I spent all of last year trying to write a book (it’s getting there) so a good deal of the entries in my commonplace diary were somehow related to writing.
(When you’re writing, everything is related to writing.)
I picked 100 of them and stitched them together for today’s newsletter: 100 quotes that helped me write.
Here’s John Gregory Dunne, in his introduction to The Studio:
Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions.
Read more in last Friday’s newsletter, all about writing and how to make it less like Donkey Work.
Today’s newsletter is about how hard (and how easy?) it can be to come up with titles.
It begins:
In My Life in France, Julia Child wrote about what a pain it was to come up with the title for Mastering The Art of French Cooking. She and her husband Paul debated “the merits of poetic titles versus descriptive titles.” They made lists and lists of titles, trying to come up with the right “combination of words and associations” that would work…
You can read the rest here.
(Reminder: I’m having a summer 20% off sale on paid subscriptions.)
In this great interview with James Hannaham, he talks about how his musical background influences his writing:
When you write pretty much anything, you’re essentially asking someone to read a musical score—to hear it in their head. So an attentiveness to sound and rhythm and meter is really useful to your aesthetic as somebody who’s putting words on a page. It’s pretty similar to putting notes on a staff, in its way.
This is also what Margaret Atwood says about writing books:
Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.
And also what Chris Ware says about comics:
What you do with comics, essentially, is take pieces of experience and freeze them in time….The moments are inert, lying there on the page in the same way that sheet music lies on the printed page. In music you breathe life into the composition by playing it. In comics you make the strip come alive by reading it, by experiencing it beat by beat as you would playing music…
Filed under: music
One of the many things Lynda Barry has taught me: If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you.
“Going through the motions” is often thought of as a bad thing, but it is the artist’s great secret for getting started.
As I wrote in Steal Like an Artist:
If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.
Get your pen moving, and something will come out. (It might be trash, but it will be something.)
For a comedic take on this, see: SpongeBob SquarePants.
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