Monday, 27 June 2011 23:03
Get Born, Dude
Acquaintance, perhaps 20 years younger than I, has finished his first novel (writing it, not reading it), and isn't sure if it's good or saleable. He said he gave it to five friends to read. One friend read it; no word from the other four. He expressed anxiety. What I saw was a writer being born. It ain't pretty.
Picking up the forceps, I said, "Why don't you hire a professional editor to read it and give you feedback?"
He said, "But that's so counterintuitive!"
Clamping the forceps around his head, I said, "Business is counterintuitive. But business is part of writing. We can be 90 percent artist, but have to be 10 percent businessperson."
Then I decided I didn't have the right to yank on him; he might yet be 10 to 20 years away from being ready to be born as a (professional) writer. But if he's ready, he will:
-budget to pay for professional advice.
-not be scared to learn a professional's opinion. In fact he will be eager for it.
-realize he needs help, that he can't do it alone or with just one or two writer friends his own age.
-see that I am not trying to drag him down to my (less talented) level; I'm just telling him something I learned.
Picking up the forceps, I said, "Why don't you hire a professional editor to read it and give you feedback?"
He said, "But that's so counterintuitive!"
Clamping the forceps around his head, I said, "Business is counterintuitive. But business is part of writing. We can be 90 percent artist, but have to be 10 percent businessperson."
Then I decided I didn't have the right to yank on him; he might yet be 10 to 20 years away from being ready to be born as a (professional) writer. But if he's ready, he will:
-budget to pay for professional advice.
-not be scared to learn a professional's opinion. In fact he will be eager for it.
-realize he needs help, that he can't do it alone or with just one or two writer friends his own age.
-see that I am not trying to drag him down to my (less talented) level; I'm just telling him something I learned.
Published in
Sanity Bubble 2008
Monday, 27 June 2011 22:58
More Money
Writer friend and I were discussing how hard it is to ask for the right amount of money for a job. Especially if the amount of money initially offered is ridiculously low or degrading (recent request for material custom-written for some business's blog offered $10/hr. I could do better at Ponderosa.). How far should we go in naming our price? She said an older friend had advised her:
"Ask until your toes curl."
Good advice!
"Ask until your toes curl."
Good advice!
Published in
Sanity Bubble 2008
Monday, 27 June 2011 22:05
Advice to a Co-Worker Leaving Her Job to Enter an MFA Program
- Get to know everyone.
- Attend every literary event that you can.
- Keep a journal.
- When you’re suffering, telephone (don’t E-mail) a fellow student.
- Your mistakes are okay.
- Understand that some of your fellow students applied to the MFA program and didn’t get in, so they are getting a regular M.A., and boy are they jealous of you.
- If you teach freshman composition, know that some of your students cannot be saved.
- Sleep on it before submitting it to workshop.
- Love affairs that start in the first weeks of grad school will end badly.
- Get a bicycle.
- Make yourself go to your writing professor’s office during office hours, just to chat.
- If you need money, get a part-time job no matter what your contract with the college says.
- Don't bug famous writers to help you, because they won't.
- It's not an illusion: Male and female writers are not treated the same.
- You'll get discouraged sometimes, but don’t let anybody stop you.
Published in
Sanity Bubble 2008
Sunday, 08 May 2011 22:28
The Poet Laureate of Missouri Said
Walter Bargen is the Poet Laureate of Missouri, the first one ever appointed. Notes taken during his talk to the St. Louis Writers Guild preserved some of the intriguing things he said:
- "The role of the writer in society is to keep us awake."
- "Poetry is like music; talking about it is not experiencing it."
- "Each first line [of a poem] is an argument for the poem's existence." (For example: "About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters. . ."; "You don't remember the hanging, but you do. . ."; "Each lover has a theory of his own . . .")
- "It's rhythm that marches your reader through the poem."
- "You know you're really writing well when you're surprising yourself."
Published in
Sanity Bubble 2008
Thursday, 05 May 2011 23:19
Tips for a Productive Writer's Conference
I listened at at the St. Louis Writers Guild networking workshop on Saturday and am passing on what I heard. Simple stuff! Yet it never crossed my mind!
1. Tough to part with the money for the conference or workshop? Consider it an investment in yourself.
2. Put your genre and the town and state you're from on your nametag. This increases the chances that you and others there will have something in common.
3. Carry extra pens and notepads (cheap ones) so that when someone says, "Wish I had a pen," or "Wish I'd brought some note paper," you can be their hero.
4. Stay at the hotel where the conference is held, not across town.
5. Go to as many sessions as there are. Even if there isn't a romance-writing session at 2:00 p.m., attend the poetry session. You might learn something. And go to the banquet thing even if it costs money and you don't really want to.
5. Pick up all handouts from all sessions. Put post-its on those you want to read carefully later, at home.
6. Don't feel bad about taking freebies such as bookmarks, tote bags, etc.
7. If you see someone who seems all alone, invite them into your group or to your table.
8. If you're meeting with an editor or agent, do NOT sit down and start reading to them the first chapter of your novel.
9. A conference is not a vacation. To get its benefits, work it.
10. Buy books from the authors there, and have them autographed. You might meet somebody.
11. Be liberal about giving out your business cards (the ones that say you're a writer). You do have some, don't you?
I didn't! And suddenly bizcards made sense! They'd make me more confident! So I checked out the free ones offered by vistaprint.com and finally designed and ordered some quite cheaply from 123print.com. Can't wait to get them and show you.
1. Tough to part with the money for the conference or workshop? Consider it an investment in yourself.
2. Put your genre and the town and state you're from on your nametag. This increases the chances that you and others there will have something in common.
3. Carry extra pens and notepads (cheap ones) so that when someone says, "Wish I had a pen," or "Wish I'd brought some note paper," you can be their hero.
4. Stay at the hotel where the conference is held, not across town.
5. Go to as many sessions as there are. Even if there isn't a romance-writing session at 2:00 p.m., attend the poetry session. You might learn something. And go to the banquet thing even if it costs money and you don't really want to.
5. Pick up all handouts from all sessions. Put post-its on those you want to read carefully later, at home.
6. Don't feel bad about taking freebies such as bookmarks, tote bags, etc.
7. If you see someone who seems all alone, invite them into your group or to your table.
8. If you're meeting with an editor or agent, do NOT sit down and start reading to them the first chapter of your novel.
9. A conference is not a vacation. To get its benefits, work it.
10. Buy books from the authors there, and have them autographed. You might meet somebody.
11. Be liberal about giving out your business cards (the ones that say you're a writer). You do have some, don't you?
I didn't! And suddenly bizcards made sense! They'd make me more confident! So I checked out the free ones offered by vistaprint.com and finally designed and ordered some quite cheaply from 123print.com. Can't wait to get them and show you.
Published in
Sanity Bubble 2008
Thursday, 05 May 2011 23:10
Anne Sexton Told Erica Jong
In the '70s Erica Jong, about to publish her second book of poetry, told Anne Sexton she feared that the critics would hammer it. Sexton wrote back:
Don't dwell on the book's reception. The point is to get on with it--you have a life's work ahead of you--no point in dallying around waiting for approval. We all want it, I know, but the point is to reach out honestly--that's the whole point. I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any of us--or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem--a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer--it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem. You have the gift--and with it comes responsibility--you mustn't neglect or be mean to that gift--you must let it do its work. It has more rights than the ego wants approval.
I'm wondering whether Sexton was right, or if it's "Writer, Keep the Faith While Society Flays You" feel-good wishful thinking that Sexton herself did not believe -- which would explain why she wrote this using so many qualifiers -- and that she herself could not use.
Quoted from: Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, by Erica Jong. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.
Don't dwell on the book's reception. The point is to get on with it--you have a life's work ahead of you--no point in dallying around waiting for approval. We all want it, I know, but the point is to reach out honestly--that's the whole point. I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any of us--or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem--a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer--it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem. You have the gift--and with it comes responsibility--you mustn't neglect or be mean to that gift--you must let it do its work. It has more rights than the ego wants approval.
I'm wondering whether Sexton was right, or if it's "Writer, Keep the Faith While Society Flays You" feel-good wishful thinking that Sexton herself did not believe -- which would explain why she wrote this using so many qualifiers -- and that she herself could not use.
Quoted from: Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, by Erica Jong. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.
Published in
Sanity Bubble 2008
Saturday, 05 March 2011 09:51
Using "Dialect" in Poetry and Prose
Maybe you remember Chico Marx, playing a "stage Italian," repeating, "Gets your tuttsi-fruittsi ice-cream," or that cringe-worthy moment in Dirty Harry (1971) when the black character is forced to say, "I gots to know," or when you want to mock a "mick," saying "Sure and begorra, me sainted mother raised me on the Em'rald Isle," and so on.
In writing workshop this is often called "dialect," although technically the English language has only one dialect -- "Pidgin" English, now rare, spoken in the South Seas -- so what you really mean is "accent." But call it what ye will, matey, arrgh, a little goes a long way. Your model for doing it correct-like is Mark Twain. Mid-19th-century American "Southwestern humorists," Twain's forerunners, wrote comic novels about backwoods characters, their texts all misspelled to convey the sound of their speech. From the author George Washington Harris:
Hit am an orful thing, George, tu be a nat'ral born durn'd fool. Yu'se never 'sperienced hit pussonally, hev yu? Hits made pow'fully agin our famerly, an all owin tu dad. I orter bust my head open agin a bluff ove rocks, an' jis' wud du hit, ef I warnt a cussed coward.
It's fun to write, but the irregular spelling makes these texts viciously hard to read. Twain's genius was to let his characters use vernacular speech, but tone the author's artifice way down:
He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off. We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key under his head nights. He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on. Every little while he locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and traded fish and game for whisky, and fetched it home and got drunk and had a good time, and licked me.
These days we worry about being accused of stereotyping. So if your speaker or character has an accent and you absolutely must use it (knowing that it conveys the character's social class and locale), let the character use one or at most two instances of it. Your readers will "get it," keep it in their heads, and won't have to decipher misspellings. Example: "He wrote me from overseas. I have a box of his letters. I saved ever one." That character never again uses her "accent" throughout the whole novel. You can really trust your reader with this. Twain proved it.
In writing workshop this is often called "dialect," although technically the English language has only one dialect -- "Pidgin" English, now rare, spoken in the South Seas -- so what you really mean is "accent." But call it what ye will, matey, arrgh, a little goes a long way. Your model for doing it correct-like is Mark Twain. Mid-19th-century American "Southwestern humorists," Twain's forerunners, wrote comic novels about backwoods characters, their texts all misspelled to convey the sound of their speech. From the author George Washington Harris:
Hit am an orful thing, George, tu be a nat'ral born durn'd fool. Yu'se never 'sperienced hit pussonally, hev yu? Hits made pow'fully agin our famerly, an all owin tu dad. I orter bust my head open agin a bluff ove rocks, an' jis' wud du hit, ef I warnt a cussed coward.
It's fun to write, but the irregular spelling makes these texts viciously hard to read. Twain's genius was to let his characters use vernacular speech, but tone the author's artifice way down:
He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off. We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key under his head nights. He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on. Every little while he locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and traded fish and game for whisky, and fetched it home and got drunk and had a good time, and licked me.
These days we worry about being accused of stereotyping. So if your speaker or character has an accent and you absolutely must use it (knowing that it conveys the character's social class and locale), let the character use one or at most two instances of it. Your readers will "get it," keep it in their heads, and won't have to decipher misspellings. Example: "He wrote me from overseas. I have a box of his letters. I saved ever one." That character never again uses her "accent" throughout the whole novel. You can really trust your reader with this. Twain proved it.
Published in
Sanity Bubble 2011
