When I first started writing the thing I most wanted to know from other writers was: “How did you get published?”
Then, it was: “How do you write?”
Now, it’s: “How do you read?”
All reasonable questions, but I should’ve asked them in the opposite order.
(And, always: “How do you get health insurance?”)
“I make sure I never face a blank page.”
—Lydia Davis
One method of writing (that works for me):
Make note of every dumb thought that occurs to you throughout the day.
Tomorrow morning, pick the thought you think is the least dumb is the most interesting* and write more about it.
Repeat ad infinitum. (Or ad nauseam. You know, whatever works…)
Just write the thing down now, when it seizes you. You have the whole eternal afterwards to decide whether or not it's dumb.
— Julia Gfrörer (@thorazos) January 7, 2020
* I edited this because sometimes the dumbest thought could be the most interesting thought and the one that gets you somewhere. “It’s a fine line between stupid and clever.”
After Edward Carey (author of Little) finished writing his first book in 1999, he wrote to his hero, Alasdair Gray. This was Gray’s response.
…please tell anyone you know in the writing game that I’m too selfish to be of use to anyone. If you photocopy this letter and pass it around I will think it a favor.
That handwriting! Exquisite. I want to copy every letter.
I’d never heard of Gray or his work until a few years ago, when Elizabeth McCracken (author of Bowlaway, and, not coincidentally, Edward’s wife) sent me this charming video of him talking about his writing and art:
“I couldn’t make a living by either of them,” he said, “so the writing helped the painting and the painting helped the writing.”
I particularly loved his response to the ever-worn-out question, “Can writing be taught?”
Of course! I couldn’t write before I was was taught! That’s why they give it to you in primary schools. Writing and speaking are things that have to be learned first. Some people at a certain stage think that they don’t have to learn any more. If you’re very interested in words then you try to keep on learning more. And the best way, of course, is by reading other writers. Good ones! Or even bad ones are better than none to begin with.
Delightful video. Do watch.
Related reading: Edward Carey at the APL
“Race to the Top; what a horrid metaphor for education. A race? Everyone is on the same track, seeing how fast they can go? Racing toward what? The top? The top of what? Education is not a race, it’s an amble. Real education only occurs when everyone is ambling along their own path.”
—Peter Gray
One of the things I love about Lydia Davis’s advice to writers in her collection Essays One is that she is explicit that the writer’s education should be mostly self-directed.
Here are points 2 and 3 in full:
2. Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting or writing. Trust your own interest. I have a strong interest, at the moment, in Roman building techniques…. My interest may pass. But for the moment I follow it and enjoy it, not knowing where it will go.
Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write about, be tested by time, not by other people—either real other people or imagined other people.
This is why writing workshops can be a little dangerous, it should be said; even the teachers or leaders of such workshops can be a little dangerous; this is why most of your learning should be on your own. Other people are often very sure that their opinions and their judgments are correct.
3. Be mostly self-taught.
There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you. I have found that pursuing my own interests in various directions and to various sources of information can take me on fantastic adventures: I have stayed up till the early hours of the morning poring over old phone books; or following genealogical lines back hundreds of years; or reading a book about what lies under a certain French city; or comparing early maps of Manhattan as I search for a particular farmhouse. These adventures become as gripping as a good novel.
I love those verbs: following your interests, pursuing them, trusting that they will lead you somewhere.
Ambling along your own path… even if it’s deep into an unknown woods…
Related read: “Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?”
I was walking in the cemetery the other day and as I read the tombstones, I thought of how we used to put up “away messages” in AOL’s Instant Messenger. (It was basically a proto-Twitter, come to think of it.) You’d walk away from your computer, the one that weighed fifty pounds and stayed on your desk, and everyone could see how funny and clever you were while you were gone.
Is not a tombstone an away message?
Whenever an old poet — an old poet — dies, I can’t get too upset.
This is what they’ve been training for! I think. It’s go time!
The great poets and artists spend so much time checking in on death.
Is not every great poem an away message?
Here is a stanza from James’ “Season To Season”:
The trick, I’m learning, is to stay in doubt,
Season to season, of what time might bring,
And patiently await how things turn out.
Eventually time tells you everything.
If it takes time to do so, no surprise
In that. You fold your arms, you scan the skies,
And tell yourself that life has made you wise…
And here’s one from “Japanese Maple”:
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same…
When Mary Beard interviewed James last year, she asked how the Japanese Maple was doing.
“It died!” James said.
Oh well. The poem lives.
The poets go, but they leave us so many away messages.
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