Writing is Boiling Down

"It's like boiling down. Four pages can go through six, eight, ten drafts to get down. The beginning is always rewritten much more than the rest, because it's the setting up of information as well as the telling of the story--that's always much harder to juggle." SUSAN MINOT

Writing--it's as much about what you take out as what you put in. 

Writing Tip: don't try and guess what editors want

"Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new." WILLIAM ZINSSER

It's scarier to trust yourself. And write the book that's in you to write. The book that only you can write. It's risky.

But which is riskier?

To follow the trend? (By the time your book comes out they'll have moved on to something else.)

To try and write the book that that someone else writes? (Won't they do a much better job at being them?)

Or to write the book that only you can write? And possibly find yourself ahead of the trend, setting the trends, doing something startling and new?

What is a poet?

"Paul Valery said that a poet is like a man who carries huge weights up to a roof and drops them all at once on the head of a passer-by."

Jeannie Vanasco 

via 

NYT book review

What is a poet?

"Paul Valery said that a poet is like a man who carries huge weights up to a roof and drops them all at once on the head of a passer-by."

Jeannie Vanasco 

via 

NYT book review

stories and skimming

James Patterson (b. 1947) said:

"If you think of the story that you tell that's your favorite personal story, or funny story, it doesn't have flashy sentences. It doesn't have too much detail. It just tells the story. That isn't, for whatever reason, the way most people write books. But it seemed to me that there was no reason that it couldn't be the way at least one person writes books. I said: 'I'm going to stop writing the parts that people skim.' "

dedications

photo: Plum with his wife Ethel and daughter Leonora in Le Touquet, July 1924

P G Wodehouse (or Plum) once dedicated one of his many books: 

"To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy

and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time."

age, youth and stars

See the full gallery on Posterous

"For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day."

Longfellow (1807-1882)

(Photo: Longfellow in 1868 by Julia Margaret Cameron)

 

look carefully now

Akira Kurosawa, the great film director, was 13 when the Great Kanto earthquake hit in 1923 destroying Yokohama, three fifths of Tokyo, and killing nearly 150,000 people. His older brother Heigo Kurosawa (16 at the time) took Akira to see the devastation. It was something Akira never forgot:

"My brother once forced me to spend a day wandering through Tokyo looking at the victims of the Great Kanto earthquake..." Kurosawa told an interviewer in 1993, 70 years after it struck. "Corpses piled on bridges, corpses blocking off a whole street at the intersection, corpses displaying every manner of death possible to human beings. When I involuntarily looked away, my brother scolded me, 'Akira, look carefully now.' When that night I asked my brother why he made me look at those terrible sights, he replied: 'If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.' With my camera, like Dostoyevsky with his prose, I have tried to force the audience--which is often unwilling--to look carefully now."

Children are made readers...

... long live picture books!

How do you spell love?

"How do you spell love Piglet?" asked Pooh.

"I don't have to spell it," said Pooh. "I just feel it." 

a a milne

hope, love, forgiveness

oh dear. sorry--for the invisible ink earlier... here is what it should have been


"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime;
therefore, we must be saved by hope...

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; 

therefore, we are saved by love. 

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous 

from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. 

Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, 

which is forgiveness." 

from the Op-Ed: Tree of Failure, David Brooks

via nytimes.com

poke in the eye? punch in the nose? The point of poetry

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away." Paul Muldoon (b. 1951, Northern Ireland)

No wonder poetry is hard work. Hard to read. (Who wants to be poked in the eye?) Hard to write. You need to be in top form, fighting fit to deliver those punches and pokes and prods... to take the breath away...

And it doesn't let you in quick. You have to work for it. Whether reading it, or writing it.

But that's what makes it so powerful.

Kind of the way with most things--at least the important things. The more it costs, the more precious it. The harder it is to climb the mountain, the more amazing the view from the top.

photos (of course) by Ansel Adams

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from s@lly l-j

what should writers wear?

John Grisham said: "Writers can wear anything. I could go to a black-tie dinner in New York City with blue jeans on and boots and a cowboy hat and a bow tie, and people would just say, 'Oh, he's a writer.' "

One of the perks of being a writer.

(Of course you've never seen John Grisham wearing anything exactly outrageous, have you? so I guess you can afford to say this when you're already kind of put together.)

Posted via email from s@lly l-j

progress

"The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us." 

G K Chesteron

wow. what, I wonder, would he have to say to us today about what we're up to?

maybe that all this busy connecting on twitter, facebook etc--if not kept in check--is in danger of leaving us more disconnected?

that all this "socializing" leaves us less social?

that all these "conversations" leaves us less able to communicate?

that listening to all the chatter leaves us less able to hear anything?

that calling our thousands of connections "friends" devalues friendship which is one of the most rare and precious gifts we are given?

Posted via email from s@lly l-j

being copied + when to cry

Guiliana Camerino died today in Venice. The handbags she designed (sold under the Roberta Di Camerino label) dangled off the arms of Grace Kelly, and Elizabeth Taylor in the 50s and 60s. Fancy doctors satchels someone called them. Beautiful is what I call them. Want one. Now please thank you.

Her story reads like a novel. Born in Venice to a prominent Jewish family, she dreamed of becoming a theatrical costume designer. She escaped to Switzerland during World War 2, where, as a refugee needing a handbag and money, made her own. Soon afterwards, a swiss woman riding with her on the bus bought the handbag right off her shoulder. Which is how it all began.

Her bags were widely copied--consciously or unconsciously--by loads of other designers. The senior buyer at Barneys described the shock of looking at Roberta Di Camerino's archive: "Every handbag I had ever seen had already been done by her years before."

Gucci's lattice of G's (she did it in 1946); Bottega Veneta's woven leather (she did it in 1957); Prada's articulated frame (she did it in 1964).

This copying bothered Camerino at first. She says:

"When I was only doing bags, I found it particularly important to be always very well dressed, so I became a client of Chanel. Once in a fitting she saw me crying because someone had copied a bag which I had done exclusively for Neiman Marcus. 'You must not cry now,' Coco said. 'You cry the day they don't copy you.' "

via NYT

Posted via email from s@lly l-j

Bonhoeffer--The Thriller

Here's a new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young Lutheran theologian in Hitler's Germany who was an early and constant voice of resistance against the Third Reich and who was executed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. It's called Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Not only is it completely brilliant, but it reads like a thriller. Not only that, but it also happens to have been written by my dear friend, Eric Metaxas.

It's already being critically-acclaimed. And little wonder. Eric has used his incredible gift of storytelling and employed primary sources to bring the story vividly to life--painting scenes so real that you feel as if you were actually there.

Take this (totally creepy image) for instance:

"... Schlabrendorff" Eric writes "recalled the grim spectacle of Hitler at table: 'To see Hitler eat was a most disgusting sight. His left hand he placed upon his thigh, while with his right hand he stuffed his food, consisting of all sorts of vegetables, into his mouth. As he did so he did not lift his hand to his mouth, but kept his right arm flat on the table and brought his mouth down to his food." (p.427)

This incredible biography that reads like a thriller that is written by my good friend is at the same time theological deep and sophisticated.

It's getting stellar reviews in the WSJ and ... (drum roll) a starred review in Kirkus. And THAT'S saying something!

(I haven't yet read the entire book, just portions of it--I'm saving it up for my summer reading! Can't wait.)

Posted via email from s@lly l-j

working or making a living?

"Work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God."
—Dorothy L Sayers

Posted via email from s@lly l-j

definition of a bad poem

Louis Simpson (author of Pulitzer Prize-winning "At the End of the Open Road") said: 

"When I write a poem, I don't know quite what it means. If I think I know what it means, I've got a bad poem. I want a poem to be beyond me. I want it to be something that transfers a feeling I don't quite understand the limits of."

more about him here.

Posted via email from s@lly l-j

definition of a boring book

Musing on his craft, Jules Feiffer note that Hemingway's spare language "made sense to a cartoonist's imagination," as "the air between words was like the silent panel in an adventure strip: it told the story by not telling, by giving over to the reader the job of filling in the writer's gaps."

Reminds me of something a favorite publisher taught me. I was reading to children in schools from an early draft of Handbag Friends and, at one particular point in the story (when the poor Handbag Friends enter the Swamp-A-Stomp and the Place of Dangerful Terribleness) the children kept stopping me and asking me all these questions. So I reported back to my publisher and wondered if I should write more on that part. He said no, when they are asking questions, that's when you know it's working. Because you have captured their imagination.

Because the definition of a boring book: doing the job of the reader for them.

The importance of leaving room for the reader.

Posted via email from s@lly l-j

Blessed Assurance

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Happy Birthday Phoebe Knapp. Pardon. What? Who?

Phoebe Knapp. She wrote the tune to "Blessed Assurance" (among more than 500 other hymns). She was born in New York 1839. 

And did you know… one day in 1873, Knapp was having a pipe organ set up in her house when a fellow John Street Methodist Episcopal Church parishioner, a blind woman 20 years older than she was, came over for a visit. Knapp sat down at the piano to play the woman a tune she'd just composed. She asked the older woman what she thought the melody was saying, and the older woman--who's name was Fanny Crosby-- replied "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine."

For the second verse, Crosby wrote: "Perfect submission, perfect delight, / visions of rapture now burst on my sight; / angels descending bring from above / echoes of mercy, whispers of love."

Posted via email from jsb