Bad Advice
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Journey Years
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Bill at the forge
Dave has talked in an earlier spasm of bad advice about the 10,000 hours an apprentice at anything must put in. Now, perhaps, it’s time to talk about the artist’s or writer’s journeyman years, or better, journeyperson years, or better yet, just Journey Years. These are the professional years after your apprenticeship has been served, the cruelly harder but perhaps much more rewarding years. A friend says that after apprenticeship (after, say, the MFA is done, or once the first book is out there, or whatever marks the transition for you in your particular set of circumstances), that after the apprenticeship comes something he Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Write Scenes!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Okay now, you’re saying, I thought the “bad” in bad advice was ironic, but after reading your title I’m thinking maybe what you’re pushing here really is bad bad advice. And I will admit that maybe today’s title overstates a bit, and that I was trying to catch your eye…..But, I mean it. Or partly mean it. What I really mean is “Don’t Write Scenes Exclusively.”
As someone who has read thousands of workshop pieces, both fiction and non-, and who has read over a hundred theses, I can say that there is a certain sameness to the work. Not that the writing and themes and events aren’t wonderfully varied and full of both possibility and dazzling writing. It’s just that almost 99.9% of that writing is in one mode and that mode is the minute by minute, often second by second, dramatic unfolding of events that we have come to call scene. Somewhere along the line the “Show, Don’t Tell” police got hold of America’s young writers and scared them straight. Straight out of summary, exposition, condensed thought, essayistic pace, and idea. Straight out of the notion that time in a book can be manipulated, pushed in and pulled out like an accordion, so that one important event might take ten pages and another a sentence. And straight away from the idea that variety is one of the deepest pleasure in any art, and that reading back to back blocks of same-sized scenes does not constitute variety. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Just Write
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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This is no time to get ready!
My old grad student and now friend Connie writes from beautiful New Zealand to say, “Help! How do I get back to my book?” I know her book. She’s been working on it for some years, and it’s already really good, the story of how she ended up where she is (small jets are involved, and an ad in the newspaper, also running away cold from a certain husband and falling in with a kind of sky pirate, now dead.) And then someone I’ve never met, Roger K., writes to say, “I’m just about started on THE BOOK.” This is not the first email from Roger K. We’ve been back and forth for years. As a former roadie, he has access to Mick Jagger. Well, not actually Mick Jagger, but someone just as big whose name I shouldn’t say so as not to give away Roger’s proposed project. Notebook after notebook of interviews and confidences and inside dope to make your knees wobble, also permission to use it all! Written permission. Just about started! And from a friend, call her Ishmaela, the author of several good novels, Continue reading →
Really Bad Advice Wednesday: Accept Being Poor!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Boy, this is a hard one. Even as I type these words I’m worried that no one wants to follow me down on this depressing bummer of a trip. Over the next few paragraphs I’ll try to convince you it’s not that depressing, but in a society that values wealth above else it’s hard to tell someone that the career you choose, even if you are talented and work as hard as humanly possible, will not likely bring you wealth. There are exceptions, you’ll argue–Charles Frazier, Tom Perrotta—quality writers who also are able to afford to pay for both home and car. It’s true, it’s true, but the vast majority of us who spend our time trying to make great sentences and books can barely pay our bills. This hardly makes us exceptional in these tough times, but that may not be much reassurance to a young writer choosing to pursue a life of word making.
So why do it? As hundreds have said before me, because you have to do it, you are compelled to, and you ain’t in it for the money. But more than that. Because there is joy in it. Joy in making your own worlds, thinking your own thoughts, creating individual art in our increasingly pre-packaged, Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday Live!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Movies
comments: 8 comments
This week, Bill and Dave discuss reading, but they do it two months ago sitting in Temple Stream behind Bill’s house in Maine. Here’s the video.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take Your Work to the Movies
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Movies
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Sometimes when I’m done with a scene or a section in a story or chapter or essay, I like to test it by thinking about how it would look as a movie. One way to help envision this is to write the script. No, really. Turn a section of your story or chapter or essay into a movie script. Nothing fancy: just take the scene or section (something short—you don’t need to kill yourself) and imagine what the first image in its movie would be, what the first words would be and who would say them, where the action would be, how the drama would fall. If you’ve been working too much in the mode of the writer sitting at her desk and talking, you’ll find that all you’ve really got is voiceover. If you’ve been sitting and thinking, ruminating in writing, you won’t even have that. Continue reading →
The Author Photo
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 21 comments
October, 2004: unbeatable
Dave and I are practically supermodels, all the camera time we log. But leggy beauty aside, for me it’s still a painful exercise trying to get the right author photo. I knew it was coming–it’s a standard request when you have a new book in the pipeline, but Algonquin’s letter threw me into a panic, a perfectly workaday letter from the very kind publicity assistant down there in North Carolina, one Sarah Rose Nordgren. “Your author photo,” Sarah wrote (and I know she’s never said this before–this missive was for me alone), “along with a copy of the attached photo contract, should be sent to me no later than August 3rd, 2011. It’s important that we receive your photo by that date so that we can use it for all promotional materials, including our catalog and advance reader’s copies of your book. Your photo should be in color. We prefer a high-resolution digital file (it must be 300 dpi, 5×7 inches or bigger, and approximately 10 megabytes), but you can send a hard copy instead. Dress for your photo can be casual, but we prefer that you Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Kill Your Internet, or, Writing in the Time of Harrison Bergeron
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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This was going to be a short essay about distraction. It was—excuse me, what was I saying? Wait I lost my train of thought….let me take this call first…and answer this e-mail….
Harrison Bergeron
As I was saying, distraction, and the thousands of possible objects we call distractions, are an enemy of the writing life, or at least, an enemy of the effort of consistent concentration required for the creation of longer projects. To write a book of prose most of us need blocks of time where we focus on nothing but that book. These blocks of time, it seems to me, are not so different in duration than the four or five set matches going on right now at the U.S. Open. And they also require a similar focus and intensity. You don’t see Nadal checking his e-mail during changeovers. He has, as the expression goes, one thing on his mind.
It is 3:46 A.M. as I type this sentence. There are disadvantages to working at this time of day, the most obvious is that I will be tired and cranky later on, especially when I teach my two o’clock class. But there are advantages, too, the chief one being that for the next two hours no one is going to call me or interrupt me in any other way. I know that my early rising time makes me an extreme case, but we all face the same challenge of finding that block, that chunk, that slice of time when we, like Nadal, can have one thing on our minds.
It’s always been hard to find these blocks and, let’s be honest, it’s getting harder. “Death by a thousand cuts,” was how a colleague of mine described the academic life, but it’s not just the academic life, it’s every life. Leave your computer for a day or two, and despite that automatic out-of-the-office reply, you will come back to find 400 messages in your inbox. E-mails and phone calls sting and swarm like insects. And it isn’t just writing that these distractions interrupt, but anything else that requires a decent block of time—going for a hike, say, reading a book, having a conversation, eating a meal.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Workshop
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 12 comments
The Haystack stair to the ocean...
I disdained all organized writer things when I was young (in my twenties, that is), regarding them as extraneous and foolish and vain. I thought the only proper apprenticeship for a writer was to make pages on my own under the unwatching eyes of various writing gods, not Shakespeare—I thought he was a jerk for all the puns—but more like Scott Fitzgerald and Bukowski. I worked in construction and as a bartender and on a farm and played music and all of these things were the experiences I was collecting for my writing fund, real stuff, life stuff. Anything I did was writing, as I saw it. I was on the wet path, as the Buddhists call it, partying and playing and working the sentences when I saw fit and writing in fits and starts, getting better, sure, but in a terrible vacuum—aside from reading, reading. Study and devotion to a mentor seemed too much the dry path for me. And why bother, since everyone knows both paths—wet, dry—lead to enlightenment. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Character Files
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
Notes in the dark at a movie, then put through the wash, all on the way to my new novel...
It may be a legacy of minimalism, or of a misreading of so-called minimalists like Raymond Carver, but in so much of the work of new writers, both fiction and nonfiction, characters get almost no, um, characterization. There’s a lot in a name, Shakespeare notwithstanding, but a name is often all we get to go on, that and a voice, if there’s dialogue, sometimes not even a name. I like a writer who lingers over a character, especially at first appearance, but only if the lingering is deft and vivid and puts a person in front of me. Even better I like a writer who captures some essential, unforgettable thing about her character in a line, nothing to slow the action down, but Continue reading →
