This blog provides advice to writers on their literary work.
See the end of this post for links on these topics: How can you get the full benefit of workshops? How can you work best with your mentor? What, when, and how should you publish?
Another important thing to do in order to sustain
a career as a writer is to carve out a space for yourself in the literary
community. I know that sounds abstract, maybe even impossible or of
questionable value, since it has little to do with literature as such. But carving
out a space for yourself in the world of letters is a very tangible thing. To
use a metaphor from my hometown of New York, it’s a bit like entering a crowded
subway car where everyone is packed in tight.
It may not
look like there’s space in there, but you’ve got to make the space by your
presence, by your urgency, and by your desire to be included.
Think about the accomplished writers you know. They have all made room for their voices in the literary world. How? There are
many ways: by the moral authority of their words, by the honesty and accuracy
of the testimony they provide as a writer, by their humor, by the width of
their heart and the well of their compassion, by the brain power of their words
and craft, by their knowledge of literature, by their ability to yank us into
the stories they tell. Each writer has her or his own magical formula. But
every writer you can think of whom you admire has done this—created a space or
niche in the world of letters that is occupied only by that person. It’s a
niche that remains empty until that writer walks into the room and claims it. It’s
a niche that no one else can quite occupy after that writer passes away. You have to have
the authority and the will to claim a space like that, a space that is your
very own. To do that, you have to find the work that you were meant to write. I'll discuss that aspect of writing in my next blog.
One word of caution: never let writing become your
path to bitterness. There are thousands and thousands of other writers out in
the world. Some are going to become more successful than you, however one
measures success. Some are going to be less successful than you. Some are going
to get where they’re going faster than you. It’s easy to grit your teeth at the
success of writers whose work you don’t admire that much.
But it’s a short step from there to becoming the
literary version of the Grinch, to feeling neglected, underappreciated, and
ignored. Feelings like that can overwhelm your literary life, and make the
thing you love so much—writing—become the source of your greatest gall. But I
believe that writing should never become your path to bitterness.
How can you prevent this? It’s not always easy.
For one thing, you should celebrate your own moments of triumph, even your
small triumphs.
If you’ve given yourself a writing assignment or
set yourself a writing goal, and you’ve completed part of it to your
satisfaction, even a first draft, enjoy that moment. Give yourself a virtual
pat on the back. Pause to enjoy that accomplishment. Then get down to the hard
work of revising.
If you get a poem or a story or an essay accepted
by a publication, that is an event worth celebrating. Tell someone. Eat a
favorite sweet. Jump up in the air.
If you get a book accepted, do all of the above
and break out the champagne, or whatever you consume to mark an incredibly
special day.
If you’re lucky enough to get nominated for a
literary prize and there is an awards ceremony associated with the prize, do
everything you can to attend the ceremony, even if it’s on the other side of
the country.
Make sure your own successes are sufficiently
marked so you feel rewarded, acknowledged, valued, fulfilled, and energized.
When you do a reading, face the audience. Look
individuals in the eye. Take in fully their appreciation of your work. When
your reading is done, make eye contact with the audience. Acknowledge the
applause. Bow. Smile. Do not sit down or leave the podium until the applause starts
to subside. Make sure it registers on your consciousness, and on the audience,
that you have understood their appreciation. When you receive positive comments
afterwards, savor them, the way you would a slice of dark chocolate torte, one
morsel at a time.
The more deeply you feel appreciated as a writer,
the easier it is to empathize with the success of other writers, and to share
and enjoy their successes with them, and to praise your peers.
A photographer I admire once told me they were feeling jealous of another practitioner of that art who was getting a major retrospective at a renowned museum. My friend said to me, “I asked myself, why that photographer and not me? I’ve been doing this twenty years longer. But then I thought, Would I want to be that other artist? Would I want to trade places with them? And I realized, no, I’m happier being the artist I am.”
We’re still human, we’re still going to feel
jealousy, but if taken in the context of gratitude for a career as a writer,
those jealous moments become more comic than tragic.
I strongly believe that the single most important
thing you can do to sustain your career as a writer is to participate actively
in a community of writers and/or fans of literature. If there is a group of
writers, however small, who are eager to read or hear the next thing you write,
that creates an enormous amount of support for starting new work, and for
finishing ongoing projects. This community could also be friends, a partner, or
family who are fans of your writing.
The most obvious form of writing community is a
writer’s group. A writer’s group is a great way to share your work, gather
information about publishing opportunities, celebrate small and large
triumphs, and commiserate about disappointments.
I’ve been in a poetry group in the San Francisco
Bay Area since 1987, when I first moved there. It’s called Thirteen Ways, named
partly for Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,”
and partly for the diversity of styles and aesthetics in the group. The membership has changed over two and half decades. We’ve stopped meeting for years at a
time, but there is a core of three of us who’ve been getting together for most
of the last twenty-five years.
We meet once a month on a Sunday afternoon. We
start off with a potluck, along with lots of juicy literary gossip and informal
exchange of information about where we’re sending our work these days. We share
our best quinoa recipes or the goodies we’ve bought. It’s social; it’s fun; the
food is delicious. That’s important in sustaining a group.
The work part of the group is a three-hour round
robin, where each member gets to read recent work. We all jump in and critique,
starting with positive comments. Then the sharks arrive. I don’t mind feeding
the sharks, as long as they don’t go for the jugular, since I am there to
improve my writing. If I get some strokes, I like the shark bites.
When we first started the group, only one member
had had a full-length manuscript published. By now, that’s true of every member
of the group. The list of awards the members have garnered is quite
impressive: the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, the APR/Honickman First Book
Prize, the Poets Out Loud contest, the May Swenson first book prize, and a gift
certificate to a local yarn store. The last one was my award. I’m sure we would
have gotten those honors without the group (especially the yarn certificate), but
the writers group has certainly helped all of us grow as authors; polish our
work; and most importantly, stay in the game. We’ve also given numerous
readings together where we’ve shared our audiences. We trade information about
where to send work, which editors like what sort of work, reading
opportunities, favorite TV shows, etc.
It may not be convenient or comfortable for many
writers to be in a group like that. Novelists and prose writers in general need
to give other readers longer extracts in order to get meaningful feedback,
which creates some logistical problems in a writers group. But I do recommend
writers groups, provided that the company and the literary styles are
compatible. That’s a big “if.” I‘ve been in groups that didn’t click, because
one or two personalities dominated—often not the best writers in the group, by
the way. Like any partnership, it’s vital to have the right chemistry.
Community is important to writers for their
careers but it’s also one of the most fun things about being a writer. Many of
the most interesting people I’ve met in my life are writers. That is one great
pleasure of being part of this cadre of inspired misfits.
If the idea or the reality of a writer’s group
doesn’t work for you, there are other ways to be involved in a community of
writers. You can correspond with individual writers, connect via Facebook or
other social networks, or just mail or email manuscripts back and forth. Your community
can be a virtual one.
Speaking of virtual communities, I think writers
who create fictions—novels, stories, dramas—have a different type of community
that helps sustain them. In an odd way, I think your characters become a sort
of community. They move into your head, where they take the liberty of carrying
on their conversations and their fights with you as the witness—not paying a
dime of rent, by the way. They become a presence in your world. When you finish
a work, you miss their company. Novelists and playwrights can survive with less
community for this reason, I think. Maybe that’s part of why people write
novels and plays, to create that community in their imagination.
One thing that’s vital in sustaining your career
as a writer is to keep a balance between your engagement with the world, and
your distance from it. Virginia Woolf famously argued that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction…” By that I think Woolf meant that a writer needs solitude and time to
create, two things that are extremely difficult without money and space.
Virginia Woolf
Solitude and time are often hard to come by in a world filled with jobs, debts,
searching for jobs, crowded housing, children, aging parents, problematic
relationships, health challenges, and so many other important things to pay
attention to. Giving yourself and getting the time to work on your writing is
sometimes a matter of complex negotiation with your boss, or your loved ones,
or yourself—sometimes the most difficult person to work out a deal with. We
risk being accused of selfishness if we demand time for our writing, at the
expense of any of our other commitments. There is no easy way to cross this
narrow log over the rushing stream. You just have to keep your footing and look
straight ahead at the opposite bank.
But distance from the world is not the only thing important to a writer.
Immersion in the world is equally important for an author. The things that may
be pulling you away from your writing today will be the material for your work
in a few years, whether it’s the ones you love, or used to love, or would like to
love if only they’d realize how much they need you. It could also be a political
cause, your students, or the neighbor you shop for occasionally—all the ways
you are knotted to the world are important, both on their own and for your soul
as a writer. As Ezra Pound says in ABC of
Reading, “More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of
intelligence.” And he should know, right? Pound was notorious for being a great
stylist with a feeble sense of humanity. Any engagement with the world that
builds your character and your soul can ultimately be good for your writing,
even if it takes away from your writing time in the short run.
It is possible to go
too far into the room of one’s own, to become so involved in one’s own thoughts
and struggles that engagement from the world is weakened. Writers are seekers,
aren’t we? Seekers of truth and beauty. But not all seekers are writers, not by
a long shot. We’ve all known writers and/or seekers, talented and sensitive
souls, whose knots to the world become unraveled because they have gone too
deeply into their own thoughts, and their own internal worlds. It’s a real danger,
particularly for writers who are among the most visionary and daring, since
their minds crave that solitary and unique undersea world of the imagination.
It’s best to dive into that world for limited times, to come up for air
occasionally, and not resurface too quickly. There is such a thing as getting
the bends from a literary standpoint, or having your lifeline cut, and humans
can’t live long in the domain of chameleon squids and bioluminescent fish.
That balance between
immersion in the world and distance looks different for each person. The
Japanese poet Yosano Akiko raised eleven children and helped found a school for
girls, but she was still able to write more than 20,000 tanka poems and eleven
books of prose, not to mention translate the classic Tale of Genji into contemporary Japanese. For Yosano Akiko, deep immersion in the world was what she needed to harvest
the material for her writing.
Yosano Akiko (holding baby) and her family
The poet Frank O’Hara
was known for writing his poems in crowded cafes, surrounded by chattering
friends.
Frank O'Hara (left) and friends
For a writer such as
the French novelist Marcel Proust, the opposite was true. Proust had only a
passing involvement with other people, though he avidly attended Paris salons
and entertained guests at the Ritz Hotel, where he lived. He seemed unconnected
to people and superficial to many, even to the perceptive. This seemed to be so
true of Proust that when he submitted the first volume of his novel, Swann’s Way, the great novelist André
Gide rejected the book out of hand for the publisher la Nouvelle Revue
Française. Gide just assumed that the Marcel Proust he knew socially could
never write a serious book.
Marcel Proust
Ultimately, Proust lived primarily for his writing,
even to the point of befriending people because he thought they would make good
characters for his novel In Search of
Lost Time, which he spent his whole life writing. The human being Proust
may have been closest to was his housekeeper.
From what I’ve heard
about him, the Alaskan writer John Haines was most at home as a writer when he
lived in a cabin on a homestead far from any city or town.
John Haines outside his cabin in Alaska
On the other hand, Haines also found time to marry five different women, so he did
achieve a counterpoint of his own sort between solitude and engagement.
The balance looks
different for each writer, but you have to find that balance for yourself, the
one that allows you to be at home both on land and in the kelp forests. Emulate
the sea otter, which swims like a fish but breathes the sweet sea air.
In Buddhism there is a term “right livelihood,”
which refers to making a living in a way that is in harmony with your spiritual
principles. As a writer, you also need a “right livelihood,” one that is in
harmony with the demands of being a writer. Or, you can marry someone rich with
a cute English accent, not a bad alternative. That works, provided you remain
in touch with something you are passionate about.
Barring that, pick a career and a lifestyle that
allows you time for your writing. Writing is a time-consuming activity. Even if
you’re writing haiku—especially if you’re writing haiku—you need mental time
to process your writing. I think of our creative thought processes as working
like laundromat dryers, where you watch the clothes going round and round, in
endless combinations.
You need your thoughts to circulate like that, for
the shirts to get tangled up in the sheets and the pants in the shirts, in
order for the right creative combination to occur. Make time to go walking or
jogging or skiing or swimming, where all you do is think and compose in your
head. Allow new thoughts and word combinations to mix in with your brain waves.
The English Romantic poets William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to compose their poems while hiking.
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Wordsworth and Coleridge did this first on England’s southern coast,
and later in the Lake District. They took so many walks along the coast that
faced France, and their writings were so radical, that the English government suspected they were plotting to find a landing site for the troops of the French
Revolution to invade England. So the government assigned a spy to follow
Wordsworth and Coleridge on their hikes, just in case. All the spy got to
witness was a few sonnets in the making, but I wonder what that spy was
thinking when he followed the poets on their romps through the rainy
countryside of England. “Kubla Khan—hmm. That must be some kind of code.”
“What do the daffodils stand for: maybe Robespierre?”
One thing you can do to sustain your career as a
writer is to choose a type of work that allows you time to think about writing,
and to write. That doesn’t mean you need a job where you can sit and type
sestinas all day at your computer, though few of us would complain about being
paid for writing poetry. But there are some careers that feed your writing, and
others that starve it. A career that feeds your writing is not necessarily
teaching writing or literature. Wallace Stevens was a lawyer on the payroll of
an insurance company, which in those days, was a relatively low-pressure job, I
imagine. Gary Snyder worked as a watchman on a fire tower for the Park Service
and wrote many terrific poems while he did that. Th poet May Swenson had jobs as a
stenographer and secretary for decades while she wrote most of her best poems.
For years the poet Li-Young Lee worked as a clerk in a book warehouse, but
the job allowed him the privacy and mental space he needed to develop as a
writer. I’m not suggesting you get a dead-end job—you should have a career that
fulfills you professionally.
But some careers do make it almost impossible to
write. I doubt you can be in charge of a major business or nonprofit organization
or a major part of a business or organization, where you have to supervise many employees, and
still write actively. I don’t think you can be in a corporate law firm where
there’s pressure to make partner. It’s the mental time as well as the actual
writing time that suffers in that sort of job. I’ve never known a writer who
had a job like that. For one thing, they’d never hire us, and rightly so. But
I’d be happy to be proved wrong about this, if someone knows a counter-example.
If you don’t know if a job will allow you the
mental and physical time to write, try it out. You’ll find out soon enough.
Use your time wisely, as our seventh grade
teachers used to tell us. People who get hooked on watching multiple old TV
series all the time may have fun with that hobby, but they rarely finish
writing books.
Another important method for saving time for your
literary work is to think through an idea before you start writing it, the way
a chess master looks many moves ahead before pushing even a pawn one space
forward. Play out the possible combinations, to see if you have any place to go
with that idea. If you see that the moves you plan will lead to an
insurmountable problem, try a different idea later. That will save you time.
One other suggestion about sustaining your work as
a writer: don’t try to do too many things. I’m sure most of you have other talents
besides writing. I know many writers who are very skilled at music or the
visual arts. It’s possible to
combine one or more of those arts with your writing and expand your range as an
artist and the audience for your writing at the same time. For instance, you
might make a film that showcases your poetry, or you might write songs as well
as poems or short stories or nonfiction. But it’s a very rare person who can
successfully pursue two arts seriously in one lifetime. I can only think of a
handful of writers in the entire history of literature who have also excelled
at other arts, at the level where their work in a second art is valued for its
own sake, rather than as an interesting sidelight to their writing.
That doesn’t mean you should give up the other
arts you practice and enjoy, but writing is not a discipline that you can learn to do well if you pursue it casually, like throwing a Frisbee. It’s a lifelong quest if you do it right, because a writer is
constantly gathering information about life and craft. You have to continually make
adjustments in how your write, based on life experiences and on the latest
information you’ve gleaned from reading and writing. You’re always assimilating
new experiences, social conditions, and influences. You don’t want to be a
literary dilettante.
The word “dilettante,” means a person who dabbles,
rather than pursues something seriously. It comes from the Latin dilettare, to delight in. You should
delight in your writing, but you also have to work hard at it, and to do that,
you have to be a specialist. You wouldn’t want to be operated on by an amateur
surgeon, so why would you want to read the work of an amateur writer? Writing
is your profession.
It’s great to be a sensitive person who loves art.
But that’s not enough, if you want to be a writer. You have to be prepared to
fail at your writing. Why fail? Because that’s how artists learn. A dilettante never
fails. A dilettante just flits from one art or one project to another, without
really improving his or her craft. As an artist, you need to fail in order to derive
lessons from each misstep, until you discover how to create work that is worthy
of an audience.
One way you can maintain your
career as a writer is to try to do at least one thing each day that advances
your writing. Here are a few suggestions:
1)begin
a completely new piece of writing
2)continue
writing a piece you’ve already started
3)edit
a piece of writing you’ve already begun
4)make
notes for a writing project you’d like to begin
5)do
research for a piece of writing you plan to start or add to
6)read
the work of a writer you’ve heard about but haven’t read
7)reread
a favorite work
8)buy
a lottery ticket (just kidding!)
9)attend
a reading
10)attend a workshop or a writer’s
group
11)read a literary magazine you’ve never read
12)submit your work to a magazine
13)research contests you might want
to enter
14)send your work to a literary
contest
15)have a conversation with another
writer about your work or their work or the work of a writer you’ve been
reading or they’ve been reading.
16)read a work of literary criticism or biography
about a writer you want to know more about
17)apply for a grant
18)buy a gun and hold up a bank
(just checking to see if you’re still with me)
19)apply for a writer’s residency or retreat
20)research reading series
21)contact a reading series to set up a reading
22)research possible book publishers
23)send a query to a possible book publisher
24)follow up on emails or letters sent to you
from magazines or publishers or reading series
25)research jobs teaching writing and/or
literature
26)apply for jobs teaching writing and/or
literature
27)teach a class or workshop on writing or
literature
28)write a book review
29)write an article on a writer whose work
intrigues you
30)write an anonymous hate letter to a writer
whose work you don’t like (just kidding again!)
31)collaborate with other artists such as
musicians, actors, visual artists, filmmakers, etc.
32)negotiate a contract for a book or a reading
33)write a blog on your art or on art in general
34)start or add to a Facebook page that includes
news about your writing
As you can see, very few of
these suggestions actually involve creativity, with the exception of figuring
out how to rob a bank. While it’s desirable to be creative as often as
possible, few of us have the spark to do that every hour of every single day.
But your creative downtime can be your active time for getting your work to
your audience, or for finding the time or resources to continue writing. The
business of writing is also an important part of being a creative artist. The
students I’ve taught who’ve continued as writers are mostly the ones who also
pay attention to the other work, getting their writing to readers and obtaining
resources to keep going.
