Bad Advice Wednesday: 15 Great Writers’ Writing Advice Revisited

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Baby’s last snapshot.

1.  Ernest Hemingway: “Kill your babies.  Then kill your grown children, too.” Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Start Everywhere

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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An Early Draft

Here’s a test exercise to invoke as you’re writing a book or story, a play or essay, really anything: flip to any page thereof and declare any paragraph or scene you find there the first paragraph or scene of the work in hand.  And read as if it were.  Read it aloud.  Does it rise to the occasion?  It should.  Does it inspire a new way of thinking about your material or story?  It might.  Does it seem to cast a different character or idea or storyline in a newly leading role?  Think about that (all of our characters are the stars of their own stories).  Is the voice and timbre and delivery and energy and interest and draw and promise everything the original start was?  The current finish?  It better be.  No room for slacking anywhere, never.  Every paragraph (or scene) should be rich enough to be the first.  Repeat. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Three Lessons on the Path to Publication of My Memoir

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Freckles and Lambs, 2006

I was fifty and the marketing manager of a university press when one day I decided I wanted to—had to—write a book. My own book. The story I needed to tell. There I was, bent over a drawer in the press’s endless row of gray-green filing cabinets, and from the radio perched somewhere overhead I heard a writer, a man my age, talking about his latest book. What am I waiting for? I wondered. I’d noticed that one of our recent authors had attended something called a low-residency program for her MFA. We were publishing what had begun as her thesis. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Rock the Boat

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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You know those moments when you sit silent in the face of the knuckleheadedness of your boss?  When you are in the room and the question–you know the answer!–hovers in the silence?  When the contractor tells you he’s not going to finish but wants to be paid anyway and you stand heavy on the manhole cover of your mind to keep the boiling in check and say “Okay”?  When you freeze on your butt in the bus while the psychopath screams?  When if only you could fly around the world at supersonic speed and cause time to reverse and go to Boston and pick out that whoever it is placing his black backpacks?  And that secondary moment when the right riposte comes to you late (l’espirit d’escalier: a useful phrase from the useful French).  Or you wake in the next day’s night with the exact plan?  Or you over beers inhabit the braver person you might have been, the guy that confronts the villain, the gal who rushes toward danger, the exhausted runner who leaps the fence, attends to the injured and dying? Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: It’s a Brave Old World

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

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Just what I pictured: Public House

A couple of months back, at a reading by Kate Miles at Devanney, Doak, and Garrett Booksellers here in Farmington, Maine, I found myself seated across from the Dover Editions rack.  These are decent paperback editions of classics, or at least just work in the public domain, priced to reach the masses.  While I listened to Kate beautifully read from her new book of the sea, All Standing, my eye kept returning to that rack.  And after the reading among the milling crowd I made my way to it, the old bibliomania surfacing.  I bought Kate’s book (which she signed to someone else, long story) and grabbed J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, one of those books I’ve meant to read lo these many years, first entering my consciousness in college (I thought it might be the Hugh Hefner story then, but was disappointed), and growing there over the years (various Irish kicks), blooming when A. Walton Litz mentioned it in a great Yeats and Joyce seminar I joined in graduate school.  Something about the repression and stifling and conformity of Irish society, back in the day.  I didn’t read it then, but I did read Ulysses, finally, A. Walton Litz having loaned me a complete set of cassette tapes: the Irish National Theatre doing a complete reading on Bloomsday, 25 hours.  Finally I heard the Joyce’s voices, glorious; finally I could read and understand the book, the secret being to listen. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Finding Time to Write

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Number one question at every panel I speak on and every workshop I teach, and in the many emails seeking solace, and etc: How do you find time to write in such a busy life?  And how can I?

It’s true, my life is crazy busy and getting busier all the time.  And yet there are plenty of blocks of time in the day to get things written, some of them big, many of them small.  And some of the small things get written in big blocks of time, some of the big things in the small.  Five minutes isn’t nothing, and ten is even more, and so I bring my laptop to the dentist’s office, and my writing mind (and note pad) on drives and to dinner parties and the shower. Because the truth is, you’re not ever going to find time to write, not in that pure way we dream of, or only very seldom.  So it’s crucial to learn to write when time presents itself, and to know when you should be writing and thinking, and when you can rest.  Yes, rest, because you can’t go around feeling bad because you’re opting for a night out with time-sucking friends or caring for your infant. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Write About Animals

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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             This morning, on the drive to school, my daughter Hadley issued a complaint.

            “One thing I don’t like about third grade is that they say a noun is a person, place or thing.”

            I asked her how this was different than earlier grades.

            “It used to be a noun was a person, place, thing, or animal.”

            We talked about it for a while. Apparently, someone somewhere had decided that third grade was the time for animals to lose their noun-ness, to be reduced to mere things. We agreed that a better definition of a noun would be an animal, place or thing, with humans taking their correct spot as a subset of the first category.

After I dropped her off,  I thought about animals, how they are not only nouns but absolutely vital to my own writing life, and to the writing lives of many others. To prove the latter all I had to do was take a sampling of my last sixteen hours: the afternoon before I had taught a workshop that featured a beautiful, funny and ambitious essay on pelicans by my grad student, Lucy Huber. Then, seven hours later, struck my insomnia, I spent some midnight hours reading and editing a chapter of John Lane’s brilliant forthcoming book on Southern coyotes, with the hope of placing it in Ecotone.  In my own house the daily evidence was compelling: not a day passed without my daughter writing a story about dogs or wolves; my wife’s first book was called Of Cats and Men, and my breakthrough book was my third, Return of the Osprey.  

            So today’s bad advice is simple: find an animal, watch it, think about it, empathize with it, read about it, study it, write about it. If you do, it will do something to your writing. Writers, along with primitive people, understand that animals have magic in them. They have the power to transport. I mean this practically, not mystically. When a writer starts looking beyond him or herself, something happens to the work. It becomes less claustrophobic, gets outside of itself, gets out of its own way. It airs itself out. I can think of no better single way of jolting your own writing out of habit than by spending time focused on some of the non-human creatures we share the planet with. Continue reading →

Pipedreams: Time and the Insubordinate Writer

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Melissa Falcon, 1996, in The Graduate

Navigating our way through the student center, past the radio station to the English Department, my Dad and I found Bill Roorbach’s office at the University of Maine at Farmington, freshman orientation, 1993.  I was 17.  With my enormous spiral perm and acid-washed jeans, also a lethal dose of neon blue eye pencil, and Summers with Juliet clenched under my arm, I peered through the narrow window, noted a few smooth river stones, a blonde ponytail and a tanned arm resting on a two-bit desk.  Dad, wearing his University of Connecticut sweatshirt (where he’d hoped I would go so he might watch basketball games and slug back beers in the student section), impatiently rapped at the door, calling out in his gruff, pot-bellied bartender sort of fashion, “Hey man, you the writer?” Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: The Art of Schmoozing (Just in Time for AWP)

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Boston or Bust (AWP starts March 7, Grub Street follows)

A few years ago, some fellow writers in a workshop admitted to sheer terror at the thought of attending a big writing conference. They were terrible schmoozers. They worried about saying the wrong thing to a big-name author or agent.  They fretted about wasting their money because they would leave the conference with no contacts in hand. Once again, theirs would be a dream deferred. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: No Small Gift–An Exchange with Poet John Casteen

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John Casteen [photo Anna Williams]