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).

I’m about to start teaching creative writing and composition once a week to a group of 11th and 12th graders in Harlem.  Many of them will struggle with basic reading and writing comprehension, but my goal is to get them excited about telling their own stories, but also to respect the craft: to understand that editing is an important part of any artistic process, that attention to details helps the final product, and that constant practice (via writing and reading regularly) can only make their own creative and academic writing better.

So what kind of stuff do I want to encourage them to read in order to get excited about books and about writing their own stories?  My mind automatically goes to “the classics,” a list of books many of which I haven’t even read myself (cue the guilt).  But are these the best works to get them excited?

The bigger question is this: Is a classic work of literature (fiction and nonfiction included) always “good” writing?

Read more »

But baby, there’s no such thing as passing. We’re all just pretending. Race is a complete illusion, make-believe. It’s a costume. We all wear one. You switched yours at some point. That’s just the absurdity of the whole race game.

A quote from “Caucasia,” the novel from author Danzy Senna, about a girl born to a white mother and a black father, both active in the civil rights movement. Birdie, the main character, doesn’t quite pass as either black or white, complicating things when she ends up fleeing with her white mother after her parents’ separation. “Caucasia” is about race, activism, mistaken identity, trauma, coming-of-age, and family. This book had the biggest impact on me of any book I’ve read in the past two years. Read more »

So, judging a book by its cover is like cardinal sin numero uno, right?  We’re in an era when people often find books NOT because of their quality but because they have a pretty cover or they have a long enough title that it matches one of their google search terms. So I should be fighting against the valorization of pretty book covers, right?

Yipes, wrong, I guess.  My design nerdery means that I actually love to browse all the book covers in the bookstore.  I did some graphic design in college and led my own campaign against ugly flyers. That’s how seriously I take design.  This love of all things pretty, well-designed, well-composed, with nice typography means that I’m totally digging this list of the best book covers from 2009 from The Book Design Review blog.  My favorites from the list below the fold:

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Ani DiFranco has this song called “Soft Shoulder” from her album To The Teeth.  I love that song.  The first verse is perpetually stuck in my head:

I don’t keep much stuff around
I value my portability
but I will say that I have saved
every letter you ever wrote to me

I want to be able to value my portability.  I’ve lived in four different cities and seven different apartments in the last six years, and sometimes I wish that moving was as easy as filling up a backpack and a little satchel and walking to the next destination.  That’s what I imagine Ani doing.

I’m no pack rat, but I do have a few boxes of letters, postcards, ticket stubs, mementos, school work, photos, and Xerox copies of interesting articles.  And books.  I’m not a collector — I think I have less than 150 books — but the books take up the most space each time I move. Read more »

I’m re-hashing an old debate here, but I only want to rehash it for the sake of silencing it once and for all:

Is writing creatively something that can be taught?  Is getting an MFA (Masters of Fine Arts degree) in Creative Writing a waste of time and money?  [Read the instances of these arguments: Should Creative Writing Be Taught? and here Why Always Write in a Room Of One's Own?]

Okay, let me say right off the bat that I’m not a fair candidate to debate this issue since I’m currently enrolled in an MFA Program.  But I think I can still fairly go on a mini-rant. Read more »

Sometimes I feel like a broken record.  I say it over and over again — the Internet is making people more literate, not less.  (We’ve written about this before — see Jennifer’s great post about “the new literacy” here).

Then a column like this comes along and I feel like I have to debunk it or at least go on a rant for a bit:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé…The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing. It was inevitable that more than a decade of digital reading would change the way we do it…Meanwhile, a generation is tuned, increasingly and sometimes exclusively, to the cacophony of interactive chatter and noise, exciting and fast moving but plethoric and ephemeral. The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.

Read more »

Publisher’s Weekly recently released their Best Books of 2009 list and it didn’t include a single woman author in the top ten.  They half-heartedly acknowledge this in a editor’s note at the top…

We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the ‘big’ books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.

…but it doesn’t change the fact that no woman wrote a book worthy of the top ten, in their minds.  They didn’t go back and change their methods upon realizing this.  In addition, only one of the men in the top ten is a person of color. Read more »

Whenever I hear about literary awards being bestowed on new works or see a list of prizes in an author’s book flap biography, I just allow the benefit of the doubt to take over.  I don’t know anything about most of the awards, but I assume they’re prestigious. Apparently I’m not alone:

The American Book Awards are different from the National Book Awards … how? Is it like a National League/American League-type of thing? Which is the one that Philip Roth is always nominated for? Don’t tell anyone, but before last week we did not know that the Booker was named for a corporation. We assumed it was a dude, or an affectionate British-y version of “bookworm.”

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There’s a lot of talk on the internet right now about the writing workshop, so I thought I’d put in my two cents.

People are talking about what it means for someone else to tell you that your writing sucks (see here, here, and here).  Well, this never happens in any of my graduate writing workshops. Even the ones I was in during high school, a time when people are notoriously mean to each other, no one ever told me or anyone else “your writing sucks.”

I know, I know, I’m taking these bloggers too literally, but still, I feel compelled to respond to the sentiment behind these posts: Read more »