Bad Advice Wednesday: Do Something for Someone Else (30 Ideas for Writers)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
45 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 →
Maps and the Mind
categories: Cocktail Hour
11 comments
I don’t think I’ve ever written a book where I didn’t draw a map about the landscape I was writing about. This goes for both fiction and non-, and includes the fantasy apocalyptic young adult book I’ve been writing with my daughter. (For that one we’ve each drawn about a dozen maps.) Maps serve as, among other things, living malleable outlines for my books. They also serve as procrastination, inspiration and, in the case of two of the maps below, tools for the reader, since they actually ended up as the books’ frontispieces. The one directly below is from Return of the Osprey, and marks out the four nests that I watched regularly during my osprey year.
Seven Good Things About Fall
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
7 comments
1. Jumping in leaves.
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I don’t love fall: the shortening days, the daylight-savings axe, the opening of troubling views through once-impenetrable forest, the birds of summer abandoning me, the regressive chores, the incremental turning inward. It’s a big breath in, and hold, and wait, like waiting for death, or at least December 21, when you can breathe out again, and the light grows. Then again, Fall. You don’t burn the leaves anymore, but still you can smell them. The kitchen’s full of food from the garden. It’s back to school, a rhythm I’ve never shaken. Continue reading →
Point of View, or Happy Thanksgiving from NYC
categories: Cocktail Hour
1 comment
The view from here
The view from my father-in-law’s apartment in New York is always nice–Central Park. But the sixth floor is just about right on Thanksgiving Day, when the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade goes by. This year we trimmed things down quite a bit, as Grandpa Frank wasn’t up for the usual party. But over the years he’s always given a speech and hosted the parade as if it were his own. My favorite year was the one the Harvey Fierstein played Mrs. Santa. Santa, of course, always just plays himself. As the last celebrity on the route, he ushers in the Christmas season, and reminds us that it’s all a big commercial, after all! But don’t those floats warm my heart, and the balloons, many of them ragged, pull me back to more innocent days.
In 1929, one of the first parades, the balloons were released at the end of the route, with address tags for return. There’s an amazing video extant that shows Wimpy, the Popeye character (“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”) being let go and disappearing into the sky. I can’t find the clip right now, as the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid balloon is obscuring all searches. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Turn the Page
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
9 comments
Betsy Lerner (Bill’s agent by the way) said this in her terrific book on writing, The Forest for the Trees : “I urge all my writers to get to work on their next project before publication. Working on a new book is the only cure for keeping the evil eye away.”
This is sound advice, and it is grounded in the fact that the writer’s mind, when stripped of its main obsession—writing—will turn to other darker objects.
So today’s advice: turn the page. Which makes great sense but, as I learned over the last few months, is a little harder these days. Ideally, I think, all of us writers would swing from book to book like Tarzan from vine to vine. But what sometimes interrupts all the swinging is the necessity of selling the book. Reviews, Amazon, sales, slights, good readings, bad readings, victories, losses. For a while after publication all the focus is on the past book, the done thing, the dead thing. Continue reading →
Americature
categories: Cocktail Hour
2 comments
This is a project that I worked on in my twenties. Like all the other projects from that time, it never saw the light of publication. I’ll be excerpting from it from time to time.
Visual Haiku
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Reading Under the Influence
4 comments
wild cucumbers
Herewith, a couple of visual haiku. Three lines invoking a season, denoting a shift or change. Silence.
Mr. Hopeless Redux
categories: Cocktail Hour
16 comments
Some of you may recall the post I wrote in June called “Mr. Hopeless,” in which I took on Derrick Jensen, and tried to explain why his world view chafed against mine. Well, this comment just appeared on that post and I think it merits being more than just a comment. Here it is:
98% of the old growth forests are gone. 99% of of the prairies are gone. 80% of the rivers on this planet do not support life anymore. We are out of species, we are out soil, and we are out of time. And what we are being told by most of the environmental movement is that the way to stop all of this is through personal consumer choices. It’s time for a real strategy that can win.
Where is your threshold for resistance? To take only one variable out of hundreds: Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are already gone. Is it 91 percent? 92? 93? 94? Would you wait till they had killed off 95 percent? 96? 97? 98? 99? How about 100 percent? Would you fight back then? Continue reading →
Beyond Flipper
categories: Cocktail Hour
2 comments
Like any sane person, I am fond of dolphins. For the last seven years or so, since I moved south, we have been on neighborly terms. I remember my first New Year’s Day in the South, eight years ago, when I kayaked over to Masonboro Island. Escorted by a squad of pelicans, I paddled across the channel thinking of birds and looking to the sky, until, suddenly, something rose out of the water. A dorsal fin. Then three more, close by. I’d like to say that I reacted immediately with sheer delight at the wonder of nature, but that would be a lie. The first moment was one of panic, before slow identification of friend, not foe. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Memoir, Don’t Do It!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
41 comments
My father and mother
People keep asking. “I’ve been writing about my parents and I don’t see how I can publish.” “My daughter has always been sooo sensitive about this stuff—she’s going to kill me.” “The good news is a contract from Scribner. The bad news is that I just realized my PASTOR is going to read this. I mean, ANYONE can read it.” “One of my friends here in [an assisted living facility] has read my book and loved it, but she says no way can I publish it. I’ll be shunned [by the community]. She Continue reading →
