The most useful advice on writing I’ve ever received comes from Gil Rogin, who told me that he always uses his best thing in his lead, and his second best thing in his last paragraph; and from Dwight Macdonald, who wrote that the best advice he ever received was to put everything on the same subject in the same place. To these dictums I would add the advice to ask yourself repeatedly: what is this about?
THOMAS POWERS
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
MARGARET ATWOOD
About a third of the self-help books that cross my desk could be distilled to two things: first, if you can tolerate a little discomfort, you can achieve almost any goal; and second, it’s amazing the lengths we’ll go to to avoid discomfort. (via This column will change your life: the two things | Life and style | The Guardian)
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A variety of old sketchbook drawings ~ including some of “Mr. Murmur,” the character from my Dark Horse comic book one-shot Thirteen O’Clock (which was an affectionate homage to 1930s-era pulps & serials; it was later reprinted in the book Maniac Killer Strikes Again!).
In July 2010, I’d made the big decision to leave the PhD program. I was back working part-time at my old job, turning over the strange things I’d experienced. And feeling a bit adrift. The PhD promised a roadmap of sorts, after all, and I’d just balled up that map and thrown it out the window. As i wondered what my next step would be, Christine Kane offered her Uplevel Your Life seminar (affiliate link). I can’t remember how I ran across her web site, but I had added her to my short list of RSS feeds and then signed up for her newsletter. I liked her story – she’d made herself into a singer/songwriter, then entrepreneur, then coach – and her blog posts struck me as sensible and sane bits of self-management advice.
I signed up for the course, enjoyed it, and still use some of her materials today. Christine is now launching an updated version of that seminar and as one of her alums, I'm happy to write about what I got out of her program and offer links to her new program.
Here are some of the things I remember about Christine’s course:
I enjoyed Christine’s program and I do recommend it for anyone who has questions about themselves and their lives and doesn’t know what to do first, wants to sort things out in a self-study format, at their own speed, and wants a sensible plan with an excellent guide. You’ll definitely finish the program with certain ideas and phrases floating in your mind that I guarantee you’ll access when you least expect them and most need them. Again, examine the Uplevel Your Life seminar material for yourself, if you’re interested.
I have continued to follow Christine’s rise and rise, and here a few things I’ve noticed. I don’t think these observations should stop anyone from signing up for her workshop. This is me reading between the lines:
I think only a few rare people can improve themselves all on their own. I, for one, am someone who benefits from the coaching model: someone who will give me assignments, hold me accountable, and kick my ass when it needs kicking. Even in this self-directed, self-paced format, I think Christine Kane proves herself to be an excellent coach, and I find myself coming back to her materials often.
Click the banner below for more information on Christine's program. Full disclosure: these are affiliate links so if you sign up for Christine's program via the links on this page, then Christine's business sends a few bucks my way as a thank-you.
In September of 1968, in what he jokingly termed “E. Gorey’s Great Simple Theory About Art,” Gorey wrote these Yodaesque words:
“This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.”
When I teach literature I always tell them, these would-be writers (we don’t do workshops, we just read great books), I say, “When you read Pride and Prejudice, don’t if you’re a girl identify with Elizabeth Bennet, if you’re a boy with Darcy. Identify with the author, not with the characters.” All good readers do that automatically, but I think it’s helpful to make that clear. Your affinity is not with the characters, always with the writer.
You should always be asking yourself, if you want to become an expert reader or perhaps a writer, you should always say, “How is this being achieved?” “How is this scene being managed?” “How is this being brought off?” Because the characters are artifacts. They’re not real people with real destinies and I know that feeling, when you’re reading Pride and Prejudice even for the fourth time, you feel definite anxiety about whether they’re going to get married, even though you know perfectly well that they do. There’s a slight sort of, “Come on, kiss her!”
MARTIN AMIS
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists so that the character has someplace to stand. Plot exists so the character can discover what he is really like, forcing the character to choice and action. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and be somebody.
JOHN GARDNER
You can’t wait to write until you’re in the mood. My God, if you waited until you were in the mood, it would take forever. You have to sit down. The name of the game is to put it in the chair.
HARRY CREWS
Read voraciously, many books at a time. Only then will you hear the conversation taking place among them.
From the RIP card set of strange phenomena ~ (1) Rain of fish (2) Psychic detective (3) Spontaneous combustion (4) Real life vampire (5) Fire ghost (6) Ghost hunter
Narrative art must be clear, but it must also be mysterious. Something should remain unsaid, something just beyond our understanding, a secret. If it’s only clear, it’s kitsch; if it’s only mysterious (a much easier path), it’s condescending and pretentious and soon monotonous.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
Red carpets, interviews and social networking are all alien to him. When a friend told him that he was trending on Twitter following his debut as Moriarty, he made a rare foray online. “So terrifying,” he says burying his head in his hands. “I would never go on it again. Oh God, it just made me want to go to sleep for three weeks. People said lovely things but then people also said the most vicious, horrible things. It’s an outlet for the angry. It’s like going into a room and being punched, then kissed, then hugged, then kicked, then complimented and then slated.”
If you use willpower only to deny yourself pleasures, it becomes a grim, thankless form of defense. But when you use it to gain something, you can wring pleasure out of the dreariest tasks. Young people who seem hopelessly undisciplined in school or on the job will concentrate for hour after hour on video games because there’s a steady series of prizes. That’s the feeling to aim for in the real world.
In order to move up the scale of emotions and become more
attractive to the things you want in life, all you need to do is
let go of your story - the idea that having what you want will
in any way change your life for the better or for the worse.When you recognize that you don’t need what you want, you’re
free to have it - and freedom is perhaps the ultimate goal…
The second secret, what they never tell you, is that yes, anyone can become a writer. Merely consider any novel by Judith Krantz and you’ll know it’s true. The trick is not to become a writer, it is to stay a writer. Day after day, year after year, book after book. And for that, you must keep working, even when it seems beyond you. In the words-to-live-by of Thomas Carlyle, “Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou has in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.”
“Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down, and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, that the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives that that’s how things work.
If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life, where you say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, and start from unpromising beginnings. And I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.”
Brian Eno
quoted in Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), 31.
