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Bad Advice


It’s Thank Your Editor Day at Bill and Dave’s!

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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I realize I’ve gone missing.  It’s because I’ve been working feverishly on The High Side, my new novel.  And moments ago, I finished.  Finished for the tenth or eleventh time, four years and counting, but finished.  The edits came back a month or so ago, and after several smart and wonderful but very intense conversations with my editor, Kathy Pories at Algonquin, I got to work.

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The thing about working with an editor on late drafts of a work in progress is that with each draft you fully believe you’ve finally done it, finally delivered the perfect manuscript.  So when your editor says she loves it, you rejoice.  You blush and stammer.  And when the other shoe drops, the “but” sentence, you tend to resist. You’re a writer, after all, and you know what you’re doing.  Kathy’s letter is very careful and thorough, and after these words: “I loved reading this; I love your sense of joy and fullness and ability to create rich Continue reading →

Wednesday is Bad Advice Day: Finding Time to Write

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Two missives this week, one from WriterMom, the other from Jean Witlow in Corvallis, Oregon, with very close to the same question.  WriterMom: “I teach four sections of composition at two different colleges, and have three kids, 6-8-12.  My husband is deceased.  I write an infrequent column for the local paper.  But that’s it for writing.  I want to know how to get my book written when I have no time and never will.”  She goes on to describe the book (almost a pitch—first advice: don’t do that—you come off like an infomercial or a flight attendant).  And it sounds good, a memoir of her husband and the risk taking that finally killed him.  Next, with as little punctuation as possible, Jean Witlow says, “Here I am finally with my MFA and my book basically written it was my thesis but needs some work and I’m going Continue reading →

Wednesday is Bad Advice Day: Rejection as Biofuel, or, Showing the Bastards

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Why do we choose to do this writing thing?  Let’s start there.

I had a critical father, a man who, as I described recently in a post called Kid of the Year, would reply when I got a 98 on a test with: “What happened to the other two points?”  I developed a self-deprecating sense of humor in large part as a defense against his sarcastic attacks.  I hated nothing more than criticism and rejection.

So of course I dedicated myself to a career that would guarantee a lifetime of criticism and rejection.

Leaving Dr. Freud aside, I think it was a great decision.  It has toughened me up enough so that I can occasionally laugh outright—ha!—at rejection.  Occasionally.  Of course it still stings, but I know that that sting is part of my writing life, my overall writing ecosystem. I was at a writing conference a few years ago when a young writer said he didn’t want to go to a particular party because it would be full of people from a journal that had rejected him. An older, well-respected writer overheard this and said: “If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone at the whole conference.” Continue reading →

Wednesday is Bad Advice Day: this week, The Secret of Getting Published (and your letters answered)

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Would you take advice from this man?

I get emails often with a few vague words of praise for my work and then the big question: I’m writing this article, this story, this poem, this essay, this screenplay, this book, and I’d like to know how to go about getting an agent.  Agent, usually, because the correspondent has  already done some investigating and has heard that you need one.  I have sympathy, because I’ve been through it myself, the feeling that there’s some secret to getting published and that no one’s telling what it is.  Well, that’s all changed.  Because I now know the secret to getting published, and I’m ready to spill it.  The same secret works for getting an agent: Continue reading →

Goodbye to All That

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Teaching

While I was teaching 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, mostly agreeable Continue reading →

Three and a half years later…

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Ned Ludd

Here’s a little article I published in the Hartford Courant, March  2007, which is only three and a half years ago.  I definitely would have been surprised to see myself expertly updating Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour back then, in like the middle ages.  After that, I’ll post an item from an interview I did in March of 2002 with the wonderful Dan Wickett, who has run the website Emerging Writers Network for ten years or so.  Note my contempt in both pieces for the man I have become: a blogger.  Oh, well, three and half years is a long time–almost enough time to get a college degree.

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My Chlog (March, 2007)

I have a confession:  I don’t really know what a blog is.  I mean, I know it’s short for Web Log and really admire whoever figured out how to save that extra syllable, and I know there are profound issues of press freedom and freedom of speech Continue reading →

On the Banks of the River Ose

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Alexander Kerensky, really.

For me, it’s all about storytelling. That’s the first value. After that, language. A great sentence trumps all kinds of more prosaic concerns, like who’s a composite character and what’s a fabrication, about what rule applies and who might be offended. Still, fiction and nonfiction aren’t the same. I never have the faintest question which category a given idea fits into as I start the day’s work. Definitions: Fiction, I make up the stories. Nonfiction, I don’t. Fiction, I might use corners of my life to help create verisimilitude. I’ve worked in a restaurant, so I can invent a kitchen. I’ve had sex, and so can Continue reading →

PROPOSING (“Will you…”)

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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I sent out my first feelers for my new book, Learning to Surf, yesterday.  I thought it might be fun to share the often frustrating, but always exciting/nerve wracking process of trying to sell a book with you, my few intimate friends.  It is a time defined by anxiety and uncertainty.  The goal is to enter into a good marriage with a publisher and, if you don’t mind me pushing the metaphor, to eventually procreate successfully.  And like most marriages, it usually starts with a proposal.

Unlike the last go-round where I spent a couple of years getting my book proposal together (see my Walking the Edge proposal below) this time I just wrote the book and sent a short synopsis, more description than proposal really.  As usual, and as with any proposal/synopsis, parts of the description are bullshit.  But most of it isn’t.  I really believe in this new book but then again what kind of idiot would spend four years of their life on something that they didn’t believe in? Continue reading →

Land of Giants!

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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[Update: May 12.  Some good title ideas coming in.  How about the Giant Side?  No–sounds like a rib restaurant.   It’s still The High Side for now… That’s the name of the vast mansion and estate in the book–If I could think of a great name for a vast mansion and estate that would also be a great novel title, I’d happily make all the changes–any more ideas out there?] [Update: May 11.  Land of Giants turns out to be what they call San Francisco… Just isn’t quite gonna work…  How about just GIANT?  No, it doesn’t work at all the same way…  Okay, back to The High Side for now… And off to ten editors tomorrow with a great note from Betsy, framing it as I never could…  Whatever happens, Later in the summer, cocktails with all you New York readers…  Alaska in June.] [Original Post: May 10]: I’ve recently finished a new novel—four solid years worth of drafting and revisions and moaning and groaning trying to make it look effortless, characters I love. The working titlehas been The High Side, but I’m not terribly happy with that. Land Continue reading →

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categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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PLEASING IMAGE

As we move away from traditional publishing, what are we moving toward?  Half of the top-ten bestselling print novels in Japan recently were originally cell-phone novels [LINK MOTOROLA], full-length, sent out to millions of subscribers text-by-text, fifty or a hundred words at a time, mostly dialogue. And several groups are vying to write the first novel created on Facebook—a line or two and pass it along, with no editorial influence, and certainly no commercial potential.  [CONSIDER PARAGRAPH BREAK] Twitter can’t be far behind.  Part of the new aesthetic seems to be Continue reading →