Bad Advice Wednesday: Spend a Week with Bill and Dave

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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             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

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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 →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Writer, Edit Thyself!

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Here’s a few thoughts on editing your own work:

1. “I hate it,” isn’t an uncommon reaction when returning to a piece of writing after a time away from it, just as “This is the greatest thing ever written” isn’t uncommon when in the throes of inspiration.  The trick is to come back to a piece with a mindset somewhere in between the two extremes.  That is to come back with a “new head,” calm, practical, aware that what you are approaching isn’t either the worse or greatest piece of writing ever produced, but something that can be tackled, re-worked, improved.

2. It’s easier to have a “new head” when there’s actually another head.  That’s the reason that editors exist.  You simply can’t see everything yourself.  Is there another individual, hopefully a writer who knows something about craft, who can read for you consistently?   Sometimes a single external sensibility (that is, a person) can help as much as a class.  (I know this one contradicts my title.) Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t be Stupid

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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One thing I’ve noticed about good writers, even the most demotic, even the most seemingly down to earth and simple-hearted, even (god help us), the raving right wingers: they’re pretty smart.  So that’s this week’s bad advice for writers: Don’t be stupid.

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For example, don’t have the phrase “legs akimbo” in the first paragraph (or any other paragraph) of your short story, as a fellow hoping to work with me in private study recently did.   Because if you use the phrase “legs akimbo” in the first paragraph of your submission, I will stop reading. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Do Something for Someone Else (30 Ideas for Writers)

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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A little help?

How to get published, how to get an agent, how to be a better writer, these are all high on the list of common questions we get asked here at Bill and Dave’s.  Where there’s not a bit of desperation in the question there is often anger, and where the anger has faded there’s sometimes sadness, maybe a whiff of self-pity.  Or is that me, feeling all those things no matter where the writing takes me, often in equal measure with pleasure, even elation (but that comes most often in the making, sitting at my desk alone, lovely, soon to be dashed).  What I’m proposing today is forgetting about our own careers (or lack) and thinking about what we can do for others, what we can do to make the world a more hospitable place for art, and for artists, which is to say for writing and writers.  Doing for others may be your key to success, and is certainly the key to happiness.  Herewith, 30 suggestions for writers.  Karma, anyone? Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Turn the Page

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Betsy Lerner (Bill’s agent by the way) said this in her terrific book on writing, The Forest for the Trees : “I urge all my writers to get to work on their next project before publication.  Working on a new book is the only cure for keeping the evil eye away.”

This is sound advice, and it is grounded in the fact that the writer’s mind, when stripped of its main obsession—writing—will turn to other darker objects.

So today’s advice: turn the page.  Which makes great sense but, as I learned over the last few months, is a little harder these days.  Ideally, I think, all of us writers would swing from book to book like Tarzan from vine to vine.  But what sometimes interrupts all the swinging is the necessity of selling the book.  Reviews, Amazon, sales, slights, good readings, bad readings, victories, losses. For a while after publication all the focus is on the past book, the done thing, the dead thing.  Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Memoir, Don’t Do It!

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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My father and mother

People keep asking.  “I’ve been writing about my parents and I don’t see how I can publish.”  “My daughter has always been sooo sensitive about this stuff—she’s going to kill me.”  “The good news is a contract from Scribner.  The bad news is that I just realized my PASTOR is going to read this.  I mean, ANYONE can read it.”  “One of my friends here in [an assisted living facility] has read my book and loved it, but she says no way can I publish it.  I’ll be shunned [by the community].  She Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Be Your Own Willy! Give Yourself a Minimum Word Count

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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       The self-discipline required for writing has always been at odds with my nature, which is fundamentally lazy.  Right now, for example, I’m switching back and forth between this blank screen and Facebook Scrabble, and I’m also contemplating the guilty pleasure book that arrived from Amazon yesterday, A Year and Six Seconds by Isabel Gillies.  It’s just warm enough that with a sweater I could read in the hammock.

       But in addition to this Bad Advice Wednesday that David asked me to do, I’ve got a novel to write, and it’s not going to write itself.  Not unless I do some typing.  You might say that the novel won’t write itself no matter what.   But I’ve found that’s not entirely true.  When writing in the long form, it seems to me that my subconscious ends up doing most of the heavy lifting – as long as I give it a little kickstart, which I can manage no matter how unmotivated or uninspired I feel.

Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: The Annotated Table of Contents

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Table of Contents for "100 Famous Views of Edo"

Let’s say you have an idea for a nonfiction book, whether it’s a memoir, an extended personal essay, journalism, or something else.  It’s hard to get started, isn’t it?  Or if easy enough to get started, hard to keep going.  Part of the problem is knowing where to start, and after that, where to go.

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Or you’ve finished a draft of a book and the chaptering came willy-nilly as you composed.  There are holes in the narrative or in the stream of argument.  The sections are of all sizes and methods and shapes.  There’s no sense of progression, or if there is, the progression seems to stutter.

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Or say you’ve written four essays on a related theme.  Growing up in Nigeria, for example.  Or your life as a teacher and coach.  Or in my case, more than 20 years ago, on my adventures in nature with my then girlfriend (now wife) Juliet.

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Or take it a little further–you’ve thought quite a bit on your subject and have some preliminary chapters put together and you want to go ahead and pitch your book idea to editors or agents. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wed: Accept Your Small Self; Strive to be Larger

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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I had every reason to be happy when I heard that Edith Pearlman had been nominated for the National Book Award.  When my wife called to tell me the news she certainly expected to be happy.  I am happy for Edith now, very happy, and I should  have been happy for her then.   After all, I had been lucky enough to be in the room when Emily Smith and Ben George, the founders of Lookout Books, had called to read Edith the glowing cover review of her book  in The New York Times.  That had been a thrilling moment, and we were on lifted up in its excitement, and news that she had now been nominated for the NBR should have provided me with a similar lift. Continue reading →