Imagination is the Passport

I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. (John Guare)

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg (**)

Often when I ask a writer to name her favorite book on writing, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within is mentioned.

I found the book wildly disorganized, with no discernable structure. Perhaps that's what Goldberg intended but it drove me crazy. That said, she offers some good suggestions, encouragement, and solid advice on many aspects of the writer's craft.

I wouldn't put this is a must read category, but it does have value. The following are a few gems from the work:

Talk is a way writers can help each other find new directions. "Hey, that's great; have you written about it?" "That's a good line, 'I lived here six years and can't remember a thing, not a thing.' Write it down and begin a poem with it." Once I came home from a visit in Boston and said to a friend in passing, "Oh, he's crazy about her." She was in the process of writing a mystery novel in those days and honed in, "How can you tell he was crazy about her? Tell me what actions he did." I laughed. You can't make general statements around writers-they want me not to "tell" but to "show" with incidents.

We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don't have our own style. Don't worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing.

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin. Your ability to love another's writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will only make you bigger; it won't make you a copycat. The parts of another's writing that are natural to you will become you, and you will use some of those moves when you write. But not artificially. Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with. That is what happened to Allen Ginsberg when he wanted to write so that Jack Kerouac could understand him: " . . . being in love with Jack Kerouac he discovered he was Jack Kerouac: that's something love knows. " You are Ernest Hemingway on a safari when you read Green Hills of Africa, and then you are Jane Austen looking at Regency women and then Gertrude Stein doing her own Cubism in words, and then you are Larry McMurtry in Texas walking to the pool hail in a dusty town.

So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us. Don't make writers "other," different from you: "They are good and I am bad." Don't create that dichotomy. It makes it hard to become good if you create that duality. The opposite, of course, is also true: if you say, "I am great and they aren't," then you become too proud, unable to grow as a writer or hear criticism of your work. Just: "They are good and I am good." That statement gives a lot of space. "They have been at it longer, and I can walk their path for a while and learn from them."

It's much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.

Even if we go off alone to write in the wilderness, we have to commune with ourselves and everything around us: the desk, the trees, the birds, the water, the typewriter. We are not separate from everything else. It's only our egos that make us think we are. We build on what came before us, even if our writing is a reaction to it or we try to negate the past.

Push yourself beyond when you think you are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.

Some people hear the rule "Write every day" and do it and don't improve. They are just being dutiful. That is the way of the goody-two-shoes. It is a waste of energy because it takes tremendous effort to just follow the rules if your heart isn't into it. If you find that this is your basic attitude, then stop writing. Stay away from it for a week or a year. Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak. Then come back.

Advice from Tobias Wolff

[Those moments of surprise that occur when you're writing, ] that's what I live for. They sustain me even if I don't have very many of them. I live with the expectation that I will have more, the faith that I will have more. What I could predict I will do when I sit down to write is not what I want to end up with. I want to end up with what surprises me along the way, what jumps. out at me from the potential of my work and not from what I've already realized about it before I've even started. If I'm simply writing down what I already know, it is of no earthly interest to me. And not only that, everyone else will know it anyway. Simply obvious stuff. I'm not subtle. When I sit down to write, I discover things that I have, for one reason or another, not admitted, not seen, not reflected on sufficiently. And those are the things that I live for in other people's fiction as well as my own.

I know that Ray Carver's stories were submitted to the New Yorker for years before they began to publish them. And I know that some of his best stories were rejected by the New Yorker before they began to take his stories. Why? I'm not attributing corruption to them just because he got well known in the interim. I honestly think that at some point they began to like his stories, though they hadn't liked the others. But why? Where's the line that was crossed there? I don't see it. So it's a very whimsical business. You become especially aware of it as a short story writer. Novelists will characteristically work for three or four years before they have something to send out. But story writers have something to send out every few months, so they're much more aware of the caprice of response. Also, when you publish a collection of stories and the reviews start coming in, one reviewer says this is a wonderful collection and the story that's obviously the best story in here is such and such. And if only such stories as, and then he names the obviously worst one, would live up to this level ... blah‑blah‑blah. Then you get another review which names a completely different set of stories as the obviously best ones and the obviously worst ones. And you suddenly realize that what Edmond Wilson said is true‑"No two readers read the same book." In the end you have to be the arbiter of your fiction, the judge of your fiction, the harshest judge of your fiction, as you are your own best reader. Who else is there in the end that you have to please? I have an acquaintance who is a very successful novelist commercially. I happen to know that she hates her own work. She's an absolutely miserable person, a really unhappy woman. And she's defensive. She talks a lot about how much money she makes and all this. She's clearly made miserable by her feelings about her own work. I know another woman who is also very commercially successful whose stuff is crap. But she doesn't believe that her stuff is crap, and she's quite happy. If you're not pleasing yourself, you haven't pleased anybody important.

Tobias Wolff from A Piece of Work (edited by Jay Woodruff)

Writing, A Safe Place

I love the fact that writing is a safe place for us to cheat on our spouses and kill people and live in other skins and cause all kinds of mayhem and then be able to get up from our chairs and make a sandwich without any fears about going to jail for the rest of our lives.

Writing definitely keeps me sane--I can't imagine what sort of havoc I'd be wreaking on the world (or myself) if I couldn't write.

Gayle Brandeis on readerville.com

The Difficulty of Story and Plot

The reason a lot of writers try to skirt the issue of story and plot is that it is the most difficult of all the writerly tasks . . . . It is a pain in the ass, but a necessary one. (Les Standiford)

An Interview with Les Standiford by Steve Glassman. Standiford is the founding director of the MFA program in writing at Florida International University.

Knowledge is the Novel’s Only Morality

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality. (Milan Kundera)

The Artist as God

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (James Joyce)