Bad Advice
Bad Advice Wednesday: Everything I Need to Know about Writing I Learned from Bartending!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
Make it a Double!
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Bill and Dave have got me thinking about cocktails. Writing, too, of course, and how the two fit together. And I’d really like to hear about how your work fits in with your writing. Or how it doesn’t. See, once upon a time I was a bartender. And lately, I’ve noticed that people who haven’t worked in the service industry react to that with a certain reverence and awe. “Wow, I wish I’d done that when I was younger,” they say. They imagine I was a sort of female Tom Cruise, shaking fruity libations, tossing bottles, juggling coconuts to the likes of “Kokamo,” lots of wicker and palm fronds and gorgeous customers lining up to fall in love. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Be Relentlessly Generous
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
Dave, Suzanne, Judy, Andy, Eve, Christine, at Doe Branch [photo Bill Roorbach]
Bad Advice Wednesday: Goodbye to the University, Goodbye
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Just Visiting
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Today’s advice (apropos Dave’s post yesterday), is for writers who teach in the university, and it is very simple: You don’t necessarily have to. I’ve quit several times, and have lived to tell the tale. Simple, I said. But not easy. While I was teaching–two decades worth–I often had to remind myself that I’d set out to be a writer, not a professor. I really loved the classroom and often the students, and didn’t really mind committee work, even got into it, wrote wicked minutes. The common enterprise of learning and making and knowing and investigating (also administrating), that’s the best. It’s great work if you can get it, and I did get it and did appreciate it—summers off, semesters or quarters of research leave, adjustable hours, health insurance, a paycheck, mostly agreeable
colleagues, the constant plumbing of the self, and so on. But was that writing? Continue reading →
Those Who Write, Teach
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
In 2008, Scott Malcomson of the New York Times Magazine approached me and asked me to write an essay about the fact that almost all of this generation of writers are also teachers. He wanted me to consider how this might detract from our work. Since I worked at a University he worried about my biting the hand.
“I know this may seem like career suicide,” he said. “But somehow after seeing your Youtube video I assumed you wouldn’t mind.”
The video he was referring to was “Transformation,” which features me tearing off my clothes and jumping up on a desk off in the middle of a lecture, and he was right, I didn’t mind.
Here is the piece I wrote for him, which did get me in some trouble, though mostly with other writers who claimed I “hated teaching.” I don’t. I love teaching. I just hate when it gets in the way of my writing.
In Captivity
Five years ago I gave up the full-time writing life and became the kind of domesticated writer known as a professor. I was not shot with a tranquilizer gun, tagged and shipped off to a university. I underwent this conversion more or less of my own free will, drawn by the Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Be a Snob!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 14 comments
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Dave is on a trip this week and I promised him that while he was gone I would read Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece, Angle of Repose. Instead I’ve been reading Most Talkative: Stories from the Front Lines of Pop Culture by Andy Cohen. There are several reasons I could feel guilty about this, the most obvious being a broken promise, or at least a delayed one. The others involve a kind of intellectual guilt – the nagging, unfinished-homework voice inside your head that believes every moment should involve edification, enlightenment, and improving the mind through High Art. “Nina,” my voice has a way of asking. “Is this really how you want to spend your time?” Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Interview Yourself, Interview your Characters
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
He was very, very, very good to me.
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Much has been written in journalism texts about the art of the interview. Basically, I’ve found that interviewing for journalism is a matter of fooling your subject into revealing herself, perhaps in ways she’ll wish later she hadn’t. People love to talk, especially about themselves. Note-taking, the tape recorder, the endless questions, all are flattering, hard to resist. But for the memoirist, interviewing is a more delicate tool. Your subjects aren’t politicians, for example, who are used to public life and tough questions. Your subjects aren’t hapless and immediate victims of accident or disaster. Your subjects aren’t experts you have approached for facts and figures. Your subjects, in fact, are very often well known to you, very often relatives, sometimes even your mother. And Mom isn’t going to be flattered by any tape recorder. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Luck and Pluck and WTF (Revisited)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 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 →
