Writing about heartbreak is supposed to be the writer’s forte. It’s something most people just expect. Writers have the unique ability to turn a heart-smashing, psyche-damaging event into something beautiful and moving. Right?
Well, maybe. But we’re also human, so we have to go through that heart-smashing, psyche-damaging event just as much as the next person. We have to get through the days where we can’t get out of bed, where we can’t listen to the radio because a specific song might remind us of someone or something…basically, a writer’s time frame of emotional healing is not superhuman. Perhaps we notice tiny details and jot them down so we can remember them later, but writing about the heartbreak while it’s still fresh is probably not something even the greatest Writers can manage.
Because, imagine it. Imagine trying to take something that feels so one-sided, so close to you, and putting it down on paper objectively. It wouldn’t be possible. The small injustices would still be crawling underneath your skin, blinding you to how things really went down.
The question then becomes, when is it okay to write about heartbreak? When is it okay to turn our deepest tragedy (or even a minor one) into our greatest work? Read more »
What does a young writer look like to you? Conjure up an image in your mind. What do you see? Thick black glasses? A fuzzy sweater, holes conveniently poked near the ends of the sleeves for easy thumb access? A hunched, pale little person, jittery from too much coffee at the temp agency where they work, scuttling around and biding their time until they publish some brilliant collection of stories that they’ve slaved over, neat, symmetrical slices of their sad, sad life? Okay great, perfect. Now take that poor myopic sap and imagine them racing down the basketball court like a wild tiger – they’re on a fast break, they take off at the foul line, flying through the air, twisting and soaring until they throw down a monstrous, two-handed jam, shattering the backboard into a million crystal fragments. Completely free and uninhibited they stand there beneath the mangled hoop, screaming with primal fury, as the glass rain trickles down from above. Read more »
There’s a great post from Mark Gluth over at HTMLGIANT right now about cannibalizing your own writing (warning: before you go read the original post, beware that the image on the post is rather gross):
The pest control guy told me about rats that cannibalize dead rats. He’s seen cats that eat cats. Then I read about this cannibal star that’s eating a planet. It got me thinking about a ton of stuff, and as per usual I started to think about writing, about how I write, about how much the end results of my writing process are built upon cannibalization of the lesser results of previous processes. About thoughts that kill previous thoughts to give rise to new thoughts.
I think Gluth brings up an interesting element of the writing process that rings very true for me. My separate writing projects aren’t so separate after all: I mix-and-match parts of different ideas until I see what fits.
But I think using the word “cannibalize” wrongly demonizes the quite useful and common act of revising, recycling, and re-using. Of taking the train of thought from a recently-killed project idea to jump-start the creative energy for a new writing project idea.
One of the most helpful pieces of advice I’ve gotten from a writing teacher is to create a text document prominently placed on my computer desktop called “Saves.” Every time I cut something out of a work — an idea, a phrase, a character, an entire written-out paragraph, something that is beautifully-crafted but no longer fits in my work — I cut and paste it into “Saves.”
The “Saves” document is now chock full of great snippets that I hope will find their way back into a completed writing project. You have to revisit it everyone once in a while to see what you have.
Better yet, once you’ve collected these snippets for years, publish the whole document as is, a pastiche of pretty little things with no home (at least that’s what my professor, Leslie Sharpe, humorously suggested).
In his article “Not everyone can be an artist,” Jones takes a look at the rise of interactive and democratized artwork in the digital age. He says:
Some forms of interactivity are obviously good for art, as they are good for society. The more democratically ideas and information are shared, the more accessible art will be. [...] So democracy is great – except when it shapes the actual work of art. I do not believe a great work of art has ever been created by communal consensus, let alone by multiple editors. There will never be a wiki-masterpiece. This is because art, if it has any value at all, is the product of deep and often rationally incommunicable perceptions, and to try and explain or share those perceptions in a communally created artwork will negotiate and re-edit them to banality.
Participatory art is a denial of talent. It panders to a cosy lie, that everyone is equally able to create worthwhile art. What chance have we of nurturing those rare wonders in our midst, the born artists, if we claim this infantile right to put on a badge that says “artist”?
I think it’s a little premature to begin making claims about how true crowdsourced artwork will fail, as this new art from is only in its infancy (See also: “Why the Internet will fail” article from 1995–d’oh). Neil Gaiman and the BBC’s crowdsourced Twitter audiobook last fall wasn’t an enormous success in turning out a high-quality piece of literature, but it’s helped to kindle the recent interest in crowdsourced art; I imagine Gaiman and the BBC’s project will be only one of many large-scale collaborative art projects we’ll be seeing in the coming months/years. And maybe someone will come along soon and find a way to make crowdsourced art a bit more palatable.
Wild predictions aside, I think Jones has some valid points, and also some invalid ones. Read more »
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Penny for getting a free copy of Black Boxes by Caroline Smailes.
This week, we are giving away a copy of They Is Us by Tama Janowitz. Oryx & Crake meets Douglas Coupland. An unforgettable vision of the future of America. Years from now America finds itself split between the rich and the poor. The haves live in luxury within the small regions that remain unpolluted while the have-nots inhabit a toxic suburbia full of terrorism, crime and genetic mutations. Perhaps not all that different from today then? They Is Us tells the story of one family from the poor side as they go about their daily lives. Julie has a job as a summer intern at an animal laboratory. She can’t resist taking home the discarded mutants and her house is filled with genetic cast offs. Her mother, Murielle, has kicked out her stepfather and now, seemingly from nowhere, finds herself subject to the attentions of multi-millionaire businessman A.J.M. Bishrop. Set against a backdrop of increasingly invasive technology, growing pollution and the President of the USA’s impending gay marriage (to be broadcast live across the nation) They Is Us features a cast of unforgettable characters that will stick in your mind long after you finish the book.
I was inspired by Jacket Copy’s classic literature web movie and so put together one of my own using the simple (and free) online animated moviemaking tool xtranormal. Below is a video featuring part of a scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet–with the titular characters as robots. Xtranormal only has sterile, computer-generated voices to provide the dialogue, but in this context I’m thinking it kind of works.
After the jump, watch Jacket Copy’s Pride and Prejudice web video. Read more »
Speaking of, here is an interesting interview with Kurt Vonnegut, which The Paris Review composited from four interviews done with the author over the past decade, so it’s more like an interview “conducted with himself, by himself.” Via The Rumpus.
3. If your plot is too exciting or moving too fast, enhance realism by making your characters stop for a meal at an ethnic restaurant. Describe each course and allow your characters to re-cap the plot so far.
13. Write what you know, especially you white people out there.
1. Never snack while writing; consume only complete meals – a starch, two vegetables and one serving lean protein (remember that one serving is about the size of a pack of playing cards.)
2. Marry somebody who will cook this.
9. If an irate reader should break into your home, tie you to a chair and terrorize you with selections from the cutlery drawer, think back to your most recent novel. Was its point of view inconsistent? Did you at any time make use of the second person, or urban slang, even ironically? Did you attempt to underscore the significance of an action by describing it as having been performed “to the max”? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, accept what you have coming.
Aaaaand because I love you, here is a video of a reinterpretation of Hamlet, which demonstrates how the play would have ended much differently if Ophelia had a sassy gay friend: Read more »
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Kerry for getting a free copy of Survival By Storytelling Issue One from SBS Magazine.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Black Boxes by Caroline Smailes. Julie Myerson meets Ian McEwan in this gripping novel of family breakdown. Ana Lewis is trapped by her own expectations. Her intense relationship with fellow student Alex begins to crack beyond repair when she becomes pregnant, and his subsequent withdrawal, emotionally and sexually are hard for Ana to bear. Eventually, following the birth of Pip and then Davie, Alex leaves Ana to a life of question and blame. Locked in her room for much of the time she woefully neglects her children, preferring instead to replay scenes from her life over and over, fighting the urge to blink for fear it should dissipate the memories. Told within the context of two black boxes, one Ana’s and one Pip’s, the story reveals the key factors that have contributed to this catastrophic breakdown of life.
In the introduction to the third volume of the literary journal, Electric Literature, the editors lament the decline of traditional reading. Yet they also recognize the fact that we are all now reading more than ever, and at a faster pace: tweets, blogs, texts, and, yes, books. So instead of publishing a death notice for the literary age, the editors present an innovative collection of stories, mediums, and writers meant to challenge the idea of conventional literature. Read more »
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Writing about heartbreak is supposed to be the writer’s forte. It’s something most people just expect. Writers have the unique ability to turn a heart-smashing, psyche-damaging event into something beautiful and moving. Right?
So proclaims The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones
This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by 
In the introduction to the third volume of the literary journal, Electric Literature, the editors lament the decline of traditional reading. Yet they also recognize the fact that we are all now reading more than ever, and at a faster pace: tweets, blogs, texts, and, yes, books. So instead of publishing a death notice for the literary age, the editors present an innovative collection of stories, mediums, and writers meant to challenge the idea of conventional literature. 
