copyright 1995
Writers, the ones I care about, and even myself, write to be read; not to aggrandize themselves in cringing elitism, not to please or psychoanalyze themselves by getting closer to their feelings, and not, indeed, just to be published and to fill that empty space on a resume. Writers write…not even to appeal to a particular readership, but to discover and bring to precious language the most important things they were capable of, and to reveal this to others with the hope that it will commit an effect on them – please them, teach them, console them. Reach them.
Richard Ford said that.
Epigraphs. Here’s a tried and true, perfectly legitimate means by which to greatly enhance almost any piece of your writing. Find great words and wisdom by some other thinker and appropriate the quote as an introduction to your own efforts. An epigraph sets the tone. It can explain your story perhaps better, more insightfully than you can yourself.
Makes you look smart and well read.
1. At the top, believe you belong there. Learn to write just to be doing it. There is only one way for a writer to fail and that is by not writing.
“It’s very simple,” explains William S. Burroughs. “A writer’s motivation is to write.”
No more excuses.
2. Life is a carnivore. Bite me.
“If you wish to be a success in this life,” Herbert Spencer said, “first be a good animal.” Animals don’t try to become something they’re not. Become what you are meant to be.
Write or be eaten. The Bible teaches that “the righteous man regardth the life of his beast.” Inside me, there is a great animal. He roams my writing.
Make good use of your demons. Become a good animal.
3. Commit everything to the word. Get the shit down on paper. Just write it.
4. Computerize. Stop whatever you are doing, if you are not writing with a computer. Stop.
Why not? Are you perhaps allergic to the greatest invention since the book? If you cannot afford a computer, steal the money you need. If you don’t think you have the nerve to steal the money, steal a computer.
A computer is worth a possible jail sentence.
Besides, think of all the time in stir you’d have to write.
5. You are living your life exactly as imagined. If you have a problem with your life, change your imaginings.
6. Call yourself a writer. First you write. Then you become a writer. Next you write some more.
7. Become a warrior. Learn to be comfortable in your discomfort. A runner becomes great when he learns to push through the pain barrier amd finds greater speed on the other side.
“The natural situation for man may well be war,” offered William James. “I do not mean that man is to man a wolf, but that man must be to man a hero.”
8. I have my own chaos theory. There are no rules. And some men are luckier than others.
“Resist much,” Walt Whitman said. “Obey little.” Establish your own rules of good writing.
“Language is living evidence. Once I repeat it, it comes to life in character. You’re given these, but to be you is always knocking up against the walls of language, taking your own rhythms, your own pauses and variations, to be who you are. We need language to be different, to fall apart, to find character.” – Anna Deavere Smith, performance artist
9. You have to believe if your work is good, somebody will want to publish it. Ultimately it all comes down to how well you write.
10. Develop the habit of art. Is success your goal? Is money or a job or the applause of the powerful? Publication? Or is art your goal?
Give yourself just an hour a day.
11. Jack Lemmon once said that to be a great actor, you must be prepared to undress in front of a crowd and turn around slowly, twice.
You cannot be truly creative if you are afraid of being judged. Hold nothing back. Don’t save a thing. Put it all into your work.
Fifteen minutes.
12. An idea a day. You don’t have to write every day, but you do have to come up with at least one good idea daily. Every day. It’s like exercise. And flossing. Making your bed.
Small Pet Warnings. Expecting ninety-mile per hour winds. So tether your dogs and cats to something sturdy.
13. “A thing known passes out of the mind into the muscles,” the poet William Carlos Williams knew.
“Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and exercise on the mind.” – Emerson
Exercise. Get healthy. Stretch. Stay hungry.
“The moment my legs begin to move,” noted Thoreau, “my thoughts begin to flow.”
Sue Grafton, author of the Alphabet Is For Making Millions mystery series, works out twice a day. “Writing is hard physical labor and very stress-producing. You have to have some way to blow your tubes and get it out of your system.”
14. A good reason to write. I remember nothing until I write it. Memories made real again, somewhat better than reality. History now. Writing is experience revisited and imagination explored.
I remember everything I have written and so my life is more interesting to me. I left all the boring parts out, so my life seems more exciting than how it really was at the time.
15. Lead a more interesting life. The more exciting the life you lead, the less difficult the writing. Become your own hero, self-disciplined and self-motivated.
Self-regeneration, recreation, re-creation, creating….
Self-liberation.
16. The fiction writer should state as little as possible.
17. In most cases, your characters’ personalities create the story’s action.
18. Summon your pheremones. Sex not only sells, it writes.
“Passion, eccentricity, and even arrogance are often a writer’s friend,” wrote Tom Boswell, The Best American Sports Writing 1994. “In private life, you may prefer to keep these unsociable traits handcuffed. But when you sit down to write, you handicap yourself severely if you do not invite them to join you at the table.”
19. First readers. Audition some friends to read your late drafts. Get input from a number of people whose opinions you respect. Ignore all input if you feel that’s best. But pay attention to what your readers tell you. Drop immediately any reader who trends toward negativity and destructive criticism. Find the readers who can do you the most good. Look for encouragement, fresh perspective, tight editing and honesty.
“All I am certain of is this: that it is quite necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and the depth of understanding to share, vicariously, the sometimes crushing burden of creative effort.” – Rachel Carson, Always, Rachel
20. Learn to play. Collaborate. Writing group = group runs. Teamwork. Writing is sport, is play, is fun, is a game, physical.
Get sweaty.
21. Act as if. Act as if you are a writer, and a damn fine one, at that. Act as if you enjoy the actual act of writing, planting your tender butt on a comfortable chair with correct back support while staring at a blank sheet of computer screen. Act as if you know the words will flow. All good things come to those who write.
22. Read your work aloud. All of your work.
23. Make some noise. Too many stories seem to occur in total silence. Where are the sounds in your work?
24. Examine the unfinished. Inventory your old work.
25. The four keys of successful plotting. Ask yourself what happens next. Next, ask yourself what happens then. Then ask yourself, next what happens. What happens then is next.
“Plot is as essential to fiction as the nerve that runs the length of a caterpillar, directing its exertions and its progree toward its destination.” – Hallie Burnett.
26. Leave out the details.
“One night, giving me a lesson in storytelling, you said, ‘Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.'” – Ann Beattie, Snow, a short story
You don’t have to tell everything. Certainly not all the truth. Leave a lot of stuff out.
“Take what you can use,” Ken Kesey has said, “and let the rest go by.”
Make observations. What’s the total picture?
Elmore Leonard leaves out all the parts people always skip over anyway.
27. Target read. It’s allowed.
28. All sentences are not equal. The same goes for paragraphs.
29. Write up. Edit down.
“Write at white heat, says Neil Millar. “Revise in cold blood.”
30. Outline. If you can map out your path beforehand, by all means, go ahead. That way you will probably get where you are heading. Of course, the key is simply to start out.
The fact you have a map doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind and go a different route.
31. There’s a phrase: “start with the fourth paragraph.”
32. Play the edges. Paint outside the lines. “What a man most wishes to hide, revise, and unsay, is precisely what Literature is waiting and bleeding for….” Kerouac wrote Ginsberg.
Roll over the rock and look underneath. “We write,” says Ann Lamott, “to expose the unexposed.”
I write to find out who I am. Finding out who I really am means learning what my limits are, seeing how far I go. Writing must push you to your edges. And, if you are lucky, to your readers’ edges.
Don’t ignore your fear. Fear can be your strength. Ignorance, on the other hand, is a weakness.
You can’t step into victory lane with your foot on the brakes. – Big Johnson Racing
33. Keep in mind you are your own student, your own editor, your own teacher.
34. Revise. “I’m constantly revising,” admits Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist Dave Barry. “Revision is so much more important than whatever you put down first. Sometimes I reword it so much, it turns into a different idea. The piece gets better and better if you keep working on it. People don’t want to hear that. They want it to be easy. The tendency is to quit too soon.”
Never fall in love with something that can’t love you back.
35. Don’t revise.
Kerouac claimed not to revise. “Rather, he believed that, like the jazz musicians and athletes he idolized, a writer must stake everything on performance. To Kerouac’s way of thinking, a writer should be no way able to redo his work than a quarterback is to revise his last pass or a bop saxophonist is to delete his last solo.” Ann Douglas, N.Y. Times Book Review, 4/9/95
The magic in the music is in the space between the notes. You’ve heard it before, take it to heart now. The message is between the lines. The beauty is in the white space between the words. Make it as crisp as crisp can be. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then five hundred words should provide the same image in better focus.
36. Write letters. Sometimes I get, what I call, writer’s bleak. I am not blocked really, but I feel barren and empty. So I write people I love. My heart fills with the thought of my loved one and the words come. Sometimes I tell stories.
Often, I write my cousin, Todd. He’s a quarter century younger and I have managed to fill his head with so many tales over the years that I am his most unforgettable character. This is a heavy responsibility, I feel. So I write Todd the truth the best way I know how to tell it.
Kerouac used letters to find out who he was. It was in his letters where Kerouac found his voice.
Trusting. Respecting. The words will come in such an environment. Find a good sounding board. And use it.
Correspondence as art. I think a good new magazine might be entitled LETTERS. By writers for writers.
37. Thread, focus, tension. Find the narrative thread, concentrate and purify that thread, then tighten and stress the thread.
Hold tight.
38. Ballet parking. Don’t listen so good. More contrary advice. Mishearing something can provide a great line. We tend to fill in the blanks, so why not open yourself to more missing words and improve upon them.
39. Polysyllablism in defense of clarity is no vice. What does it mean for us to be rebellious today?
40. Never concentrate on relaxing. Just let go.
41. Do not be your own worst critic. Part of being a writer is being a critical reader of your own work, but avoid self-abuse. Believe me, there are other people out there, editors, parents, ex-lovers, jealous peers, who will be perfectly willing to tell you how badly you have written.
Rejection is just another form of criticism. “Why should my happiness depend upon the thoughts in someone else’s head,” Emerson wondered.
42. Shave down.
There is not on aspect of your life that doesn’t relate to the writing experience.
43. If you can’t make a commitment to the story, make one to your characters. You gave them life, now give them a life.
44. Try to lead a life superior to yourself.
To be a cowboy, you not only have to be smarter than the cattle, your horse has to work harder. – Barker Ajax
If you have to have an absolute, make it yourself.
Become your own hero.
45. Raymond Carver said he enjoyed writing in which people we know are in situations we understand.
“Write what you know” doesn’t mean you are limited to material you have lived or seen. “Write what you know” means tell your truth as you perceive it.
Write about what you don’t know.
46. Make a long story short.
47. “You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.” – Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird.
48. Be honest about your goals. Do you want to publish more than you want to make money more than to quit your day job so everybody will think you are as cool as iced gelato. Or do you want to get good, really good. Do you want to be great? Do you want to be rich and famous? Loved?
I want to be feared. That dog is so bad, it’s scary.
49. Carry a pen. You never know.
50. Sometimes I get up on the hardass side of the bed. Show your guts.
51. Make your Sunday car your daily driver. Give yourself a nom de plume. Wear a costume.
“I have a coat rack in my room with costume pieces on it. When I write, I lose myself in the voice of the character that I become by donning these different costumes, and these different personas. I think it’s a way of getting away from myself.” – Denise E. Chavez.
52. Ask the pretty girl to dance.
She was glimmering in the moonlight and I felt like dancing the moment I first saw her.
53. Combine stories. Monte Walsh, another brilliant, but the only long, novel by Jack Schaefer, perhaps you remember Lee Marvin in the movie Monte Walsh, is a series of vignettes which Schaefer later crafted together into a forty-one year epic. You write a novel scene by scene. Why not take two stories, put them together, see what you got. And where you might be heading.
Put a half dozen or dozen stories togther.
54. Read less. Do you really think you learn more about writing by reading or by writing?
“To put away one’s orginal thought in order to take up a book,” warned Schopenhauer, “is a sin against the Holy Ghost.”
The difference between reading and writing is the difference between sitting high up in the stands bundled up in a parka drinking hot coffee spiked with Wild Turkey or bending over the center’s butt, taking the snap.
55. Open a magic file. There is a woman, more than a couple at least, who wait patiently for me to blossom. I think they must think of themselves as gardeners. They’ve done all this fertilizing and pruning and weeding and they are really looking forward to the day I finally burst into bloom.
I have a file called blossom. In that file, I write freely. Here I allow myself to flower, bursting with full knowledge these wonderful nurturing women are so patient and loving and supportive. All they really are asking is that I trust my heart as they do.
I don’t do business in blossom.doc. I don’t work on deadline. I don’t grind out a piece for pay. I play here, much like you might fly a bright kite at the beach.
In the magic file, there is no fear nor second doubts.
56. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy writers resemble each other. Each unhappy writer is unhappy in his own way.
We are born to be happy.
We are born to be heroes.
57. Ask yourself, “What’s startling?” What makes my dick hard? What gets me wet? Great writing is the opposite of safe sex. Take chances. Learn to take chances on purpose.
58. Write long. Put everything down on paper. “Sometimes you have to write it long,” says Robin Cody, “to figure out what to leave out, how to chop it down to those three paragraphs to make it crisp as crisp can be.” Put everything in. Take most of it out.
59. See the story in your head.
60. Fuck the rules. All the rules make it very difficult to write, a friend once confided. Forget the rules, I told her.
All the expectations make writing difficult, too. Whose expectations?, I wonder. The only rule is words on paper; the only expectation is words on paper.
61. Fear losing. Prefontaine was afraid, some say. Some say, that’s what made him great. I am more afraid of not writing than of writing poorly. That’s a big step.
62. Turn up the volume. William H. Gass was asked how deeply he identified with William Kohler, the ever so lonely protagonist of The Tunnel. “To write of such a man, you have to know loneliness, of course, but only of the kind that everyone has experienced at one time or another. It’s like the terrible blizzards I once put in a short story. I had never experienced blizzards like that, but I had experienced snow. You just turn up the volume.”
63. Massage yourself. There’s so much you can reach alone.
64. Writing requires energy but it also gives you energy back. Writing can make the end of work, quitting time, the beginning of your day.
“Is life too short to be taking shit, or is life too short to be minding it?” – Violet Weingarten, Intimations Of Mortality, from Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird.
65. Keep moving. Writing is about motion and a body of writing in motion tends to stay in motion.
In Complicity, Ian Banks’ protagonist offers this advice when he’s caught in a tight spot: “When in doubt it is vitally important to keep moving. Velocity is important. Kinetic energy frees the brain and confuses the enemy.” Keep moving is a good idea whether you trying to elude a serial killer or writer’s block.
Go for a swim in your mind. Learn how to plunge into a stream of consciousness. The ability to free-associate is a key path to discovery.
66. Get over it. Forget stuff. Put it out of your mind.
“I don’t want to remember. Memory hurts. Like crying. But still and deep. Memory rises to the skin then I can’t be touched. I hurt all over, my bones ache, my teeth loosen in their gums, my nose bleeds. Don’t make me remember. I forget as hard as I can.” – Fred D’Aguiar, The Longest Memory.
67. Ignore success. To those of you who are currently, umm, feeling unrewarded, you have better ways, writing, for example, to spend your time than chasing after some imagined acclaim and recognition. To those who have enjoyed some modicum of reward, you know who you are, good for you.
My feeling about big success is that anybody who can make a living not working in a factory is lucky. Beyond that, you’re successful,” says Warren Zevon. “And after that it’s like scratching off the winning number at a 7-11. If I do what interests me and is meaningful to me, then it’s pretty safe, & insofar as it goes, it will get the attention it deserves.”
68. Help other writers. Assist the victims.
69. Find your characters inside yourself. The writer as subject.
70. Use a crutch. John D. (no relation) MacDonald worked from photos, his imagination a blank at times. Of course, your remembrances might too evaporate if, like MacDonald, you wrote three or four books a year for thirty or forty years. “It was a time of innocence, a time of confidences, long ago, it must be. I have a photograph. Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left of you.” – Simon & Garfunkel, Bookends.
71. Get lucky.
72. Marry someone rich and understanding, preferably someone quiet who travels extensively. With or without you.
73. Quit your day job. Imagine a life dedicated to writing.
74. Write fast.
75. Try method writing. Study acting. Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares is a great book for writers. An actor creates a character and brings him to the stage or screen. A writer puts a character on the page. The form is different but the method is similar.
76. “The best way to write is to get out of bed – don’t brush your teeth – and go straight to the study and start to write. Half an hour later, take a break and get dressed. That way you have started a writing rhythm that will stay with you the rest of the day.” – Jackie Collins
77. Great writing is all about self-esteem.
78. Just do it. When you find yourself wanting to write, STOP whatever you are doing and give yourself four minutes. A man can run a mile in less time. How much can you get down on paper while he is circling the track once, twice, three times, pushing around the final turn, headed for the finish line.
79. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want to read yourself.
80. What people think about you is none of your concern. What you think about yourself is all important.
81. Write about anything, any thing, you find interesting.
82. Write about what you write about. Reconcile what you feel inside you with what you see going on all around you.
83. “At best [writing] is a rewarding combination of creative experience and creative expression. One cannot exist without the other. Memorable writing can happen only out of memorable living.” – Peggy Simson Curry, Creating Fiction From Experience
84. “To encourage the reader to turn to page 2, give him something on page 1: conflict, trouble, fear. Start with action; explain it later.” – Brian Garfield
85. Some of the best writing you will find in this country is found in Nike shoe advertisements, which makes sense, since some of the most highly paid writers in America write the copy. Surely Nike’s ads offer some of the best advice to writers. There is no finish line.
86. Lose that THAT word. Lose IT, too.
87. Think of writing as sculpture. “The sculpture is within the stone.” – Henry Moore
Share the story of editing Richard Knox. Chip by chip, Richard. Chip by chip. You know the story is in there and you will find it if you just keep chipping away at it.
“It’s a sculpture in that you have to chisel the language and feel the form under the words until the image emerges,” says Les Plesko. “The risk you take is that the entire edifice cracks. But if you do your work carefully, the core holds. You write your way through to the thing that you really want to say, which you would be unable to get at any other way.” – Les Plesko, Poetry Flash, 4/93
88. Take A.P style. Please. Associated Press style is what I tend to think of as an oxymoron.
“Style is revelation.” – Norman Mailer
89. The importance of research is grossly exaggerated.
My friend Al thinks he knows all there is to know about women. Al learned all there is to know about his opposite gender as a very young man, so he has ceased any further study. Al has never married and, since his 17-year-old cat died, he has lived alone. I, on the other hand, who claim to know very little or nothing about women, am almost never without one.
A woman, that is. I wouldn’t live with a cat.
My point is this: screw research. It’ll make you late starting and slow down the going. Remember open book exams? If you knew the answers to the questions, if you understood the material, you didn’t need the book. If you didn’t understand the material, all the books in the world wouldn’t help you ace the test.
Make shit up. That’s one of the beauties of this racket. When in doubt, you can always pull a big lie right out of your ass. Do less research.
“I prefer to deal in truths,” Tom Robbins says, “instead of facts.”
One night, I went to a free writers’ workshop at a retirement community. It was a Tuesday, spring on the Oregon coast, the room filled with writer wannabes. The ninety-minute affair began with the instructor juggling plastic bowling pins. Classic opening gambit, I guess. Memorable, although I forget her point, something about how the writer must keep aloft three separate considerations. Don’t recall them just now.
There was a woman sitting next to me, an older lady, who had just borrowed a book about geniuses. She was obviously looking for a secret, a clue toward success. I told her, don’t read the book, sit down and start writing.
90. Pass your work around. Self-publish. Share the work.
91. Do it for the Money.
“When real proles want to write or be artists, they often make hard choices: between sleep and their work, for instance; between ‘vacations’ and work; between dental and medical care and work; between economic security and work. The time to write must be purchased. And it is at this point that tooth decay proles and braces proles part company.” Linda McCarriston, Class Unconsciousness and an American Writer.
92. Marijuana helps, but alcohol is not your friend.
“Cannabis is always a help. That whole class of drugs. They stimulate the visualization and make it more vivid. and often they seem to stimulate the process of association. When you don’t see where the narrative is going, drugs help you see three or four possibilities. With drugs you see it all more vividly, and therefore it becomes easier to transpose.” – William Burroughs
93. Music. Get down. Get funky. Go country. Some great lyrics. Listen to the classics, like Dylan or Elvis.
If your life is a movie, what’s playing on the soundtrack?
94. Forget planning. You do not need to know how a story is going to end to get one started. If you know the beginning, get it down on paper. And if you don’t know the beginning, start in the middle. The best stories always start there anyway.
95. Change the names to protect the guilty. Write your life. Write down all your memories. Write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Write down all your darkest secrets. Tell everybody.
Write what has been hidden. – Grace Paley
96. Get down. You don’t have to know how your story is going to end in order to start writing. If you know the beginning, get it down on paper. You don’t have to know the beginning either. Start in the middle.
97. Compete at unusual distances. Enjoy a change of pace.
98. Stretch yourself.
“I try to conceive a project that’s obviously too difficult for me, and then I try to write better than I can.” – Martin Cruz Smith.
99. Compete against yourself. Not Robert Waller, not Raymond Carver, nor Pam Houston or E. Annie Proulx. Keep striving for improvement.
File away your mistakes. Keep them around so they may reproach you.
100. Sports is not about the final score, but about all the things that lead to the winning tally. Writing is much the same.
101. Once you finish a piece, it becomes inventory.
“I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.” Hillel. The best advice for dealing with rejection.
102. Go to the movies. Get out of your life for a while.
“A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.” – Henry James
103. Everyone of us walks around like an endorsement athlete promoting a product which is ourselves. Robert Parker can dedicate the second paragraph of every chapter to a physical description of his characters, but that doesn’t define the actor for us. Parker tells us what he wants to show us, he shares his observation of the character’s costume, which is what the actor is willing to show the public. But is what you wear who you are?
“One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can’t.” – Ann Lamott
How a person behaves is more telling than what he says. What she says is more expressive than what she wears. Choose action over dialogue. Tilt towards dialogue instead of description.
104. Remember, dialogue is action.
105. Write the unsaid dialogue. What aren’t your characters saying to each other? Often, you will learn more about what’s going on by what isn’t spoken.
Silence is loud to those who know how to listen. What are your characters not saying? You need to know that, too.
106. Re dialogue, your reader should be able to identify the speaker by his speech. He said, she said should be extraneous.
107. Find a formula. Make sure it works for you.
108. A great story should only consist of great lines. To begin writing a great story, all you need is a single superlative sentence.
Collect sentences.
109. Never open with your first line.
110. Practice. Train. A day of training missed is a week lost. – Ron Clarke. That man had stamina.
111. Write a bad book.
112. Show. “Low art is just telling things, as, There is the night,” Robert Henri told Edward Hopper at the New York School of Art, “High art gives the feel of art. The second is nearer reality, although the first one is the copy.”
Henri did not offer an example of high art. So I shall elaborate. It was cold is low art. Colder than a witch’s tit is high art.
113. “Very few writers really know what they are doing until they have done it.” – Anne Lamott
114. “Good writing is all about telling the truth.” – Anne Lamott
115. “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.” – Ethan Canin.
116. Vigilante fiction. Do not turn your back on evil, confront it. Ethan Canin teaches that you should never write out of vengance. Ann Lamott teaches that you should always write out of vengance. Nicely, of course.
I coach vigilante fiction. Somebody gets in your way, kill the motherfucker. Get your anger down on paper.
What’s her name, the woman working her way through the alphabet with one damn bestselling mystery after another, she got her start when she felt like she couldn’t stand her significant other for one instance longer. So she plotted his demise. Fictionally. She got it on paper. She wrote it down. She is now rich and famous.
You can do the same thing. Get started.
117. You are greater than you know. You are special.
Nobody has enough time.
118. A story is the sound of two leaves clapping in the woods where no one listens.
I have this image of great writers as my tribe’s medicine men.
119. When you write bullshit, your work will read like crap.
Critics are so many buzzing flies to a writer: his real critics are his readers. – Hugh Kenner.
120. Whisper. Don’t explain yourself.
“When I write, I disturb….I have a knack for disturbing…I will be disturbing after my death,” offered Jean Cocteau. And he is.
121. “If a dog will not come to you after he has looked you in the face, you ought to go home and examine your conscience.” – Woodrow Wilson.
122. WITHOUT ARTIFICE. Simplicity is strength.
123. “Almost nothing seems to be generally true, almost nothing generally false, so that the best anyone can do is find his own way, reveal it as such, and go on hopefully.” – Richard Ford.
124. Today, Richard Ford tells us “The righteous man, whoever he is, needs to take consolation more willingly, and be ready to encounter himself less in the person of the storyteller or even in the tale told properly, and more in the fabric of a life which might simply be like his.”
125. “A life, even a short one like mine, once dedicated to literature was not a wasted life. I was merely a failure at what I was doing, and along with failure’s other dull commissions comes – as should be – the opportunity to think things over. Failure may not always inspire one’s best decisions, but one’s profoundest convictions do often arise nearby.” – Richard Ford.
126. Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime.
127. “Is it not almost always the case that you can tell a good story by the fact that very few people like it.” – koan from Richard Ford.
128. The beginning of a story must not only capture the imagination of the reader but also the writer.
“Writing is dark and lonely work, and no one has to do it. No one will even care much if it doesn’t get done at all, so that choosing to do it and to try to do it well is enough of an existential errand, enough of a first step, and for whatever my money and counsel’s worth, enough of a last step, too.” – Richard Ford.
129. Don’t answer the phone. How often is the caller Steven Spielberg with an option bid for your as yet unbegun first novel? How many times is the interruption somebody offering to fulfill your most fervent desire. Almost never, am I right? Am I right? Almost never.
Don’t stop writing – or screwing or exercising or eating – to answer the phone.
130. Be good to yourself.
“You write better with all your problems resolved,” notes Garcia Marquez. “You write better in good health. You write better without preoccupations. You write better when you have love in your life. There is a romantic idea that suffering and adversity are very good, very useful for the writer. I don’t agree at all.”
131. “I’d like to run around with many beautiful women, different every day. And never work. To be a bum. To get up at any hour, without thinking. But then I couldn’t write. And the only thing I ever wanted to do in life was write.” – Garcia Marquez.
132. “There’s something about playing guitar that’s similar to writing. You’re solo and on a good night you drift away with the music. Year’s ago, no way would you catch me on that stage. Writing’s like that. You’ve got to be ready to face your worse fears.” – David Long, writer, teacher, member of Tut & The Uncommons.
133. Write every day.
“I write every day, seven days a week. If I don’t write, I feel guilty. There’s real work out there, and I’m not doing it. The least I can do is write.” Dave Barry
134. Don’t wait for inspiration.
“If you have to make a living at it, you just can’t rely on inspiration. It doesn’t come along often enough. I write for a couple of hours every day, even if I get only a couple of sentences. I put in that time. You do that every day, and inspiration will come along. I don’t allow myself not to keep trying. It’s not fun, but if you wait until you want to write, you’ll never do it.” Dave Barry
Write first, get inspired later.
135. Stop when it is quitting time.
Quit for good.
Give up. If you are stumped, if you find yourself facing that big block wall, quit. Stop trying to write. Do something else. Don’t pick at yourself.
“You have those days where you have to drop a stone by your side to see if you’re still moving.” – Stu Jackson, general manager of an NBA expansion team.
Know when to stop. Quit a joke as soon as you can. Get out of a scene as early as possible. Don’t linger.
136. Always make the last shot in training. Never leave the gym without sinking your final practice toss. You don’t want to imprint no air ball on your mind. You want to go to sleep thinking, swish. A lot of writers talk about getting down that last good line, so you can come back the next day and find yourself at a good starting point.
Part of the fun of being a writer is solving the next puzzle. Always leave yourself something to puzzle over.
137. Forget the crossword puzzles. Forget the newspapers.
138. Have your characters tell stories.
139. Never write a book that can be read while watching television. My mother reads bodice-rippin’ romance novel while watching Jeopardy. She announces all the answers to all the questions, some before any clues are given and then she reads until the TV contestants catch up.
I wouldn’t mind writing a book that could be read and enjoyed while driving.
140. Don’t wait until your parents die to write about them. “Write as if your parents are dead,” Ann Lamott advises.
“Just don’t publish any of it,” Mom said.
Write about your family secrets. “If you cannot get rid of the family skelton” said George Bernard Shaw, “then you might as well make it dance.”
141. Work late. This is especially true if you don’t work in a cave. Ref Jeff Taylor.
142. Work in a cave.
143. Buy a gun. Your hero needs a few tools.
144. Shoot your television.
145. Addict yourself. Positively.
146. Appreciate the little things.
147. If you do what you are driven to do, if you create the life you were made for, happiness should follow. At least you will have established an environment where joy can flower.
“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” – Dr. Samuel Johnson
148. Get angry. In anger there is art.
“Anger is a weapon for virtue and valor,” Aristotle was correct once again. Use the heat created by losing your temper. Temper is about survival, fighting back. Fight back.
“Some people,” according to sociologist Ernest Becker, “never learn that their organism has a right to take up space without shrinking, to assert itself without feeling guilt, to emit odors and digestive noise without shame, to scream in affront and pain when they are attacked.” Go ahead, let loose.
149. When you are doing well, don’t bother to stop to count the words.
150. Try the final line a few different ways.
151. Become inconsistent. “Damn consistency, it is the hobgoblin of small minds.” I don’t know who said that. Look it up yourself.
Or not.
