Another prized object. "Bird by Bird." Anne Lamott.
This is a favorite because of its practical writing advice. Make your narrator likable. (But no! you may say, if you are avant garde. A narrator can be anything I want him to be! And Anne Lamott--and Ethan Canin--roll their eyes. Just make the guy likable, especially if you're fresh and new, starting out. Make things easier for yourself. Make him--or her--relatable.) Give yourself permission to write poorly. Better to do that than to not-write. Dream up a character, and start somewhere good with that character, travel somewhere bad, and then wind up somewhere good again. That's all. That's a story. Take a photo and, instead of fighting to describe everything in the photo, focus on maybe one square inch, and try to get down everything happening in just that square inch. That's your day. Give yourself assignments, and then finish them. Actually finish your writing assignments.
If you're at a loss, write about the lunches you ate in childhood. Important: Just mine your childhood, over and over and over. That's the golden stuff. That's when your brain was plastic, and when nearly everything was dramatic and weird. Yesterday, I sat in the lunch room at the school where I work. It could not have been a quieter, more deadening experience. But I had a brief memory of the surging hormones and subtext I experienced when I was a high-school student, and I wondered if that was what was going on for all the high-school students around me, in that seemingly dull and quiet room. How much we change in adulthood! I remembered a certain failed Latin teacher, from my high-school days; he didn't drive, and he carried his work in plastic grocery bags, and you'd sometimes see him at his mother's grave. It was rumored that--when he shook hands with certain male student-athletes--he would allow his index finger to creep forward and caress the palm of the teenaged hand, in a disconcerting way. One afternoon, at lunch, my friend and I looked over, and there was the Latin teacher sobbing among a few uncomfortable colleagues. Sobbing at the lunch table. Eventually, he was fired, because he was caught viewing porn at work. I will always remember my mother's sigh of relief on the phone, as she did her reporting. "At least it wasn't kiddie porn."
Lamott says, If you focus on a small thing, like school lunch, certain characters might pop up and surprise you. And that's what just happened in the paragraph above. I might think my birthright is to tell stories about certain figures in my life who have loomed large for years--my parents, an ex, a sibling, my husband--but it may be that God's great gift to me is this wacky Latin teacher, who said maybe twelve sentences to me in the space of my four years in high school. You don't choose the juiciest material in your brain; God hands it to you, and sometimes, He gives it a disguise. Another trick to borrow from Anne Lamott: Writing about the tiny thing often allows you to write about the cosmic thing. If you try to tackle the cosmic head-on, you may, often, stumble. So, for example, Calvin Trillin routinely wrote about nice meals he'd had, because really this was an indirect way of writing an on-going memoir about family life. Janet Malcolm seems to be detailing court cases, but really she's giving us a portrait of her own dazzling inner world. The tiny allows for the cosmic. If I've kept objects around for years--"Heat," "Bird by Bird"--then surely they mean something to me. I need only start describing them, and the meanings begin to open up.
Two things stuck out for me, recently. First: Philip Roth recalls having written "The Plot Against America." He would tell himself something every morning: "Don't invent, just remember." He would dream the plot--and then his job was just to recall what he'd dreamt. If you're "remembering," your prose can have a quality of ease, which it might otherwise lack. Also, the TV writer Nell Scovell: "Writing isn't about creating; it's about discovering what's already there." You set out on an exploratory hike through your own mind, and then you just make note of some of the weird stuff you spot, hidden there.
Well, there's more to say. But it's a beautiful Saturday! More later. Happy Weekend!
This is a favorite because of its practical writing advice. Make your narrator likable. (But no! you may say, if you are avant garde. A narrator can be anything I want him to be! And Anne Lamott--and Ethan Canin--roll their eyes. Just make the guy likable, especially if you're fresh and new, starting out. Make things easier for yourself. Make him--or her--relatable.) Give yourself permission to write poorly. Better to do that than to not-write. Dream up a character, and start somewhere good with that character, travel somewhere bad, and then wind up somewhere good again. That's all. That's a story. Take a photo and, instead of fighting to describe everything in the photo, focus on maybe one square inch, and try to get down everything happening in just that square inch. That's your day. Give yourself assignments, and then finish them. Actually finish your writing assignments.
If you're at a loss, write about the lunches you ate in childhood. Important: Just mine your childhood, over and over and over. That's the golden stuff. That's when your brain was plastic, and when nearly everything was dramatic and weird. Yesterday, I sat in the lunch room at the school where I work. It could not have been a quieter, more deadening experience. But I had a brief memory of the surging hormones and subtext I experienced when I was a high-school student, and I wondered if that was what was going on for all the high-school students around me, in that seemingly dull and quiet room. How much we change in adulthood! I remembered a certain failed Latin teacher, from my high-school days; he didn't drive, and he carried his work in plastic grocery bags, and you'd sometimes see him at his mother's grave. It was rumored that--when he shook hands with certain male student-athletes--he would allow his index finger to creep forward and caress the palm of the teenaged hand, in a disconcerting way. One afternoon, at lunch, my friend and I looked over, and there was the Latin teacher sobbing among a few uncomfortable colleagues. Sobbing at the lunch table. Eventually, he was fired, because he was caught viewing porn at work. I will always remember my mother's sigh of relief on the phone, as she did her reporting. "At least it wasn't kiddie porn."
Lamott says, If you focus on a small thing, like school lunch, certain characters might pop up and surprise you. And that's what just happened in the paragraph above. I might think my birthright is to tell stories about certain figures in my life who have loomed large for years--my parents, an ex, a sibling, my husband--but it may be that God's great gift to me is this wacky Latin teacher, who said maybe twelve sentences to me in the space of my four years in high school. You don't choose the juiciest material in your brain; God hands it to you, and sometimes, He gives it a disguise. Another trick to borrow from Anne Lamott: Writing about the tiny thing often allows you to write about the cosmic thing. If you try to tackle the cosmic head-on, you may, often, stumble. So, for example, Calvin Trillin routinely wrote about nice meals he'd had, because really this was an indirect way of writing an on-going memoir about family life. Janet Malcolm seems to be detailing court cases, but really she's giving us a portrait of her own dazzling inner world. The tiny allows for the cosmic. If I've kept objects around for years--"Heat," "Bird by Bird"--then surely they mean something to me. I need only start describing them, and the meanings begin to open up.
Two things stuck out for me, recently. First: Philip Roth recalls having written "The Plot Against America." He would tell himself something every morning: "Don't invent, just remember." He would dream the plot--and then his job was just to recall what he'd dreamt. If you're "remembering," your prose can have a quality of ease, which it might otherwise lack. Also, the TV writer Nell Scovell: "Writing isn't about creating; it's about discovering what's already there." You set out on an exploratory hike through your own mind, and then you just make note of some of the weird stuff you spot, hidden there.
Well, there's more to say. But it's a beautiful Saturday! More later. Happy Weekend!
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