it's out there ... so write about it!

"The material's out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in." - Beverly Lowry

In my case, it seems it's not a "calm lake" of material waiting for me to dive in but more an ocean of waves crashing in. I can catch a wave and ride it in, or I can drown. Think I'll let my writing be my surfboard.

Began a short piece this morning entitled "Spoiled Milk." I'm not sure where it's going yet, but the image of a woman who sums people up by the contents and condition of their refrigerator struck me while I was cleaning my own this morning. Maybe it'll become something, maybe it won't. I, like Lowry, believe there is material for stories all around us - in the ordinary, mundane actions and circumstances of life, as well as the grand and dramatic moments.

books that make you cry

"It's much easier to write a solemn book than a funny book. It's harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry. People are always on the verge of tears." Fran Lebowitz

I googled "books that make you cry" and the only interesting thing I found on the first page was a list of Books That Make You Cry from goodreads.com. Some of the books listed made me scratch my head; others, namely the classics, I agreed with.

Today I heard a piece on NPR about Jonathan Franzen's 2001 novel The Corrections. Winner of the 2001 National Book Award, Franzen's novel sounds like a book that promises to make me laugh and cry. Here's a link to readers' reviews of the novel posted on Diane Rehm's NPR website.

the audience of ten

"A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course, if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content." - Alfred North Whitehead

I'm not convinced of Alfred North Whitehead's conviction that we really write "for an audience of about ten people," but I'm willing to entertain the thought. Here's my list of the ten folks for whom I write:

1. myself (I get to include myself, I assume.)
2. my father (It pains me a bit to admit this.)
3. the men I've loved (a collective "person" & I won't name names)
4. Joan Norton (my high school AP English teacher)
5. my son
6. Michelle G. (a close friend and former student)
7. James Joyce & company (a collective group of authors who have influenced me)
8. my mother (Why she's so low on this list, I'm unsure.)
9. Dr. Kathleen Hassell (my master's degree creative writing professor at UNF)
10.my brother Curtis Wilson Smith (deceased December 22, 2002, a talented musician and writer)

a Mark Twain quote on Labor Day

Happy Labor Day, writers! Relax and enjoy the day. Anyone who's tried it knows making a living writing is a ridiculous venture, but one well worth the pursuit.

A little Mark Twain on Labor Day:

"Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for."

Keep writing and keep the literary faith!

on metaphors

"The really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature because they correspond to something essential. If you invent metaphors, they are apt to be surprising during the fraction of a second, but they strike no deep emotion whatever." - Jorge Luis Borges

Classic Metaphors That Come to Mind:

Chasing the white whale/the big fish
The Tree of Life
The Great Flood
The growing of gardens & the time of harvesting
The acts of cooking & eating
Metamorphosis & mutation (turning into a bug/butterfly/wolf/X-men)
The carnival/freak show
Rivers flowing
The game of chance/gambling
The office space & work
Eagles/hawks soaring & the power of flight
On-coming trains
Couching lions/tigers/dragons
Aliens
Fear of technology

What classic metaphors come to mind for you?

earning an "honest living"

"You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living." - George Bernard Shaw

My attempts at earning an "honest living" before staying home to write:

movie theatre worker
drug store clerk/pharmacist's helper
waitress
retail women's clothing/jewelry salesperson
car salesperson
microfiche filer (worst job ever)
substitute teacher
ESE paraprofessional
high school/middle school teacher
summer camp coordinator
non-profit site director
bookstore owner

Thought for the Day

"I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper." - Steve Martin

Give yourself credit where credit is due and don't be too hard on yourself. Writing is creating out of thin air, from the smoke of our dreams and desires. It's not magic, and it doesn't come easily.

the writer's store of energy

"A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime; one volt of it properly directed will bring a character alive." -Graham Greene

We'd like to believe we are noble and kind and unselfish. I'm sure for all of us, even the most depraved of us, there are occasions when these aspects are true. But for our fiction, they're not very interesting. At least, not unless set in contrast against our own inclinations toward pettiness, meanness, and greed. We are all human, right? And, even though we might want to deny so, aren't noble, kind, unselfish characters, ultimately, a bit boring? I mean, we all love Superman, but don't you secretly want to step on his cape, now and again? Isn't Batman, with his obsessions and secrets, more like us?

To understand the varied aspects of humanity, a writer must begin by knowing himself or herself; then, be open and courageous enough to draw from that knowledge, disregarding the whispers. We hear you behind our backs, you know. "Does she really do that?" "What kind of a guy thinks up a thing like that?" "Did that really happen to her?"

We jolt our characters alive out of our own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Sometimes it ain't pretty, folks. But isn't that a yummy morsel to chew on?

Thought for the Day

"A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down . . . If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him." - Edna St. Vincent Millay.


One of my favorite Millay poems.


And do you think that love itself

And do you think that love itself,
Living in such an ugly house,
Can prosper long?
We meet and part;
Our talk is all of heres and nows,
Our conduct likewise; in no act
Is any future, any past;
Under our sly, unspoken pact,
I KNOW with whom I saw you last,
But I say nothing; and you know
At six-fifteen to whom I go—
Can even love be treated so?

I KNOW, but I do not insist,
Having stealth and tact, thought not enough,
What hour your eye is on your wrist.

No wild appeal, no mild rebuff
Deflates the hour, leaves the wine flat—

Yet if YOU drop the picked-up book
To intercept my clockward look—
Tell me, can love go on like that?

Even the bored, insulted heart,
That signed so long and tight a lease,
Can BREAK it CONTRACT, slump in peace.

the good, the bad, and the corny

"The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. Irony is always scratching your tired ass, whatever way you look at it. I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass." - Jim Harrison

I don't disagree with Harrison. But I think leaning on the side of sentiment is dangerous, especially for beginning writers. If we write from a place of emotional honesty our words will ring true. If we fake it or exaggerate, we become overly sentimental saps.

John Gardner calls this style of writing Christian Pollyanna and warns us "People who regularly seek to feel the bland optimism the Pollyanna mask suspports cannot help developing a vested interest in seeing, speaking, and feeling as they do -- with two results: they lose the power to see accurately, and they lose the power to communicate with any but those who see and feel in the same benevolently distorted way."

The mask of sentimentality is a cop-out. It's an easy, lazy way to process the world and communicate to your reader. Don't be lured by its distorted reality of dead expressions, flawless heroes, and happy endings. Sentiment, yes. Sentimentality, no. Write how you really feel about things.

Thought for the Day

"How can you write if you can't cry?"
Ring Lardner

the scissors and the pencil

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."
Truman Capote

Cutting passages and scenes you love, writing you've labored over with the sort of devotion and intensity a new mother shows her young,can be gut-wrenching. The only rule for me in writing is this: Does it work? If it doesn't, and many times we know it doesn't (even when we are in love with the sound of our own words), we must take out our scissors. Do it. Cut it. Cut it out all at once and be done with it. One sign of a good writer is the ability to see objectively, to know what works and what doesn't, and when it doesn't, to cut without mercy.

To edit is to edit is to edit is to .... Thanks, Gertrude

Today's task? Editing
Today's thought? "I try to leave out the parts that people skip." Elmore Leonard

Paula Fox on writing ... and a little Pavese for good measure

"Hard and unremitting labor is what writing is. It is in that labor that I feel the weight and force of my own life. That is its great and nettlesome reward.

It is not easy to convince people who take writing courses just how much labor is required of a writer.

After all, their mouths are full of words. They need only transfer those words to paper. Writing can't be really difficult, like learning to play the oboe, for example, or studying astrophysics.

Pavese, in his diary, also writes:
'They say that to create while actually writing is to reach out beyond whatever plan we have made, searching, listening to the deep truth within. But often the profoundest truth we have is the plan we have created by slow, ruthless, weary effort and surrender.'

Most students of writing need little convincing about the deep truth they have within them, but they are not always partial to 'slow, ruthless, weary effort.' Few of us are. Yet there comes a time when you know that ruthless effort is what you must exert. There is no other way. And on that way you will discover such limitations in yourself as to make you gasp. But you work on. If you have done that for a long time, something will happen. You will succeed in becoming dogged. You will become resolute about one thing: to go to your desk day after day and try. You will give up the hope that you can come to a conclusion about yourself as a writer. You will give up conclusions."
Paula Fox, "Imagining What You Don't Know"

The Guardian has published a wonderful article online about Fox and her works. Click on the link above. It gave me hope to read she didn't publish her first novel until age 43. I turn 43 this December. Perhaps it is not too late for a successful writing career.

misbehavin'

" . . . part of me was still a writer, I guess, and a writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave."
Mike Noonan, protagonist of Bag of Bones by Stephen King.

oh, those writers . . .

Feeling a bit snarky today. In honor of the smug snark that lies in the hearts of every writer now and then, two quotes from two of the greats.

"This is what I find encouraging about the writing trade: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"They always think that if you write well you're somehow cheating, you're not being democratic by writing as badly as everybody else does." - Gore Vidal

Raowww! Writers, please, retract your claws.

6 ways to get through a bad writing day

"Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter." - Jessamyn West

While my writing day has not been "hell on earth" today, I think every writer feels this way on occasion.

6 Ways to Get Through The Writing Day From Hell:

1. Talk to a friend or fellow writer.
2. Read words of inspiration.
3. Take a walk.
4. Eat a good meal.
5. Remember writing is rewriting and you can always revise what's not working.
6. Be grateful. If all else fails, remember some other writer probably had it worse that day.

How do you deal with the writing day "from hell"?

file under "Advice to Remember"

I like collecting practical advice for the young writer. In my case, I'm not young, but I am young in my quest for publication. There were the attempts in my early twenties at short story publication in the small presses of the day. And, later in my early thirties, I found some success in the local poetry scene. But, now in my early forties, I've begun my first full-fledged attempt at writing and publishing novels. As I write this I see a pattern of activity in the early years of each decade of adulthood. What does that say about me? I'll have to give it further consideration. Anyway ... advice for the young writer from Ring Lardner:

"A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation for the editor."

Something to think about. I wonder how this applies to electronic submissions?

A few more words of advice to the young writer ...

"My point to young writers is to socialize. Don't just go up to a pine cabin all alone and brood. You reach that stage soon enough anyway." - Cyril Connolly

"Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust your own judgement, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad -- including your own bad." - Doris Lessing

"They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talk about themselves." - Lillian Hellman

And on that note ...

another reason to write

"I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for?" - Alice Walker

Thought for the Day

Today's thought comes from William Zinsser's On Writing Well.

Writing is like a good watch--it should run smoothly and have no extra parts.