A recent piece by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, titled "How to Think about Writing," caught my attention because he seemed to be describing how I've always felt about blogging -- at least the sort of blogging I do, and like to read -- but it also applies generally to much of the writing I admire -- and ultimately decide to publish.
"When you write," Pinker says, "you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing." Perhaps this seems stupidly obvious. How else could anyone write? Yet much bad writing happens when people abandon this approach. Academics can be more concerned with showcasing their knowledge; bureaucrats can be more concerned with covering their backsides; journalists can be more concerned with breaking the news first, or making their readers angry. All interfere with "joint attention", making writing less transparent. Couldn't agree more, though I never thought of it quite so simply. As Burkeman points out, many writers start with this as a goal, but somehow abandon or forget it along the way. As a meditator, I'd venture to guess that what gets in the way is our ego: the writing becomes about us: our emotions, desires, problems, needs, the particular ax we want to grind. In other words, we forget that the reader is standing beside us, or sitting across from us, waiting for something to unfold; waiting to be delighted, surprised, enlightened; waiting to ponder; waiting for her world to open and shift ever so slightly, waiting to be changed. That can happen through a little quirk of human behavior shown through dialogue, or through a single sentence of luminous descriptive prose, a line of poetry that reveals the familiar through an entirely new lens -- and of course, I think it can also happen through drawing and painting and all the other arts. Burkeman concludes with this advice, worth printing out and putting on my studio wall: The reader wants to see; your job is to do the pointing. Of course, it really isn't that simple. First we have to train ourselves to be people who actually see something: people who are able to quiet down enough that we become an eye, an ear, a sensitive skin, but not so sensitive that we cannot bear it. Then we have to learn how to express what we have learned through our senses, intelligence, and experience. Finally, we have to learn how to give it away - how to point our effort toward the invisible reader rather than back at ourselves; how to become a vessel that fills and empties over and over again. Not a bad way to spend a life. --Elizabeth Adams (cross-posted from the Editor's personal blog, The Cassandra Pages) A personal reflection by Phoenicia publisher Elizabeth Adams, who is also a writer and an artist What I have realized in the past few years is that, while socio-political issues matter tremendously to me, and I think that political activism is terribly important, for me, at this point, too much immersion in politics kills my creativity. It's pretty much either/or. The energy that it takes for me to be committed and active in politics makes it almost impossible for me to do art or music or write at the level I want to. It's impossible to keep one's involvement on the level of the issues alone. The negativity, polarization, and rhetoric surrounding political action in the U.S., especially since 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, made me feel helpless after a while. It was possible to help break down barriers about homosexuality and religion,and I'm very glad I was involved in that struggle. It was possible to help dismantle some stereotypes about the Middle East, about Islam, about an inevitable "clash of civilizations" -- but only very slowly, and on a local level, almost person-to-person. The struggle against the power of money and corporations and the military, the choice to locate and exhaust the planet's fossil fuels while destroying the entire ecosystem -- I'm not sure fighting these battles is possible anymore through the system itself; maybe only a collapse will cause wholesale change. When it comes to matters of war, peace, and the power of the strong over the weak, we have learned very little over the millenia. I was involved very intentionally for a long while; it changed me for the better, and I know my efforts did some good. But I knew that eventually I'd have to make some decisions about what I wanted to do with my remaining time -- time that seems to feel ever shorter and more precious. My mother wanted me to go into politics. It wouldn't have been a bad fit, in some ways, and I was invited once to run for the Vermont legislature -- but I said no. We each have to look at our own gifts and what we're passionate about, as well as where our lives have led us, and what possibilities are open to us at a particular time - and make the most of them. If we don't do that, we may have to live with big regrets. And we also have to ask: where can I make the most difference? For me, the greatest passion has always been for the arts. I've been fortunate to be able to spend most of my professional career as a graphic designer, a field closely related to the fine arts, and now to have some additional time to devote to work other than the kind that pays the bills. But the decision to focus on art and on writing -- both my own and other people's -- and to try to minimize the many distracting, conflicting, enticing calls for involvement in other pursuits and other projects -- comes at a time when it's particularly hard to be an artist or a writer, let alone a publisher. There's a lot of discouragement around, and many obstacles which have never been quite so daunting: economic, governmental, social and cultural changes are all contributing, and these combine with and magnify the personal challenges that have always existed for people who live creative lives. It all depends on where you look.
Phoenicia editor and publisher Beth Adams takes a close look at the recently-released statistics on the gender gap in traditional literary journals vs. online publishing, using qarrtsiluni as an example, on her blog The Cassandra Pages. The conclusions may surprise you! Chris Clarke and I have been online friends for a long time now, almost all the time I've been blogging, which will be seven years this coming week! We became friends when we were both contributors to the Ecotone Wiki, a collective early project of a number of bloggers who were interested in writing about "place."
Chris has continued to write about place, nature, life, and spirit, first at "Creek Running North" and now at Coyote Crossing. He's one of the internet-based writers whose work I admire most, for the consistent quality of his thought, his luminous prose, and for his dedication to writing itself. He not only keeps at it, he thinks deeply about what he's doing and believes, as I do, that we can always improve our craft. Readers here may have seen Chris's comments on some of the previous posts, and he's written about Phoenicia at his own blog too. I'm so grateful for this kind of give-and-take and thoughtful discussion about topics of mutual interest; writing used to be one heck of a lot lonelier than it is today. I asked Chris for permission to reprint his recent post, "How to Write," because the advice he gives is worth its weight in golden bytes -- and there's wisdom here for aspiring and expert writers alike. HOW TO WRITE by Chris Clarke 1. Spend most of your time reading. Start as early in life as you can. Read everything — billboards, cereal boxes, books, letters, instruction manuals, correspondence course texts, magazines and affidavits. Drown yourself in a sea of sentences. 2. Keep track of the reading material that most moves you. Don’t worry if you can’t find commonalities among the various pieces at first. Don’t pick a favorite, or even a top ten. Keep it all in one big category: “stuff I loved reading.” Reread items from this category on a frequent basis. 3. Keep track of the work you least like reading. When you’re about to add a work to this category, spend some time thinking about why you’ve decided not to like it. If it’s simply a matter of the author being boneheaded and wrong, waste no more of your time on the work. But if it’s something else, figure out what that something else is. Pay attention to that. How does the writer fail you as a reader? Are there patterns within the writer’s work — consistently mangled metaphors, illogic, clunky language? 4. Edit other people’s writing. Take a class in editing at your local community college if you have to learn the basics, then volunteer your services at a non-profit or other community organization helping out with their newsletter or paper or magazine or website. Nothing teaches you what you want to avoid in your own writing as quickly as finding and correcting it in others’ writing. Nothing teaches economy of language more quickly than editing a 2,200-word article to fit it into a 600-word hole in a newsletter. As an alternative, take some of the books from step 3 and mark them up. Find the problems that caused you to dislike the work. Underline them. Describe them. 5. Go back to your pile of stuff you loved reading and do the same editing. Make positive comments where you feel moved. Note problems if you find them on rereading. 6. Pay attention to the world. Find something, or many things, that affect your emotions. It doesn’t matter what they are. Birds, stones, music, pastries, books, software, toys, bottle caps, medical procedures, politics, sex, other people’s writing. Whatever. It doesn’t matter except that it should matter to you. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of anyone writing about those things before. Just pay attention to them. Pay attention to how you feel about them. Note the nuances. Learn everything you want to know about them until you run out of time, information or interest. Keep doing this, with one thing or many things, until you die. 7. Eavesdrop. Sit in restaurants by yourself, or with another person who’s quiet. Be non-chalant and non-intrusive. Pretend to read a newspaper. Note the rhythms of conversation, the pauses, the phrasing and repetition. 8. Spend a couple years learning a new language. Nothing makes the inner workings of your native tongue more apparent than learning to think, and write, in a new one. If you already speak more than one language, add another to your repertoire. Pick different language families. If you speak English and Spanish, study Mandarin. If you speak those three, study Euskadi. 9. Start a blog. Commit to yourself to write and post 100 words a day on your blog. Feel free to write more than that if you get momentum going, but give yourself that daily deadline. Don’t edit before publishing, aside from a cursory once-over for embarrassing typoes, spelling and grammatical errors. Don’t worry if you have nothing to say. Don’t worry if you blather. Just: 100 words a day, at least, put up where people can see and respond to them. And replying to comments on your blog doesn’t count toward the 100-word total. Though you should reply to comments. You make friends that way, and writers need friends. 10. You pay attention to getting your spelling right, and to word choice. You pay attention to sentence structure. You need to take that up to the next level. Pay attention to paragraph structure as well. A paragraph is an idea. You’ve heard that said, if you’ve taken composition classes, and it’s basically true. But it’s more than that. A paragraph is not just a string of sentences in a logical order. A paragraph is a stanza in a poem, a verse of a song. It has an internal structure that has nothing to do with the information conveyed by the sentences. If all the sentences in a paragraph are the same length, you have a monotonous paragraph. Sometimes that’s what you want to do. Mostly it won’t be. Vary and balance sentence length within a paragraph. Put a long sentence in the middle of a series of short ones. Put two short sentences after a very long one. Language is music. Pay attention to its rhythm. 11. Read your writing aloud. Even better, have someone else read it aloud. Note where the reader stumbles. If it’s not over a word that’s hard to pronounce, then phrasing or sentence structure is probably the stumbling block. A sentence that’s stumbly when read aloud is a sentence that will distract the silent reader. Note the tripups and fix them. Smooth them flat. Sand them down. At the very least put up some caution tape. This is also a good way to learn about words you use far too often, phrases you’ve done to death, and concepts you haven’t illuminated sufficiently. 12. Write things. Put them away for a week. Don’t even look at them once in that time. Take them out again after a week and edit them. Look for stumbling block sentences, paragraphs that don’t quite follow, ideas that there’s an obvious better way to convey. 13. Remove the first and last paragraphs of each drafted piece altogether and see how the piece works without them. Most writers take a paragraph to crack their knuckles and warm up at the beginning of a draft, and you’ll find a perfectly good and more economical beginning at the start of the second paragraph. Taking a paragraph to wind down at the end is common as well. If, while reading your last para, you can hear the theme music swell in your head and imagine credits rolling, cut it out. There’s almost always a great ending line at the end of the previous para. 14. Explore indecision and doubt where they exist. Don’t try to explain the things you can’t explain. Doubt is way more interesting anyway. Find the weak points in your argument and acknowledge them. Hell, celebrate them. 15. There’s another level of structure above the paragraph. John McPhee once described some of his essays as having a structure like a lowercase “e.” They started out in a direction, made a wide expository loop, then ended up near but not precisely at the starting point, heading in more or less the original direction. Write a 2,000-word essay structured like a lowercase “e.” Then write essays structured like an “O,” an “S,” and a “Z.” 16. Take two wholly unrelated concepts. Write an essay about both of them. Make the transitions seamless. Write so the reader says “I never knew those two things had anything to do with each other, but it’s so obvious now!” Hint: Most of the effort lies in selecting the two things. The writing comes naturally. 17. Above all, enjoy your writing. Go back and reread things you wrote years ago and find joy in them. My Saturday morning began with a quick read of a two-part article in the Guardian, "Ten Rules for Writing Fiction," in which a number of contemporary authors were asked to give their advice. As both a writer and an editor, I found a lot that was worthwhile, though some took the question more seriously than others, and the article was very long -- probably the editors didn't want to offend anyone by leaving them out. The best standalone lists, I thought, were those by Geoff Dyer and Al Kennedy.
So let's look at what the responses had in common, and what stood out. First, each author found a way to say: "If you want to be a writer, write." I don't write fiction, but I've written every day for several decades. Before I became a writer, my journal was full of pages talking about all the reasons I wasn't writing. The ways to avoid and procrastinate are endless! If this is what you really want, there's only one path: stop talking about it, stop making excuses, and write. Two other words appeared in almost everyone's list. The first was "Read." Good writers read widely, and they think hard about what they've read. If you list your favorite authors, can you also explain why you admire them? Have you analyzed their work, so that you know what it is about how they write that works so well? Have you tried to emulate it? There's nothing wrong with imitation if you know you're doing it and trying to learn from it. The second word was "Cut." Part of becoming a good writer is learning to become a good editor; unless our manuscripts are in pretty good shape, they aren't going to get far. As E.B. White said so clearly when asked for his own top 3 points of advice: "Omit unnecessary words! Omit unnecessary words! Omit unnecessary words!" Writing freely is the first step and a necessity: just get the words and ideas down, and don't burden yourself with too much editing as you go. But then go back, correct the errors, and see what can be cut. We prune a rose bush not only to make its growth more vigorous and the plant stronger, but to reveal the contrast of perfect flowers and thorns that constitute its true nature. It's the same with editing. Cutting out everything non-essential strengthens the writing, and it should also reveal to you, and to the reader, the essence of what you wanted to get at in the first place. Beyond "Read," Write" and Cut", here are ten points that jumped out at me: 1. Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary. -- Geoff Dyer Whether it's a notebook or file of conversations overheard, interesting words, scenes observed, or a yearly collection of letters and emails that record your life, I agree that keeping a journal of some sort is extremely helpful. On days when starting the main project is difficult, writing in the journal or composing a letter to a friend is a way to ease into the harder work of the day. A journal is also a path into the deeper self, showing us not only what we're thinking but how our minds work and change over time. The best writing proceeds from this kind of self-knowledge and careful observation. 2. Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted. -- P.D. James Our lives are boring only if we decide to think of them that way. Everyone's life is filled with opportunities for observation of the self and others, and of the world around us in its grandeur and minutiae: it's our inattention to the mystery, variety and peculiarity of life that limits us, not our inability to fly to exotic places or our lack of unusual relationships. People are fascinating everywhere. We have to seek out life, not the other way around, and learn to see and use the material that's around us by knowing it intimately, and observing our own knowing. 3. Find your best time of the day for writing and write. --Esther Freud I'm not at my best when I first get up, but after an hour I'm ready to work. I've always written in the morning and stopped by 2 or 3 pm. Everyone's different, but writers need to find their own best time and place to write and develop a daily discipline. The existence of computers and online venues for daily writing can actually make that easier, so long as you avoid being distracted. Most dedicated writers have a minimum daily goal: 500 words, a page of writing, a daily blog post, a 140-character poem, a certain number of pages of editing. You'll be astonished how much you get done once you get in the habit of daily practice, and the sense of accumulative accomplishment will help you keep going. 4. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. --Elmore Leonard Never say "never", either -- of course our characters have to shout or whisper once in a while -- but I think the basic point is well-taken. Write with nouns and verbs, preferably familiar ones: they form the strong foundation of good writing that can hold a reader's attention. Overuse of adjectives and, especially, adverbs always weaken writing; look for a descriptive verb that can do the same work you're trying to lay on a plain one modified by an adverb, for instance. Avoid being clever or erudite unless there's a reason for it beyond showing off. Practice writing dialogue using only the verb "said" and see if it sounds less self-conscious; allow the speakers to speak by sharpening your ear, and get yourself out of the way. 5. Listen to what you have written. Helen Dunmore Good writing has an internal rhythm and pulse that neither calls attention to itself nor is repetitive and predictable. Developing an "ear" for your own prose is essential; read what you've written out loud, and analyze the structure of your sentences to see if you fall into repeated patterns that are boring or create choppiness, awkwardness, or confusion for the reader. Have you written three sentences in a row starting with prepositional phrases? Have you varied the length and complexity of the sentences in each paragraph? Do the paragraphs begin and end repetitively? This is an area where only practice will help: write, read, listen, and ask a good editor occasionally for her comments. 6. The way to write a book is to actually write a book. --Anne Enright Like writing itself, large projects are easy to talk about and yet there are hundreds of reasons to avoid beginning them (or finishing them once begun.) Don't be worried about failure or what other people may think: one of the worst regrets in life isn't failure, but never attempting the things you really wanted to do. So try, and trust that the process will teach you a great deal, which is the best reason for doing new things. 7. Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet. -- Roddy Doyle It's no gift to creative types that we can now search the entire planet and find out who's already done the exact thing we thought would make us unique; in fact it doesn't take much more than a trip to the local mega-bookstore to become paralyzed. When I first started as a freelance graphic designer, my father, a businessman, gave me the excellent advice, "Don't worry about the competition, just do what you do as well as you can." It's the same in the arts: we have to shut the door, sit down at the desk, and do what we are meant to do, being true to ourselves and not worrying about everybody else. 8. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving. --Neil Gaiman In art, we leave artifacts that trace our development both as artists and human beings. When I look back at my old journals and early essays, they embarrass me, but I also find I have compassion and greater understanding for the person I was then, and am now. Lately I've been reading all of Joseph's Conrad's novels; the earlier ones are raw and halting works-in-progress, written by a young man finding his way. Very few of us will burst onto the scene with a brilliant first novel. Life is about process much more than it is about accomplishment and laurels; we're here to learn and to grow. So it's important to do one's best, and then let it go and move on, using the limitations we've identified and struggled with as challenges for the next project. 9. Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it. -- David Hare What is "style" anyway? I put this enigmatic comment of Hare's in the list because I wanted to think about it more myself. Young writers always worry about developing their own style, often with unfortunate results. I think it's more important to just write rather than to focus on being inimitable. One's genuine style tends to emerge over time, and except for some particularly quirky examples, the better ones tend to be fairly subtle. Less, I think, is more. 10. Have humility. -- Al Kennedy I like Kennedy's whole list, because she pricks the balloon of self-importance that afflicts so many writers, and also acknowledges that writers actually do live in relationship with other people. She suggests that we listen to others and learn from them, but also know ourselves well enough to run from destructive advice. Instead of using family and friends as fodder, she gently encourages us to write in a way that honors the people closest to us. Too many writers and artists get caught up in an egotistical game and forget, until it's too late, that we're here to live a whole life where art doesn't always come first. Is it possible to be in relationships, to be responsible and loving toward others, and still find the time and energy time to write? Can we avoid turning our fears and disappointments against ourselves, as well? Is it possible to be a dedicated writer and not leave destruction in our wake? These are pretty important questions to ask. Finally, Kennedy takes us back to where we began: Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go. -- Al Kennedy |
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