Elmore Leonard said, “Writer’s block just means you got up from your desk.”
Skip the boring parts
Maud Newton, whose long-anticipated book Ancestor Trouble comes out next year, shared some excellent writing advice: “Don’t Write the Tedious Thing.”
“At times while working on my book over the years, I would become resentful of it.” She wrote that she would hit a certain point and think, “Ugh, now I have to write this boring part.”
Then I would realize: this is my book! There are no rules! I can write it however I want! Also, I would think, if I’m bored by something that I believe I need to write, the reader undoubtedly will be too, if not because the subject is inherently boring, then because I myself find it so unbearably tedious to imagine discussing it for five pages. Often as not, I would remember some aspect of the subject that deeply interested me, something a little outside the way it’s usually perceived or written about. Then I would meditate on that, and soon I would be scribbling notes from an increasingly excited place until I found a way forward. A form of beginner’s mind.
As Elmore Leonard told us, “Try to leave out all the parts readers skip.”
I try to do this. If there’s a part bogging me down, I try to leap over it, somehow, and see if the piece will work without it. (It usually does.)
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Another friend of mine, Clive Thompson, says that with non-fiction writing, many times you think you have “writer’s block,” when what you really have is “reporter’s block.”
“If you’re stuck,” he says, “stop typing. Go hunt down some new useful facts. Then you’ll come back refreshed.”
You’re having trouble writing not because you can’t find the right words, but because you don’t know what you’re trying to say. You don’t have the right facts at hand.
So the solution is to gather more facts. You need to step away from the keyboard, stop trying to write, and do some more reporting: Make phone calls to some new sources, consult new experts, read a relevant book or article. Once you have the facts at hand, the words will come.
Or to put it another way, when you’re writing nonfiction, the words flow from the research. If the words aren’t flowing, usually the problem is the research isn’t there. To say something, you have to have something to say.
“Block” is a sign that you don’t have what you need and you should probably go somewhere else and do something else until you get what it is that you need.
Your “block” could just be boredom.
You’ve bored yourself.
You’ve become uninterested in writing.
The way to be interested in writing again is to find something interesting to write about.
Time to go out in the world and notice something.
“Is it possible to practice noticing?
I think so.
But I also think it requires a suspension of yearning
And a pause in the desire to be pouring something out of yourself.”
—Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several short sentences about writing
The “suspension of yearning” is key.
Stop wanting to write long enough to find something worth writing about.
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I love what Carole King said about handling writer’s block in Paul Zollo’s excellent Songwriters on Songwriting:
So, most of all, don’t worry. Go do something else. Come back later.
“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.” ?
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Most of all, skip the boring parts.
Getting out from under the influence
“Every writer is every writer they’ve loved and quarrelled with who came before, as every parent is every parent they loved and quarrelled with.”
—Hilton Als
Watching Ken Burns’ Hemingway, I was reminded of the great Elmore Leonard, who said, “I used to read a lot of him till I learned he had no sense of humor.”
He expanded this thought in a Fresh Air interview:
I had studied Hemingway so closely and learned a lot, but I didn’t agree with his attitude about life, about himself. He took everything, himself, everything so seriously. And, your style comes out of your attitude — what kind of a person you are, you know, your personality, how you see things. Are you optimistic? Are you funny? Are you grim? What? This is all out of your attitude. And once I learned that, then I had to find other writers to study and imitate.
This is an old, old story: the student imitates the master, learns what they can, but then has to move on (often to imitating someone else) if they’re to find their own thing.
This jumping of influences usually happens over and over — Billy Collins says your voice usually comes from copying a half dozen other writers and becoming a blend. (And Hemingway himself once said, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”)
As I kept watching the documentary, it was emphasized over and over again by the talking heads how influential Hemingway is, how impossible it is for writers not to be influenced by Hemingway. (Once again, our grammar of influence seems to me inadequate. We talk about influence backwards.) It got me thinking I’d watch a whole documentary about writers talking about how they got themselves out from under the influence of their writer heroes.
Another favorite writer of mine who talks about getting out from under the influence of Hemingway is George Saunders. In several talks, he’s talked about being a young man and having a “medical condition called a ‘Hemingway-Boner.’” He describes his early stories as going something like, “Nick walked into the Wal-Mart. It was pleasant.”
In a Talk at Google, Saunders explained that if a writer is lucky, they get to a point where they realize that the voice that they’re imitating simply can’t cover their own worldview. A new voice is needed. “That is a holy moment for a young writer,” Saunders says, “when you start getting full body impatient with your mentor.”
Like Leonard, Saunders discovered that his own comedic worldview didn’t match Hemingway’s more tragic one:
What I got tired of in Hemingway was that he, in his later work especially, he wasn’t funny. He didn’t have any sense of humor actually. He knew very well who the noble, interesting people were and so on.
And my life was not — I never lived a Hemingwayesque moment really.
I remember as a young kid coming out of a funeral– a very sad, terrible thing. But the funeral was being held in a mock Georgian mansion—one of those mansions that had been put up just to be a funeral parlor.
And then you walk out of that, and everyone’s crying and it’s terrible. And across the street, there’s a Chuck E Cheese. And the mouse is on break. And he’s on the side of the building with his head off. And he’s smoking.
So that moment could not show up in Hemingway. He couldn’t do it. He had a stylistic cave he had made for himself.
And I thought, that’s where the gateway to style is. And when you see something in your life, in your heart, in your world that the style of your hero can’t accommodate, then it’s a time for growth.
Or, as Brancusi put it, when he left Rodin’s studio, “Nothing grows under big trees.”
ESTABLISHMENTS OF THE ILLEST REPUTE
This is yet another page from CALAMITY and my own personal favorite so far.
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It’s my day off. I’m hanging out, playing with my re-animated laptop, and listening to the soundtrack from Jackie Brown.
I saw the movie a year or two ago, but I got the DVD set out from library last week, and I’ve watched it three times since then. The acting is fantastic, the soundtrack kicks ass, the characters are warm and living and breathing. Quentin Tarantino’s best movie, hands down.
It’s based on Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, and just like any Elmore Leonard plot, as Martin Amis has noted, there’s a big bag full of money and everybody’s trying to get at it. Within this framework, the characters come alive. It’s a simple, genius formula.
Here’s a bit from Elmore Leonard’s website:
When Quentin Tarantino was a kid, he stole a copy of Elmore Leonard’s The Switch and got caught. Unrepentent, he later went back to the same store and stole the book again. Elmore Leonard was a beacon in the direction that he would soon head in his films. He wrote a movie directed by Tony Scott called True Romance which he said was “an Elmore Leonard novel that he didn’t write.” It certainly is an homage; it even opens in Detroit. After Reservoir Dogs came out, Elmore wrote Rum Punch which reprises the three main characters from The Switch. Tarantino read it and wanted to buy it but didn’t have the money. Elmore and his agent Michael Siegel offered to hold it for him. When he did acquire the book, Tarantino did not contact Elmore Leonard for a long time. When he did he said he was afraid to call. Elmore said, “Why because you changed the name of my book and cast Pam Greir in the lead? He said, “That’s Ok, just make a good movie.”
Dutch has said that he thought it was by far the best adaptation of his work. The DVD set includes some great interview with Leonard. (It also includes the hilarious, “Chicks Who Love Guns,” which QT wrote and directed specifically for the film.)
Anyways, if you haven’t seen Jackie Brown or read Leonard, you’re in for a treat.
OLIVE OATMAN’S HUMAN CANVAS
THE BELIEVER has an article this month on “literary tattoos,” but what’s most interesting about it is the stuff about “our nation’s first tattooed white woman,” Olive Oatman, who was “released in California after four years’ captivity with Mojave Indians. Oatman was ‘repatriated’ (probably against her will) in 1856 and resurfaced wearing a tribal tattoo on her chin, which riveted the American public.”
Oatman, thirteen, and her younger sister, Mary Ann, seven, were captured in 1851 by Yavapais Indians who killed her family in southern Arizona (then Mexico) as they were traveling west on a wagon train from Illinois. The girls lived as slaves to the Yavapais for a year, until the Mojaves, who felt sorry for them, bought them and installed them in the family of a subchief, who treated them as his own. They were tattooed as part of a typical Mojave puberty ritual that guaranteed their entrance into heaven. Mary Ann died during a famine, but Olive lived for four years among the Mojaves until the U.S. Army rescued her—by force—in early 1856. Tanned, tattooed, and wearing only a bark skirt, she was virtually unrecognizable as a white woman when she was delivered, on the east bank of the Colorado River. As her rescuers approached, she sat in the sand, covered her face, and cried.
There’s a bunch of great stuff on Oatman, in the article, and I highly suggest you read it. There’s also an Elmore Leonard connection:
It was, oddly enough, crime writer Elmore Leonard who would return to Oatman and her tattoo in his 1982 Western story, “The Tonto Woman.” (Oatman’s face even appeared on the cover of his 1998 collection, The Tonto Woman and Other Stories.) Leonard, who had clearly done his historical homework, modified the details of her history by marrying her off before her kidnapping (in reality she was only thirteen when she was abducted), giving her twelve (not four) years with the Mojaves, and making her husband a cold, rich rancher who forces her, on return, to live alone in the desert instead of on his ranch with him. (By contrast, Oatman went to school and married a man she met postcaptivity).
But the main detail Leonard expands upon is her tattoo. His captive, Sarah Isham, asks the Mojaves to tattoo not just her chin, but also her cheeks: “I told them if you’re going to do it, do it all the way. Not like a blue dribble,” she recalls to Ruben Vega, a Mexican horse thief poised to steal her husband’s cattle. Impressed that she insisted on her own marks, he tells her to remember, “There is no one else in the world like you.” A fellow outlaw, he even touches the tattoos and says, “You’re in there, aren’t you? Behind these little bars. They don’t seem like much. Not enough to hold you.”
I read “The Tonto Woman” way back in early undergrad when I was trying to get into Leonard, and loved it. Read the article, then go get THE TONTO WOMAN.