A GOOD T.I.T.L.E. GOES HERE

One Christmas, 1995 maybe, I returned from Honolulu to find the puppy dead.  Worst dog sitter ever.  

Salmonella happens.  

Same time I was offered a teaching gig at a prestigious writing retreat.  No surprise, nobody signed up.  

Work so hard to remain unknown, can’t be shocked if you don’t cultivate a celebrity following.  

But I did think about what I might say. – JDW

A GOOD T.I.T.L.E. GOES HERE:

A Totally Incomplete, Treacherously Literary Experience.

Being a study in word play.

“Michelle? [Ms. Rohl was an Olympic-level race walker and mother.]  She’s exceptional. As a coach, having coached my own teams, I’ve not worked with an athlete that exceptional. She is very tough. She doesn’t think it, but she’s so mentally cued into what she’s doing. She may not be able to tell you how she trains well. ‘I just do what my coach says,’ she’ll say. That’s part of her mental toughness. She’s tough enough in her mind and has enough trust to not question what she is doing.”

Personally commissioned by the president of a major shoe company to write a few profiles.
Your shoe dollars at work for a good cause.

I have a memory problem. The first question – look, you can ask me this – is exactly how much evasive editing is part of my loss of memory. I’ve been up against that one before. My position with respect to anyone else’s claims for actuality has always been: it’s you against me and may the best man win.

I’m not as stupid as I look.  Are you?  For instance, I’m no golfer.

I did have a burst, and this is the ghastly thing which awaits each of us, of creating the world in my own image.  I removed all resistance until I floated in my own invention. I creamed the opposition. Who in the history of ideas has prepared us for creaming the opposition?

This has to be understood because otherwise… well, there is no otherwise; it really doesn’t matter. – Tom McGuane, Panama.

Instead of writing the book I wanted to write, I wrote the book that wanted to be written.

PAY ATTENTION.

I hear the words call my name.

Skip the tough parts for now.  Sometimes A Good Title Goes Here is the best you can do.  A lesson there.  You don’t have to write everything perfectly all the time.

My other title ideas were The Code of Wild Dog: The Complete Guide To A Better Life & A Skinnier, Sexier Writer.

Or Feral Gump.  Maybe I Know Why The Chained Dog Barks.

Start with the hard parts. They are usually easier than you would think. A lot of my advice may appear contradictory and it is, because you have to do whatever works for you. Too many writers spend too much time trying to figure out what works for other writers when they could be spending the same time figuring out what works for them.  Short sentences.

The path to becoming a great writer will not be found in a subscription to Writer’s Digest or a corked-wine-and-cheese literary festival. The answer lies entirely within you.

I myself am a work-in-progress, so my theories and philosophies must be understood to remain unfinished. If you have a real problem, consult a physician. But if all you want to do is write a single perfect sentence every so often, then follow me.

I cannot tell you how to get rich but I can tell you how you can lead a rich life. I am not a teacher; I won’t simply tell you what I know. Believe me, you don’t have time to hear everything I have to say. I will not tell you what to do. I do not know what is best for you, but I know what has worked for me. Or not worked. And often it’s been the same.

“In general,” Schopenhauer told us, “the wise of all ages have always said the same things.” Not me. I am going to say some things you won’t believe. I am going to say some things I don’t believe. I am going to say much that may be wrong. Even untrue. But I will tell you nothing false.

Second only to a language, a writer must have integrity.

So, let me set you straight. I am not here to tell you how to find an agent, I am not here to tell you how to get your first novel published. I am not here to share with you the secrets of writing the irresistible query letter. I am not here to explain to you the obtuse responses necessary to win a grant. I do not know how to do any of these things. I am an artist, not a businessman. I am not a salesman, I am a writer.

Have I made myself clear?

Everything I tell you will move the story along. The writer, like a shark, must keep moving or he will die. He must keep the reader moving, too.

I am here to share with you what I have learned the hard way, what I’ve been taught over decades of scratching out a living with no discernible skills other than the desire to string together words of meaning and beauty, sentences of moment and movement, paragraphs of import and impact, pages of passion and pathos. Create the illusion of alliteration.

Often, I ended up with drivel, drab and disappointing. That last paragraph, for example. But I kept writing. And I kept improving.

If nothing else, I found my voice. I can laugh and cry, sing and sigh, scream and whisper, etc. More words of same vein go here. Say, Hallelujah!

Stories are the hard part so far. Discipline a problem; feel like I could be working harder. And I probably could be. I could.

I call myself a coach. I can show you what I do. And I can explain how I came to do it. I can share with you some of what I’ve learned this past half century. Those times when I was paying attention. The rest remains with you.

All we control basically is what we choose to do.

“God has fixed this law,” Epictetus tells us. “If you would have anything good, receive it from yourself.” Success depends on you, not your life.

“I BELIEVE ANYTHING MY COACH TELLS ME,” said Tish Henes, a small town senior track athlete after successfully defending her two Oregon state high school championships, AND SHE TOLD ME I AM IN THE BEST SHAPE OF MY LIFE.”

That’s the attitude I want you to have. Pay attention.

You are in the best shape of your life.

“When you are a writer, your senses never atrophy. – Phyllis A. Whitney

Here’s what shaped me.

In 1993, Americans purchased 58.4 million self-help books. Year in and year out, the best selling books in our country are devoted to the most personal form of home improvement. Yet nobody ever seems to get better.

I wasn’t feeling so good myself.

Finally realized my chances of being one in a million were a million to one.

Anyway, I was trying to create a mystery story. Read the classics, by which I mean Chandler and Hammett, and you see the hero is invariably a better shot, a better fighter, a better lover, a better driver and a better man than the average palooka on the street. That’s taken for granted. And while I too am all those things, I found myself wondering how a writer measures up to his character. How does he write that heroic material?

I asked a friend, let’s call him Steve, who was working on a mystery himself.

“Simple,” Steve said. “You become the character in your mind, put yourself in his shoes, and imagine how he would respond. When you are writing, you’re the hero.”

Steve’s hero, by the way, couldn’t keep his old truck running, it was always breaking down at the most inappropriate moments, and he got raped up the butt by a giant psycho.

Seemed to me that a writer who imagined the heroic milieu was merely pretending. The material would be somehow inauthentic.

My hero likes women, his truck is bullet-proof. Why, I wondered, limit your heroic self to the times you are writing? Why not actually become your own hero? Now there’s an idea.

Your life becomes fictional and your fiction becomes more realistic.

Pass each day in the senses and your writing becomes sensual.

“You are the hero of your own life story,” Frank McConnell said. “The kind of story you want to tell yourself about yourself has a lot to do with the kind of person you are and can become. You can listen to (or read in books or watch in films) stories about other people. But that is only because you know, at some basic level, that you are – or could be – the hero of those stories, too.

“You are Ahab in Moby Dick, you are Michael Corleone in The Godfather, you are Rick or Ilsa in Casablanca, Jim in Lord Jim, or the tramp in City Lights. And out of these make-believe selves, all of them your own self-in-the-making, you learn, if you were lucky and canny enough, to invent a better you than you could have before the story was told.”

Every story must tell a picture. Your face is a self-portrait.

Growing up as a little boy in the 1950’s I watched a great many western movies.  I watched detective shows.  I watched George Maharis and Martin Milner tooling along Route 66 in a Corvette convertible.

Rt. 66 was really just another western.

Star Wars, too, when you think about it.

In How To Write A Damn Good Novel, James N. Frey discusses the difference between natural man (homo sapiens) and fictional man (homo fictus).

Homo fictus is simpler.

Homo fictus has hotter passions and colder anger, travels more, fights more, loves more, changes more, has more sex.  Lots more sex.  Homo fictus has more of everything.  Even if he’s plain, dull and boring, he’s more extraordinary in his plainess, dullness and boringness than his real-life counterpart.

Human beings sometimes do foolish things.  They mispeak, they forget, they buy when they should sell, they miss opportunities, they’re blind to the obvious.  In effect, they are not at all times and in all situations operating at their maximum capacity.  Not so with homo fictus.

The principle of maximum capacity, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT, does not require that a character always be at an absolute maximum, but is at the maximum within that character’s capability.

Homo fictus always operates at his maximum capacity and it is never within a dramatic character’s maximum capacity, when faced with a problem or a challenge, to do nothing.

You can try this at home, boys and girls.

Ask yourself, how did I get here?

That’s history.

Ask yourself, where do I want to go?

That is your future.

Ask yourself, what am I doing?

This is the place to start.

Exercise your own judgement.

In an essay entitled “Heroism,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. [Heroism is] scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. [Heroism] works in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and the good. Heroism is obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character.”

Our art, says Dr. George Sheehan, is no less than the self we make and the life we live.  Art and heroism are all about who you are and what you do.  Artists do art and a hero performs heroically.

Words are symbols described to make your life an immortal journey. Write enough about an amazing man and you become one.

“No one can create a character from pure observation,” said Somerset Maugham. “If it is to have life it must be at least in some degree a representation of himself.”

Jack Kerouac doubtlessly influenced the philosophy of the writer becoming his own hero.

“His ‘true story novels’ are direct transcription of his experience,” explained Ann Douglas in the New York Times Book Review, “sometimes written just months after the events they describe. Kerouac’s goal, as he wrote to Allen Ginsberg, was to ‘unleash the inner life in an art-method.’ Convinced that an American life described with total honesty could constitute art, even great art, he intended his books to form a single autobiographical legend.”

The hard part is living up to your own myth.

In the universe that is my writing, I am the sun.

I learned this concept from Herm Atkins, a national-class runner some years back. He’s now a police officer in Bellingham, Washington. Maybe Everett. Whatever, a town with a sense of humor somewhere up north. Anyway, I remember a conversation with Herm.

“When I step up to that starting line, I am the greatest runner in the world.”

“But, Herm, I hate to be the bearer of factual tidings, but you’re not even the greatest runner here.”

“Until somebody beats me to the finish line, there’s no evidence to the contrary. Every race is a new chance.”

“And when you lose?”

“Somebody else had a better day.”

Trust in yourself.  Believe in yourself.  Herm did.  He didn’t have time for self-doubt.  When he finally slowed down, he got his skinny black ass a badge and a nine-millimeter automatic.

Practice self-excavation. Who’s in there?
Great writing is all about knowing who you are, being real and creating a separate reality on the page. Great living is creating your own reality in the now.

The genius, or talent, is knowing who you are. Then acting that way. Having something to say. Vision maybe. Doing the work. And finally great words.

Ann Lamott says, “I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good at it.”

There is a finish line and your assignment is to reach for it. The real losers are those who don’t get to the starting line.

Your job? Practice finishing.

“Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.”

THE CODE OF WILD DOG.

Doggone it! Defy the odds. Break loose. Adapt your game.

Do the work. Act now. Stand for something. Assist the victims. Become your own hero.

I have a philosophy of life and I try to live by it.

“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity,” Smother told me from the time I was two years old, old enough to run away from home. The border between smart and crazy is easily crossed, so today I’ve got a Ph.D from the funny farm. Good ol’ WACK U.

A fine line is the edge I have crossed in the years since. It’s a tight rope. Character is destiny, or so the ancient Greeks claimed.

Mickey Spillane says of his famous private eye Mike Hammer, “He only drinks, dresses, or does what I do.”

Imagine your life as you’d like it to be. Put those words down on paper. Write it out. Right it out. Ride it out.

The Bridges of Madison County has been on The New York Times best seller list for three years. Have you read it? This really cool artist/cowboy in a classic pickup and tight jeans drops in on an Italianesque farmer’s wife all by her lonesome for four days while everybody Christian is at the State Fair.

Well, sparks fly as if you were rubbing Clint Eastwood and what’s her name who’s always does those phony accents together on the big wooden kitchen table where the whole family sits together when they’re home. But they are not home, thank you very much. The two middle-aged but firm lovers keep in touch, figuratively speaking but they don’t see each other again.  I think that’s what happens. Read book, take cold shower, sigh. Believe me, wait for the movie if you haven’t read the book. Which I believe took seventeen days to write. You read Bridges and wonder sometimes what Waller did with all that time.

I am, you know it, jealous as shit.

But I have the most confident sense The Bridges of Madison County is Waller’s life as he would imagine it.

He imagined it, he put it down on paper. And now this slim-hipped long-haired professor has women throwing themselves at him and he can afford a thousand pickups. A Rolls-Royce pickup like Travis Magee’s, for instance.

Waller has a video on VH-1, for chrissakes. Just imagine what someone of talent could accomplish?

I met Andre Dumas, a man of enviable talent. He’s crippled, in a wheelchair, since he stopped his car by the side of the road, hopped out like a good Samaritan to aid a motorist in distress and was soonthereafter run down by another vehicle.

Dumas quoted Eugene Debs: “While there is a lower class, I’m in it. While there is a criminal class, I’m of it. While there is a man in prison, I am not free.”

Dumas was raised Catholic.  Family and church play major roles in his brilliant short fiction.  This is what he told me.  The parts I remember.

“We are the first people who actually have some sense of what’s happening around the world.  Some small sense…  Being a writer is depressing.  You must sit still.   Talent is fairly common.  It’s an unpleasant thing to do.  It is largely mechanical when a story doesn’t work.

“At any given time there are only three hundred people making a living entirely from writing.  There are more navy admirals on active duty.  You should not be shy, if you have no money, to find someone who does and fall in love with them.”

With the proceeds of his first literary award, Dumas bought an eighteen-foot Whaler and put a thirty-five horsepower on the back of it.

If you are a writer, you will write.

I am starting to ramble.

Submit your work.  You are more talented than you know.

THE HOWLISTIC APPROACH.

Note the epigram which opens Hunter Thompson’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: HE WHO MAKES A BEAST OF HIMSELF GETS RID OF THE PAIN OF BEING A MAN. – Dr. Johnson

I am the Wild Dog. I see man as animal, artist, hero.  His goal? Become a god.  Become your own supreme being.  That seems a worthwhile goal.

“Art is a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories and sensations of the body,” offered William Butler Yeats.  Sounds kinda orgasmic, doesn’t it.

Psycho Poet.  Schizophrenia as muse. And so I became part feral canine.  Wild Dog.

Write as if God was reading. – Barker Ajax.

“It’s all the same thing, man,” Janis Joplin sings.  In writing and running and life, I try to take a wholistic approach.  Attempting always to meld the physical, mental and spiritual.  Difficult and often unsuccessful work.

And the next day I try again.  The sun each morning is my wakeup call.

“When all of you is centered – with no part standing off to criticize, admire, or guide,” explained Sidney Cox, “no wonder you show what you did not know you had, and act with style.”

Re self-help, in this I have the last word.

Hell, I am the last word.  Become your own self-help guru.

“Man, everyman, must at every moment be deciding for the next moment what he is going to do, what he is going to be,” stated Jose Ortega y Gasset. “This decision only he can make; it is non-transferable.”

THE WRITING GAME.  WORD SPORT.

Throughout the history of games, coaches have always, always, stressed the fundamentals. Because it is the ability to perform the basics which, more likely than not, will determine the outcome. The basics determine the winners.

Willpower is more important than talent.  Choose production over promise.  Do the work.  Make the effort and make it more often.  It was William James, as I am sure you recall, who first told us “effort is the measure of the man.”

I try very hard as a coach to teach my writer-athletes that reaching to be the best you can be is as important as actually being the best you can be.  The pursuit of a personal goal should be and can be a very enriching process.

You must learn to love to write.  Erich Segal was right.  Love means doing your best, because when you do your best, no apologies are necessary.  Love ensures you will do your best.

You love to play, to win, to have fun.  That’s being a good animal.

The writer must become an athlete.

How much different would the literary world be if Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac, fill in the blanks, instead of being drunken womanizers, were monogamous long distance runners?

Imagine the paradigm which would have influenced the writers of our generation.

I did my best. To womanize, drink and run all at the same time.

Leaves no time for writing.

THE WRITING GAME. WRITING AS SPORT.

Buy some velcro, put a piece on the seat of your pants and another piece on the chair at your writing desk.

The writing coach.  Composition as sport.

Writing is a lot like fishing. In the final analysis your success is entirely dependent upon the fish. Whether they want to bite your bait or not. But as a fisherman, you still have to put yourself in position to catch them. You still have to get up early, use the proper equipment and, in a manner of speaking, you still have to cast your bread into the waters.

“That is why athletics is important,” Brian Glanville wrote. “They demostrate the scope of human possibility, which is unlimited. The inconceivable is conceived, and then it is accomplished.” Then it is written.

Think of writing as a team sport and find somebody to play with. being a part of a team can help you reach further as an individual than you ever could alone.

To win anything, the first thing you need to do is control yourself, the second thing you need to do is control the environment around you, Greg Norman’s father told him.  Do that and you are on your way to improvement.

Sports fans know a great deal about plot structure.  Take pro football, for example.  There’s the regular season, the setup, where we learn the names of the characters, get some sense of who they are, how they behave, what their weaknesses and strengths are. Then there’s the playoffs, the buildup, where the stakes are raised, and the main actors come to the fore, and tension mounts. Finally, the payoff, the Super Bowl, the big climax, where all the marbles are on the table.

“The will to win is nothing without the will to prepare.” – Juma Ikangaa.

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” said golfer Bob Tway, winning his first tournament after a five-year drought. “A lot of times you wonder, Why bother? But what kept me going was my love for the game.”

“Every day I would keep doing something and although maybe it didn’t look like I had improved, inside I felt like I was gaining on it. If you keep doing that over five, six, or eight years, then it’s going to turn around.” – Nick Price, golfer.

Stay loose.

Keep your eye on the ball.

Don’t always try to swing as hard as you can.

“What you have to do is make your mind that you are going to have fun or you’re not.” – Sparky Anderson.

There are 518,000 male high school basketball players in the United States. Of these, less than 4%, 19,000 will play on college teams. The last time I checked there were 367 NBA players. Only 40 or 50 new players are drafted from college into the pros.

Writers face similar odds.

You’ve got only so many choices in life. You either give in, give up, or keep going. – Rich Brooks, football coach when asked how he got to the Rose Bowl after 18 seasons at the University of Oregon.

When you’re trying to decide which club to hit, the first one that comes to mind is the right one.” – Harvey Penick, golf legend.

Write your work before you start editing it.

Grip your idea and rip it.

How about putting? Putting is like editing for space, knowing just which words to let live. Study the shape of the words.

What would Steve Prefontaine say if he was coaching writers?

How to be a winning writer, according to the Principles of Pre.  Self-motivated.  Consistent.  Etc.  Apply Pre’s ethic to the written word.

A good writer and a good runner stay lean.

“Writers are interesting when there’s a multiplicity of the world in their work. Too much academia, the requisite creative-writing courses, the master’s degree in writing and the inevitable professorship can kill prose. There’s not enough texture or fabric of the world in the work. Know all sorts of things – crochet, bocci ball, Mexican recipes, entomology – because if you’re fishing for a metaphor, isn’t it great to know entomology. The cross-hatched luster of a flapping butterfly can describe a window screen. ” – Mark Leyner. Oregonian,  4/2/95

“It’s a writer’s duty to be an observer, not to show a high profile.” – John D. MacDonald.

“I’d go out on the bike, hail, rain, snow, or sunshine, and start pedaling and I’d know if it was there or not.  If you feel tired, then you just don’t do it.  It’s either all-out or recovery. There’s no in-between.” – Graeme Obree, World Record 1 Hour

SCRAP.

“I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.” – Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt.

“It takes a long time to become young,” Picasso said. In school they teach you how not to write. They give you a blank page, a boring topic and a word limit. Tell you to avoid the first person singular. Warn you, don’t use a preposition to end a sentence with. And other important rules.

Shape your letters just so.

Influences. Poe, Wilde, Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Kerouac, Henry Gregor Felsen, Jack Schaefer, Bukowski, Richard Ford, I collect John D. MacDonald.

Mark Twain. Hemingway. Henry Miller. Lenny Bruce. Kerouac. Dr. Hunter Thompson. Elmore Leonard. Shane. The Lone Ranger. Bob Dylan. Sports Illustrated.

Who I like now: Pam Houston, Jim Thompson, Cormac McCarthy, E. Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver once in a while, Richard Ford. Tobias Wolf. Forrest Gump. I could listen to Sherman Alexie all night. Larry Brown.

To tell you the truth, my influences are always the people I’m reading at any given time. I plan it that way. Typically, my intuition, if not common sense, leads me to writers that help me with whatever I am working on right at the moment. I write five books at a time and I read five books at a time. Often, one of the books I am writing or one of the books I am reading demands more of my time and focus. And so I go there.

Joyce Carol Oates’ short stories are good reading, particularly while you are writing character studies.

I have many influences as a writer. Realized only after writing fiction how many fictional influences I have as a man.

I became in many ways my own hero. The hero of the books I read and the hero of books I would hope to write is the man I would hope to become.

Become your own influence.

The strenuous life tastes better. – James.

Life is made in doing and suffering and creating. – James

No mention of paychecks, bylines or paychecks.

Believe in what you have to say. What you believe is your message. You are your own message. Tell the truth.

A hero lives what he believes. Impose your will on reality.

An hour in the morning is worth two in the evening. – Dimnet

I wrote The Sky Fisherman without my glasses. It seemed to bring closer to the characters. – Craig Lesley

SHORT ASSIGNMENTS. SHITTY FIRST DRAFTS. – ANNE LAMOTT

Oughtabeography. Become your own hero. The writer as subject.

Vigilante fiction. “In the destructive element immerse.” Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Pup fiction. A doggone good idea.

Scribe-anon, a support group for writers

Writers’ Anonymous. Why not a 12-point program for writers? Modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous and similar organizations.

It is as necessary to write as much as you read. – Hallie Burnett

Writing is as habit-forming as tobacco. – Erskine Caldwell

“Good writing is truly democratic, open to all. What’s really snooty is to put out commercial garbage for those you feel superior to.” – Garrison Keillor

Gail Sheehy talks about a man’s second adulthood. The key she says is making the transition from competition to connectedness. Seems to me she is talking about the same thing I’ve been talking about, the transition fron sports to writing. What is writing but a search for connectedness?

If an author calls his work fiction, the reader should call it fiction.

riting?

Creative procrastination.

Breaking the rules. My eighth grade English teacher’s name was Miss Spelling. Contrary advice. E.g., Read Less.

Be a real writer.

Free spirit writing.

The sex of writing. Poetry is flirting. Journal writing is like masturbation.

Is it okay to make up new words?

Profanity is language fouled as a defensive weapon, dirty words a warning like the first faint smell of skunk.

Or shit.

Friends don’t let friends be poets. The virtues of prose.

My history as a writer. Lessons of life, and what the anecdotes have to teach about writing, what they taught me.

Short Story idea. My Life’s Story. A writer’s story as How-to-write lessons.

Everything I know about writing.

“I just decide to go to a place and write,” McCarthy tells us. “One of the great hurdles in life is when you can forget about what other people are doing.”

Interview technique?

“Years ago I talked to a linguist who gave me three questions to ask that would be sure to bring a response: Have you ever come close to death? Have you ever been accused of something you didn’t do? Do you remember the circumstances of your birth?” – Anna Deavere Smith, performance artist.

Myself, I’ve had more than a little success with the question, if you could be any kind of bird, what bird would you be and why?

You are always looking for stories.

Conducting an interview is like pitching batting practice.

Where do I get my ideas?

Some of them arrive like a 16-year-old returning the family car one minute before curfew.  It’s getting late.  I look out the window. The driveway’s empty.

Suddenly, tires screech!

Others come like an overdue check when you’re really down on your luck.

Don’t listen to anybody else until you have finished your first draft.

Do not fear rejection. Embrace it. Defeat has its upside.

“Rejection is an attitude. Once a poem is finished, it becomes inventory. There’s no accounting for the vagaries of editorial taste.” said Floyd Skloot, whose recent award-winning poem had first collected 19 rejections. Skloot, by the way, was paid $75 for a poem which appeared in April ’95 Atlantic Monthly.

Once you finish a story, it becomes inventory.

Become your own coach.

1. Listen. Pay attention.

2. Encourage. Support.

3. Share tales of the writing life. Offer a series of lessons, some learned, some not.

4. Explain what works for you, what doesn’t.

5. Review the student’s effort. What’s good? What could be better?

6. Exercises.

7. Respect. Always there is respect. For the words, for each other. For yourself.

There are many sources outside literature where we can advance our understanding of what it takes to become a great writer.

A glimpse through an issue of TV Click reminded me that “Good work is hard to do – period. If you are trying to learn and trying to grow, you have got to work hard. You can’t settle for a bag of tricks. It is hard to do honest work…. If you are doing stuff you don’t believe in, it really makes it that much harder to get the energy to try to serve it. But when you are inspired by the material, it sparks something and makes you not want to drop the ball…. It’s always great to be dealing with issues. It forces you to examine, perhaps in a deeper way, some of how you feel about those moral issues personally. There are a lot of gray areas.” Television celebrity Adam Arkin offered these words of advice in a syndicated piece by Susan King.

Arkin may know what he’s talking about, but clouding the sagacity of his message like camouflage netting is Arkin’s choice of words and King’s writing.

There’s nothing wrong with a writer cleaning up a subject’s syntax, just as there is nothing wrong with an editor cleaning up an interview. For example, “you have got to work hard,” could just as easily have been said, and written, as you have to work hard or, even better, you must work hard. Don’t think such a change prejudices the integrity of the quote.

Good writing is not hard to do really. Honest work should be easier to do than dishonest work. You can’t settle for a bag of tricks, but every good writer carries as big a bag as he can tote without slowing himself down. Inspired or not, don’t drop the ball. Anyone who has actually dealt with issues knows such dealing is often not great. One can hardly examine except in a deeper way; that is what “examine” means, to my mind.

Adam Arkin talked to King about his motivation as an actor. “Fear of things not being good, I joke about it, but to some extent you really don’t want to stink up the joint. Fear keeps you trying to be good.”

Too often, fear keeps you from trying.

You can build a short story from the first sentence to the last.

How do you find your voice? How can you recognize the sound of your own voice?

“The supreme law of life is this: the sense of worth of self shall not be allowed to diminish.” Alfred Adler, an Austrian psychologist said that.

THE MEANING OF SUCCESS.

“Being number one does not necessarily mean you are doing things right,” George Sheehan.

“One can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing.” – Maurice Blanchot

To make a good story, you eliminate as much as possible. Writers should know when to stop. What is left out is often far more important than what is put in.

Let your stories write themselves. Let them be what they want to be.

Revision gives you the sense of the organic whole, like when you enter a dark room, it takes a while for your eyes to adjust to the light before you start to see shapes. Not the events of the book, but its soul. The events are almost an aftereffect. – Les Plesko, Poetry Flash, 4/93

Style should be the foremost thing, because form determines content. The shape of the language pushes the momentum of whatever action or lack of action is there. language fires certain associative ideas for the author – which then goes to the reader as a byproduct. – Les Plesko, Poetry Flash, 4/93

Patrick O’Brian maintains that style is a writer’s choice of words. More important is what O’Brian calls prose rhythm. Prose rhythm then is the order in which the writer places those words and the spaces he sets between them.

“In the long run, the market rewards risk.” – Steve Salerno, Writer’s Digest, June ’87

“You have to work in whatever way you can, and thereby progress; each piece of writing you do is enormously and coincidentally similar to every failure and every success you have had previously. Each new work is practically related to the work you did the last time.” Eavan Boland, Irish poetess.

Great writing is better than bad sex. – Barker Ajax

“The tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.” – William Faulkner

Emerson said talent writes with genius, genius writes with wine.

Care about your characters and their fate.

Asked his theory for plotting a mystery, Raymond Chandler said, “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun.”

How do we want our prose? “Vivid and continuous,” John Garner said. “Immediate and compelling,” answers Anne Lamott.

Never give up.  Grow or die.  Get wilder.  Take more risks.

Write the fewest number of words you need to tell the story.

Writing is a craft, great writing is an art. I am here in some ways not to discourage the craftsman, but to celebrate the artist among you. While I as much as any man appreciate the merits of smoothly applied latex wall covering, just because you can paint a ceiling, doesn’t mean you are ready for the Sistine Chapel.

Get 200 photos and write 500 words about each one. When you’re done, you’ll have 100,000 words. Toss’em all out. Now you are ready to become a writer. In whatever field you chose, whatever art it is that moves you, throw the first hundred thousand away. From that place, start.

The best example I can offer to explode the notion of writing as something to be taught, the difference between a poorly written book about writing and the truly inspiring book about writing is art. And the artist creates the latter.

A single sentence paragraph must be good enough to stand alone.

Too true.

A series of single sentence paragraphs can be a good goal.

Don’t do too much overt psychoanalyzing.  Don’t spell out your message.  Not too obviously, if you must spell it out at all.  Let the reader find the message for themselves.

You’re not fooling anyone, you know.

Start with one true fact. – Hemingway.  Doubtlessly a paraphrase.  Check Movable Feast.

Ask yourself where do I fit into the picture?

Take notes as you go through life. Learn to step aside yourself. Get a new perspective, one that puts you in the movie.

Life is like a library. You can’t judge a book by its cover blurbs.

“Choose one word and say it over/and over, till it builds a fire inside your mouth.” – Naomi Shihab Nye.

The only thing you’ve got that is deeply your own, is your values and what you believe in. And that believing means something. You don’t believe in anything unless you stand up for it. And you should always try to keep your mind free, because you might not have a lot of money and you might not have a lot of success and life can get really hard, but essentially how you live is who you are. – Elizabeth Ashley.

“The writer must never cease being astounded by the mediocrity and self-satisfaction of the material world in which he is obliged to function. He must never cease being outraged by the compromise with pride and love and honor which he knows his society, and even himself, has made. In every work he sets down there must be his sharp awareness of the fear of men before their own kind, of the constant failures of justice, of the endless distortions of truth, that have brought our civilization to the brink of disaster. For in common with all religious believers, the writer knows that this is not the way the world was intended to be.” – Kay Boyle, Oregon artist & activist.

In every good writer is the willingness to say that unspeakable thing which everyone else in the house is too coy, or too frightened, or too polite to say. – Tobias Wolff.

The storyteller’s claim is that life has meaning – that the things that happen to people happen not just by accident…but that there is order and purpose deep behind them or inside them and that they are leading us not just anywhere but somewhere. The power of stories is that they are telling us that life adds up somehow. – Frederick Buechner.

A writer must make a decision to march or to dance. – Guggenheim.

Difficulties are things that show what men are. – Epictetus.

All a writer can really do is check into work and see what happens. – Andre Dubus.

It doesn’t matter how good you are if people don’t read you. – Pete Dexter

I think that it takes courage to lead a life. Any life. I am a risk taker, and I think you can’t be a good writer unless you’re a risk taker. – Erica Jong.

Writing is the hardest, most arduous work there is. It’s terribly difficult and as you get older it gets harder. Perhaps that’s because writing is thinking, and thinking is the hardest thing we do. Writers lead lives of total loneliness and terrible pain, and we try to help them. – Roger Angell.

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. – Flaubert.

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.” – Thoreau.

(Great quote to memorize) It’s not the critic that counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, and often comes up short again and again.

Who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause. And who, if at best in the end, knows the triumph of higher treatment and high achievement. And who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his soul shall never be with those cold and timid ones who neither victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt.  (But far too long.)

One of the saddest experiences which can come to a human being is to awaken, gray-haired and wrinkled, near the close of an unproductive career, to the fact that all through the years he has been using only a small part of himself. – V. W. Burrows.

“When you write you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and to feel that it’s good and to sell millions of copies of it and have everybody whose opinion you value think it’s good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You’re not likely to ever get all these things, and you are not likely to ever get all these things, and you’re not likely to give up writing or commit suicide if you don’t, but that is – and should be – your goal. Anything less is kind of piddling.” – Dashiell Hammett, from an unfinished novel Tulip, published posthumously.

There are no rules for the novel, ever…which saves it from people who like to make rules. – Doris Lessing at Arts & Lectures series in PDX, May 28, 1987.

“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” – Mark Twain.

When I finish one play, I don’t get up. I stay there until I get an idea for the next one. – August Wilson.

Ending.

The lights dim.

Fade to black.

A voice off stage booms o’er the loudspeaker:

“Whoever he was. he has left the building.”

Ha!