practitioners and envy them their serenity.   But for me that kind of work leads to a kind of intellectual sluggishness, a state of mind where writing the actual book begins to seem impossible. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Reelin’ in the Years

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

comments: 5 comments

Answer: the one in the middle.

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Until yesterday, my yearbooks lived in a little-used closet at my parents’ house. Somehow they’d never made it (along with one gorgeous post-college wok) to Texas, where I lived for eleven years. Even after I moved back to New York last winter, a few towns up the Hudson from my folks, I still hadn’t managed to retrieve the yearbooks—the wok being first thing I re-claimed. Along with an electric guitar I don’t really know how to play. And the gnarly snowboard (mid 90s Gnu, electric orange and blue) covered with over a decade’s worth of dust. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Writing by the Think System

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence

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Your job as a writer is making sentences. 

Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head.

In your head.

Did no one ever tell you this?

—Verlyn Klinkenborg, from Several Short Sentences About Writing

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In his intense little essay http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/where-do-sentences-come-from/ August 13 in The New York Times promoting his new book, Several Short Sentences About Writing, Veryln Klinkenborg clears his throat for three paragraphs, takes a swipe at American education, and unveils how beginners might learn to write. He’s a stylist I admire, so I drew near. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Become an Expert

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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One-piece steel hammer

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A great way to approach an essay and eventually a book is to become an expert at something.  You might start with the idea of writing about your summer fishing in the Adirondacks, or about your history as a dancer, or your years working construction, all good–great stories, and fascinating.  But as you begin your draft, also study up.  You’ve already done your research in that you’ve done the fishing or dancing or building, also in that you’ve read extensively in dance history, or fly-tying books, or building code manuals.  But there are many experts in these wildly diverse fields.  I’m talking about going micro.  So, for the fisherman, Stone flies.  For the dancer, say, pointe shoes.  For the builder, not tools, but the hammer. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Have an Idea

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Juno just last week, in restoration at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Ideas are abstract by nature. Unbidden, ideas (like memories) arrive in our brains in pieces: a bit of evidence, a blast of emotion, a sentence of logic, a shot of paranoia, a visceral reaction to film on the news, a vision clear as wind and descended as if from heaven. The pieces float around, coalescing in various and partial shapes, wrapped and then rewrapped in layers of preconceptions, blankets of family custom (or pathology), clear sheets of wisdom, sturdy pockets of knowledge. The problem is getting what seems whole and vital in our brains onto the page whole and vital. Seldom as we sit with pencil in hand will the idea come at once (though many experienced writers are skilled at doing earliest drafts in their heads). Most often, an idea will reveal itself fully—move from amorphous blob to elegant artifact—only in the writing. Honest first drafts often look like the mind as described above: aswirl with conflicting notions, half-baked insight, generous impulse, hackneyed platitude, opinionated surety, brilliant strings of words, silence. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Just Say No

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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“Just Write” by the Haystack nonfiction workshop, 2011. [Photo Lisa Cirando]

“What is the best advice you ever received about writing?”

“Just write.”

The above is from an interview with Madeline L’Engle that I found in the back of my daughter’s copy of A Wind in the Door.   L’Engle certainly earned the right to dispense advice, however terse, having written more than forty books for which she won numerous honors, including a Newberry Medal and a National Humanities Medal. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Day Off, Really Off

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Loafing Zone

Carl Jung would take two weeks off from everything and take vacations in order to dream.  Because he knew as we all do that dreams come most vivid when we’re relaxed and receptive, also that they come when we’re asleep.  Even the memory of dreams takes lassitude–you can’t get that thread back once you’re fully awake, the ice skates that helped you fly to see your farm (the farm you don’t have). Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Write a Fan Letter. Preferably to Me.

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Actual Photo

Let us start with Robert Browning’s fan letter to Elizabeth Barrett, January, 1845:

“I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart — and I love you too. Do you know I was once not very far from seeing — really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning ‘Would you like to see Miss Barrett?’ then he went to announce me, — then he returned . . . you were too unwell, and now it is years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some slight, so it now seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be?” Continue reading →