January 2012
17 posts
17 tags
Semi-Late Bloomer: Alice Munro
Alice Munro, a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize. Generally regarded as one of the world’s foremost writers of fiction. Her reputation as a short-story writer is international. As Cynthia Ozick put it, “our Chekhov.” -wikipedia
Alice Munro never meant to be a short-story writer. She’d aimed for sprawling novels. But when it came down to it, there just wasn’t...
14 tags
Ned Hepburn
Ned Hepburn has worked with/for Interview, Black Book, Vice, MTV news, Thought Catalog, Bust, National Geographic Channel. I wrote to him and asked how he got started as a freelance writer and what’s his writing routine. He wrote back to me!
“Right now, not many people are paying for writing, which is terrible. But the doors are wide open, as long as you don’t mind the shitty...
17 tags
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov wrote most of his novels, including Lolita and Pale Fire, on index cards. His novel Ada, for example, wound up taking over 2000 cards.
In a 1967 Paris Review interview, Nabokov says, “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule is...
25 tags
LATE BLOOMERS: Raymond Chandler
At 20, Chandler became a reporter. He was an unsuccessful journalist, published reviews and continued writing romantic poetry. Accounting for that time he said, “Of course in those days as now there were clever young men who made a decent living as freelancers for the numerous literary weeklies, but I was distinctly not a clever young man. Nor was I at all a happy young man.”
He...
23 tags
Hunter S. Thompson
Do you worry about Plagiarism?
No, I pride myself with having the wisdom and taste to steal from the right people: Conrad, Fitzgerald, the Marquis de Sade, Prescott, Isak Dinesen, Coleridge, Twain, Pee Wee Herman—that swine. I learn from these people. Especially the dead ones.
16 tags
Wes Anderson
Writing on my own is not fun for me. With Life Aquatic, Noah (Baumbach) and I would meet every day at a restaurant before lunch and we’d stay six or seven hours till dinner. We’d make each other laugh. That’s how we got it done….I am surprised because I always think of myself as someone who tries to do a lot of stuff and who is lazy. So I am happy to learn I can actually...
13 tags
Gabriela Mistral (first female lit nobel prize...
I write on my knees, the desk table has never been of any use to me—not in Chile, Paris, or Lisbon. I write during the morning or night. The afternoon has never given me any inspiration; I do not understand the reason for its sterility or lack of desire for me.
I believe that I have never written a verse in a closed room or in a room facing a drab wall of a house. I always seize a piece...
8 tags
Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa wrote back to me! This makes up for being rejected by Leonard Nimoy. Here’s his amazing response about how he writes:
I don’t have to think about writing. I just write. I keep a yellow notepad beside the bed and in the middle of the night or in the early morning I scribble down a word, a few lines, sometimes pages. Writing, for me, is an improvisation on an image or a...
15 tags
Stephen Hawking
“In a moving address, Prof Hawking described how his diagnosis with motor neuron disease at 21 had helped transform him from a gifted but lazy student into one of the world’s most eminent academics.
The professor admitted he had worked for just an hour a day while an undergraduate at Oxford, but said the news of his condition spurred him on to complete his PhD and become an academic.
...
organic-hummus-dip asked: what is the theme for this blog
14 tags
James Cameron
At the beginning of any writing project is the agonizing period of nebulous ideas. Trying to will a world into existence. I circle around it, nibbling at the edges, writing notes [sometimes for years].
Then slowly a change happens. Without warning, it becomes easier to write a scene than to write notes about the scene. I start sticking words in the mouths of characters who are still...
12 tags
James Franco
This is an aside about James Franco that goes along with what Steve Martin was saying about sitting in your trailer a lot.
“I’ve often heard it expressed that he must be a mountebank, since no single person could be doing as many things as he does. How could he possibly be simultaneously reading for a Yale Ph.D and filming a multimillion-dollar motion picture? I’ve wondered the same thing...
14 tags
Steve Martin
“I was very vulnerable to criticism for many years. I could read a bad review and remember it my whole life. One day, in the early ’90s, my play was opening for the third time in Chicago. This free press paper gave it a terrible, terrible review, saying, “It’s horrible this type of play gets put on and keeps other good writers from getting their play put on.” And I looked at the...
16 tags
Amy Hempel
I used to write only at night. All night, with a Walkman on. Did that for the first book. Much of the second book. Now there’s too much I have to get done in the day. You try not to be precious about it. An average day includes around two hours of writing writing, about six miles of dog walking (which also counts as writing), a lot of time on E-mail, a movie, some forensics shows, and CNN to see...
11 tags
Maya Angelou
It begins at 5:30 in the morning. After showering, she leaves the house, preferring to write somewhere else.
“I keep a hotel room. I have everything taken off the walls, and I bring in yellow pads, a Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary, a bible, a deck of cards, crossword puzzles and a bottle of sherry (red wine). When I approach the door, it is with utter apprehension and...
17 tags
Rejection
Mr. Nimoy wishes you good luck with your blog and he thanks you for your interest, but his routine varies greatly and he is unable to comply.
11 tags
Eckhart Tolle
“A summary of how Eckhart Tolle writes:
1. Stillness
2. Awareness of thoughts as they arise
3. Write, or if the thought is not relevant or useful, wait in stillness for the next one”
25 tags
David Lynch
For seven years in the 1980s he ate lunch at Bob’s Big Boy every day, which consisted of cup after cup of coffee and a single chocolate milkshake while scribbling notes on Bob’s napkins. He arrived at Bob’s at precisely 2:30 p.m. each day. The reason: “If you go earlier, at lunchtime, they’re making a lot of chocolate milkshakes. The mixture has to cool in a machine,...
December 2011
7 posts
10 tags
K. Silem Mohammad
Get up, shower, walk to work, buy coffee and breakfast, check email and Facebook, prep for class, teach, hold office hours, banter with colleagues in copy machine room, teach some more, answer emails, look at Facebook, go home (stop at grocery on the way), fix dinner, pour glass of wine, watch shows, talk to girlfriend, check email and Facebook, peer into chasm of own existence, recoil, lose...
7 tags
Leo Babauta (Zenhabits.net)
I wake with a cup of coffee and read. Then I write something — a blog post, a book chapter. That’s my main work for the day. Once that’s done, I take care of smaller things like email and administrative details. Then I take care of my body — I do some kind of workout. Lastly, I spend time with my family.
8 tags
Haruki Murakami
For him that means waking between 4 & 5am to write. After about 5-hours in front of the keyboard (writing or no writing) he runs 10 km. And after that he spends a couple of hours in a record shop thumbing through the jazz section for rare vinyl. Next, he has some free time for hobbies. For him it might be swimming some laps. Then it’s back to his office for a few hours of translating his...
8 tags
Ian Fleming (James Bond novels)
“In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.” -Sebastian Faulks
7 tags
Ben Fountain
“He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job. He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for...
5 tags
Tao Lin
“In the morning, he said, his meal is small, usually including iced coffee, organic fruit, or ‘green juice.’ Then he goes to New York University’s Bobst Library, where he writes for five hours, which, judging by his public web activity, includes a large amount of tweeting and Facebooking. During the rest of the time, Lin said, he’s mostly online in his apartment….I began to think, Here is someone...