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Archive for March 2010
 Use what you know to get started My name is Andrew Boryga, and this post is the beginning of a bi-weekly column I’ll be writing entitled “From One Young Writer to Another.” The purpose of my column is to give a different perspective on the literary world. Through my own experiences as a young writer I want to provide some advice for people my age, or at the least, examples of what not to do.
I am a freshman English major at Cornell University. I first became interested in literature in middle school, and since my sophomore year of high school, the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be is a writer. The majority of my writing thus far has been journalistic. I have been writing fiction for less than a year. In most cases my inexperience would be a limiting factor, but on this site it’s a gift.
So if there is any writing issue you’d like to see tackled from a young person’s perspective, whether or not you’re a young writer yourself, let me know by emailing me at andrew@litdrift.com.
I began my first real short story in November. Billy was my first protagonist.
He lived in a small Midwestern town and worked a gas station. He was a sophomore at a decent college but didn’t like it much. He wanted out of his life.
A man pulled into his station one day driving a car covered in bumper stickers, offering Billy the ride of a lifetime. “Come watch the lines on the road with me,” said the ragged old man.
This whole story had been mapped out: the plot –– everything. But after four pages, I had nothing to say. Billy was still in school, getting ready to leave with the traveler and I was preparing to write crazy adventures for the two of them –– crazy adventures I’ve never experienced myself. I’ve never hitchhiked, never bought anything but roundtrip bus tickets and I’ve always known when I was coming home. And so Billy’s story remained four pages long.
During winter break in December, I went home. I enjoyed the food and my old friends. I reminisced. I pulled out my box of old middle school photos. I thought about all the stupid things my friends and I used to do. I thought about my old principal who’d only give late passes to the pretty girls and I thought about the bus driver on the BX 55 who’d yell and holler every time I went through the back entrance.
Then it hit me.
“What the hell am I doing writing about a kid from the Midwest?” I asked myself. I’ve lived in the Bronx for 19 years –– I don’t know jack shit about the Midwest. Read more »
A visualization of some odd writer rituals from Lapham’s Quarterly. Victor Hugo wrote naked in the bedroom, Emily Dickinson wrote poetry in the pantry, John Cheever wrote in his underwear in the basement. Lots of nude or semi-nude writing going on, I can see.
A pre-Catcher Salinger writes to Hemingway.
“He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.” This and more best metaphors ever, via.
In this week’s edition of Life’s Not Fair, Jersey Shore castmates JWOWW and Ronnie have landed a book deal.
How to become a literary star.
5 “wonderfully weird” book videos to add to the list.
What do David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Wikipedia have in common? Via.
James Franco edited by the New York Tyrant.
Robot Rilke, via.
Snarkmarket’s Robin Sloan writes a piece of flash fiction with near real-time editing help from Twitter.
The problem with fairy tales.
Aaaand because it’s hump day, here is a plastic bag with the voice of Werner Herzog: Read more »
 When Doug Funnie wasn’t Doug Funnie, he was Smash Adams. When he wasn’t Smash Adams, he was Quailman. When he wasn’t Quailman, he was Durango Doug or Jack Bandit or Chameleon or Wafflestomper or Race Canyon.
Doug himself was the creation of Jim Jinkins who likened Doug to the middle-schoolers of the early 90s. He stated that Doug was a righteous albeit average middle-schooler and relied primarily on his imagination for entertainment. When Doug’s many alter egos were not being used for his amusement, he found that they came in handy for solving his middle-school issues. Oftentimes, he’d assign his problem or question to the alter ego most equipped to handle the situation.
Alter egos usually arise out of necessity. While Doug’s creations came mostly out of boredom, the insecure middle-schooler found he needed the guise of his more confident alter egos to execute the actions he himself was too afraid to do. Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus’s character on her Disney TV Show, Hannah Montana) wants to live a “normal” teenaged life but makes a living as a teenybopper rock star – therefore, Hannah Montana is born. In comics, a secret identity was necessary for various superheroes to conceal their true self from evil villains and the adoring masses.
I’m willing to bet that you are at least two people. 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 SMD for getting a free copy of Gents by Warwick Collins.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Point Dume by Katie Arnoldi. Set in Malibu, Point Dume is cast with a fascinating crew of characters – among them, the thirty-something surf goddess Ellis, Pedro the weed poacher who deals out of his camper, over-privileged Frank who takes pride in his mansion and vineyard, and the illegal immigrant Felix who makes the dangerous journey from Mexico to work at a cartel-run pot farm in Southern California. The fictional narrative in Point Dume is firmly rooted in pertinent issues that are all too real today. Arnoldi writes with authority, informed by her own extensive and revelatory research including many hikes into active cartel-run marijuana grow-sites with the U.S. Park Police. With experience and expertise, she takes on the death of surf culture, human trafficking, drug cartels, and the environmental devastation caused by illegal pot farms on public lands. She addresses the transformation of a once blue-collar suburb into a billionaire’s playground with secret large-scale marijuana farms right in their backyards.
 This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by The Overlook Press. Read more »
 I’m a pretty easy-going person. It takes a lot to bother me and even more to piss me off completely. But there is one issue that gets me every time. Every. Single. Time. What’s that issue? Excitement. No, not the actual emotion. The over, and downright wrong, use of the word.
How many times, during a 24-hour period, do you hear people say “yeah, I’m excited about this” or “yeah, I’m excited about that”? Probably a lot of times, right? But here’s the thing, are these people really excited to do whatever they’re going to do? Or are they just looking forward to it?
Webster’s defines excitement as exhilaration: the feeling of lively and cheerful joy and the state of being emotionally aroused and worked up. When you or someone you know says you’re “excited to talk to so-and-so tonight,” are you in a state of lively and cheerful joy? Most likely: no. We all feel exhilarated once in a while, but anyone who’s emotionally aroused and worked up on a daily basis needs to check their prescriptions.
So yes, it really, truly bothers me when someone says they’re “excited,” when what they really mean is that they’re “looking forward to it.” Why are my feathers all ruffled? Mostly, it’s because the word excited has become so common, we don’t even think about what we’re saying when we say it. And speaking without real thought – well, that irks me. Read more »
Whether or not Twitter remains a popular tool or a passing phase, it is still a useful instrument for writers to use to connect with their fans, record passing thoughts, and try out new material. Below is a list of five writers who surely would have made good use of the social media tool if given the chance, and here’s what they might be Tweeting.
Charles Dickens: Freelance writers in this day and age use Twitter to drive readers to their work. Very quick to realize the opportunities and the audiences created by new media, Dickens would surely overtweet. But his dedication to his fans would keep his feed interesting.
“@bookbench pls tell yr readers to keep their fingers crossed for the fate of little Nell and DM me with any concerns regarding her outcome”
Jonathan Swift: Read more »
Kurt Vonnegut draws some graphs to explain how fiction works, via.
Six simple tips for writing a literary manifesto.
Talk about finding a silver lining: Bad Review Cliche Bingo.
Edit other people’s sentences for fun with oddly addicting Bite-Sized Edits, via.
Author photo failures.
Buzzfeed co-founder Jonah Peretti has a choose-your-own-adventure Twitter, and Mediabistro is lauding him for “[breaking] new ground in Twitter Lit.” Which isn’t really true, as the ground has already been broken, but Peretti’s project is cool anyway.
Fiction advice from ad guys.
A French experiment modeled after the Milgram experiments found that people would kill, literally, to be on TV.
Aaaaand because I love you, and also zombies, I would like to share with you this: will you survive a zombie apocalypse, the flowchart. Read more »
Jennifer Schuessler’s essay in the New York Times on the disappearance of actual work from literary fiction made me wonder if anybody is really, truly interested in the day-to-day minutiae in a corporate world where most of it could be summarized as “read emails” and “responded to emails.”
For example, Moby-Dick’s ridiculous number of chapters devoted to whale anatomy could actually be more interesting than reading in detail about the number of times I read an email, talked to our accounting department, responded to first email, and read the next email.
 Modern Tools Read more »
Maybe it’s just me, but there seemed to be quite a few literary videos cropping up over the weekend. From hitchhiking Kafka cockroaches to songs about children’s literacy to an astute response to the ongoing debate over publishing’s future, I thought these videos might serve as a nice introduction to the week. Read more »
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