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 »

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).

So proclaims The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, which seems odd to me. Seriously? I’m trying to think of counterexamples, but I’m coming up with nothing. There’s the theory that Shakespeare’s plays may have been actually composed by a group of people, but as that’s only a theory, I’d be interested in hearing some better-documented examples of group-made art.

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 »

Nabokov at work

I.

Some of the greatest writers of our time have neglected the conventional image of a writer at his desk and opted instead for more unorthodox approaches.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote standing up at a lectern. He also wrote longhand, and only on index cards, so as to write scenes non-sequentially.

Philp Roth took Nabokov’s lead and added movement to his repertoire –– Roth claims to walk a half a mile for every page he writes.

Then there’s Tom Wolfe,. Wolfe was 6 feet 6 inches tall, so his reasoning for standing up might have been less about innovation than it was about finding a desk that wouldn’t destroy his knees.

II.

Then there were the horizontal writers. Read more »

In case you haven’t heard about TED, let me break it down for you: what started out as a “small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading” has turned into a highly Googled, highly popular website that features tons of speakers taking art and ideas to new levels. Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame, recently took over the internet with her words about nurturing creativity, and I must have gotten at least 8 emails gushing about how awesome it was and how I had to check out it RIGHT NOW. An excerpt: Read more »

In news that isn’t really news, today’s artists are having a hard time making a living. And when they do make a living, they probably aren’t working on their art.

For the majority of us who majored in something that made our parents shift uncomfortably in their seats – or worse yet, acquired a graduate degree in that field, the reality of every day life is indeed a heavy one. Most of us won’t be discovered at an early age and catapulted to fame before we can mentally or emotionally handle it. Hell, most of us won’t even see the first letter in the word fame. But what we will see: bills, long hours at sucky jobs, and more reports about how today’s artists are having a hard time making a living.

I know plenty of talented writers who have settled into lives of little consequence (teaching, working 40 hours a week as editors and proofreaders, transcribing Japanese manuals into English…) because they got too damn tired of walking the poverty line. They fought the good fight as long as they could, but time eventually claimed its victory. They no longer cared if their masterpiece was ever published or garnered lavish acclaim, they just wanted to buy groceries without coupons and own a DVR. Read more »

The writers of the Beat Generation: proof that being social can be a boon to your writing rather than a detriment.

I realized I wanted to be a writer sophomore year of high school, when I learned that engineering–my former ambition–required practicing actual math and science. Not for me.

Impressionable as any 16-year-old, the “writer lifestyle” became all too important to me. I turned to what I thought was the writer look: black-rimmed glasses, messy hair (the natural way), and wrinkled button-ups rolled to my elbows. I adopted the apparent “writer mindset.” My opinions became gold, fart jokes became immature, and as far as I was concerned, no one was capable of understanding the “depth” of my writing.

I lost quite a few friends that year.

Writing itself is a solitary act, a lonely act. However, I’ve learned­­––the hard way––that the solitude of writing doesn’t and shouldn’t have to affect writers’ social lives. Read more »

Lucky Writer's Socks?

Baseball players are known to have strange pre-game rituals. Rob Murphy wore women’s underwear under his jock strap while pitching (honestly, can you think of anything less comfortable than a jock-strap-and-thong wedgie?), while Kevin Millar used to sprinkle his bats with doe pee when he was with the Florida Marlins. But as the phrase, “I’m going to write, so I’m taking the candle” left my mouth, I started wondering about the odd rituals of writers. Read more »

In the writing world, creativity is often confused with complexity. Flowery prose that marches on for years, knotty metaphors so strange there’s a reason they’ve never been used before, and dense paragraphs that require a tweezers to get through – that, to certain writers, is success.

I once had a professor who thought reading should be a mental cardio session, a humbling experience that wasn’t complete until you threw the book against a wall in frustration. I never did well in that class; partly because I couldn’t stop myself from thinking he was an egotistic asshole and therefore skipping his assignments, but also because I subscribe to the TLC theory of creativity.

The more to the point you are, the more likely people are to listen.

TLC is a television station that’s not afraid to lay it all out on the table. They’re also not afraid to dedicate about 60% of their airtime to little people, obese virgins, and the occasional show that makes you wish you weren’t eating a burrito while watching. Read more »

The ghost of Vladimir Nabokov: "I told you to burn that damn book!"

I was troubled when I first read in the New York Times that Vladimir Nabokov’s final, unfinished novel (The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun)) was published against his explicit instructions. At the end of his life, Nabokov told his wife, Vera, to destroy Laura if he had not finished it before he died.  Because she failed to carry out this task, Laura fell into the hands of Nabokov’s son, Dmitri. Dmitri, now in his mid-70s, decided to hand over the notes containing his father’s final creative efforts to a publisher (Knopf) because he felt his father would not “have opposed the release of Laura once Laura had survived the hum of time this long.” Representing what Dmitri claims is “the most concentrated distillation” of his father’s creativity, Laura consists of a series of index cards and notes packaged in a fancy, expensive book. It’s not really a novel but more of a peek into a writer’s creative process.

But should it have been published?

At first I thought “oh hell no” and was very angered by what I interpreted as Dmitri’s callous disregard for his father’s final wishes. But then I read Nathaniel Rich’s article on The Daily Beast. Rich, who has actually read the book (unlike me), says that “to describe The Original of Laura as a novel would be like mistaking a construction site for a cathedral” and calls the three year public debate over its publication “silly, meretricious” and “waged on false grounds.”

Here’s what I think: Read more »