A Slight Delay

Every so often, it happens. You stare at a blank page, and… stare. And then stare some more. You go back to your notebooks, then back to staring. You try coffee, tea, warm milk, eight-year-old scotch, late-night phone calls, and nothing works. As far as you can tell, you’re officially “blocked.”

Every so often in this space, I’ll be putting up writing prompts, exercises, and other suggestions for beating the block. I’ll put something up just as soon as I think of something…

Okay, only kidding. Here’s your first batch: (more…)

Just the same as nobody writes in a vacuum, nobody writes for a vacuum, either. Nobody writes for the sake of not being read. Nobody–at least no one that I know–writes something with the fervent hope that it’s overlooked or ignored.

So who are we writing for? Who’s your audience, your adoring public? Many people who create–whether for a living, or just on impulse–will tell you that they’re doing it primarily for themselves, and that’s a good starting point. After all, if what you’re doing doesn’t even interest you, why bother? Having said that, I think most people who write do it on some level in order to reach a wider audience; stuff that’s written primarily to please one’s self ends up reading as though it was written that way (ie. bloated, self-indulgent). (more…)

A little while back in this space, I wrote about certain writers and writings acting as inspiration, or permission, for your own efforts. I’d like to take up what I think is the flip side of that particular coin: separating your voice from your mentors’.

James Thurber wrote once of Robert Benchley, one of his influences, “One of the greatest fears of the humorous writer is that he has spent three weeks writing something done faster and better by Benchley in 1919.” And chances are, you’ve been there, too. You re-read something, whether it’s a first draft you’ve just finished, or something you’ve re-written for the nth time, and realize that it’s a copy of your favorite writer (or, worse still, one you don’t like all that well).

I’ll admit, I went through my Benchley phase, and a Barthelme phase when I was in college–among others. If you encounter something that inspires you to create something in response (I’m wording it that way for those of you who paint, play music, et cetera), odds are that there’ll be something of the inspiration in the finished product. (more…)

The dishwasher is the bane of creativity. Just my personal opinion, mind you, but one based on years of evidence. Seeing neatly regimented rows of mugs, bowls, dinner plates and silverware represents lost opportunities; for me, there’s no better time for thinking than when you’re elbows-deep in suds. You could say that dishpan hands and creativity go together like peanut butter and jelly.

It’s not that there’s an insane amount of concentration going on; it’s rather the opposite. It doesn’t take all that much concentration to do dishes, so your mind is generally letting something else brew while you’re getting those caked-on bits of oatmeal off your bowls. I won’t say that every dishwashing experience has produced Isaac Newton-quality stuff, but what I have gotten over the years has been useful, sometimes even startling, and usually better than what I come up with when I sit there straining over it.

Now, for you it could be something different. Some people have their a-ha moments in the shower (singing “Take On Me” doesn’t count, by the way), while gardening, or in the course of doing any number of usefully mindless things. They’re a good way to overcome mental blocks, whether it’s a creative block or a problem that stubbornly resists solving no matter how hard you’ve tried. And, lest this sound like some kind of new-agey crap, there’s actually scientific evidence to back it up. (more…)

Sooner or later, it happens: you’ve read a lot, or listened to hours upon hours of music, or seen enough paintings to fill the MoMA twice over, and a thought comes to you: I could do this. That spark, when it comes, will be something different for each person; it’s that one thing that lets you know not only that you want to do this, but that it’s alright to give it a whirl.

Salman Rushdie wrote something years back that sums it up wonderfully. In an essay on Gunter Grass, he says:

There are books that open doors for their readers, doors in the head, doors whose existence they had not previously suspected. And then there are readers who dream of becoming writers; they are searching for the strangest door of all, scheming up ways to travel through the page, to end up inside and also behind the writing, to lurk between the lines; while other readers, in their turn, pick up books and begin to dream. For these Alices, these would-be migrants from the World to the Book, there are (if they are lucky) books which give them permission to travel, so to speak, permission to become the sort of writers they have it in themselves to be. A book is a kind of passport. And my passports, the works that gave me the permits I needed, included The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein, the Crow poems of Ted Hughes, Borges’s Fictions, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros—and, that summer of 1967, The Tin Drum.

(more…)

Last week’s assignment was to shut off the computer and get yourself to a library. I’ve had a thing for libraries for almost as long as I’ve had a thing for books, which is a long time now. I feel like a kid in a candy store… so many books, so little time. If you’re a reader, there’s no better place on Earth.

And if you’re going to write, there’s really no way to overestimate the value of reading. That may seem too obvious to even bear stating, but it’s not something to take for granted. More than once I’ve spoken to writers who claim they don’t like to read.

What the…? (more…)

I read two articles this week that seemed to me almost a call-and-response. The first was a piece in Slate, Lazy Eyes: How we read online, by Michael Agger. The other is What The Internet is Doing To Our Brains: Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr, appearing in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Agger’s article is simultaneously a how-to for those who’d like to write snappy internet prose, and a reasoned critique of same; Carr arrives obliquely, through his own critique, at a similar but not identical conclusion.

If, as McLuhan famously stated, the medium is the message, then it would seem as though the message is efficient, long on bells and whistles, and stripped down to its barest essentials. Much writing online is barely recognizable as prose, having been stripped to a terse, almost telegraphic economy. Sentences and paragraphs, the staples of the printed page and much of the blogosphere, fall by the wayside in favor of a shorthand that reads like an advertisement. Prose often as not ends up reading like advertising copy, a choppy flow of simple declaratives, bullet points, and sentence fragments. Paragraphs, like this one, are decidedly unfashionable. (more…)

Discipline is never an end itself, only a means to an end. –Robert Fripp

Last week’s assignment, for those of you scoring at home, was to write three paragraphs a day, every day. Like jogging, biking, or any other kind of exercise, you may have found yourself–and/or may yet find yourself–aching in places you didn’t know could ache as you get around to exercising stuff that’s lain dormant for a while.

The whole idea here is to build a routine, and to turn writing into a habit. It’s hard to write if you haven’t done it in a while; making excuses not to write is a heck of a lot easier than staring at a blank page or screen, and figuring out what you’re going to fill it with. As with jogging, though, it gets easier the more often you do it. And at some point it stops being exercise or a chore; it’s something you look forward to, a rush of adrenaline or endorphins, if you will. (more…)

Chance favors the prepared observer. –Marcel Duchamp

One of the problems you’ll run into, if you haven’t already, is the “writer’s block” dilemma. The reason for last week’s assingnment, besides getting you outside your comfort zone, is because most of us fancy ourselves a certain “kind” of writer. I’m a poet. I don’t “do” nonfiction.

There’s nothing wrong with specialization. After all, you’ll probably get more out of your writing if your subject is one that you know and love. But sometimes you’ll feel tapped out, as though you’ve said about all you can say just then on a given subject, or you talk yourself out of writing on something because even though you know it, you know someone out there knows it better. There’s a lot to be said for just using whatever’s close at hand, whatever grabs you in the moment, and running with it. (more…)

Last week’s assignment was to write something awful. Not merely bad, mind you. I’m talking truly horrid. In case you’ve spent the last week fretting over the point of that little exercise (I know you weren’t; play along for a bit), here’s why I put it out there:

Anyone that takes writing even remotely seriously wants to do it well. And anyone–at least of the writers I know–that wants to do it well is convinced that their writing is pretty awful. Now, I’ll grant you that there are some pretty bad writers out there. But if you tried this exercise, you probably found that it took some effort to come up with something bad. (more…)