Archive for March, 2009
For writing memoirs - to be or not to be a camera?
If you’re writing a memoir, you must decide from the outset: do you want to be a camera, or a person?
If you’re a camera, you’ll see everything that happened and relay it to your readers in great detail - but you’ll feel nothing and admit nothing. This will allow you to make your version of events and people as crazy as you like, without taking responsibility for your own involvement, either back then or now.
If you’re a person, on the other hand, you’ll have to admit that yes, you participated actively in your life: you not only saw what went on, but you made decisions, you had choices. This will apply not only to the story of back then, but to the here-and-now, where you as the flesh-and-blood writer have feelings and thoughts and opinions about what you’re telling us.
“Deliberate practice”: What works for golfers can work for writers
I’ve just read an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, ostensibly about golf, that I think raises some neat ideas about mastering any pursuit, most definitely writing included.
The article, by columnist John Paul Newport, is sardonically titled “Mastery, Just 10,000 Hours Away.” It explores research by cognitive scientists into the actual rather than apocryphal differences that distinguish prodigies from duffers, then segues into advice from such top golf instructors as Pia Nilsson, who works with Annika Sörenstam. From a writer’s perspective, here are the most salient comparisons:
An interview with Robert Plotkin, author of The Genie in the Machine
I mentioned in an earlier post on this blog that a couple of years ago, I worked as a book doctor and writing coach with Robert Plotkin, a Boston-based patent attorney. At the time he contacted me, Robert had been working for several years on an idea for a book about a new breed of software applications, which he dubbed “genies.”
Prototype genies were already in use at NASA and in the consumer products industry; the wishes they’d made come true included everything from other computer programs to radically enhanced satellite antennas and toothbrushes. Based on interviews with the computer scientists who’d come up with the genie concept, Robert estimated the eventual impact on society would be staggering. Genies can come up with designs a human being working alone could never even conceive of, and can work far faster as well. It may sound like, well, a fairy tale - but one of Robert’s predictions is that someday you and I will have access to consumer versions of genies. In which case, we’ll be able to find out for ourselves.
Every writer’s biggest mistake - and what to do about it
No matter what it is we’re writing, from a book chapter to a letter to a friend, there’s one mistake we’re more likely to make than any other. And it’s a bad mistake, too - a source of confusion and misunderstanding in our readers, a defilement that if we knew of it would seem as gross as a blotted mosquito or coffee spill on the page. Yet for all this, we no more see the damn thing than we can see a molecule of air! It’s as if a hypnotist had seduced us into adding nonsense words to our prose, which everyone can see but us.
Stuff your ears with wax: why writers should ignore literary critics and English teachers
I’m teaching a course on essay-writing this semester at New York University, and so naturally I assign short essays to my students. One essay I got back was interesting in part because it was so incoherent: it started off about a specific event, but thereafter devolved into a series of disconnected descriptions - almost if the writer had tried a free-writing exercise before giving up. And yet I knew the student in question was too diligent for that to be the explanation.
When I got in touch with him, he abashedly confirmed that indeed, he hadn’t wanted to write a straight account of the event in question: what he was after was an “allegory,” in which actions and consequences would seem so unimportant that their details could be discarded. His inspiration, he added, had been a Hemingway short story and a related commentary by the late novelist and literary critic, John Gardner.
Quelle mésaventure littéraire! I realized that what had happened to my student had happened many years ago to me, back when I too was a budding writer. (I’m not sure whether I’m still budding - let us get a little further into spring and I’ll tell you).
