Writing advice I gave someone on OK Cupid who wrote me saying she was a “terrible writer” but wanted me to challenge her to write poems: 

But you don’t read like a terrible writer (That well placed “Fools.”in your message!), but you may mean terrible in the sense of never doing it. I find the best thing, and if I’d challenge you right now, at noon (well, midnight, but who challenges at midnight?), I’d say to not worry about poems or proper writing, but to take what you do write more seriously, be it emails or journal entries or tweets &c. Isak Dinesen learned precision in writing tons of letters from Africa to relatives in Denmark. Sylvia Plath learned to write about her life as if it were a novel in her journals. The results were Out of Africa and The Bell Jar. I didn’t write much fiction last year, but I wrote reams of emails, tumblr posts, etc, etc, but I didn’t let myself get lazy or too careless with them.  

Oh god—now I’ve challenged you to make every thing you write a chore. No no. One good sentence every day would be worthwhile. Here, I’ll give you this inspirational quote I read today to make up for it: 

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way of making your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” —Kurt Vonnegut 

From an application letter I wrote for a fellowship in Houston (and for which I was rejected): 

Last night I went for a walk on the bike path that runs behind my house. In a group of trees there were hundreds of birds, all of them chirping. Hearing them after the snow-dampened silence of the Midwestern winter, they sounded like the first day of a new school year, when the students are buzzing to exchange schedules and news of the summer. To find old friends again and to meet new ones. These birds too were trying to find others of their kind, hoping that their distinct warbles would draw like to like.

But it’s not just birds and students who are using their voices to find others like them. Everyone wants to make those connections. Whether it’s professionals and academics writing research papers and posting to online message boards with the hope to discover potential collaborators who share their passions, or people like the fans of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy who created a newsletter to track down other obsessive Nancy fans, or the many looking for romance online via dating sites, hoping that their responses to “What I am doing with my life” and “The six things I could never do without” will tug at the hearts of potential life-mates. Nearly everybody writes and so the writing teacher, unlike the teacher of other less-universal crafts such as painting or musicianship, is in the unique position of being able to help hone peoples’ voices, to make their songs louder and clearer.

How it’s done: 

“And in order to be relaxed while writing, I drank a Newcastle. Also coffee, so that I’d be sharp. And still I wasn’t sufficiently relaxed, so I drank some Yukon Gold that I found in the liquor cabinet. No, not Yukon Gold, that’s a potato. Yukon Jack, a kind of Canadian liqueur. It was delicious. It added a slight Gaussian blur. And then some more coffee, so I’d still be sharp. Blurred, smeared, but sharp.” 

—Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“Most of Apple’s competitors are interested in doing something different, or want to appear new. I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us: a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better. Committees just don’t work, and it’s not about price, schedule or a bizarre marketing goal to appear different—those are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.”

—Jony Ive, head designer at Apple

There’s something for the writer to consider here and perhaps it’s the choice that we make at some point or another. The 20th century gave us the rise of the writer (and artsits) as one who runs his ego up the flag pole for others to admire I’m thinking of Thomas Pynchon, or William Gaddis, or James Joyce (who famously said he was writing things academics would pore over for years). It worked for them—their novels are great. But I feel it’s the path that’s tenable for very few.  Compare them to the great writers of the late 19th century: Dickens, Tolstoy, George Eliot. They were all heavily invested writing for an audience. Their novels were unmistakably theirs, but the egos were always in check by the demands of the novel-buying public. They didn’t try to sell books that had a bizarre goal (“no letter e”—ah, sorry Perec!).

I like something that Ernest Hemingway, whose ego was as large as any, said to the New Yorker in 1950 about his writing in comparison to writers he admired: “I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.” This is the model that I like and it has in it the sense of Ive’s searching for a “genuinely better” product. Hemingway bent his ego to achieve goals besides back-patting. Had he gone out writing only things he himself wanted to write without regard to what had come before or what people would enjoy, he would be as widely-read today as his pal Gertrude Stein. 

My advice to the young writer, which I consider myself to be, would be this: Find those who have been successful who you can take on and beat them. Then find bigger prey. Look at how Apple did it: They found their Turgenev in the portable music player market and produced the iPod and went from there to bigger prey (phones, tablet computers).

Also consider what Donald Bartheleme used to say: Wacky modes must break hearts. There must be a connection with the audience. That even for experimentalists there should be a break in the ego and the question, What does the Other desire or need and how do I communicate it to them?

‘kay. I’m gonna eat lunch now. #eggs #virgin bloody mary

An email I wrote to someone teaching undergraduate fiction writing who wanted things to teach:

“The one good thing I learned from Curtis Sittenfeld about writing short stories is that it’s like preparing for a packing trip to a mountain top. You pack everything that  you are going to need on the way up to get you to the top and you don’t want to pack any extra because it will only burden you. I think Frank Conroy used to say that, at least that’s what she said. 

Also there’s Hemingway’s parable of the iceberg, where the short story is what appears above the water, but there is an entire mass underneath it, which the reader won’t see but will realize or feel is there. 

Those stuck with me from my undergrad writing courses. 

The best things I know about writing, though, are to have confidence and to know grammar. The writer is the one responsible for making the reader buy into a sack of lies (or “the fictional dream” as John Gardner called it) or to travel a train of thought, and without confidence all is lost. 

You should also give them Amy Hempel’s story The Most Girl Part of You ( http://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/calabj/298/The_Most_Girl_Part_of_You.pdf ). They will hate it but ten years later one of them will realize that it was actually genius and then he or she will think warm thoughts about you. 

etcetera.”

An email I wrote to someone else who had complained about using too many verbs in an email:

“There’s nothing wrong with verbs or too many verbs. They are what give writing life.” 

Here’s a good quote about how linear plotlines work with the viewer’s imagination by Will Wright, creator of Sim City, The Sims, and Spore that comes from a talk he gave with musician Brian Eno for the Long Now foundation. (The talk is available at fora.tv.):

One of my favorite scenes from Indiana Jones is from the beginning of the movie, where he’s running out of the temple with his treasure, and all these traps are going off. He almost falls into this pit, this giant boulder rolls over him, and as a viewer, I’m imagining every one of these things as a possible failure state. What would happen if the boulder rolled over him, what would happen if he fell in this pit, what if this trap got him? And so even though I’m seeing one path through that possibility space, my imagination is filling out all the possibilities that could have happened, and that is a lot of the drama. Is me understanding that possibility space that surrounded him, and the one particular path he took through it. And I think that’s the element of a lot of drama.