Henry Miller’s Commandments

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence

comments: 18 comments

A photo of a page from a yellowed book has been going around Facebook: it’s Henry Miller’s commandments, just a note he jotted to himself while living and working in Paris, c. 1932.  It’s collected in a New Directions paperback called Henry Miller on Writing.  And he was a guy who had a lot to say on the subject.  [here's a great interview with him in The Paris Review] Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: The Memory Game

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

comments: 17 comments

Bill and friends, August, 1972

#

One of the many curious things about the act of writing is the way it can give access to the unconscious mind. And in the hidden parts of consciousness lie not only hobgoblins and neurotic glimmers, but lots of regular stuff, the everyday stuff of memory. The invisible face of your grade school bully is in there, somewhere, and the exact smell of the flowers on vines in your grandma’s Continue reading →

Read Local!

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

comments: 1 comment

I was sitting here musing the other night, and mulling (my friend Peter Campion told me on the same night that mulling refers to the medieval practice of heating an iron rod or poker white-hot and plunging it into your alcoholic beverage—instant boil, and instant vaporization of the alcohol, and so an efficient delivery of your musing fluid), that is, I was sitting here somewhat mildly fluthered (Irish for shitfaced, which I realize is a kind of absolute—I mean, what could “mildly shitfaced” actually mean?), anyway, sitting here pondering among and amid my bookshelves, and I thought, Think how far these books had to come to get here!  Published all over the world, printed even moreso, Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Jack Yourself Up! (Through Rituals)

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

comments: 4 comments

There are those who think it’s hard to write every day.  Maybe.  I’m of the camp that it’s harder to write once in a while. The rituals of daily-ness are built to contain a writing life in a way that the formlessness of the occasional is not.  And for most of us who have chosen to make knocking words around our life, there are rituals a-plenty.  Mine include getting up early, stretching my back (chronically bad since I was a teenager), drinking a cup of tea for calm before starting in on coffee for intensity (I am currently on day 11 of no coffee for the first time in many years so I apologize if my prose is sluggish), keeping note of my hours at the desk on a chart, listening to music (different albums for different drafts—The Talking Heads Stop Making Sense, for instance, for rolling along on first drafts), and, later in the day, long walks by the Cape Fear river armed with a microcassette recorder (and later still, notes in my journal armed with a beer.)  Right off I notice that there are a lot of liquids involved in my rituals which seems right since there is an element of communion, and ablution, in the whole thing.  Like most daily rituals mine was never planned but rather evolved, and did so for the single purpose of getting words on the page.

At the moment I am teaching a graduate class called The Writing Life, and some of you might remember that I posted the syllabus last year  (I’ll paste this year’s revised syllabus below).  The class starts, fittingly, with Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and as I re-read that book I noted that her rituals were more extreme than my own, and seemed geared toward creating an intensity far beyond the everyday. She writes:   Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday (Creative Nonfiction: What Kind of Roast Chicken IS This, Anyway?)

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

comments: 10 comments

Eat This Image!

Andrea Zeeman, a very sweet and gentle friend of mine was, back in the day, a food stylist.  Not a chef, not a cook, not a sandwich maker.  What she did was prepare food to be photographed—whole menus for food magazines, sample dishes for cookbooks, convincing chef’s creations for Hollywood.  She was brilliant at her work and made a good living because she was indispensable.  And the reason the likes of Gourmet Magazine couldn’t live without her was that even the most beautiful, most appetizing dishes photographed as they were, fresh out of the oven, no matter how renowned the chef,  looked . . . plain.  And sometimes ugly.  Or even sickening.  Roasted chickens—plump and Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Spend a Week with Bill and Dave

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

comments: 8 comments

             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

comments: 5 comments

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

comments: 8 comments

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

comments: 31 comments

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.

#

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

comments: 48 comments

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 →