Bad Advice
Bad Advice: Super Bowl Sunday Edition (Wah!)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Monica at the Bill and Dave’s REALLY Super Bowl
There he was, late in the fourth quarter, sacked again at third-and-long, the game out of reach. The game, that is: the AFC Championship game, the one that would have led him directly to a record-breaking sixth Superbowl. I averted my eyes in sympathy, reluctant to witness his marrow-deep humiliation, the future first-ballot Hall-of-Famer sitting on the 30-yard line, legs straight out, shoulders curved in despair. Tomorrow’s front-page photo: the great Tom Brady posed like a kid in a sandbox, wondering, like the rest of us, what the hell went wrong. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Be Porous, Be Available
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 9 comments
“A career is like a garden,” Bill Roorbach told me and a roomful of other eager writers nearly ten years ago at the 2004 Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers Conference at Goucher College. “There is only so much you can control. The beans won’t climb the pole until they’re ready, and sometimes the garden just evolves where it wants – you just step out of the way and fit yourself in.” Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: To Binge or Plod?
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
Alise on a roll.
As literary crushes go, Aimee Bender is definitely in my top ten. I discovered her short stories as an undergrad—the first one I ever read, a bad photocopy of “The Healer,” featured a girl with a hand of fire and a girl with a hand of ice. It was bursting with two of the things I value most in fiction: imagination and heart. I was hooked. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Throw Your Skis Across the Brook
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Temple Stream. Your skis would land in the middle…
There come days skiing back in the woods, early and late in the season, when it rains and then rains more, and the ice is busted up by the resulting freshet, and you cross even the small brooks without some thought. On my regular route, the first brook is one I’ve named Nina Brook, since no one else seems to have named it. On my first morning of skiing this year, just a few inches of snow, I took my skis off, threw them over, crossed on the usual rocks, put the skis back on and continued. But on the second day came the rain, all day, all night, all the next night, then more snow. You could hear Temple Stream in the night, and you could hear Nina Brook, wow. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Greetings from a 25-Year Old in His Childhood Bed in His Parents’ House
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 21 comments
Vasilios at a reading from his screenplay, “The Ungettable Get.”
Speaking to Bill after his recent reading at Andover Books in Andover, Massachusetts, I asked for his take on some trouble I was having. We talked for a bit, he gave me some advice (not bad, because it was a Thursday), shared a bit of his own experience, then encouraged me to write in to Bill and Dave’s. I said, “But I haven’t come to any sort of conclusion about anything!” And he said, “Well, then write about how you haven’t come to a conclusion!”
.
I’d written a page about the particulars of my situation to send Bill. But when I read it over to edit it, I grew disgusted with myself and immediately deleted it. “For the love of God, man, stop whining,” an inner, much more put-together version of myself surfaced to say (in the voice of Ian McShane, strangely enough). But I mean, I’ve already got this word document open named “for Bill,” so I’ll at least send something. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Wait till the last minute!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Portland has the best Christmas lights.
Well, it’s still Wednesday, so I think we’re okay here. I’m in Portland, Maine, after a great event at a great store, Longfellow Books (where they sell “that new book smell–not available on the Internet.” This is home territory in some ways, and a lot of fine feathered friends turned up, many of them writers. And talking to a crowd with familiar faces might be the hardest assignment of all. Especially when you know your bad advice is due! Ian McRae, Dave’s friend from third grade, reminded me as we met for the first time: “I’m still waiting for my bad advice!” Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Work the Work
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 11 comments
I am most definitely a “nostalgiac.” I find myself looking back, quite fondly, on those days as a twenty-something when I changed jobs like I did outfits before a night out of barhopping. Okay, yes, it was years, an epoch my mother referred to (then and now) as “Floundering Up in Ithaca” her lips pursed in distaste, as if she’d just gotten a whiff of ripe flatfish. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Practice, Practice, Practice
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
At big college reading recently a very tall and bristly young man loomed over me with my new book in hand. He wasn’t buying it, he was just holding it. “Is it worth it?” he said. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Stop Doing That!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
I visited a physical therapist after my neck surgery, and he was a great help as I recovered from that trauma. While I was there, what the heck, I asked about a chronic, painful issue I was having with my elbow. Not from tennis, not from skiing, not from softball, not even from typing–I hadn’t been doing those things since my neck injury. No, my elbow problem–nothing to do with my spine–was the result of hitting it on the door frame as I walked into the very, very familiar bathroom at my house. It’s an old place, and that doorway is narrow, and I just judged it wrong, repeatedly judged it wrong and smacked my elbow, so often, in fact, that I’d raised a bony lump on my right wing, painful, and sticking out the way it was, even more likely to get banged. I told Dennis the P.T. about this. He didn’t even have to think, just shot back his advice: “Stop doing that!” We laughed, but he was serious, and he was right. He even had instructions: “Think about how you go through that door and go through that door a different way! Slow down, tuck your arms in. Or, Bill, just pause and think before you go in there!” And that’s what I did, stopped hitting that door frame with my elbow, and now after years of chronic pain, my elbow is fine. So that’s my advice for today, with thanks to a great professional: “Stop doing that!” Whatever it is that’s making you hurt, whatever it is that’s keeping you from doing what you want to do, whether it’s writing, reading, thinking, making, or being, whatever you’re doing that isn’t for the good? Stop! Stop right now! Stop doing that! Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Have Way (with words)
categories: Bad Advice
comments: 4 comments
As a writing teacher, my favorite joke is one of Steve Martin’s.
“Some people have a way with words,” he said famously. “Others…not…have…way.”
This point, as you can imagine, is fairly relevant to a class full of people who want to be published writers. If you are going to try and be a professional athlete it’s helpful to be relatively athletic. And if your goal is to be a writer it helps to have an innate gift for words.
But why bring this up to a bunch of people who are already determined to become writers? Isn’t it potentially cruel to point out that some lack this gift? I prefer the word “realistic” to cruel. One thing a writing apprenticeship is about, on top of putting in thousands of hours of writing sentences and producing work , is finding out who you are, or at least who you are on the page. This process of discovery is not often started with clear eyes, but it better be ended that way. As full-fledged writers, we had better have at least a passing acquaintance with how our own minds work, with our particular quirks of imagination, and with a general sense of our strengths and weaknesses.
