Conversations and Connections Writer's Conference

I spent Saturday in Dupont Circle at the Conversations and Connections Writer’s Conference. I can’t praise this even enough.

I’m not much on writing classes or workshops. I’ve attended them and I’ve taught them. But what I always come back to is that you can learn to write, but you can’t be taught to write. While this may seem like an oxymoron, I think experience will bear this out as a truth. You learn to write by writing. A lot. Sure, you need someone to show you how to write sentences, how a dictionary works, what the different verb forms are. But once you’ve got the rudimentaries down, after that it’s all milage.

The keynote speaker was Mary Gaitskill, the National Book Award nominated (and National Book Critic’s Circle Award nominated and PEN/Faulkner nominated) author. She said something along these same lines. She talked about “craft,” a term bandied about by critics and writing teachers, and how “craft” has very little to do with good writing. Because good writing is “art.” We discuss “craft” because it is something we can get our arms around. We can analyze it, explicate it, and talk about it in a relatively concrete way. But it’s hard to talk about “art.” It’s more mysterious. But it is what makes the difference between a great novel and a mediocre one.

I’m not convinced there is any such thing as craft in writing. What, exactly do we mean by “craft?” Whether you say “he said” or “he uttered” or “he exclaimed” (or even “exclaimed Bill”) after a line of dialogue? Is this “craft?” Is the plotting of a story “craft?” (If so, then it’s not a very exacting kind of “craft,” like turning a table leg or mixing mortar the right way so it holds the tessera correctly; there are so many ways to write a story, who can say which is the right way? And very often, a new, innovative way that had never been taught, never even thought of before (Faulkner? Joyce?), is often held up as great art.) So what, exactly, do we mean by “craft?” Maybe how hard you hit the keys with your fingers? How many words-per-minute you type?

Setting my misgivings about writing workshops in general aside, I attended this conference with an open mind. I was rewarded with some great sessions about the business of publishing fiction and poetry, writing a novel, and web publishing. I found these discussions encouraging. The novel session in particular: it was like therapy. I got to hear published novelists talk about the ups and downs of writing a novel, their own set backs, challenges, habits, and strategies very much mirroring my own. It let me know that I haven’t quite gone ‘round the bend just yet, that I’m still in there moving ahead in the right direction.

Some of the participants included Rachel Adams, the editor of Lines and Stars, who published my story A Day Like Any Other in the magazine’s inaugural issue last year. Also in attendance were the folks from Potomac Review, No Tell Motel, Gettysburg Review, and Failbetter.
The best thing about this conference was the bang for the buck. It was for real writers; what struggling writer can actually afford the hundreds (even thousands) of dollars to attend many of the writer’s conferences that have proliferated over the past decade? Conversations and Connects was $45, and it included a free book, a subscription to a literary magazine of your choice (I chose The Gettysburg Review), and a “speed date” with a literary editor. I hope they hold this conference again next year.

A final note: the reason I haven’t kept up my blogging is directly related: I’m about 100 pages into writing a new novel, which sucks up my creative energy more than I thought it would.

Writing, Suffering, and Primo Levi

I have a New Yorker cartoon pinned up in my cubicle. It shows a college student sitting in her Ivy League style dorm writing a letter home: “Dear Mom and Dad:” she writes, “Thanks for the happy childhood. You’ve destroyed any chance I had of becoming a writer.”

I think I had a happy childhood, and a rather easy life up to this point. I live a country with great material wealth. I want for nothing. I am personally more wealthy, in money and possessions, than probably 95% of human beings alive today. (If you’re reading this, you probably are too.) Does this disqualify me from “becoming a write?”

Lately, I’ve found myself reading Primo Levi, the Italian chemist and writer who was an Auschwitz survivor. He wrote some of the best books I’ve ever read.

Was he a good writer because he had good material? Are his books profound because the experiences he had made him profound? I’m not trying to make light of his experience; it's a basic technical question for a writer. Levi had terrible, life altering things happen to him. These experiences fueled his world view, and were fodder for most, and one could argue all, of his writing. If he had grown up in late twentieth century America, would he have written so well? Would he have written at all?

In college, I sat around with other English majors discussing whether you needed to suffer to produce great art. Back then, we agreed that in some way, indeed you did need to suffer, even though I secretly did not want to suffer, ever. You’d have to go through a war, or grow up in horrible poverty, or have been abused, or have some terrible disease, or be a member of an oppressed people to have something legitimate to say.

Today, I come down on this question in approximately the same place: you do need to suffer to produce great art. But I’ve refined my premise: basic human existence in no matter what circumstances provides enough suffering to fuel any creative soul for many lifetimes. No need to wish for or, worse, seek out more suffering.

Hard work, drive, and talent (whatever that is) determine what you fashion out of your experience. If you believe that you don’t have anything to say, then you don’t have anything to say. And if believe you do have something to say (even if you light your cigars with hundred dollar bills and are the picture of health), if you say it truthfully and well, and keep at it, then, indeed, people will discover that you do, indeed, have something legitimate to say.

So I’d like to believe that Primo Levi would have written great books no matter when or how he might have lived. But, selfishly, perhaps, I’m glad he lived when he did and wrote what he did.

Wasted my talent? I made 68 albums! Talent, Writing, and Selling Out

Deanos dilemma (being accused by a dead Homer Simpson in heaven of wasting his talent) is quite frightful for the creative soul. The implication is that Deano sold out.

Most of us wish for such troubles; if you “sell out”, it means that (a) you had talent in the first place, and (b) people wanted to pay you a lot of money.

But what does selling out mean? And can you sell out without being successful?

I’ve attended (and even taught) my share of creative writing workshops. Inevitably, there is always at least one student who wants to know what the secret is of selling his work. He comes to class hoping to find the secret formula, the magic knowledge that will land him on the best seller list. The answer, of course, is quite simple: write good stuff. And then send it out. Repeat.

This need to know the secret formula is all too human, especially when you see what makes it onto the best-seller list. I mean, there has to be magic involved somewhere! This student doesn’t really like the simple answer, so he starts to formulate theories. I can distill all of the theories I’ve heard over the years into one question: “will it sell?” This question taints the rest of the workshop for such students. They’ll make comments about other people’s work such as: “I think your story is written well, but I don’t think there’s a market for it,” or “people are interested in Chinese coin collected right now, so why don’t you make the main character a Chinese coin collector?” or “using those types of words (swear words, 50 cent words, foreign words, etc.) will turn people off, so you should cut them out.”

These theories effect this student’s writing as well. He’ll copy what is selling write now, be it Clancy-like, Grisham-like, or King-like, and he’ll do as good or as bad a job as they do. But he won’t make good writing. What ever you think of these writers, on thing is certain: they didn’t set out to copy anyone or write to the market. They wrote what they wanted to write. But this poor guy spends his time trying to time the market. He might have talent, he might not. Whatever “talent” is (and I’m not sure), it’s not as important as working hard and believing in what you write. How can you believe in what you write when are trying to write for some amorphous “market”, and not for yourself?

The question “will it sell” spells death to creative writing. We all struggle with self-censorship as it is, ranging from “what will my mother think if I write this?” to “will I be labeled a big fat jerk if I say that?”

Are people like Clancy and Grisham and King sell-outs? I’d argue that they didn’t have much talent to squander in the first place, so they aren’t. What about the poor guy in my writing workshop? If he really has something to say and the drive to work hard, but keeps getting stuck on “will it sell,” he’ll never be a sell-out, because he’ll never be successful. He’ll simply waste any talent he has, and lots of time.

I had a creative writing teacher who said “if you really want to make money, go sell drugs. Or play the lottery. Don’t waste your time writing.” Clancy and Grisham and King hit the lottery. But they also wrote what they wanted to write, market be damned. So did Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston, but they didn’t hit the lottery, at least not like the other three did. I’d argue that none of the six are sell outs.

So which of them are good writers, which of them are bad? Which of them used their talent to its full potential, and which of them didn’t? Which of them helped create a better world, and which of them didn’t? I have no idea. The only thing I know for sure is that some of them wrote books I like to read, and some of them didn’t.

It is sweet and decorous to die for ones country

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

Wilfred Owen, 1918 (after Horace)

My grandfather was in France, slogging through muddy trenches, fumbling with his own gas mask, and ultimately being wounded by a German bullet and left for dead around the time Wilfred Owen wrote his decidedly anti-war poem. He was recuperating in England when Owen was killed by German machine gun fire one week before the armistice.

I didn’t know my grandfather well. He was the tall old man with the stiff leg (from the German bullet) that still, 60 years later, would expel puss from time to time, who spoke little but did everything. He didn’t talk much about the great war. Once, when my grandparents were visiting, my brother and I had our toy soldiers ranged across the family room floor. Pap-pap sat near by, watching. After a while, he reached down and moved our tank, which was behind the infantry, to the front. “You always follow your armor,” he told us. I’m sure he had learned more, seen more, experienced more, but that’s all the wisdom about war he chose to impart to his young grandsons.

I often wonder what Pap-pap thought about the necessity of war. Being a man of few words, he wasn’t one to make grand statements or protests. We have a letter to the editor he once wrote, scolding those who illegally parked in handicap spaces around his small town in northern California. He had the credentials to make such a complaint. Beyond that, he lived more than talked. I get the feeling he wanted to leave the horror of war behind.

He was told many times that he was a dead man. At the field hospital in France, the doctors triaged him to the back of the line. He had lost a lot of blood, and seemed a hopeless case. They were surprised to find him still alive later in the day. When he was shipped back to England, he weighed about 90 pounds. He was six feet tall. He wasn’t expected to make it back to America. At home during the depression, the doctors found spots on a chest X-ray: TB. He went away to the mountains near Donegal, Pennsylvania to breath clean air and to die. It turns out what they saw on his lungs were mustard gas scars. I would imagine such things bring existence into clearer perspective.

He didn’t join the Bonus Army’s march on Washington. Instead, he took care of his growing family in western Pennsylvania. He was laid off from Westinghouse during the depression, worked odd jobs and for various relief agenciessix years, was eventually picked up again at Westinghouse and worked there until he retired. Then, in 1960, he started a second life in California, where he and my grandma (and a number of my aunts and uncles) ran a restaurant / gas station / Greyhound Bus stop at Patway Village along U.S. 395. He built a house, drilled wells, laid in an irrigation system and a septic tank, built a garage from the timbers of an old barn. I have fond memories of visiting there, the smell of sage brush and pine trees and my grandmother’s petunias, the fresh strawberries and peas and apricots.

My grandfather didn’t die for his country. Instead, he lived for his country. And for his family. Perhaps it is sweet and decorous to die for one’s family, or perhaps even for ones country. I don’t wish to make light of the experiences of the men and women in the U.S. armed forces, both living and dead, and the sacrifices they have made, because I truly believe it is a noble thing to lay down ones life for another, or for a noble cause. But it seems to me that, as my grandfather did, it is far superior to live for ones country and family.

A Writer’s Washington

Eric Maisel’s 2005 book, A Writer’s Paris: a guided journey for the creative soul, addresses an all too common experience among struggling writers: finding the time and motivation to write. “At home,” Maisel says, “you can keep yourself busy with the rigors and routines of ordinary life and not quite notice that you aren’t writing. There is always another errand to run, another meal to prepare, another corner of the garden to weed. Time is abundant and easily squandered, and also fleeting and hard to grasp. There is always tomorrow, but never today.”

Washington is full of would-be writers and closet novelists who I’m sure can relate. Anyone who has ever tried to squeeze a writing avocation into the slivers of time between a day (or night) job, family, friends, dry cleaning, groceries, and sleep will understand the fleeting nature of abundant time.


Maisel’s antidote is to go to Paris for an extended sabbatical and write. This may seem like a radical solution to what could be summed up as a simple self-discipline problem. But he is quite serious about it, because Paris is, as he says, “home to the entire intellectual history of the West” and “is the place you go when you mean to put your creative life first…Paris is the place to write.”

Maisel also advocates writing in the public spaces of Paris, for three or four hours a day, because, he writes, for “even for the most productive, published authors, three or four hours of writing is often the maximum.” Write in the cafés a la Hemingway, or in the Louvre, or relaxing in the allees of the Tuileries. Between writing stints, he instructs us to stroll around Paris, taking in the sights and sounds of the city of light, allowing us time to contemplate the larger questions of existence, and maybe find the perfect baguette, too. This is the advice I’m now taking, only I’m doing it right here in Washington.

Washington, believe it or not, compares quite favorably to Paris. While there’s no city on earth quite like Paris, Washington holds its own, a world capital full of energy and creativity. Washington boasts a large population of people from every part of the world, who bring with them their cuisines and world views, infusing Washington with a vitality found in few other places. People from all corners of America flock to Washington as well, whether to further their careers or to attend one of the fine universities within the city. And we can’t overlook local Washingtonians, whose families and traditions and neighborhoods inspired the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones, to name just a few. The diverse denizens of Washington make it a cosmopolitan place, not so much a melting pot as a stew pot, rich in culture and thick with ideas.
There are world class museums scattered throughout the city, and embassies that host art shows and concerts. The largest library in the world, the Library of Congress, is a Metro ride away. Wonderful food abounds, from traditional French to soul food to Ethiopian to little places where the cab drivers congregate for lunch. (If cabbies eat there, it’s good food.) Washington has a vibrant theater life, behind only New York and Chicago, and also boasts a world class symphony, opera, and ballet company. Finally, Washington is a wonderfully walkable city, famous for its triangle parks and green squares, its fountained circles and city gardens, its monuments and architecture. Washington, I would argue, has everything to feed a writer’s soul, and his stomach.

Like many other writers I’ve met in Washington, I’ve got a problem of time and motivation. I keep my lap top on a table in my apartment next to a stack of unpaid bills and mail. Next to the table is a chair piled with laundry that needs to be folded, and next to that a stack of unread books has toppled over on the floor. Because writing, by its very nature, is hard, I’ve found it easier to occupy myself with not writing each day after work. I’m not motivated to write in my apartment. But strolling through the mad swirl of happy dogs in Lincoln Park, my spirits rise. Gazing at the city laid out before me from the big window in the Hirshorn Museum or watching the sparrows soar and dive under the great canopy inside the National Building Museum, or simply having a chili dog at Ben’s, and I am positively inspired.
So I’ve taken to writing in different places around the city. One sunny Friday morning in January found me at Murky Coffee near Eastern Market, writing among the cops and law students and hill staffers who filed in and out, buying their morning doses of caffeine. On such days, I’ll eat lunch at the Southwest fish market, buying a sandwich from Captain White’s and eating it with a view of the Washington Channel and the circling gulls. I might find myself under I.M. Pei’s little pyramids at the National Gallery, the tiny, lopsided cousins to the Louvre’s. At a table facing the rushing cascade behind the glass wall that fascinates children who can’t help but try and touch the water, I sip coffee and write. And I’ll stroll the streets of DC, the Hill in all it’s Victorian glory, colonial Georgetown, the European flavor of Upper Dupont, the eclectic energy of Adams Morgan. I’ve tried coffee all over the city, Love Café, Tryst, Open City, Murky, and I’ve got more to try.

My plan seems to be working. I’ve been writing, and, more importantly, I look forward to doing it. I’ve found that I can’t wait until I have more time to write, because I will never have more time than I have right now. And I can’t wait until I’m in the perfect place to write, either. DC may not be Paris, but it’s where I live right now.

A Different Kind of St. Patrick’s Day

For the second year in a row, Solas Nua, the only organization in the United States dedicated to contemporary Irish arts, will be giving away thousands of books by contemporary Irish writers for Irish Book Day. Solas Nua volunteers will be all over the city at places like the E Street Cinema, Eamonn’s in Old Town Alexandria, and the Warehouse Theater at Mt. Vernon Square, along with many other venues. They’ll be giving away books all day long on Saturday, March 17.

Instead of simply getting drunk on green beer (or perhaps along with doing that), celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish by participating in the thousands of years of Irish scholarship and literature: pick up a book or two or three! St. Patrick helped instill a tradition of literacy and scholarship in Ireland that continues to this day. Enjoy a great read this St. Patrick’s Day!

On Writing Well

"You will never write a good book until you have written some bad ones.” George Bernard Shaw

I have an artist friend who says the same thing about painting. It’s about mileage. You’ve got to do a lot of work, gradually improving, until you begin to do truly good work. Doing a lot of work, generally in isolation, with little recognition and only small (but meaningful) intrinsic rewards, for a long time, years usually, is a pretty tall order. That’s why you meet so many people who “always wanted to write a book” or “want to write a book someday,” or sadly, who have given up.

Shaw’s quote brings up a couple of interrelated issues that all writers face: quality and time.

What’s good writing? What criteria can you use to judge whether a piece of writing is good or bad? For publishers, the answer is simple: what ever sells is good. There are lots of writing programs around the country who, we are to assume, will teach us these criteria. (Whether they actually do this is a matter for another posting. Let me say this: with whom did Faulkner “workshop” his writing? And can you imagine Hemingway sitting around a table listening to other people’s opinions about how he handled dialogue or characterization or “theme”?) There are also those who feel that any judgment about whether a book is “good” or not is extremely subjective. But I believe it is much more objective than people want to admit, even when it comes to fiction. Good writing says something important, reveals Truths about existence. So-so writing (and, of course, bad writing) may tell an exciting story, and it may even tell the story well, but that doesn’t make it good writing.

I’m not saying that good writing is didactic. Usually, stories that teach lessons fall into the category of “bad.” Good writing reveals, but doesn’t preach. It isn’t pushy or bombastic or egotistical. The best I can say is, while I can’t specifically define good writing (or bad writing), I know it when I see it.

This understanding of what’s good and what’s not comes from putting in the time. Time writing but also time reading, observing, and thinking. It is the rare writer who has success early on, and even those writers put in the time at some point, because there is no substitute for time. F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise, to great acclaim, soon after graduating from Princeton. But he wrote and read a lot his entire life up to then. Plus, he was probably a genius. But his best work still lay ahead. Most writers hit their strides in their 30s and 40s, and some continue producing quality writing late into their lives, if they haven’t been poisoned by success. (That, too, is a topic for another time.)

Where does this time come from, especially for people who are forced to make a living doing other things, be it bartendering or proof reading or bureaucrating? That, actually, is a deceptively simple question: you make the time. You get up an hour earlier. You write on weekends. You write in the evening. You take days off to write. You do what ever it takes. It’s a simple solution, but extremely difficult to implement. These are the problems that every writer faces, especially when it’s easier to meet friends for drinks than face the blank screen again.

I’ve always been of the opinion that you can learn to write, but you can’t be taught how to write. That may seem counter-intuitive. But let’s face it, you learn to write well by writing, just like you learn to hit a tennis ball well by hitting lots and lots of tennis balls. And you have to write a lot. I’ve probably written a million words of fiction so far in my life, and I have one published story to show for it. But I keep going, for reasons unknown to me, ever trying to make “good” writing.

DC’s Newest Literary Magazine

The first issue of Lines & Stars has just hit the web! I highly recommend it. Lines & Stars is a brand new literary magazine devoted to great writing produced right here in DC. The first issue really showcases some great work, a refreshing literary breeze blowing through the city. And I’m not just saying that because I have a story published there (at the bottom of the fiction page).

The editor, Rachel Adams, has done a fantastic job of putting together the primier issue. There are plans to print a “3-D” version as well, which will be available in local book stores. Spread the word, submit your stories and poems, and simply enjoy the writing!

Writing: Sincerity vs. Truth

“For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.” George Orwell

I find it quite surprising that George Orwell said this, the writer who told the “truth” about a lot of things. He lived the truth. He fought in the Spanish civil war against the Fascists, unlike Hemingway who did more meddling than actual fighting, or Henry Miller, who didn’t even show up. How can a writer so associated with telling it like it is (Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia) hold the belief that truth is not as important to a writer as some ephemeral idea like “emotional sincerity”?

The quote comes from Orwell’s 1940 essay “Inside the Whale”, an essay I consider required reading for any aspiring writer. He is actually writing about Henry Miller, the writer now considered to be a rather quaint dabbler in literary smut. Miller refused to be political, and instead wrote from a position of “emotional sincerity,” as Orwell puts it. In fact, good writing depends on “emotional sincerity.” This is what makes Edgar Allen Poe so great, Orwell says; not truth in the literal sense, but a kind of sincerity:

…there exist 'good' writers whose world-view would in any age be recognized as false and silly. Edgar Allan Poe is an example. Poe's outlook is at best a wild romanticism and at worst is not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense. Why is it, then that stories like The Black Cat, The Tell-tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher and so forth, which might very nearly have been written by a lunatic, do not convey a feeling of falsity? Because they are true within a certain framework, they keep the rules of their own peculiar world…

(I love that: “not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense.”)

During the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Orwell further contends that there was a lack of good writing (prose fiction, specifically). This was because most fiction writers were involve in politics in one way or another, too concerned with telling the “truth” about politics. Henry Miller being the exception, of course:

I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney.

Orwell seems to have, shall we say, a grudging respect for this point of view.

The title of the essay, “Inside the Whale,” comes from the story of Jonah; swallowed by a whale, he is protected from what is happening in the outside world, relatively comfortable inside all that warm blubber. However, soon he will be vomited up on the shores of reality, whether he likes it or not. This stems from Orwell’s own peculiar world view: he assumed the world was quickly sliding into fascism, and that people like Miller, apolitical to a fault, would not much longer be able to stay on the sidelines. The ability to stay on the sidelines, however, is what enables great literature to be made in the first place, and why great books are rarely produced by those who vehemently believe in any sort of dogma or doctrine, political, religious, or otherwise. (Although, ironically, Orwell may be an exception.)

Good literature has nothing to do with pushing some point of view. That’s called propaganda. Good literature comes from this idea of emotional sincerity, an engagement in the things that can be known personally, subjectively. It is very hard to write good fiction (or at least get it published) at a time when political orthodoxy, whether right or left, red or blue, fascist or communist, is the order of the day:

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

What are they not frightened of? Sincerely expressing their version of reality, full of angst and emotion and humanity, even if it doesn’t fit the larger orthodoxy of the time.

I’m not sure how to go about this, myself, but I think it has to do with those nagging little voices I hear in my head as I’m writing: “what will people think if you write that? What will your grandmother think of you? Won’t people think you are a leftist/racist/sexist/socialist/capitalist/you-name-it-ist?” etc. These thoughts paralyze the creative writer.

But I think that if we write honestly, sincerely, emotionally, then we begin to approach the larger “truths” of the human condition, which is what literature is all about in the first place.

I plagiarize the old-fashioned way!

I just found out that one of the wittiest things I’ve ever said I actually stole from Robert Benchley. I make no claims that it’s the wittiest thing anyone has ever said, or even the wittiest thing that Benchley ever said, just that it’s probably the wittiest thing I’ve ever said.

A few of us were sitting around one evening, talking politics and semiotics and what-not, over a few bottles of something, and someone made a comment about the two kinds of people there are in the world. I don’t remember now who those two kinds of people were, perhaps “good” and “bad”, or “smart” and “dumb”, but most likely, knowing these half-drunken conversations as I do, it was something like “those who know what it’s like to work for a living” and “those who have just knocked over the water pitcher.”

Seeing how far the discussion had sunk, I slowly and deliberately made the pronouncement: “The way I see it, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t.” My comment killed. Or at least that’s how I remember it.

Just yesterday, I found out that I had stolen my pronouncement from Benchley without even so much as a footnote! I don’t ever remember reading it before. At the time, I thought I had created it out of whole cloth. Which leads me to wonder, how many other of my pronouncements, witty or otherwise, have I pilfered?

For instance, what if it turns out that last Christmas dinner, when I blurted out “God bless us, every one!” at the end of the blessing (which induced gales of familial laughter, even though I was trying to be profound), I was repeating something I might have heard or read somewhere else? What if, when my membership in Skull and Bones was rejected and I sent them a note simply, but haughtily, stating “I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member, anyway!”, that I was actually committing some sort of plagiarism, or at the very least, baring my uncreative soul?

If this were true, it would mean that the wittiest thing I’ve ever come up with would be: “nanny-nanny goo-goo, I got you-you.” And God help me if the provenance of that pithy saying is called into question!

Hemingway on Writing in the Morning

"When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. . . .When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have e made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again..."

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

I used to do this. Actually, before it was light, just as the sun was coming up, in my bedroom in my little house on Oakland Street in Arlington. I need to do this again. It's a good way to write. I felt energized the whole day. That early, I didn't even know what I wrote until I looked at it the next morning. And then, I didn't remember it again because it was so freakin' early! Eventually, I had all these pages of manuscript, good stuff, created by me, but somehow magically. The editing and rewriting I could do in the light of day. But the writing, in wee-hours.

Notes on PEN/Faulkner, Gimmicky Writers, etc...

We went to see E.L. Doctorow on Friday night at the PEN/Faulkner reading hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library. I like the PEN/Faulkner reading series. As it turns out, however, I don’t like E.L. Doctorow’s writing. He’s part of a generation of American writers who are taken very seriously by critics and English professors, and are also commercially successful. Writers like Don DeLillo, Tom Wolf, Tom Robbins, and John Irving. They all suffer from the same problem: they write about stuff that they want us to believe is profound, but when it comes right down to it, is either trite, not insightful, or totally lacking in meaning.
For instance, Doctorow read a short story narrated by a man who had joined a cult. While smoothly written, the story had very little to say. It ends with the cult leader running away with all the cult’s money and the narrator’s wife. Oooooo, cult leaders are immoral hucksters! What a revelation! Never saw THAT coming! The problem, of course, with this conclusion is that, not only doesn't it add anything to humanity’s understanding of the universe, it’s actually, well, wrong. Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Applewhite, all died with their followers. What Doctorow wrote was what all we non-cult-followers wish to believe about cult leaders: they don’t actually believe what they preach; they are simply greedy con artists, when in fact the evidence proves otherwise.

Other examples of what I'm talking about: Tom Wolf makes the earth-shattering revelation in I Am Charlotte Simmons that college-age women HAVE A SOCIAL LIFE! Who knew? No one born in the last 40 years would be shocked by anything that Charlotte does.

Don DeLillo ends the prologue of Mao II with this: “The future belongs to crowds.” This sentence is so utterly devoid of context, concreteness, and even a peripheral relationship with meaning, that one may think that it must therefore be DEEP, so deep that I, with my tiny intellect, just don’t get it. In fact, it’s simply bad writing.

“Gimmicky” is the word I would use to describe all these writers. They pick something that has a particular hold on the popular imagination: cults, gangsters, girls-gone-wild, abortion, hippiedom, and then deliver exactly what their audience expects.

Regarding my own writing: Last week was a good week here at aportablesnack: my work poem was picked up by Wonkette, my post about DC Restaurant week was picked up by The Express, and someone actually posted my poem on Joel Auchenbach’s blog page. (By the way, poems are supposed to be grammatically incorrect!) Plus, I finally recieved a copy of my article about the Capitol City Market that was published on December 13 in the Current Newspapers (Georgetown Current, Dupont Current, Foggy Bottom Current, Northwest Current). Unfortunately, it’s not posted anywhere on-line. And finally my friend arjewtino was picked up by Gridskipper. A precedent setting week!

Book lists and such

Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. - William Faulkner


In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald mentions how he makes lists of everything. He wonders if he’s strange. When I read that, I thought “Wow! I’m not the only weirdo out there!” I make lists of many things: to-do lists, lists of people I know, lists of trips I’ve taken (noting next to each one whether it was by car, plane, train, or a combination), lists of cities where I’ve spent the night.

I used to keep lists of all the books I read in a given year. I’d write down the date, the title, and the author. I don’t know why I did this. I didn’t record what I thought about the book. It was simply an accounting sheet. I averaged 30 to 40 books a year. I sometimes wish that I still kept such a list, but I don’t read as much as I used to. So here’s a list of most of the books that I read this year:

The Coast of Chicago, by Stuart Dybek
Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Monkey Wrench, by Primo Levi
The Families Who Made Rome, by Anthony Majanlahti
The Comedians, by Graham Green
Flappers and Philosophers, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy, by Tommaso Astarita
Kavanagh: A Tale, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A Writer’s Paris, by Eric Maisel

Rereads:
A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
Harvest Moon, by Carl Sandburg
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving

Boy, that’s barely a book a month! How pathetic. New Years Resolution: stop making lists.

Sit Down and Write!

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Thomas Mann


After one whole week of blogging, I find myself creating a blogging persona. This isn’t particularly shocking if you’re a writer; it’s what writing is all about, especially fiction: creating characters.

I also realized that I’m straying a bit from what I said I was creating a blog for in the first place. I wanted to talk about the writing life, and instead I’m just being silly and creative. That’s fine, but I find I’m doing the same thing with my blog that I do with my writing, which is find ways to avoid writing (or blogging about writing).

Of course, this is a trait common to lots of people involved in art. I find lots of excuses to NOT write, like cleaning the house, or going out with friends, or I’ve had a bad day, or I’m not in the mood. There are no tricks for becoming a published writer. But I do know a sure-fired way NOT get published: by NOT writing. I’m pretty good at that. Successful writers all have one thing in common: they never stopped writing. Writing is difficult, especially writing fiction. Anyone I’ve ever met who says writing is fun or easy doesn’t write very good stuff.

This makes the physical act of sitting down to write a struggle. Usually, once I start to write, I like it. And the more I write, the easier it becomes to sit down. But starting a new story, a new book, a new chapter, sometimes even a new day, I feel like I’m gingerly stepping to the end of a high-dive. Do I chicken out and climb back down, or do I stand there, with my arms wrapped around me, shivering? Or do I simply jump off?

Of course, all of this belly-aching (and I’ve got journals full of this stuff) doesn’t change the fact that each day, I simply must sit down and write. And when I think of it that way, it’s rather simple, only four words: sit down and write.

Washington on a Bad Day

Even on a bad day in Washington, when it is raining and traffic is at a stand still all over town, and grumpy bureaucrats are arriving late at every FOB, and my car just got another ticket for being parked on the wrong side of the street, and I received an inexplicable summons via certified mail from some obscure DC office that regulates trash cans that I know will only be resolved after a maddening descent into the Kafkaesque bowels of the DC bureaucracy, even on a day like that, I’m glad I live in Washington.

Washington is not Paris, and certainly it’s nothing like Paris between the wars, when you could pay for drinks with a short story and live for years on what you could make fishing in the Seine. Paris isn’t even like Paris anymore. Maybe Paris is better, but Washington, even on a bad day, is a great place for a writer to live. At least for this writer. I need people around me, traffic noises, art, culture, beauty. I need the LOC, the art museums, the literary readings, the Belgian beer, chili and waffles and collard greens, the liquor stores on every corner. I don’t wish to be cut off in a cul-de-sac where I never see another human being walking past my window. Washington is a human city, both in scale and attitude. I’ve started this blog to explore these kinds of ideas: the writing life, but the writing life in Washington in particular.

People might disagree with me about Washington (or with my views on writing). Good for them. They are right. For them. And I’m right for me. I’d rather be in Washington than anywhere else in the country. (And I’d rather read the books I read and write the way I write than do anything else.) Parking tickets are cheap compared to the slow and steady decay of one’s soul that comes from living anywhere else.

This isn’t really my first blog ever. I did a guest blog for my friend ArJewTino a while back that got picked up by Wonkette, much to ArJewTino’s dismay. That had always been his dream, to get a nod from Wonkette, and I beat him to it. I haven’t followed through on my promises to post reviews of reviews for every restaurant I’ve never been to; there’s so many, it’s a daunting task. But it kind of goes along with the theme of this blog: daunting tasks and snacks. Unfortunately, I think Hemingway was wrong: Paris is not a moveable feast; it's a feast alright, but when you leave, the feast stays there. And Washington is barely a snack, but it's the best I've got.