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.
I saw a trackback to my blog with this quote:
“The notebook is the place where you figure out what’s going on inside you or what’s rattling around. And then, the keyboard is the place that you go to tell people about it.”
Who said that? I thought. That’s pretty good.
It was me. Many years ago!
Still pretty true, although, I also figure out a lot of stuff at the keyboard, too.
(I’m a little less binary than I used to be, which I count as progress.)
I don’t know how these Friday newsletters come together. Or maybe I do. They usually start with an image I want to put at the top, or a subject line. Today’s began with the subject line: “Listening is the whole deal.”
I came across that line when I was reading The Work of Art, and I knew I had 3 things I wanted to put in there — the Eno doc, Perfect Days, and the Four Tet interview — which were all somewhat related to listening. So once I had almost half the letter, I figured might as well make it a theme.
My favorite bit in the letter is item #9:
“The act of writing is to me to listen,” said Jon Fosse in his Nobel lecture. “When I write I never prepare, I don’t plan anything, I proceed by listening… At a certain point I always get a feeling that the text has already been written, is out there somewhere, not inside me, and that I just need to write it down before the text disappears.”
I don’t consider my newsletters fine literature or anything like that, but there’s something that happens when I’m out here in the studio at my desk, and I’m writing and just pushing things around, seeing how they bump up to each other — the arrangement presents itself, and the thing just comes into being.
At least, that is, when it’s going good.
Anyways: Happy Friday.
Today’s newsletter is about some of my favorite writing books like What It Is, Bird By Bird, and Several Short Sentences About Writing:
In attempting to practice what I preach with my own “practice and suck less” challenge, I bottomed out so bad last week that I had to do that most embarrassing of things that writers occasionally have to do: I reached out for help from a writing book. (Unfortunately, my own books don’t really work on me.)
The book I reached for was new to me: Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life. I felt comforted after only a few pages. (How much more pleasant it is to read about how to write than to write!)
As I kept reading, a thought popped in my head: Every writing book is good.
Every writing book is good if it gets you to write! It doesn’t even need to be that good. In fact, it could be bad! You could be reading it and think, “Shoot, I could do better than this” or “I’d rather write than read any more of this crap.” Either way, the writing book has done its job if you put it down and head off to write.
There’s a famous story about the actors Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier on the set of the movie Marathon Man, retold by Isaac Butler in The Method: How The Twentieth Century Learned to Act:
Hoffman explained—or perhaps bragged about—the lengths to which he would go to capture his character’s worn-out, paranoid emotionality. He had been staying up all night and running in order to look exhausted. In response, Olivier, exasperated by his younger male colleague, deadpanned, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”
I tell my own version in today’s newsletter: “Why don’t you try typing?”
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