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One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.
put a little bit down on paper every day,
I was drawn to oddballs, ethnic people, theater people, poets, radicals, gays and lesbians—and somehow they all helped me become some of those things I wanted so desperately to become: political, intellectual, artistic.
and this freed me up to write short stories instead. “Do it every day for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.”
I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship’s rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.
hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer.
The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
But you can’t teach writing, people tell me. And I say, “Who the hell are you, God’s dean of admissions?”
😂
freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.
And they may even go from wanting to have written something to just wanting to be writing, wanting to be working on something,
Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.
Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.
you don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it.
The first useful concept is the idea of short assignments.
E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going,
he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.
Vonnegut said, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
I think this will also show how taking short assignments and then producing really shitty first drafts of these assignments can yield a bounty of detailed memory, raw material, and strange characters
Blog posts, freelance, newspaper columns
sometimes when a student calls and is mewling and puking about the hopelessness of trying to put words down on paper,
Lol
Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t—and, in fact, you’re not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing. First you just point at what has your attention and take the picture.
You couldn’t have had any way of knowing what this piece of work would look like when you first started. You just knew that there was something about these people that compelled you, and you stayed with that something long enough for it to show you what it was about.
You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.
“Honey? Leave him lay where Jesus flang him.”
I once asked Ethan Canin to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing, and without hesitation he said, “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.”
I think he’s right. If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn’t really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time.
Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal. When you have a friend like this, she can say, “Hey, I’ve got to drive up to the dump in Petaluma—wanna come along?” and you honestly can’t think of anything in the world you’d rather do. By the same token, a boring or annoying person can offer to buy you an expensive dinner, followed by tickets to a great show, and in all honesty you’d rather stay home and watch
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don’t mind if a person has no hope if he or she is sufficiently funny about the whole thing, but then, this being able to be funny
matter of how we, as writers, tell the truth. A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way.
Frederick Buechner wrote: You avoid forcing your characters to march too steadily to the drumbeat of your artistic purpose. You leave some measure of real freedom for your characters to be themselves. And if minor characters show an inclination to become major characters, as they’re apt to do, you at least give them a shot at it, because in the world of fiction it may take many pages before you find out who the major characters really are, just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done
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Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen.
Characters should not, conversely, serve as pawns for some plot you’ve dreamed up. Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don’t worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.
Find out what each character cares most about in the world because then you will have discovered what’s at stake. Find a way to express this discovery in action, and then let your people set about finding or holding onto or defending whatever it is.
something must be at stake or you will have no tension and your readers will not turn the pages.
I tell my students to write this down—that the dream must be vivid and continuous—because it is so crucial.
He had an imaginary company, whose business was having cats put to sleep, whose slogan was “The pussy must pay.” Let someone do this with your manuscripts, help you get rid of the twists in the plot that are never going to work no matter how hard you try or how many passes you make at it.
Drama is the way of holding the reader’s attention. The basic formula for drama is setup, buildup, payoff—just like a joke. The setup tells us what the game is. The buildup is where you put in all the moves, the forward motion, where you get all the meat off the turkey. The payoff answers the question, Why are we here anyway? What is it that you’ve been trying to give? Drama must move forward and upward, or the seats on which the audience is sitting will become very hard and uncomfortable. So, in fact, will the audience.
If you knowingly fake something to get the plot to move forward—if, for instance, you have taken a character you don’t understand and given her feelings you don’t really feel because you want the plot to work—you probably won’t get away with it. The reader will stop trusting you and will possibly even become bitter and resentful.
The climax is that major event, usually toward the end, that brings all the tunes you have been playing so far into one major chord, after which at least one of your people is profoundly changed.
You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending:
We get to feel privy to their inner workings without having to spend too much time listening to them think.
It’s bad enough that I have to think all the time without having someone else dump his or her obsessive-compulsive, paranoid thinking on me, too.
With Hemingway, things began to terse up. Good dialogue became sharp and lean.
remember that you should be able to identify each character by what he or she says. Each one must sound different from the others. And they should not all sound like you; each one must have a self.
If you are lucky, your characters may become impatient with your inability, while writing dialogue, to keep up with all they have to say. This is when you will know that you are on the right track.
and you may see that you’d better get rid of that topcoat, it’s pretty jive, and that you need to go back and redo the early dialogue. But don’t stop and do it just now. Keep moving;
let them spend some time together, let them jam for a while. Come back later for the rewrite.
You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.
God i love this lady
