Bad Advice
Bad Advice Wednesday Holiday Edition
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Joan R. Wigglesworth of Manhattan, Kansas, writes: “To be a real writer, must I write on Thanksgiving Day?” Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Enshrine Craft
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: Comments Off on Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Enshrine Craft
Painted Desert (Richard Gilbert)
.
“If you stay in newspapers long enough, you’ll only see words.” —Ernest Hemingway
I encountered Papa’s warning in my teens, reading everything by and about him. When I went to work in newspapers after college, his phrase haunted at odd moments. I’d just knocked out my fourth police brief of a morning, say, and realized I had another to go—on an epidemic of car-battery thefts—and it was six minutes before deadline. Usually it was satisfying, working each little story like a jigsaw puzzle, selecting pieces culled from the police blotter. But was this what he meant? Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Let Politics In
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
I don’t mean editorialize.
I don’t mean sound like you are on Fox or MSNBC.
I mean don’t erect a wall that separates the political from the rest of your writerly world. I mean don’t think that just because it is the current fashion to think that “literary writing” should be kept clean and separate from political writing doesn’t mean it should be.
As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I am working on a book about Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. One of the pleasures of studying the work of these two men is that even Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Applying for an MFA Program? Whoa! Not So Fast
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
Lee Martin
‘Tis the season when undergraduates’ thoughts turn toward applying for admission to an MFA program, which has me thinking of how different the culture is these days than it was when I got my B.A. in 1978. Although I knew I wanted to write, I also knew I needed a bit more seasoning. In those days, it was assumed that some much necessary time would pass between that undergraduate degree and the attempt to enter an MFA program. It was also very clear that the competition was fierce and admission wasn’t guaranteed. When I finally thought I was ready to try four years after that B.A., I wrote to the Associated Writing Programs and asked them for a list of MFA programs. When it arrived, it was a single sheet of 8 1/2” by 11” paper. The list from the front side continued on the back and stopped about half-way down the page. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: My Top Ten Pieces of Advice
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
The top ten pieces of advice I have received, some of it about writing, some of it about life, in no particular order:
1. My friend Melinda Macinnis said, “Always believe what people tell you about themselves when you first know them.” We were in our twenties at the time, and I think the conversation was about potential love interests. But I have found over and over again, in all kinds of relationships, that this is true. Pay particular attention to the things people tell you by accident.
2. I worked in a bookstore in Chatham with a woman who was a therapist – she’d just moved there with her husband and hadn’t decided whether she was going to set up a practice or retire. Sadly, I can’t remember her name, but I liked her enormously. Diane? Maybe it was Diane. She told me that she never read her own work at a certain time of day because that was when she was most critical and apt toward anguish. A bell went off inside my head, and now I never read my own work in the late afternoon.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Get Parkinson’s Disease
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 11 comments
Anxious Bode
-Good morning! Welcome to the writers show. Today we welcome Anxious Bode, writer, distinguished professor of panic at Frost University. Anxious is the founder of the magazine Milk Shake. Professor Bode we’re happy to have you with us.
-Call me Anxious. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Pick the Flowers! An Un-Fairy Tale
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
The context: We learned at the beginning of the school year that kids on the Radford, Virginia, High School Cross Country Team could no longer run on roads. The boys were state champs last year and they have a tradition of roaming all over the place, hilly streets, through neighborhoods, waved at by friends. Parents pushed back, and the administration gave no good rationale for it, or shifting ones, or they changed what is was called (a policy, then a directive?). Anyway, the overprotective fear of kids getting hurt is something I touched on in in A Natural Sense of Wonder. The original piece led to a sequel after a board meeting and there will be at least one more. As we discuss a ban on road running in Radford, you may be interested in a similar town that banned flower picking. It was written by one Jonathan Slow, a little-known friend of Jonathan Swift’s. Tune in for the next installment when the queen herself speaks. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Art is the Solving of Problems
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
I had a friend so, so many years ago in NYC who was a kind of general artist, when that was newish. She painted, she sculpted, she performed (when you least expected it), she was into concept, and conceptual art. She’d say things like, “Imagine a column of air a mile in circumference and a twelve miles high.” And we’d sit around and truly imagine it. Then she’d report it stolen. And the police would come. And usually arrest her. Stuff like that. Anyway, she got the best job, probably the only job she could actually have held down, at one of the big department stores: Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Writing Tips from Annie Dillard and Rafael Nadal
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
This was originally posted in January 2011, but given the results of the U.S. Open seems relevant:
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: Get on Your Bike!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
Today’s bad advice is simple: bike more, write better!
I now have a daily loop at school, through the woods, out on the road, back through the woods. Nothing particularly strenuous, but by adding another ten minutes I’ve pushed the total time up over an hour. And I find this makes the rest of my day, and my writing, both easier and, I think, better.
