Bad Advice
Bad Advice Wednesday: Start a Writers Group?
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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My Writing Group
A long time ago I would write a story, feel good about it, and send it out to the Paris Review or the New Yorker. I recall putting the very first of these in a blue mailbox in Ithaca, New York (which dates it early ’70s), and actually going to visit the mailbox for the next week or so. After a month I got the rejection slip and the story back (remember paper? envelopes? “stamps”? one-month manuscript turnaround?) and then I’d decide one of two things, or I’d pick both: 1) The story sucked. 2) The magazine and its editors and readers and the whole culture that spawned it and them and pretty much everyone in the world sucked. And so back to my typewriter (remember typewriters?), a fresh story. Because why would you revise something that sucked? Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take Down your 10,000 Hours
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Most of the talks I gave over the last month were Environmental with a capital E. But one was more specifically about writing, given to some young writing students, and in it I gave an overview of the first decade of my own writing career (“career” being a word I wouldn’t have used, even loosely, back then). That chapter of my writing life could be aptly titled Banging My Head Against the Wall. I wrote two novels, the first better than the second, that were big, clunky, and ultimately unpublished. When I finished each novel, I sent them along to 5 or 6 big New York publishers and they sent back the obligatory form letter rejections. One editor wrote a personal letter, that included the phrase “You are a writer of considerable talent,” a phrase that I clung to like a lifeline through my (roaring) 20s. I revised the book along the lines of her criticisms and sent it back to her, only to get a form letter in return. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday (Thursday Edition): Take a Break
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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MacDowell Colony Cabin
I’m in New Hampshire as I write, enjoying the annual Roorbach family gathering at the lake. Five or six hundred of us, including container loads of Elysia’s cousins, have climbed Mt. Cardigan, eaten large amounts of everything, swum, fished, sailed, sung, rope-swung, toasted marshmallows, thrown horseshoes, and etc. And I, I haven’t written a word. I am taking a break.
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But that’s just one of the kinds of break I’m talking about here. Another is the opposite—the writing break. In which you carve out a week and take yourself somewhere (preferably boring, preferably alone), and perform an ambitious task: finish that book, start that play, learn Russian. Continue reading →
Health Insurance and the Independent Writer
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
comments: 10 comments
Cobra
When my wonderful five years at Holy Cross were up I was able to take advantage of COBRA health coverage. The acronym stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, but it’s appropriately threatening, deadly snake, right. All the act states is that employers’ insurance plans must continue to cover employees terminating for any reason for eighteen months after termination. This protects many people, but for an example, think of someone battling cancer: can’t work anymore, gets to keep insurance. For a while. If she can pay. My own COBRA amount was about $2200 a Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Write in THE FUTURE
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
Everyone can imagine a time in the future when circumstances will be better, more ideal, for tackling that big book, that perfect poem, that masterpiece. Right now you are too stressed, too busy, involved in a family squabble, and money’s tight. But in that imagined future life is stress-free, everyone gets along, your bank account’s flush, and of course you have plenty of spare time. No wonder you want to write the book then. If you did it now, with all this other stuff going on, you couldn’t do justice to the work of genius that is in embryo in your brain. If you did it now it would come in fits and starts; you would make mistakes; it wouldn’t be pure. Continue reading →
Scraps from The Cutting Room Floor
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Gessner arrived for a little R and R in the midst of his burgeoning book tour. My Green Manifesto is getting good attention, and it was Dave’s turn. We hadn’t had anything but a virtual cocktail hour for over a year and it was great to clink glasses. The conversation ranged from deep to silly, from sad to hilarious, and we really didn’t stop talking, usually over one another. Much of what we say is about our work (in fact, we filmed a couple of conversations, one sitting on a log in the stream: stay tuned). His at the moment is the preparation of his next book, Tarball Chronicles while publicizing the current one. Mine Continue reading →
Wednesday is Bad Advice Day at Bill and Daves: The Cutting Principle
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
Dave
My friend Richard Gilbert is working on a fascinating book about his years farming, and writes: “Well, I’ve made it through a light edit and effort to trim. Great: I cut 52 pages, the bulk of it including most of one chapter. That still leaves a 467 page ms., Lord. But I think I will pitch at that length. At this stage of completion and polish, isn’t it okay to do that? I don’t want to be an amateur or anything, but I am afraid any more cuts to get it even to 450 (my avowed pitching goal) might cut what an agent-editor-publisher would like. Or am I just being pathetic? Mine must be a common dilemma–a writer knowing his ms. is long but fearful of cutting it himself past a certain point. (And, really, unable to, because he can’t see it fresh or from enough distance. I mean, if I put it in a drawer for ten years this would be Continue reading →
Wednesday is Bad Advice Day: Getting Started (Fiction Edition)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Sonia Rykiel Pearl Sunglasses
I often have great, clear ideas for fiction, glorious stories blooming whole in my head, but when I sit down to write, something happens. Or more accurately, nothing. Or at least nothing like the vision that came middle of the night or driving to Portland, or (frequently) watching a good movie. Maybe this is because the crisp, beautiful idea I’ve envisioned is really only a series of events detached from person and place, or alternately an image attached to a problem–something like a dream, compelling and vivid but impossible to grasp in real time. Where to Continue reading →
The Incremental Method
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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David showing me some technique
I have these secret projects. Maybe you do, too. One lately has absorbed me on my daily walks through the woods here. About a half-mile in on one of my circuits there’s a stretch of deep mud you can’t quite skirt–a spring rises there when the weather is wet. So a few years ago I started placing stones in the mud. There are plenty of stones around, just not many flat ones, and most way too heavy. But over time, at the rate of a stone or two a month, I’ve managed a pathway. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Tough Guys Keep Journals (And You Should Too)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Every year I bring in a big pile of black journals into my classes and plop them on the desk and go on and on about how important they are to my writing life.
And every year my students nod politely and say “uh-huh” but you can tell what they really want to do is roll their eyes and get this bit about diaries over with so we can move on to more important writing stuff, like how do you get an agent. Journals, admittedly, aren’t sexy. They conjure up thoughts of “Dear Diary” and tears over lost high school boyfriends or girlfriends, and they require that least fashionable of writing tools—a pen.
