For Posterity's Sake: An Update to an Old Post

As this post comes nearly two years since my previous one, I've long since assumed that this blog was officially defunct. Maybe it still is. I tweet and facebook and generally publicize my thoughts to the virtual world in 140 characters or fewer. Blogging is dead, anyway, isn't it?

But as I trudge through the final pages of my dissertation, I've again been thinking a lot about the writing process. Part of this has involved revising and updating my previously posted Thirteen Theses for the Writer. For posterity's sake, if no other, the shiny, new, 2011 version is below.

16 Theses for the Writer

1) Advanced thought in accessible prose. As often as possible.

2) Always write as if a larger audience - one that consists of intelligent non-specialists, especially a multidisciplinary group of people you know personally - will read what you've written. All explanations later deemed unnecessary can be edited out and will have served to bolster your knowledge and credibility.

3) Write about subjects that interest you. Truly.

4) How you feel about the writing, the subject, the audience, etc. will get embedded in your prose. So will how you feel when writing.

5) Beyond emotion, body matters: exercise increases blood flow to the brain, meditation stills the mind and facilitates focus, sleep restores both mind and body while promoting the most creative, human endeavor (dreaming), and so on. But the occasional glass of bourbon helps, too.

6) In three versions:
6.1) Be who you want to articulate. Then, write.
6.2) Ontology first. Composition second.
6.3) Compose your self first.

7) A writer's mantra:
Write.
Every day.
No matter what.
[Note: But you can define "every day" how you like. For me, it means 5 or 6 days a week]

8) If possible: Write First.
[This does not contradict number 6]

9) "Nulla dies sine linea" – Plinius

10) "Nulla dies sine linea - but there may well be weeks" – Walter Benjamin
But if you find yourself having gone weeks without writing, start writing.

11) Embrace a healthy obsession with both your subject material and writing about it.

12) Revision is generative. Even destruction, as Marx tells us, is a creative process.

13) Keep your scheduled writing time sacrosanct. Protect it from intruders, interlopers, and yourself.

14) Writing attracts inspiration; waiting prolongs its absence.

15) Rest and relaxation can be as useful for your work as work itself. Moreover, taking a long enough break from work will enable you to return to it as both a reader and a writer. [But if you find yourself having taken too much time off, see number 10]

16) No single approach to writing is 100% effective 100% of the time. Switch it up as often as necessary.

The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses

In December, I posted my "Thirteen Theses for the Writer," which were, in part, a response to Walter Benjamin's "Post No Bills" (Selected Writings, Volume I). In "Post No Bills," Benjamin includes "The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses" along with "The Critic's Technique in Thirteen Theses." Consider this Part One:

The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses:

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude of a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea – but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea – style – writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

I often get stuck at number 1. Good thing this isn't a 12-step program.

One Art

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

~ ~ ~

Bishop rewrote this superb villanelle seventeen times before getting it right.

For more on the revisions, see Brett Candlish Millier's "The Drafts of 'One Art'."

"On Not Winning the Nobel Prize"

From Doris Lessing's 2007 Nobel Lecture, given in acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year she wrote The Cleft (click here for the New York Times review):

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?" Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration.

If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

Read the full lecture here, or get it as a .pdf courtesy Nobelprize.org.

BTW: Orhan Pamuk's 2006 lecture - "My Father's Suitcase" - is also wonderful.

Susan Sontag's Journals

I haven't read Reborn yet, but I want to.

As Daryll Pickney describes it in his New Yorker review:

Sontag’s “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25), edited by her son, David Rieff, is a fascinating document of her apprenticeship, charting her earnest quest for education, identity, and voice. The volume takes us from her last days at North Hollywood High School to the year that, now living in New York, she published her first novel, “The Benefactor.”

NPR's John Freeman points out that:

Reborn is full of earnest exhortations to read books (Moll Flanders, another tale of self-creation) and smile less ("Think of Blake. He didn't smile for others"), as well as descriptions of lectures attended and films inhaled, sometimes at the rate of three a day.

I'll admit that posthumously publishing someone's journals is worse than hanging their dirty undies out to dry (and for everyone to see), and the fact that it was her own son who published them is a bit...bothersome. But, according to Richard Eder of The New York Times, Rieff published the journals knowing that "Sontag had left her papers without restrictions to the University of California, Los Angeles. If he did not do the job, thus at least keeping some control, someone else would."

I guess Junior didn't think he could have destroyed the journals himself (which is what he says his mother would have done were she alive). And I'm glad he didn't. Here's the thing about seeing someone's dirty undies blowing in the breeze: it's hard not to look.

Besides, I love reading journals written during a period of intense creativity. Take Kafka's journal entries produced during the writing of The Trial. They're wonderful insights into not only the writer's mind, but also into the process of writing.

For example:

August 29. The end of one chapter a failure; another chapter, which began beautifully, I shall hardly--or rather certainly not--be able to continue as beautifully, while at the time, during the night, I should certainly have succeeded with it. But I must not forsake myself, I am entirely alone.

September 1. In complete helplessness barely wrote two pages.

October 15. Two weeks of good work; full insight into my situation occasionally.

November 1. Yesterday, after a long time, made a great deal of progress; today again virtually nothing; the two weeks since my vacation have been almost a complete loss.

December 19. Yesterday wrote "The Village Schoolmaster" ["The Giant Mole"] almost without knowing it...

January 20. The end of writing. When will it take me up again?

Excerpts from The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Vol. II, 1914-1923

You see? Even Kafka struggled. And you see? Pretty interesting, huh? I bet Sontag's journals are even better.

Thirteen Theses for the Writer

Today I set aside the aforementioned MLA paper to start revising the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation. When I read through the chapter, I revisited the struggle of writing it in the first place, and so I started thinking about ways I'd like to approach writing.

This is, in part, a response to Walter Benjamin's "The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses," which I will post here sooner or later. But it's also just my thoughts on the practice of writing, conveniently packaged in 13 segments.

1) Advanced thought in accessible prose.

2) Always write as if a larger audience - one that consists of intelligent non-specialists, especially a group of smart people you know - will read what you've written.

3) Write about subjects that interest you. Truly.

4) How you feel about the writing, the subject, the audience, etc. will get embedded in your prose. So will how you feel when writing.

5) In three versions:
5.1) Be who you want to articulate. Then, write.
5.2) Ontology first. Composition second.
5.3) Compose your self first.

6) A writer's mantra:
Write.
Every day.
No matter what.
[Note: you can define "every day" how you like. For me, it mean 5 or 6 days a week]

7) If possible: Write First.
[This does not contradict number 5]

8) "Nulla dies sine linea" - Plinius

9) "Nulla dies sine linea - but there may well be weeks" - Benjamin
But if you find yourself having gone weeks without writing, start writing.

10) Embrace a healthy obsession with both your subject material and writing about it.

11) Revision is generative. Even destruction, as Marx tells us, is a creative process.

12) No single approach to writing is 100% effective 100% of the time. Switch it up as often as necessary.

13) Rest and relaxation can be as useful for your work as work itself. Moreover, taking a long enough break from work will enable you to return to it as both a reader and a composer.
[Note: But if you take too much time off, see number 9]

Neologisms

Jefferey Euginedes, a writer who's probably better known for The Virgin Suicides - a book made famous by Sofia Coppola's filmic interpretation (accompanied by a fine soundtrack composed and produced by Air) - than for his Pulitzer-winning masterpiece Middlesex, writes, in the voice of Middlesex's protagonist and narrator Calliope:

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.”

And so I propose that we should come up with better words for expressing more complex emotions. They don't even have to be "Germanic train-car constructions" like Schadenfreude.

Like, for example, "the irresistible urge to 'zerbert' a baby's belly." How's about "Zerbunger"?

And, really, what's the word for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar"? I'd really like to know. I'd use this word.

And how's about a word to describe "the agony of entertaining unappreciative house-guests," or "the joy of discovering someone has done a household chore you were putting off"?

How's about some help here? I'm suffering from deneologificiency.

Typing Without a Clue

I just read this excellent New York Times article by guest columnist Timothy Egan. Here it is in full:

Typing Without a Clue
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: December 6, 2008

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

Joe, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, was no good as a citizen, having failed to pay his full share of taxes, no good as a plumber, not being fully credentialed, and not even any good as a faux American icon. Who could forget poor John McCain at his most befuddled, calling out for his working-class surrogate on a day when Joe stiffed him.

With a résumé full of failure, he now thinks he can join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell and Joan Didion.

Next up may be Sarah Palin, who is said to be worth nearly $7 million if she can place her thoughts between covers. Publishers: with all the grim news of layoffs and staff cuts at the venerable houses of American letters, can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.

Here’s Palin’s response, after Matt Lauer asked her when she knew the election was lost:

“I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.”

I have no idea what she said in that thicket of words.

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.

Writing is hard, even for the best wordsmiths. Ernest Hemingway said the most frightening thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.” And Winston Churchill called the act of writing a book “a horrible, exhaustive struggle, like a long bout of painful illness.”

When I heard J.T.P. had a book, I thought of that Chris Farley skit from “Saturday Night Live.” He’s a motivational counselor, trying to keep some slacker youths from living in a van down by the river, just like him. One kid tells him he wants to write.

“La-di-frickin’-da!” Farley says. “We got ourselves a writer here!”

If Joe really wants to write, he should keep his day job and spend his evenings reading Rick Reilly’s sports columns, Peggy Noonan’s speeches, or Jess Walter’s fiction. He should open Dostoevsky or Norman Maclean — for osmosis, if nothing else. He should study Frank McCourt on teaching or Annie Dillard on writing.

The idea that someone who stumbled into a sound bite can be published, and charge $24.95 for said words, makes so many real writers think the world is unfair.

Our next president is a writer, which may do something to elevate standards in the book industry. The last time a true writer occupied the White House was a hundred years ago, with Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote 13 books before his 40th birthday.

Barack Obama’s first book, the memoir of a mixed-race man, is terrific. Outside of a few speeches, he will probably not write anything memorable until he’s out office, but I look forward to that presidential memoir.

For the others — you friends of celebrities penning cookbooks, you train wrecks just out of rehab, you politicians with an agent but no talent — stop soaking up precious advance money.

I know: publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print. True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage.

There was a time when I wanted to be like Sting, the singer, belting out, “Roxanne ...” I guess that’s why we have karaoke, for fantasy night. If only there was such a thing for failed plumbers, politicians or celebrities who think they can write.

Amen, brother.