All kinds of love

He said he feels kind of guilty for being such a hermit. “I tend to really cut myself off. It’s not a good thing. You wind up getting sort of crotchety and pissy. Your friends call up and just want to get together for dinner and it’s like, ‘oh Jesus,’ and you feel so put upon. You get really obnoxious and particular about your time.”

Wells Tower talking about himself in talking about writing fiction, in a New York Observer story earlier this year entitled “Wells Tower, Fiction Writer, Is Looking for Joy” (which sounds a little ironic, when you’re looking at this snippet only.) But yeah, I know this/these writers.

Associatively, I hear Neil Young’s song start up in my head: …”I have a friend I’ve never seen, he hides his head inside a dream, someone should call him and see if he can come out, try to lose the down that he’s found…”

In the dark

Struggling with, in what I”m writing — this novel in stories, not knowing what will happen. (Again.)

That long slog. Just writing, writing, writing to find out what will happen with this character. Will it add up to something? Will he go somewhere? Can it be or become something meaningful — something worth reading about?

These are the hard parts. The hardest parts. Trying to trust that this dallying around on paper is going to become.

The hard part of writing is the thinking

From William Zinsser on writing & keeping up to date his book, On Writing Well:

(The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking.)

That, finally, is the life-changing message of On Writing Well: simplify your language and thereby find your humanity.

I would treat the English language spaciously, as a gift waiting for anyone to unwrap, not as a narrow universe of grammar and syntax.

As an editor I knew that almost anything can be cut to 300 words; the material is somewhere in the marble, waiting to be quarried out.

writers must set higher standards for their work than anyone else does—and must defend what they write against every editor or publisher or agent who tries to distort or dilute it.

Women, in particular, felt that they needed permission to believe in their remembered truth.

The long sentence

I love a long sentence, written well. I love to hear a long, well-written sentence read aloud. The cadence, the music, the breath. I love to take a good breath and read a good long sentence aloud especially if that good long sentence is mine. I love to hear its sound, how it plays out.

The other night at a writers’ thing I read a piece I’ve recently written aloud. Someone reported afterward, as a criticism, he had counted 75 words to one of my sentences. My thought was: And?

Composing

Putting pieces in a specific order at a specific time.

How does that work?

I was reading a short story and, finished, went back to a phrase that stayed with me: a sliver of birthday cake, and next thing I knew I was writing a poem about a satin slipper.

How did that happen? I don’t really want to know. The best times are those with mystery.

The traveling writer

As in:

INTERVIEWER: Do you write in your study or do you occupy every room of the house?

ROBINSON: I do a lot in the study, but the couch also, and so on. It’s nice to be able to move around and not be completely bound to one place or another, the way some people are.

That I can relate to. Reading the interview with Marilynn Robinson (The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 198) I’m reminded of why I do bother those times I do to read author interviews. It’s fun to read of the [revered, successful] writer whose practices or ways of doing it are your own, and in this case, it’s fun to have debunked the idea that one must have one’s regular spot. This is what’s assured and promoted in such [good] handbooks as The War of Art and Eric Maisel’s Deep Writing, and a few others. It’s not that I don’t see the reason for it, as part of the ritual, and the reason for the ritual — how it shortcuts and avoids a lot of anxieties and unnecessary diversions and energy drains, etc and so on — but it’s important to me to be fully alive, to not be a robotron. Write anywhere! I say. Write anytime! What is the point otherwise?

On the other hand, I appreciate tremendously how she says that she needs to forget the physical — yes — and therefore dresses like a slob, so that she can forget herself:

I dress like a bum. John Cheever would wear a suit and a hat and go down from his apartment to the basement of his building with an attaché case. But that’s not me. I like to be as forgetful of my own physical being as I can be.

(I will make no comment on her religiousness. Other than to say at least she has given it thought.)

Avoiding the enervations of modern life

Why I sometimes cannot do the blog, what at those times seems to be a pointless activity.  Jeanette Winterson explains very well in her [August] column.

There’s a common myth that creativity is linked to dark states and depression; it isn’t anything like as simple as that. I think it is to do with being open, which you have to be if you want to be honest in your work, and it is to do with the liminal state of creativity – a place that happens on the cusp or the boundary of two worlds and is exhausting, exhilarating, but also frightening, and full of shapes that are unknown.

Ondaatje on Divisadero

Last night, P and I went to Books Inc to hear Michael Ondaatje read from his book Divisadero. I haven’t read the book yet, though P — who reveres Ondaatje’s work– has. I will, though. And I do, also, love Ondaatje’s poetic, nonlinear writing. It was lovely to hear his voice reading, the lull of his accent and the different from Americanized English emphases on syllables. I loved hearing him say “Petaluma” which is where the opening section of the novel is set. I liked hearing him say how he likes the Northern California landscape.

Some of the highlights from the Q & A part of things follow.

On method: He writes in longhand. No one else can read his handwriting, he joked.

On trusting the process: He doesn’t plot out his novels and doesn’t know where they will go or what will happen. He begins with a small situation. A few characters, very vague. He lets his characters develop.

On research: He does this simultaneously, only.

On writing poetry while making a novel: He can’t do this anymore.

On living with another writer: It’s “very good!” I could be a bank robber for all she knows, he joked.

On what his novel is about: Authors shouldn’t do book tours until their books come out in paperback — up till then they are still stammering answers, i.e. don’t fully know what their books are about.

On the title: Divisadero has more vowels than my name, he joked. He professed to finding it difficult to title his work. He liked the sound of Divisadero; he liked the concept behind the street’s name: divisions, which seemed to fit or work [or perhaps extend the idea of?] the divisions in the novel.

He said many other things. In much better ways than my notes let on. I felt most comforted by hearing how it is a walk in the dark when first we start putting something to the page. Sometimes I need to see manifest, be in the presence of a good result come from that willingness to bear the discomfort of not knowing, braving the blindness, the storms.