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In a documentary about Andy Warhol, he said that the motto of his life had become “So what?” No matter what happened, good or bad, he could dismiss the event by thinking, So what?
The writer Monica Drake tells of studying under Joy Williams in the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Williams scanned a story submitted to the workshop and sighed, “Ah, white space…the writer’s false friend.” Perhaps
A favorite is chapter 18 from Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. There the main character pursues a girl through the standing sets of a Hollywood movie studio of the 1920s. Strung together are fake monuments and antiquities, every culture and time period in history crammed cheek-to-jowl, the modern world juxtaposed with dinosaurs. It might be the most perfectly surreal passage in all literature.
was years before I understood why I wrote these social model books. It wasn’t until I’d been introduced to the work of the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. He suggests that people create “liminoid” events as a kind of social experiment. Each is a short-lived society in which people agree to be equals. Communitas, he called it.
Instead of writing about a character, write from within the character. This means that every way the character describes the world must describe the character’s experience.
Dorothy Parker’s story “The Standard of Living.”
When Anthony Bourdain’s people emailed my people and suggested I escort Tony—insiders called him Tony—on a tour of Portland, Oregon, sights, I agreed. Trouble is, to be on location with Tony was to find yourself a small float-y bubble in the surging sea of energy that rushed and broke around Mr. Bourdain. As we walked past restaurants, the wait staff would rush out and grab him, dragging him bodily in, settling him into a seat and delivering every item on the menu. If you watch the reruns you might notice me hovering in the edge of some frame. If you look closer you can tell I’ve taken two
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If you watch the reruns you might notice me hovering in the edge of some frame. If you look closer you can tell I’ve taken two 600-milligram Vicodins, and I’m high as a kite to deal with the stress. I stumble and mumble, and when we visit Voodoo Doughnut and they present me with a huge penis-shaped doughnut that spurts goopy custard all over my face, well, I’m unfazed.
Tom Spanbauer would call this “going on the body.” By this he meant focusing on physical sensation within a character. As in, “This would be a good place to go on the body…” It’s a reliable way to unpack a dramatic moment.
As the writer Matthew Stadler advises, “When you don’t know what comes next, describe the interior of the narrator’s mouth.” He was joking, but he wasn’t.
Thomas Kinkade “Painter of Light” comfort-porn landscape of some perfect thatched cottage in a twilight rose garden.
The writer might not be smarter than us. But the writer is braver and more honest.
In regard to the unfinished draft, Tom Spanbauer used to say, “The longer you can be with the unresolved thing, the more beautifully it will resolve itself.”
his instructor, Gordon Lish. Tom called the themes of a story “the horses.” He’d ask a student, “What are the horses of this?” In
once you’ve established your characters and settings, give your people a glimpse of the outside world. It’s based on Heidegger, sort of, and his idea that escaping from your Dasein or destiny is pointless.
anytime you broach a subject yet refuse to explore it, that’s called occupatio (in Greek paralipsis).
