Signs of compost

Friday, December 9, 2022

Keeping in mind Ann Patchett’s “I am a compost heap,” every time I pass the local community garden, I feel like the signs on the compost heap could stand in for various stages of the book-writing process.

Ray Bradbury on feeding your creativity

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Ray Bradbury’s advice for being more creative

Every night read:

– one short story

– one poem

– one essay

Do that for a thousand nights and you’ll be stuffed full of ideas pic.twitter.com/35d6Z2V1os

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) November 1, 2022

Here’s a clip of Ray Bradbury’s advice for writers in a 2001 keynote, “Telling The Truth.”

He suggested that every night you read:

one short story
one poem
one essay

If you do that for the next thousand nights, he said, you’ll be full up of ideas.

This 1000-day “Ray Bradbury Challenge” came to me via Oleg V, in the comments on my newsletter about one of my favorite tools, the 30-day challenge. (It reminded me a lot of Goethe’s checklist.)

I liked it so much I went back to Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing to see if he had a little more advice along these lines.

“It is my contention that in order to Keep a Muse,” he wrote, “you must first offer food…. If we are going to diet our subconscious, how prepare the menu?”

One thing he emphasizes is that you shouldn’t just feed on what you think you should feed on, but what’s most delicious and what really nourishes you.

“I have fed my Muse on equal parts of trash and treasure,” he wrote, and that often included “comic strips, TV shows, books, magazines, newspapers, plays, and films.”

He said that nothing is lost and you must resist the urge to throw out things that meant so much to you when you were younger.

What is most important, he writes, is “the continual running after loves.”

The constant remains: the search, the finding, the admiration, the love, the honest response to the materials at hand, no matter how shabby they one day seem, when looked back on.

I’m delighted by how much of this resonates with my own methods and what I’ve practiced and preached over the years, the method of “input and output,” but the 1,000 nights advice also delights me because I spent a few Octobers ago reading a short story by Bradbury every night and it was one of the most joyous reading experiences I’ve ever had.

Finally, I took a walk this morning and listened to David Remnick’s piece on Bob Dylan in his 80s:

In order to stave off creative exhaustion and intimations of mortality, Dylan has, over and over again, returned to what fed him in the first place—the vast tradition of American song. Anytime he has been in trouble, he could rely on that bottomless source.

Sounds familiar!

A solution to writer’s block: Transcribe yourself

Thursday, June 23, 2022

Stewart Brand once said to Brian Eno: “Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already — and all you have to do now is find it?”

In a similar vein, I enjoyed this story of how KC Davis, author of the brilliantly-titled How To Keep House While Drowning, wrote their book:

I had long stared at blank word documents, unable to get my thoughts on the page. I’m actually not a great writer — but I am a pretty good speaker. So I went back through my social channels and transcribed every short form video I had ever done on this topic and that left me with all these disjointed paragraphs. I spent another two months trying to decide how to connect these little vignettes into a “real” book and finally realized that my choices were to publish an imperfect book or not publish the perfect book. So I decided to make each section its own chapter — some only a page long.

I’m reminded of this advice from Matt Zoller Seitz:

Here is a technique I suggest to fellow writers who are blocked for whatever reason: just talk about the piece with a friend, record it, then play it back and write down the good stuff. This method also works with Gchat & similar programs. Go straight to document after.

And how Nicholson Baker wrote his brilliant book The Anthologist by filming himself with a camcorder:

He set up a camcorder and recorded himself presenting in various parts of his house. “I would try to rehearse what it would be like to explain something complicated, like iambic pentameter, in a familiar way,” says Baker, who also found himself singing poetry in his own barn, in Maine. “How would you explain it if you’d been thinking about it for twenty years? So I came up with 40 hours of tape and transcribed the audio.”

I suppose one could skip the transcription step by talking directly into the computer’s speech-to-text?

I know a lot of songwriters do this with song ideas: they record a bunch of voice memos on their phone, but then they make time to listen to what they’ve recorded, often on shuffle.

Regardless of the tech you use, the method is: record yourself thinking out loud, and once you’ve transcribed that into a draft: edit yourself by reading out loud.

Homework every night for the rest of your life

Thursday, May 12, 2022

Filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan once said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

That’s the thing about the job: you’re never “off.” If “everything is copy” (Nora Ephron) then you’re always “on,” even when it looks like you’re doing nothing. (Arm yourself with Gertrude Stein, if only as a joke: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”)

“All things are potential paragraphs for the writer,” wrote Shirley Jackson in her lecture, “Memory and Delusion” (collected in Let Me Tell You):

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

The “always on” thing can feel like a curse, but it’s also a blessing: it means that any boring old experience (grocery shopping, getting stamps at the post office, picking your kids up from school) can become potential fodder for the work, so you’re “always on,” always paying attention, alert, awake to life, alive, casing the joint, looking for stuff to steal.