7 posts tagged “writer”
This list of tips for writers comes from an unlikely place.... the NEA blog on reading, which I was browsing trying to find the origin of that list I just posted.
1. Join a writers group, if only for the deadline. Always, for anything you write, have a deadline. When you meet one deadline, make another. When you blow one, definitely make another, and by all means forget you ever made the first one. Guilt is not your friend.
2. Be funny. Whether you’re writing comedy or not, be funny. If you can’t be funny, be amazing, because writing well without at least occasionally being funny is almost impossible. Try to make a reader laugh, or at least smile, with the way you pace and phrase a line. If you can’t use language to provoke one of the commonest, most pleasurable experiences around — laughter — how in the world are you going to do the harder but not necessarily better thing, and make a reader cry?
3. Enlarge your vocabulary. I’m serious. Your vocabulary is your tacklebox. If you go fishing with only a couple of lures, you’ll catch the same kind of fish over and over. Bring an overstuffed tacklebox, and there’s no lunker you can’t land. Use your vocabulary judiciously, of course, because not everybody has as big a one as you do. But don’t be afraid, every once in a while, to use a word your reader might not know. How else are they going to learn? How else did you?
4. Keep it sensual. By this I don’t mean write dirty, I mean engage all of a reader’s senses, especially but not exclusively the visual. Whether with a description or a metaphor, create pictures in your audience’s head. If you want to write about abstractions, be a philosopher, and reach even fewer readers than you already do.
5. Make stuff up. There’s been a vogue lately for writing that feeds on pre-existing material: novels about a famous love affair, novels about a notorious calamity, novels about great writers, etc. This kind of novel can work, but something original is almost always better than something derivative — more surprising, more fun, more suspenseful. In fiction, as on Wall Street, derivatives are an easy payday, but they don’t create wealth; they only redistribute it. The trouble with making up a new story is, alas, that it’s harder. Does Antioch teach a full-length course in plotting? I wonder, because it’s the least teachable skill a writer needs. If only it were the least important.
A related point here: the difference between telling the truth and making stuff up is getting slippery lately. When in doubt, trust what works. If the true stuff reads better, you’re probably writing nonfiction, so take out most of the made-up stuff. If the made-up stuff reads better, you’re writing fiction, so take out most of the true stuff. If you can’t decide which stuff reads better, write poetry. There at least, the true and the made-up belong together.
6. Keep rewriting the ending till it’s perfect; then wait a week and write it again. Writing an ending is the great lost art in American fiction. With the possible exception of your first graf, your last graf is the most important. If you can’t decide between two endings, they probably both need work.
7. Go for broke. Odds are you’ll be broke anyway, so you may as well go for it.
8 . Write every day. I’ve never tried this myself, but I hear it works.
DISCRETION: The quality of being discreet; circumspection. SYNONYMS prudence, discretion, foresight, forethought, circumspection.
I just read this NYT Sunday magazine article by former Gawker editor Emily Gould, which was very provocative and I'm curious about what other Voxers think. [From Valley Girl Intelligentsia]
Emily talks about her predilection for "oversharing." This is the danger of becoming an online personality, sharing yourself and details about your personal life (the more salacious the more enticing.) In short, you become addicted, an attention-whore. In the page-view-centric world of NY media (and in our larger reality-tv culture) it is easy to see the danger in this. Emily has many predecessors who go far beyond she has: Julia Allison, whose even more famous predecessor is the woman-of-the-moment, Candace Bushnell. Anyway, the writer uses the blog as performance or stage, and some funny/crazy things start to happen after getting addicted to the attention you get online.
Emily, by virtue of being at Gawker, *is* a real internet celebrity, as many of us are not, so the magnifying effects are like the difference between being Britney and being the local homecoming queen. But for a short period into her narrative, you do relate to her story of innocently finding community and finding support. I definitely did.
If you want to read the juicy gossip version, see Emily's article about oversharing (and over-exposing!) and her ex-colleague, ex-boyfriend's article about being blogged about by Emily (oh the meta-referential horrors!). More here.
If you just want to reflect, here is a quoted passage from Emily that I found thought-provoking for all of us (and have prompted me to take some probably best-left private rants *private*. I remember that when I first came to NYC, I encouraged my musician roommate to take a stage name to preserve some distance between herself and the stage persona she often had to assume. Pseudo-anonymous blogging starts to makes that public-private line very fuzzy. It's funny how there is something about this medium which does encourage, perhaps even naive levels of sharing and soul-baring.
How do you soul-bare without losing your soul completely? What would someone from an earlier, staider time, like Jane Austen say? What advice would you give everyone else who has seemingly gone crazy with the media's eternal crazy-house mirroring and self-reflection? I think it has truly become a disease.
OK, that's all the reflection I am capable of at this late hour in my time-zone shifted state. Here is Emily.
When you write about things as they’re happening — which is what most people do on blogs — you lose perspective, or rather, your perspective shrinks, so that only a tiny slice of your reality gets recorded. The cumulative impact of several months’ worth of posts can lead to an entirely different conclusion than a few snippets taken out of context. This is the danger of blogging and also its seductive charm. It’s so easy and fun to report on your current state of mind and your opinions, especially when you have strong feelings, and strong feelings are also fun to read about. You hated that movie! You’re in love with that guy! That person’s a douchebag!
Unfettered self-expression has its drawbacks, though. Like: what if you change your mind? What if you learn some things that make you feel entirely differently about that person, that movie, that guy? The version you recorded is still perpetually available, making you seem wishy-washy or, worse, like a liar if you flip-flop now. Your problem now becomes that the most popular result of a Google search becomes “the truth,” even if you’d like it to be otherwise.
- Emily Gould, heartbreak soup
[...] Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
- J.K. Rowling
Above was the title of J.K. Rowling's commencement speech a few days ago at my august alma mater. Here is an inspiring excerpt from her speech.... I think it's fabulous that they had her, and strongly disagree with the snotty seniors who were opposed. Rowling is the first person in the world who has ever become a billionaire through her writing, and the world's second-richest female entertainer. Reputedly, she is also richer than the Queen of England, which must be a fun fact to tell herself.
Also, I didn't know she had actually been a Classics (including mythology) major, but it makes so much sense.
My favorite mini-poems from tweetpoem this week:
oh wounded heart
take a breath.
feel the fist throbbing
a congealed tear
contained.
taking a breath:
release.
---
springtime tears
wash clean my face,
the limpid sky.
---
indian girls visiting
in cotton-candy pink
dupattas and pigtails
fingers lingering
over faces
and slick celebrity papers
heartshapedsky did this lovely quiz (seems they're all the rage these days) and so i've tagged myself.
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List three ways you are stereotypically a girl:
1. I love romantic *everything* pretty much. Stories, movies, people, books...
2. I love clothes and shopping. But as much for the artistic value and the colors, as the preening value (perhaps more so).
3. I get attached very easily...
List three ways you are stereotypically a boy:
1. I tend to hide (and not be aware of) my feelings. At the least, this is an American boy thing.
2. I admire beautiful women in the street.
3. I like sports: I was always a tomboy and could run as fast, and hit a ball as hard as many of the boys my age.
Three of your everyday essentials:
1. my laptop (of course!) these days I am often found carting around two of them.
2. my close friends
3. my favorite lip gloss, which is fiery peach and sparkly
What was I doing 10 years ago?
I was turning 21, living in England with my aunt, and writing the first chapter of my first novel
What are 5 things on my to-do list for today
1. Get my laptop fixed
2. Go to an interview at 1 pm
3. Finish some files for my freelance job
4. Return all the calls I got yesterday
5. Make sure my cell phone insurance application is submitted
Snacks I enjoy:
1. black olives
2. crackers and cheese and bits of sausage
3. any kind of nuts: pistachios, almonds, marcona almonds (a new find), walnuts
4. tortilla chips and peach mango salsa
5. home-made guacamole
Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. have apartments in NY, Paris, and somewhere rural by the sea
2. fund women's education in developing countries
3. meet lots of brilliant and interesting people
4. be a venture capitalist and work with startups
5. frankly, retire to my private island, write, paint, and have my friends visit me (a friend bears credit for that one)
Places I have lived before:
Nigeria
Kings Lynn
London
Cambridge
Brooklyn
Last night my phone got stolen (along with my camera and about $60) from my purse. My purse was lifted, but I later found it... sans camera, phone and money. First of all, this makes the third time I have lost my phone in less than 30 days -- and the only time I have absolutely no chance of getting it back. Once I left it at my sister's house while traveling, and amazingly the second time a chess player in Bryant Park returned it to me, after I dropped it during my afternoon read on Saturday. Seemingly my phone and I are not just not meant to be :) It always bums me out when something of mine gets stolen. I just can't fathom how other people can be so unscrupulous. I may have been the world's most sheltered child, but still, this just doesn't gibe with my sense of the world. Oh well - I just have to accept that this is so.
This is so different from what I was reading this weekend; something by a Buddhist nun who writes about coming to the realization that she always had as much as she needed, no matter what happens. Enough time, enough money, enough opportunity, enough love, enough compassion. When things seemed to get unmanageable, she would just stay calm, hang in there and with faith, everything would somehow be resolved. It has been helping me stay calm in the face of three major projects this week (my new consulting gig, freelance programming work, and interviews) -- and is the only reason I'm taking a break now to check in and write a blog post.
Leaving with a quote:
You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.
- Kahlil Gibran
Here are my favorites this week from my Twitter feed. I can use up to 140 characters for each... and this is my favorite creative project recently. Constraints are surprisingly liberating! Please send me feedback.
true love's shadow / a spark can not burst / to flame
but in the presence of the other
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Found: on concrete city floor
iridescent
winged butterflies
huge shattered moths
four inch tiger-striped
wasps.
Beauty misdirected.
---
springtime -
motherhood awaits.
pen beckons. heed it -
and then you, my dear, will
blossom into flame
