Skip the boring parts

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

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.)

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching

Friday, February 19, 2021

In the introduction to her translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Ursula K. Le Guin writes:

The first Tao Te Ching I ever saw was the Paul Carus edition of 1898, bound in yellow clothe stamped with blue and red Chinese designs and characters. It was a venerable object of mystery, which I soon investigated, and found more fascinating inside than out. The book was my father’s; he read in it often. Once I saw him making notes from it and asked what he was doing. He said he was marking which chapters he’d like to have read at his funeral.

A few years ago, when you could actually shop in a bookstore and talk to strangers, an elderly woman walked up to me in a Half Price Books and said she had nothing to read.

“Well, you’re in the right place,” I said.

We got to talking and discovered we both enjoyed poetry. She said a lot of people in her life were dying so she was reading Lao Tzu.

“Lao Tzu?” I said. “I love Lao Tzu.”

We walked together from section to section. I browsed; she talked. At one point she recited some Robert Frost and some Basho:

Eventually we said our goodbyes. I think of this woman now when I pick up the Tao Te Ching, and I wonder how she’s doing.

“It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts,” Le Guin writes. “Funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring.”

Every poem seems to me a subtweet of our crooked world and our lousy, corrupt leaders.

And Le Guin’s footnotes are perfect:

If you read Le Guin after reading this translation, you realize how many lines from her books could’ve been lifted from Lao Tzu.

This sentence from The Left Hand of Darkness, for example:

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

Or this one:

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching (more excerpts over at Brain Pickings) was a great solace to me for the past four years, so much so that I put it in the recommended reading for Keep Going. And there’s a fairly new reprinting, which means it’s pretty easy to find.

* * *

Every ~~Saturday~~ Friday* I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

* In the interest of preserving my sanity, I’m cutting my daily blogging, and hopefully all my online time, down to Monday-Friday.

Tape quilts

Thursday, July 30, 2020

My latest bit of collage procrastination: I’ve been making miniature quilts out of tape and magazines. (Posting them as I go on Instagram.)

It makes things more pleasant, being stuck at home, to make homemade, handmade things.

Alan Jacobs quotes Ursula K. Le Guin in his piece, “Handmind in Covitude”:

Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.

I’ve been sort of peripherally interested in quilting for years. My mom quilts, and one of my favorite possessions is this simple quilt she stitched together in college:

Which, you know, isn’t much different than these pieces:

This recent interest surged from reading about the work of Rosie Lee Tompkins, watching this documentary about the quilters of Gee’s Bend, and following Amy Meissner’s Instagram, but the seeds were planted way back. I found this batch of photos from my 2015 book tour:

That batch also included these wonderful 16mm film quilts by Sabrina Gschwandtner that I saw at the RISD museum in Providence:

I’m fascinated by how long it takes seeds of thought to sprout. So many of my projects which I think are new ideas are actually pretty old ideas that receded (re-seeded?) into the back of my mind, and hung out there dormant in the soil, waiting for the right conditions…

It’s also not lost on me that my books, too, are stitched together like quilts. (If you look closely in the back of Steal Like An Artist, there’s a quilting reference.) When I can’t stitch together words, I stitch together images.

UPDATE (Aug. 19. 2020): Before I get any more letters from upset quilters, I’d better apologize for misusing the term “quilt” to describe these works. A quilt is, technically, 3 layers of fabric: a patchwork on top, a backing, and some sort of stuffing in the middle, stitched together.

A poem for awards season

Monday, December 9, 2019

I came across these lines yesterday when I was flipping through Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of Lao Tau’s Tao Te Ching. (I like the title she chose, “Hushing.” It reminds me of the “Locking” season.)

I once mentioned to my five-year-old son that his favorite band, Kraftwerk, had won a Grammy.

“What’s an award?” he asked.

“It’s like a prize that you get for doing something well,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “What’s a prize?”

It made my day. Imagine a world with no gold stars!

A one-armed miniature version

Monday, July 29, 2019

“Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades; and it is terrible, but not very terrible.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World

Here is a six-year-old photo of Owen and me. A few days ago, at a signing, an expectant mother asked me if I had any advice. “Oh man. I don’t know,” I said. “That first year is rough. Just take it easy on yourself.” Then I thought about all the hours I spent trapped with a sleeping baby under my arm. “Try to find a one-armed miniature version of what you do!”