Jonathan Harris. Click the image to read the accompanying story.
I recently started a new support job that I actually like. After working a job that made me miserable for many years, I got a job working for an online publishing company that produces gorgeous photobooks. My recruiter knows I’m a writer, and when she first called to pitch me the job she prefaced it by saying: “Well, it’s in publishing…but don’t get too excited: they publish photos, not text.” Now a month into the job, I can see that I’ve stumbled into a veritable wonderland of artistic inspiration. I spend my days looking through photobook after photobook…bearing witness to the photographic stories of the lives of random strangers. And I’m discovering: sometimes it can do a writer good to get away from words for a while.
I ran across a post praising the benefits of linking photography to writing. Photographer/writer John Oughton says that they both offer “a way to represent a unique view of the world to others.” He also presents photography as a way to be present, “to pay attention,” and to truly see what is around us.
“Good photographers are not necessarily those with better equipment; they are those who can see something unique and capture it in an interesting form,” says Oughton. I think the same can be said for good writers. Half of being a writer is seeing, and the other half is finding an appropriate and exciting form in which to pour the results of that seeing. The world offers us so much creative material, if we only pay attention. Read more »
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).
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 »
On my computer there is a folder labeled “Short Stories”. In that folder lie 20 or so opening paragraphs to short story ideas I’ve had the last few months. They range from a delusional bus ride, a sleep-running businessman and my dog’s neurotic nature when he can’t find his toys. The one thing they have in common is that they’re all unfinished.
Think of the process to becoming a writer like the process of building a brick wall.
I’ve always been one to shoot for the moon and be really pissed off if I land amongst stars. It’s a problem I think most young writers and artists in general go through, setting lofty goals for ourselves and getting angry when they aren’t met.
My problem is that I want to be published in the New Yorker right now. Read more »
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
- Elvis Costello
Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking when I hear the silly things that you say...
Oh Elvis. You’re so wise. It’s true, using one medium to describe another is always a challenge, and writing about music is no exception. This of course hasn’t stopped people from trying; there is a massive and constantly-expanding network of fanatical bloggers and music critics out there, passionate listeners who deconstruct every obscure indie release in excruciating detail, who obsess over artists 99.8 percent of us have never even heard of. And you know what? Despite its occasional pretensions, I love this community; their relentless sifting of new music has lead me to some great bands, and they are ultimately the ones who identify and dictate what music will be popular in the future.
What I don’t love is the style of writing that many of the people in this community employ: the use of fragmented images and phrases to try and illustrate what a particular piece of music sounds like. You’ve probably read some of this before; a reviewer will attempt to describe a song by writing something nonsensical like: “The verse shimmers along, buoyed over a gentle sea of bass by airy wisps of keyboard, until it explodes into the chorus, a glorious cacophony of overdriven guitar and distorted drums.” This style of writing is ridiculous and a waste of time. No one could ever read one of these crazy streams of consciousness and gain any real kind of understanding of what the song actually sounds like; music is too subjective, and the terms used in these descriptions are too abstract to be useful. (They are also often repeated – for example, the verb explode is one of the most prevalent and pernicious words in all of music writing, appearing in about 60 percent of music reviews. It seems like every song is combustible.)
It’s a rare–and highly interesting–phenomenon when the success of a character overwhelms even its creator.
A. A. Milne found Winnie the Pooh’s popularity a source of profound annoyance. Despite his credentials as an established author and playwright, few took his “adult” work seriously after the success of Pooh.
J. M. Barrie had the same troubles with Peter Pan, who entirely overshadowed Barrie’s other works, past and future.
Better-known are the woes of Arthur Conan Doyle. The writer absolutely hated Sherlock Holmes, whom Conan Doyle believed was distracting him from his more important literary pursuits. So plagued by the stature of his own creation, Conan Doyle resorted to throwing Holmes off a cliff in 1893. Public demand and financial need prompted Conan Doyle to revive the famous detective a decade later. The detective has not died since. Read more »
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 »
Who and what do you want to be in 2010 (but more importantly, why)?
Today is New Year’s Eve and like many people at this very moment, I’ve been thinking about my resolutions. I’ve shunned this tradition the past couple years because for some reason – if I clearly stated I was going to do something – the likelihood of it not happening was even higher than if I had not said anything at all.
I enjoyed a pretty successful first year out of college but like many, the recession soon found me and my hopes for steady work and monetary stability were knifed in the face. This year, I learned that “Freelancer” was just a glorified term for “Intermittently Unemployed.” Naturally, this leant me quite a bit of time to sit on my couch and stew in my own thoughts. It took awhile to boil down the carcass of my early twenty-something idealism, but at the end of 2009 I found myself with a rather flavorful confit of hope and aspirations. Since I wasn’t sure where to start, I asked a handful of friends what their personal resolutions would be. Most were pretty run-of-the-mill (you know, like “getting in shape” or “getting out of debt”) and I’m not really the biggest fan of run-of-the-mill. I was also set on making my resolutions concrete and more specific (you know, like “double the income I had in 2009” instead of “earn more money” or “master the Arabic language” instead of “learn new stuff”). My desire to prevent my resolution from being ill-defined was shot to death (wow, my writing is violent tonight) upon asking my friend Bryan what his resolution was going to be.
This summer, Alice Hoffman infamously lashed out on Twitter at Boston Globe critic Robert Silman, who had given her novel a lukewarm review. Hoffman called Silman “a moron,” and added, “Now any idiot can be a critic.”
In October, Maurie Sendak, responding to concerns that Where the Wild Things Are may be too scary for children, told worried parents to “go to hell.”
And last month, a kerfuffle erupted on the Amazon page for romance author Candace Sams’ novel, Electra Galaxy’s Mr. Interstellar Feller. Negative reviewers were attacked by a user called NiteflyrOne, who was soon exposed to be Candace Sams herself. After 15 pages of back-and-forth rancor (most of which has been deleted by Amazon), Sams threatened to report everyone to the FBI.
Although these sort of sophomoric responses baffle me–as writers, aren’t we trained to communicate our thoughts rationally, preferably after many revisions?–I can understand where they’re coming from. Read more »
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?
It’s a rare–and highly interesting–phenomenon when the success of a character overwhelms even its creator.
2009 has been a busy year for aggrieved authors.
