“Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.”
Category Archives: Writing
#TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter
Twitter is channelling writer angst, gripes, and chuckles over things people say to established writers.
“Oh, you’re a writer? When I retire, I want to write a book too.”
“So are you still writing or are you working now?”
“I really like your work! Will you write for us? Oh, we don’t pay.”
How do you spell conflabigation? You’re a writer, aren’t you?
I love your work. It’s just like, oh, that other guy, you know?
And then there’s this one from Guy Gavriel Kay.
An Artist’s Failure to Work
An artist’s failure to work is rarely mechanical—fingers that fail to curl around a pen or a brush—but spiritual: a fear that has rendered them artistically blind or deaf. The solution to them all is to draw closer to God, the source of all order, rest, and freedom, and of every image, sound, and word. — Carey Wallace
Awake at Night with an Active Mind
Writer and world traveler Karen Emslie writes about waking up in the middle of the night and how it may be a good time for creative play.
It is true that when I wake at 4am I have a whirring mind. . . . If I write in these small hours, black thoughts become clear and colourful. They form themselves into words and sentences, hook one to the next – like elephants walking trunk to tail. My brain works differently at this time of night; I can only write, I cannot edit. I can only add, I cannot take away. I need my day-brain for finesse. I will work for several hours and then go back to bed. . . .
Indeed, when [Nicholson] Baker was writing what would become A Box of Matches
(2003), a novel about a writer who gets up around 4am, lights a fire and writes while his family sleeps, Baker himself practised this ritual, then went back to bed for a second sleep.
‘I found that starting and nurturing this tiny early flame helped me to concentrate,’ Baker told The Paris Review. ‘There’s something simple and pleasantly meditative about building a fire at four in the morning. I started writing disconnected passages, and the writing came easily.’
Too Fun to Quibble
Martin Edwards follows his nose from one clue to another within The Detection Club, a London dinner society of British detective fiction writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and R. Austin Freeman.
Edwards crams many facts into this work, but his primary goal is “to refute the charge of ‘cozy’ that has hung over the Golden Age writers since a rebellious Englishman named Raymond Chandler moved to California and took to the pages of the Atlantic Monthly to denounce the whole project of British detective fiction in a famous 1944 essay called ‘The Simple Art of Murder.'”
Joseph Bottum concludes, “Of course, the actual argument of The Golden Age of Murder is almost beside the point. The book is too enjoyable, too enthusiastic, to live or die by the success of its thesis.” (via Prufrock)
The Editorial We
Who came up with this joke, “Only monarchs, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we’”? The Quote Investigator, um, investigates.
Learn Better Handwriting
Learning better handwriting from a calligrapher. I’d like to have better cursive writing, but all of my bad habits have been congealed by playing the journalist.
In Defense of Prose
John Updike said, “Nabokov writes prose the way it should be written: enthusiastically.”
Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma runs with this idea in his essay on colorful writing:
Paul West noted in his essay, “In Praise of Purple Prose,” written around the heyday of minimalism in 1985, that the “minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant turns its back on something almost holy — the human bond with ordinariness.” This rationale, I dare say, misunderstands what art is and what art is meant to do. The essential work of art is to magnify the ordinary, to make that which is banal glorious through artistic exploration. Thus, fiction must be different from reportage; painting from photography. And this difference should be reflected in the language of the work — in its deliberate constructiveness, its measured adornment of thought, and in the arrangement of representative images, so that the fiction about a known world becomes an elevated vision of that world.
He argues that the most remembered and loved novels are those with beautiful, even audacious, prose.
I remember James Joyce using prose purposefully in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. His flowery language swelled with his theme, drawing attention to select passages in the story.
“It is not, however,,” Obioma explains, “that the ‘less is more’ nugget is wrong, it is that it makes a blanket pronouncement on any writing that tends to make its language artful as taboo.”
Bobette Buster with Eric Metaxas
Two writers talk about story on The Eric Metaxas Show. “The point of living is to become fully alive.” Storytelling is part of that life.
Who Looks at Your Book Before It’s Published?
Bethany McShurley spells out the reasons a book could use multiple editors.