The Summer Writing Blues: Losing the Battle with Glorious Distractions

Ignore an empty beach at your peril: Go forth, writer, and reflect on the sand twixt your toes.

Yeah, I know, all you serious writers are still at it, even though a hot and glorious summer beckons from beyond the nearest window. Maybe you sigh, grimace, close your eyes for a moment, you try to close your ears to the sounds filtering in through the invisible cracks in your airtight bastion of creativity: the siren call of birds chirping, the summery drone of a lawn mower, the shrieks of the kids next door splashing in their pool. Oh yes, and that most famous of summer sounds, the slamming of a screen door.

I say, give it up. I decided to make the summer, with all the irresistible distractions of summer guests, boating, beaching, traveling, a time of renewal. If you are in a rust belt climate, the dregs of winter will come oozing back all too soon carrying the lovely dark and dreary motivations toward self expression. I'm going to rationalize these hot months into an excuse to do no more writing than scribbling an occasional blog or jotting down any stray profound insights into a small pocket notebook. Then, come November with its gray rain and leafless and heartless trees scratching against the windows of my writing room, I'll retrieve them and weave them into something satisfying.

Besides, I wrote for the past seven months and now my editor is busy scanning my winter manuscript for missteps and passive voices, wooden prose, and cardboard characters. As for me, I'll spend some long days in guilt-free beach walking or some rail-down sailing on the Chesapeake, or hot dog-eating family gatherings. It's time to catch up on myself, to see what I've become, what's left of me now, after so long hovering in the cold. 

How to Stop Students Horrid, Horrific, Hatred of Writing: An Idea

Encouraging young people to love writing: A enthusiastic "celebrity" can make a difference.

That's me up there, in the hot seat in front of a school media center filled with middle schoolers. I was a visiting "celebrity" author and my intentions were good: get these kids to see writing as a wonderful adventure rather than a hideous, boring, and despicable chore.

An insane expectation? First, I had try to get into the mind of the average 6th grader (OMG). What was going on inside that brain, overstimulated as it was by the infinite digital excitements of gaming and Internet social networks? Why did they love reading Harry Potter and love texting and emailing, but hate classroom writing assignments?

I took stock of my prior knowledge. As a professional who spent thirty-two years working in the public schools as a speech-language pathologist, I knew a few critical facts:

• While human speech--talking--is a hugely complex but natural process generally mastered by the age of three or so, writing is not.
• No, writing is a hugely complex language skill that is not acquired without intense, long-term instruction in the correct use of its seemingly endless, persnickety, idiotic, and stupid conventions; it is, in fact, an unnatural or "overlayed" skill.
• Humans are gregarious, social creatures and anything that feeds into and supports that social gregariousness will tend to develop rapidly and even joyfully, e.g. talking to friends, or exchanging blips of friendly chatter on FaceBook or Twitter. And, better yet, when writing on these social networks, those persnickety, idiotic, and dumb grammatical rules can be officially ignored thus making the experience even more joyful.
• Classroom room writing assignments that are not related to socializing and which require the exacting use of grammar and spelling rules will be seen as boring, difficult, rotten, dumb, and despicable.

How then, to approach the problem?

• Break up the bad attitudes, confound the resistance, make them drop their guards by bringing in a "real" published author. It will be helpful if this author has had lots of experience presenting dog-and-pony shows in front of large groups of middle schoolers and is loud and enthusiastic and has had some (bad) acting experience.
• This author will then read a little from his books and answer questions about being a writer. Surprisingly for kids who hate writing, there will be a lot of very good questions and then he will have the students write a very short beginning of a story and give them the opportunity to come up and read it aloud in front of their classmates and....
• ....teachers will suddenly realize that students actually love writing, they just hate writing assignments that have nothing to do with the excitement of socializing with their friends or making up wild stories, and so....
• ....after the visiting author finishes an entire day of talking to class after class of students and has no voice left and leaves the school dazed and very much in need of a beverage, the teacher can capitalize on the short-lived enthusiasm for writing he has left behind.
• How to do this? Give even the most mundane writing exercise the thrill of the social network by relating it to important things in their lives and then encourage them to come up into the "author's chair" in front of the class, and read part of what they have written.
• Do this on a regular, weekly basis, and with luck and skillful, underhanded, sneaky, pedagogical manipulations, the enjoyment of this type of writing will generalize to other more academic writing assignments.
• And that is the key to this process: If students have an enjoyable writing experience once a week, the skills aquired and the improved attitude will impact other writing assignments and they won't even notice it.

I've done this quite a few times and it does seem to work. As you can imagine, the onus then falls on the poor language arts teacher to keep the enthusiasm going. Writing an essay on, say, Benjamin Franklin, is not seen as quite as enticing a project as emailing a friend. But why not? In fact, why not have them email a friend about Benjamin Franklin. He was not exactly a boring guy and having students find the fun and funny or even scary things he did and let them write report it in prose that uses words in a creative, off-beat way can help keep the enthusiasm for writing alive.

In the end, as they mature, students must learn that some writing assigments are just going to be boring. There is no way around it. It's life. Get the job done and get over it. Still, I have found that in most writing assignments, there is room for a little creative fun with words and language and if we can pass this along to our students, it can have a big impact on their education and, eventually, on their careers.



What I Learned About Writing Whilst in Chicago: The Penny Dreadfuls are Back in Style

Playing the Blues at Buddy Guy's Lounge: What does this great Chicago Blues musician have in common with a great writer?

I'm just back from Chicago where I was a writer/tourist. One doesn't mind being a writer in Chicago--or any place else for that matter--but one hates being a tourist because of the bad reputation tourists have for wearing funny clothes, and being sweaty, cheap, shallow, and ignorant.

Picture your classic thirty-something couple. They are wearing shorts and flowered shirts which, by 1:00 in the afternoon, they have sweated through. He is swinging his big camera around like a bazooka while their three children are dragging along and complaining loudly because their bellys are full of greasy fries and ketchup and they really need naps or to be in front of a television set.

Observed on the promenade along  Lake Shore Drive in Chicago last week:

Mother to her 4-year-old son: "David, stop doing that and come here. David, I'm going to count to three. David, one (long, hopeful pause), two (longer pause), three. "DAVID! STOPPING DOING THAT AND COME HERE!"

There was relief from the Great American Summer Vacationers, however. I found it in Legend, Chicago Blues great Buddy Guy's restaurant, lounge, and blues heaven. It happened to be right across the street from my hotel and you can go there for lunch and hear great blues or go there at night, eat dinner, and hear great blues. This is no dangerous dive, either. It's clean (very clean), well stocked, and well ordered. Cajun-style food is mostly served, and the patrons are respectful and serious about their music.

I don't carry a bazooka camera. I use a Nikon CoolPix that slides in and out of my pocket, no bigger than a fat credit card, and I got this picture of a musician playing great that night and that got me to wondering. How did he get so damned good?

The guitar was, quite literally, an extention of his body and so an extention of his mind, and so an extention of the very soul of his music. He never had to look down to find a chord. His fingers danced along the fret board jitter-bug fast, finding the precise place on the right string without any apparent effort. And he did this in perfect harmony with the guitarist who was playing next to him and in perfect rhythm with the drummer.

And that's what got me worried. Watching him got me thinking about something in the brave new world of fiction writing: Internet self publishing. Could this muscian have possibly decided to become a blues guitarist six months ago and get up and do what he was now doing? This wonderful muscial magic?

Of course not. What this guy was doing took years and years and years and years of persistent, daily, grinding hard work. And then before he was allowed get up on that stage, he had to audition before a very, very choosy, persnikkety, and judgemental expert in blues music that was not his mother.

My take on it is this: writing that is worth reading is just as difficult to produce as music that is worth listening to. But what is happening today in fiction writing is that people can--by the millions--publish whatever they write without having practiced and without having auditioned in front of anyone at all, even their mothers. Amazon.com is filled with such stuff and the selective reader must sort it all out by looking at the publisher before he buys. Published by CreateSpace? Be suspicious. Anyone can do that. 99-cent ebooks on Kindle? Buyer beware. The old Britsh Penny Dreadfuls are back.

So it worries me. If you would be a serious writer, you must be like a serious musician--pay your dues and learn to play. It takes many years to acquire the skills to make wonderful music with words. I suppose the great reading Internet public will sift through it all and in the end, the great writers will float to the top of that infinite slush pile. But until then, how are you to know that what you sent your 99 cents for is worth even a penny--and that's dreadful. 

Now that my rant is over, here are some fun and/or instructive quotes by writers who made wonderul music with words.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I’d type a little faster.
                                                         Isaac Asimov

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
                                                         Walter Bagehot

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed.
                                                           Sophy Burnham

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
                                                           Lord Byron

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
                                                          Truman Capote

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
                                                          Truman Capote

Practice, practice, practice writing. Writing is a craft that requires both talent and acquired skills. You learn by doing, by making mistakes and then seeing where you went wrong.
                                                          Jeffrey A. Carver

Write from the soul, not from some notion what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.
                                                          Jeffrey A. Carver

The pen is the tongue of the mind.
                                                          Miguel de Cervantes

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
                                                          Winston Churchill

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
                          Cicero Roman author, orator, & politician (106 BC - 43 BC)

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.
                                             Hart Crane, American Poet (1899-1932)

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
                                             John Dos Passos

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.          
                                            Annie Dillard

In good writing, words become one with things.
                                            Ralph Waldo Emerson

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
                                           William Faulkner

Writers aren't exactly people.... they're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
                                           F. Scott Fitzgerald

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
                                           F. Scott Fitzgerald

Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. (Translation from French)
                                           Gustave Flaubert

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
                                           Benjamin Franklin

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.
                                           Kahlil Gibran

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.
                                           Allen Ginsberg

If any man wishes to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
                                          Goethe

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power . . .
                                          Louise Gluck

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.
                                         Anthony Hope Hawkins

Easy reading is damned hard writing.
                                        Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man."
                                        Heidegger (from "Building Dwelling Thinking", 1951)

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.
                                        Ernest Hemingway

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
                                        Ernest Hemingway

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.
                                        Ernest Hemingway

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.
                                        Ernest Hemingway

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
                                       Doris Lessing

I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire.
                                       Gordon Lish



I'm in Oz. No, Really, I'm in Oz.

Chicago skyline from Chicago River: a truly magnificent "smelly onion"

“Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.”

                                                                                Frank Lloyd Wright

“I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.”
                                                                              Henry Louis Mencken

"...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."
    Edgar Rice Burroughs, Chicago native, on deciding to become a writer



I used to worship at the alter of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Tarzan books got me swinging on backyard vines and wrestling with imaginary gorillas before I was eight years old. Edgar was born in Chicago and he would probably be considered the least of the famous writers produced by this city, writers that include Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, and Saul Bellow.
 
So, her I am, too, a writer wallowing in one of the world's great cities, trying hard not to feel like a golly-whiz bumpkin just off the farm amidst this grand skyline. But, golly whiz, one does get a crick in the neck the first few days here from looking up--up, up, up, up, and all around. It does stagger the faculties, this Oz of glass and steel that seem to emerge directly from the blue water of ocean-lake Michigan.
 
 

So, I figured, this fascination with the improbable constructions of man (and a woman architect, too) will pass. Give it time. Take your rubber-neck pictures, wander the streets gawking, take the Chicago River architecture tour (the poor docent was going hoarse trying to tell us everything as the boat steamed along). After a day or two, you'll be like Saul Bellow want to go and die in Vermont.
 
It's now day three and I'm about to finish this blog entry and head out again. Maybe today as I cross Michigan Ave. to the Art Institute of Chicago for another few hours of enthusiastic shuffling and staring, shuffling and staring, I'll be able to stifle the thus-far irrepressible urge to look up. Tomorrow I'll be able be like travel writer Paul Theroux and be hard and cynical and grumpy and write about the actual writers who came from this town. Or maybe about the food, or the wonderful, conversation-stopping rattle and roar of the elevated railway, or the lovely young women dressed so fetchingly in their summer-in-the-city minimals.
 

Multitasking Can Ruin Your Writing: Frankie say Relax, Don't Do It

What distractions plagued Shakespeare while he penned Hamlet?

Multitasking allows you to screw up several things at once.

                                                                     Internet wisdom


Every morning, at my own choosing, I enter a multitasking hell scape.

To wit: I get up, make a cup of coffee, grab a breakfast bar, head into my cave, sit back in my recliner, and get the day going. It isn't hard to multitask eating, drinking coffee, and reading/writing; my mistake is turning on the television.

See, I'm a news junkie; I can't help myself. Those are my friends up there on that 47-inch, High Def, flat screen and they need me as much as I need them. I've been visiting with them for years and for some reason the political prattle they stuff into my brain satisfies an insatiable hunger to know everything and know it now.

And it's not helpful that while Morning Joe and his cronies are chuckling and yelling, accusing and revealing, that across the bottom of the screen runs a continuous stream of yet more information about politics, entertainment, the economy, and sports. And I have a new camera I use on these blogs that I'm trying to figure out this morning and still follow Twitter protocol and what was that first, all-important line of the story I was going to start? Oh, and my editor--what about her? She's had the manuscript for my new novel for two weeks and I haven't heart a thing. Is that the cat crying in the kitchen?

So here I go: My pulse begins to race as my overheating brain follows my twitching, blinking eyes as they dart back and forth, up and down, among the irresistible choices. A bigger-than-life pretty woman towers over me imploring, the stock market took a hit yesterday (Damn, I should have moved those funds.), some drunk, jackass t.v. star killed himself in a traffic accident, all the while, my laptop--on my lap-- beckons with its own images and news that I just can't afford to miss......

Long ago when I was a college student studying human cognition and linguistics and psychology and stuff like that, I was taught that our brains cannot--simply cannot--focus on more than one task at a time. You have one consciousness, one awareness, one you, and that you is very jealous of its grip on your attention.

So, when you multitask, you are in fact forcing your conscious self to flit, with more less efficiency, among the many siren choices. Some of us are good at it, I guess. We can focus, however briefly, on one stimulus, process it, assess it, store in in our long-term retrieval memory banks, and then move ever so quickly on to the next, do the same, move on again. Let's call it flash processing.

But even the best of us, those of us with great flash processing gifts, suffer the consequences of TMI coming at us too fast. Picture Shakespeare, on the other hand, hard at work on Hamlet. What distractions did he have to deal with? A rooster crowing in the court yard? A bucket of slops being poured onto the street from a second floor window? A cockroach nibbling at his breakfast cheese? A bothersome louse picking at his scalp? Minor stuff, I think, compared to the modern misery of this screeching, pounding, flickering digital age. No wonder he produced the most wonderful literature, and with a quill pen and a pot of ink at that.

So, summoning all my resources and having given the pundits their due, I gratefully, guiltily, hit the off button on the remote. I feed the insistent cat, get a third cup of coffee, retrieve my second breakfast bar from between the arm of the recliner and the seat cushion, and settle in to--write this blog.

Blogs, Bloogs, Bleegs: How to Avoid Chatty, Hasty, Illiterate Blogging Babble

....I think "blog-like" is a disparaging term. I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn't seem to have any literary merit at all. It's a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.

                                                                                        Writer Paul Theroux


Whew, it seems poor, famously cranky Mr. Theroux got upset when an interviewer said his latest book The Tao of Travel, seemed "blog-like." His book is, of course, anything but hasty and illiterate. All his books are well-considered acts and he has become justly famous (and rich) because of his carefully constructed, thoughtful prose. As a fellow traveler and a fellow writer, he is one of my favorite reads. Paul Theroux is the real deal. Read his many published works and weep, ye struggling scribblers.

And his criticism of blogs and blogging is spot on, too. Just scan through a couple. In fact, I'll do that now. Here is a snippet from a blog by a hopeful writer named Lucy Ann:

It has been a while since I've actually written something. I have done lots of planning, lots of rewriting, but not a lot of the 'creating' recently. So that's something I am trying to get my head back into. I think Matti and Dorcas are my main priorities right now, though I do need to write a new short story too. I have a lot of work to do, but I'm trying not to let that feeling of being under pressure and needing to rush consume me again. Trying to take it one piece at a time.

Yes, this is chatty, hasty babbling from a young mother who is, sadly, too preoccupied by her children to get any real writing done. That's the purpose, the goal of her blog--to chat about her writing, but we readers of blogs really don't care about her. Not yet. Of course, if we had found this babbling in an old yellowed journal in some musty attic in England and discovered it belonged to, say, George Eliot, we wouldn't be so eager to dismiss it.

Here is another snippet from another blog chosen at random:

Finishing The Ale Boy’s Feast was a moment of disappointment, not for the fact that I didn’t like the ending, quite the contrary. I enjoyed the ending, and loved the balance of both mystery and resolution. But it was a disappointment that the story has come to its end, in a sense. The story obviously, goes on. But our reading of it has reached its end....

This is blatantly babbly. The writer perhaps should have spend a little more time tightening it up his review of this book and trying to dig a little deeper into things so the reader could learn something, maybe enjoy some pithy or humorous insight into reading and/or writing. A little more thought, perhaps? A lot more thought, actually.

And here, just the next click away on the next blog, I found this by a blogger who describes herself as an atheist, lefty, mother, and someone who writes about whatever comes into her mind:

I was thinking about the things (memories/tastes) that a person can give you in life, some of them are small and some of them are large. Some of it good and some of it not so much.

Someone important in my early life died recently and I have a sort of collage in my head of what he meant to me. The trivial and upbeat of which I will be sharing.

A minor interest in keeping coldwater fish, a repulsion from eating fish (or indeed any seafood ever), a love of the 'World's Strongest Man' and the music of Johnny Cash.

 And finally a rainbow. On the evening I drove away from the hospital there was this fantastic, vivid, perfect semi-circular rainbow. The best I've ever seen. I drove away wondering if it was the last time I'd see him and if I'd always now think about him in connection to rainbows. I don't know whether the latter is true, but the former was, it was the last time.

So, I guess Mr. Theroux annoyance was justified. If this random sampling of blogs is any indication of the state of the blogosphere, to have one's new book compared to it would be enough to make a serious writer of prose turn purple and maybe get up and kick something, perhaps the interviewer: "You man now leave. This interview is over and don't let the door...."

As for this blogger, and that would be me, who is also a writer of novels and short stories, I hope I am holding my own somewhere up above the chattering, babbling, illiterate class. I do this by:

1. Spending time on my blogs, sometimes hours. I write, re-write, reconsider, re-write, consider yet again, and re-write.

2. I publish the blog because knowing it is out there traveling around the world makes me anxious about it's quality and that makes me reconsider what I wrote yet again.

3. I think about it for the next day or two, sometimes dream about it, sometimes waking up with a start: "Good grief, what the hell was I thinking." Or maybe, and better, a brilliant epiphany: "Ha! That's wonderful. Why didn't I think of that sooner?"

4. Armed with such nocturnal insight, I get up, log on, log in, re-write.

5. I feel free to return to the last blog, or any previous blog written during the past six years, any time at all, and revising, re-writing, or even deleting stuff that suddenly seems silly, shallow, blabbing, illiterate, or shallow.

In the end, then, we can show the great Mr. Theroux that blogging can be literate, thoughtful, well written,or dare I say, even profound. We need only take our time and think and write and think and re-write and think again and re-write again and yet again and again until the babbling and chatter is transformed into something worth reading.

Why Being a Writer is Being Like the Buddha and/or Donald Trump

Anyone who goes into travel writing in order to become rich or famous or feted is courting disappointment; anyone in search of huge inner wealth (and challenge and stimulation) should be richly rewarded. Pico Iyer, travel writer, novelist

I think Pico Iyer is probably richer than you and I. He says he doesn't travel anymore, spends lots of time in meditation, and doesn't care about having lots of cash, so it might be piling up around him. He is certainly more famous. And he's a writer. So what gives, Pico, with the advise do to something else if you want to be either rich or famous? Why do some people who have become rich and famous at something tell the rest of us not to think we'll get rich and famous doing what they are doing?

I'm considering writers as travelers and travelers as writers, as interchangeable persons here, from a philosophical viewpoint, though Iyer is specifically referring to people who write about traveling. And in that context, I think the point of Mr. Iyer's advise, as I understand he has, as do I, an affection for Buddhism, is why the hell would you want to be rich or famous anyway? Maybe his point is that to be rich is to be spoiled and to be famous is to lose the precious invisibility that is the writer/traveler's entre into the real world. To be rich and famous is to miss the purpose of life, which is to attain true understanding; that is to say, enlightenment.

So Iyer says to write out of love. It is the inner wealth that is important. I can understand that. Most writers make precious little money by way of their scribbling and equal amounts of fame. But if you are passionate about writing, and dedicated to it, and devoted, and love doing it very much, you are living the life you should be living regardless of your financial gains or ego rewards.

I embrace this philosophy. It's such a comfort, so reasonable and rational an approach. Still, I'm afraid I can't deny that at the first smell of possible financial gain and the announcement that the literary prize was mine and mine alone, not his, not hers, ha! how the blood is fired, how the heart smashes itself against the ribs, how the body swoons, and the skin erupts in goose bumps and the call to Mother is made immediately.

So, the lovely truth about writing seems to be this: If we write and write and write and fail to become rich and famous, we were still writing and so we were building up great inner wealth and were actually successful. If we write and write and write and indeed become famous and commensurately rich, we will have accomplished both material gains and inner riches. You can take them to the bank and then take the rest of the day off. I think I'll go and do that now.