Category: Creative Writing

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech | Open Culture

Feb. 27 is the birthday of writer John Steinbeck, whose great novel of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath, gives an eloquent and sympathetic voice to the dispossessed. In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” You can watch him deliver his Nobel speech above.

And for insights into how Steinbeck reached that pinnacle, you can read a collection of his observations on the art of fiction from the Fall, 1975 edition of The Paris Review, including six writing tips jotted down in a letter to a friend the same year he won the Nobel Prize. “The following,” Steinbeck writes, “are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.”

For the entire list of tips and more, visit: John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech | Open Culture

And more tips here:

Here’s one way to become a better writer. Listen to the advice of writers who earn their daily bread with their pens. During the past week, lists of writing commandments by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard (above) and William Safire have buzzed around Twitter. (Find our Twitter stream here.) So we decided to collect them and add tips from a few other veterans — namely, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman.

Source: Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell | Open Culture

And one tip from me: Don’t get too hung up on tips but write if that is what you want to do. Just write. Your style will develop. Your words will come out. Your story will come out. Try various things. Start at the end. Or start at the beginning. Try outlining if you’re comfortable with it. Or not. Do what comes naturally. If you like what you do, then you’ll find yourself trying to do more. If you don’t like what you do, then read a book and try it again when you feel you’re ready.

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Shakespeare and Company, Paris’s famous bookstore where wandering writers are welcome | The Washington Post

By James McAuley, September 27, 2016

This week, the bookstore will release a comprehensive history of the shop which includes 400 pages of text, testimonies, and photographs from the store’s sprawling archive. (James McAuley, Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
This week, the bookstore will release a comprehensive history of the shop which includes 400 pages of text, testimonies, and photographs from the store’s sprawling archive. (James McAuley, Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

PARIS — Shakespeare and Company, the small, crumbling bookshop on Paris’s Left Bank, may be the most famous bookstore in the world.

It was the first place to publish the entirety of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” when no one else would, and for decades it has been an informal living room — and sometimes a bedroom — for many of the most revered figures in modern literature: ­Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac and ­Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Durrell and Anaïs Nin.

This week, the staff of the multicolored storefront at 37 Rue de la Bucherie released a comprehensive history of the shop that originally opened at another location in 1919. The book was years in the making, nearly 400 pages of text, testimonies and photographs from the store’s sprawling archive, crammed in mismatched boxes in a closet three floors up an uneven staircase. Conceived as a “memoir” instead of a history, the project is essentially a rigorous attempt to explain what, ­exactly, Shakespeare and Company is.

Read the whole story and watch a video here: Shakespeare and Company, Paris’s famous bookstore where wandering writers are welcome – The Washington Post

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First freewriting exercise in a long time

I read ““Writing Without Teachers,” by Peter Elbow in college. One of the things he talks about is how a daily freewriting exercise can free the writer’s mind to write better. It involved writing for at least ten minutes and not stopping even to think of the next word you’re going to write. Not thinking of ideas. Not starting in one place and not going to another. So, I tried to get back into the practice, which I used to do regularly, today. Here is the result. Hope you enjoy.

Freewriting. Writing freely. Writing about freedom. Writing to free the thoughts and ideas that sit untapped, stored in a can of sardines on a pallet on a ship in the harbor, a ship with a name of mostly consonants, painted thickly with a reddish pink or pinkish red sea faring paint and stacked with a seemingly infinite variety of colored shipping containers that, once removed, once unpacked, are placed neatly on trucks and indeed become the containers on the trucks – MAERSK and other names that make me, even an adult, curious as to what they contain, where they come from, China probably, where they’re going, various Walmarts or Michael’s probably, how much they’re worth and if we really need them as if they are but another example of the freedom we hold so dear, the same freedom that holds so many others captive and economically enslaved so that we can enjoy our toilet bowl scrubbers, our Christmas ornaments, our multi-colored ink pens and infinite notepad designs like this one made “sustainably” from the waste of the sugar cane manufacturing process, made for and by Staples stores, but still, behind the sugar industry in Florida where maybe some of that material originates, is a political corruption that spoils millions of acres in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars that’s reported on in the Miami Herald but continues despite the corruption that holds migrant families hostage in the Land of the Free.

Freewriting exercise by Christopher J Zurcher.

freewriting-2-cjzurcher

 

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Today is the birthday of Gabriel García Márquez

It’s the birthday of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who said, “I’ve always been convinced that my true profession is that of journalist.” That’s Gabriel García Márquez, born in Aracataca, Colombia, on this day in 1927. He’s the author of one of the most important books in Latin American literature, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

He once said: “I learned a lot from James Joyce and Erskine Caldwell and of course from Hemingway … [but the] tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.’’

For more on Marquez and others : The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

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‘The story really wants to defeat you. You have to be more mulish than the story’ | Writer’s Almanac

It’s the birthday of the novelist Khaled Hosseini (books by this author), born in Kabul, Afghanistan (1965).

Khaled Hosseini said: “There is a romantic notion to writing a novel, especially when you are starting it. You are embarking on this incredibly exciting journey, and you’re going to write your first novel, you’re going to write a book. Until you’re about 50 pages into it, and that romance wears off, and then you’re left with a very stark reality of having to write the rest of this thing […] A lot of 50-page unfinished novels are sitting in a lot of drawers across this country. Well, what it takes at that point is discipline […] You have to be more stubborn than the manuscript, and you have to punch in and punch out every day, regardless of whether it’s going well, regardless of whether it’s going badly […] It’s largely an act of perseverance […] The story really wants to defeat you, and you just have to be more mulish than the story.”

Source: The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

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Three of my favorite writers’ birthdays are today: Seuss, Irving and Wolfe.

Today is the birthday of three of my favorite writers: Writer and illustrator Dr. Seuss (born Theodor Seuss Geisel) , writer John Irving, and 20th century writer and cultural anthropologist Tom Wolfe.

In the fall of 1936, Geisel was coming home from Europe, stuck below deck during a long rainy stretch. He started making up words to fit the rhythm of the ship’s engine, and the poem he composed in his head became his first children’s book: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937). His manuscript was rejected more than 20 times; editors disliked the fantasy, the exuberant language, and the lack of clear morals. One day, after receiving yet another rejection, he finally decided to give up and burn his manuscript. He was thinking about this as he walked down Madison Avenue in New York, when he bumped into an old classmate from Dartmouth, who had recently become a children’s book editor for Vanguard Press. After hearing his story, the classmate took Geisel back to his office and introduced him to some executives, and it wasn’t long before he had a book deal. He said later: “If I had been walking down the other side of Madison Avenue, I’d be in the dry-cleaning business today.”

John Irving keeps a practiced routine when he writes. He sits at an L-shaped desk surrounded by notepads and notebooks and writes his books by hand before typing them. “I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand — in addition to how much it slows you down — is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.”

Irving’s most recent book is Avenue of Mysteries (2015).

He said, “If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.”

And while Wolfe had a Ph.D. he decided to be a newspaper reporter. Then, in the early 1960s, there was a newspaper strike in New York City, and the paper he worked for was affected. He was out of a job for a while, and he decided to pitch an idea to Esquire magazine for a story about the hot-rod car culture around Southern California.

The editor agreed, and Wolfe went out to L.A., hung around car shows, drag races, and demolition derbies, and ran up a $750 bill at a Beverly Hills hotel. He’d taken lots and lots of notes, but he couldn’t figure out what the story should be or how to write it up — not even by the night before his magazine deadline. The editor told him to type up his notes, send them, and he’d go ahead and put together the story. Wolfe sat at his typewriter and banged out a letter to his editor with his ideas and observations. His editor liked it so much that he just removed the salutation (“Dear Byron”) at the top and published Wolfe’s notes as a feature article. The story was a huge hit and became the title piece in Wolfe’s first published book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965).

Read a lot more about these writers here: at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

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Overseas jobs online now!

A character in a story I’m working on is surprised at the online availability of jobs in Afghanistan ::::

…. you could literally find a job in Afghanistan online, from the Army’s Civil Logistics Augmentation Program, which sounded like a rational way to contribute to society — or the destruction of one — to truck drivers where employment may be located in “potentially dangerous areas, including combat or war zones,” and where threats to your life could be from “dangerous forces or friendly fire,” and, in case they’re not killed, candidates need to “work well with others, customers and all levels of management.” Or you can become a “final evaluation consultant” for a human rights organization that calls themselves a “movement working to further human rights for all and defeat poverty.”

Many of the jobs can be applied for right from a smart phone, the good thing being that with Google’s locator services, paid for only by the ads they sell (sure, okay, I believe that) they know a lot about you before you even submit your application – they know you’re interested before you even apply because they know you’ve been looking, and they know where they will have to fly you in from.”

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Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, the Art of Revision, and His Reading List of Essential Books for Aspiring Writers

By Maria Popova

“As a writer you should not judge. You should understand,” Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) counseled in his 1935 Esquire compendium of writing advice, addressed to an archetypal young correspondent but based on a real-life encounter that had taken place a year earlier.

In 1934, a 22-year-old aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson set out to meet his literary hero, hoping to steal a few moments with Hemingway to talk about writing. The son of Norwegian immigrant wheat farmers, he had just completed his coursework in journalism at the University of Minnesota, but had refused to pay the $5 diploma fee. Convinced that his literary education would be best served by apprenticing himself to Hemingway, however briefly, he hitchhiked atop a coal car from Minnesota to Key West. “It seemed a damn fool thing to do,” Samuelson later recalled, “but a twenty-two-year-old tramp during the Great Depression didn’t have to have much reason for what he did.” Unreasonable though the quest may have been, he ended up staying with Hemingway for almost an entire year, over the course of which he became the literary titan’s only true protégé.

Source: Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, the Art of Revision, and His Reading List of Essential Books for Aspiring Writers – Brain Pickings

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It’s the birthday of poet Sharon Olds | Writer’s Almanac

It’s the birthday of poet Sharon Olds (books by this author), born in San Francisco (1942). When she was eight years old, her teacher asked the students to write poems, and Olds handed in a poem she had read in the post office, which began: “Neither wind nor rain nor gloom nor dark of night …” When the teacher demanded to know whether she has written it, she explained that of course she had, because it was in her handwriting. It was the first time she realized that writing a poem meant actually making it up, not just writing it down. She said: “My early influences for good writing were the Psalms, and for bad writing were the Hymns. Four beats, the quatrains, that form. […] I didn’t know until I was 55 that my craft was the craft of the Hymns I had grown up singing. I was writing in a way that felt comfortable to me.”

Source: The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

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Happy Birthday Kurt Vonnegut | The Writer’s Almanac

It’s the birthday of a writer who was also a veteran (11/11 is Veteran’s Day in the United States, which honors Americans who have served their country in the armed forces) Kurt Vonnegut (books by this author), born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on this day in 1922. He’s the author of Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Cat’s Cradle (1963), Breakfast of Champions (1973), and Timequake (1997).

vonnegutHe said that as the youngest child he was always desperate to get some attention at the supper table and so he worked hard to be funny. He’d listen studiously to comedians on the radio, and how they made jokes, and then at family dinner time, he’d try to imitate them. He later said, “That’s what my books are, now that I’m a grownup — mosaics of jokes.”

All his life he loved slapstick humor. He told an interviewer that one of the funniest things that can happen in a film is “when somebody in a movie would tell everybody off, and then make a grand exit into the coat closet. He had to come out again, of course, all tangled in coat hangers and scarves.” When he was on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he told his students that they were there learning to play practical jokes. He said, “All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.”

Source: The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

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Maya Angelou Stamp Quote Actually Came From Connecticut Children’s Book Author Joan Walsh Anglund

A picture of part of one of the new Maya Angelou stamp sheets that were issues Tuesday, April 7, 2015. (photo: cjzurcher)
A picture of part of one of the new Maya Angelou stamp sheets that were issues Tuesday, April 7, 2015. (photo: cjzurcher)

The news that the U.S. Postal Service was honoring Maya Angelou, poet, author and civil rights advocate, with her own forever stamp was welcomed by her fans. Angelou, who died last year, was a cultural icon and mother figure to a generation of writers.

Jabari Asim, associate professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College in Boston, was excited. Until he read the quote on the Angelou stamp:

“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

Funny thing, he had always thought the quote came from Joan Walsh Anglund, the prolific children’s book author from Connecticut.

via Maya Angelou Stamp Quote Actually Came From Connecticut Children’s Book Author – Hartford Courant.

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A reading from ‘Prime Green’ by Robert Stone on video | Narrative Magazine

Long before Robert Stone became a National Book Award–winning novelist, he tried selling encyclopedias in rural Louisiana, only to be arrested on suspicion of being an outside agitator. Regrouping from that calamity, he pondered joining a traveling theatrical troupe putting on a Christ play. In March 2009, at our Narrative Night in San Francisco, Bob gave a hilarious and moving reading of youthful tales, included in his memoir Prime Green.

Prime Green by Robert Stone | Narrative Magazine.

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Lists :: 1. Because they’re simple. 2. Because they’re playful. 3. Because they work. | Beyond The Margins

Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing:

“[My] lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.”

And in The Paris Review:

“So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word?”

via 1. Because they’re simple. 2. Because they’re playful. 3. Because they work. | Beyond The Margins.

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Stephen King: ‘Religion is a dangerous tool … but I choose to believe God exists’ | The Guardian

Stephen King. Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/Getty Images
Stephen King. Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/Getty Images

Stephen King, whose forthcoming novel Revival features a Methodist minister who condemns his faith after a horrific accident, has described organised religion as “a very dangerous tool that’s been misused by a lot of people.”

In a rare and lengthy question and answer session published in the print edition of Rolling Stone, King laid out how he “grew up in a Methodist church,” but how he “had doubts” about organized religion ever since he was a child, and how “once I got through high school, that was it for me.”

Nevertheless, said the bestselling novelist, he chooses to believe in God “because it makes things better. You have a meditation point, a source of strength.” He told Rolling Stone: “I choose to believe that God exists, and therefore I can say, ‘God, I can’t do this by myself. Help me not to take a drink today. Help me not to take a drug today.’ And that works fine for me.”

For more on this story, visit: Stephen King: ‘Religion is a dangerous tool … but I choose to believe God exists’ | Books | The Guardian.

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bleeding heart

flog me into submission you daily beast of ambition
beating your head against the concrete wall
of emails, text messages and phone calls.
my bleeding heart is no match for the blood you make run
from my forehead, my chewed hang nails, my nose, my heart,
my gums.

why don’t you take it out and show it to me in a broadcast not of beauty but of what’s happening in Africa or the Middle East? bleeding heart.

make me sick again and again with human rights abuses and corporate greed that pollutes the water that quenches the thirst of hundreds of millions of people, you beast, bleeding heart

quenches the thirst of you and me, our children and theirs. bleeding heart.

tell me it’s all in the name of nutrition, flavor, price savings and clean water and air – it’s cheap after all.

it’s cheap when we pick it up at the supermarket stocked with aisles and aisles and aisles and aisles and aisles
in which we lose ourselves among endless varieties of poison,
a disease-making cauldron packaged as a fruitopia eutopia

my kid screams when he sees the labels of the things he wants, squeaks with feigned happiness and glee

my kid screams when he holds the plastic that killed someone in its being made and will kill someone else in its disposal.

my phone rings. I pick it up and hand it to him.
he squeals again.
It’s his mother.

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He walks on the street not on the sidewalk, swats at the fly and says “stupid fucking fly.”

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