Writers' Routines

Semi-Late Bloomer: Alice Munro

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:41:00 -0800

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 time. ”I had small children, I didn’t have any help. Some of this was before the days of automatic washing machines, if you can actually believe it. There was no way I could get that kind of time.” As a young author taking care of three small children, Munro learned to write in the slivers of time she had, churning out stories during children’s nap times, in between feedings, as dinners baked in the oven. It took her nearly twenty years to put together the stories for her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968 when Munro was thirty-seven.

“William Maxwell’s my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. All short story writers say Chekhov, but really, he was terribly important to me. When I was in my twenties, I read Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty. Eudora Welty held my greatest admiration. But I read almost everybody in my twenties, as people do. I felt it necessary. When I first started to write I wrote imitative stories, the way everybody does.”

Ned Hepburn

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:22:00 -0800

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 pay. It really is just about getting that first step. Once you have a few articles online, you can then start emailing editors “hey, my name is ____, I have this and this online, I’d love to pitch you these ideas”, etc.

I’ve just been very, very persistent in emailing people. A couple days ago I sent out, what, 20 emails? To pitch one article. And two people replied. One person said no. The other said maybe. It is what it is. You need a thick skin. And probably another source of income. It’s a persistence game….Learn how to write shorter emails, too. Editors don’t have time to read a 350-word pitch.

I used to think it was incredibly romantic to write into the wee hours of the night, often while drinking, because that’s what I thought my heroes (Thompson and Hemingway in particular) did. But I started writing in the morning, with breakfast (toast, fruit, coffee), and I found that was when I had the clearest thoughts. A lot of it has to do with timing, finding out what time of the day works best for you.

Just get in there and do it. You’ll mess up, and by the nature of the job, you’ll mess up in front of people. But that’s half the fun. Laugh it off and try again. Never stop trying.

http://nedhepburn.tumblr.com/

Vladimir Nabokov

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:20:00 -0800

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 flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.”

Index cards were like his laptop and text editor: portable, in that he could write in the car while his wife drove him across the Western US on butterfly expeditions, and easily editable, because their order could be reshuffled. They also allowed him to write his novels non-linearly, middle last. Nabokov also preferred to write standing up. -wikipedia

LATE BLOOMERS: Raymond Chandler

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:00:52 -0800

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 strung tennis rackets, picked fruit and endured a time of scrimping and saving. By 1931, at age 43, he had become a highly paid vice president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate, but a year later, his alcoholism, absenteeism, promiscuity with female employees and threatened suicides contributed to his being fired. Chandler turned to writing to make a living, teaching himself to write pulp fiction. He published his first short story at 45, and his first novel, The Big Sleep, at 51. -wikipedia

“The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at the least, when a professional writer doesn’t do anything but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. But he is not to do any other thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines. Two very simple rules, a: you don’t have to write. b: you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.” -Raymond Chandler

Hunter S. Thompson

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 04:04:00 -0800

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.

Wes Anderson

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:42:14 -0800

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 get things done.

Gabriela Mistral (first female lit nobel prize winner)

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:30:00 -0800

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 of sky: that which Chile gave to me with all blueness, Europe gives scribbled with clouds. My mood improves if I positively direct my old eyes and gaze at a mass of trees.

I always have 4 or 6 sharp pencils by my side because I am quite lazy. I revise more than people can believe. I like to write in a neat room, although I am a very disorganized person.

Writing tends to cheer me; it always soothes my spirit and blesses me with the gift of an innocent, tender, child-like day. It is the sensation of having spent a few hours in my homeland, with my customs, free whims, my total freedom.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:55:07 -0800

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 state of mind. In a certain sense, I think I am writing when I’m not writing, hoping that the little marvelous, gluttonous machine, the brain, is aligned with the universe. It seems I’m always striving for a line or image that makes me laugh or ask, Damn, where did that come from? Surprise is the fuel that drives the engine.

I write in longhand. I believe the gesture triggers a connection between the brain and the hands where possibility extends the way when one works in carpentry, the body present as the mind drifts in and out of attention and meditation. The banging rhythm of the hammer, or the push-pull of a handsaw, these physical gestures call awake the cadence of being in the world.

I write in a disorganized fashion on random pages of a notebook, sometimes in a shorthand I invented. At times jazz plays in the background—Sonny Rollins, Miles, Bird, Trane. Other times I crave extreme silence. What leads me is emotional, or psychological, or visceral, or sometimes just the language itself, and I don’t wish to control it. Because I believe embracing freedom is essential for the poet.

Stephen Hawking

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:26:00 -0800

“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.

‘At first I became depressed. I seemed to be getting worse pretty rapidly. There didn’t seem any point working on my PhD because I didn’t know if I would live long enough to finish it. But then the condition developed more slowly and I began to make progress in my work. After my expectations had been reduced to zero, every new day became a bonus and I began to appreciate everything I did have. I began to work hard and I enjoyed it.”

—-

It’s so interesting to learn that Hawking had been a lazy, unmotivated student, and he only became productive after his ‘expectations [were] reduced to zero.’

what is the theme for this blog

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:23:54 -0800

haha it’s evolving. it started as writer’s daily routines, but now I just post anything I find inspiring about writing and being productive.

James Cameron

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 04:27:00 -0800

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 mannequins, forcing them to move and to walk. Slowly their movements become more human. The characters begin to say things in their own words.

The curve inflects upward. The pace increases. By the end of this period I’m writing ten pages a day. The curve becomes almost vertical as the thing seems to come alive. I become a witness only, a court reporter getting it down as fast as I can.

James Franco

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 04:02:00 -0800

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 myself. But I learned a secret. People think that when you’re the star of a film, your time must be chock-full with endless minutia—appearances, conversations, getting “into character,” and so on.

But when you’re the star, you end up just sitting around a lot. For a single shot to take place, for instance, a whole series of organized events have to be set in motion: The 3D crew has to gauge the shot, the cinematographer has to line up the camera, the lighting crew has to arrange its lights and shades, the set has to be rearranged or otherwise moved into place, the wardrobe and hair departments have to prepare the actors—and through all of this, the actor just sits and waits.

In fact, actors will often sit and wait so for so long that “body doubles” will sometimes be hired just to sit and wait in the appropriate place for the actors. So when you see James’s character with his arm trapped under a rock in 127 Hours, what you don’t see is that there was an assigned reading under the rock with it. When he’s playfully wrestling with a genetically-enhanced chimpanzee in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, just off to the right of the shot was a stack of books.

The truth is, if you’re an A-list Hollywood star like James Franco, and are willing to put the time into earning a Ph.D, you may actually have more time to read than many of your colleagues. Heck, you don’t even have to worry about the grocery shopping, laundry, and other sundry tasks that every other poor graduate student in the country has to worry about. After visiting Detroit, the thing I found myself wondering was not “How does James do it?” but rather “Why aren’t more Hollywood actors earning Ph.Ds?”

I’m no longer surprised, then, when James comes online for our chat and has not only done the assigned reading, but gone ahead and read a few extra texts as well, watched a few extra films, seen the DVD “special features,” and is prepared with several written pages on what we’re studying. So while a lot of actors turn to knitting, James Franco is becoming a scholar.”

Steve Martin

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:57:00 -0800

“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 review and thought, You know what? I wrote a play and he wrote a review and that’s the difference between us. And I was never bothered by it again.

“I don’t watch myself generally. I do something, see it once, and then I’ll probably never see it again unless it’s an accident. It’s spooky to look at yourself, because you are never quite what you think you are. And you are never as good looking as the person you are acting with, or something like that. So I learned to stay away from it because it was giving me more negative feelings than positive ones.”

“You have to be kind of informed and naive at the same time. You have to be naive about how badly you are doing because if you were smart about it, you would quit. So the most difficult thing was to have perseverance.” -Steve Martin

—-

I like the vibes in these responses. Like, his consistent, deliberate efforts at averting self-doubt and nurturing a positive outlook. It seems like a pattern in his way of functioning, like a survival mechanism.

Amy Hempel

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:18:46 -0800

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 what I missed.

Gordon Lish thinks writers don’t succeed because of talent, but because of will: you become a great writer by wanting to be one. Drive, will, character, “all of which Amy has,” Lish says. Hempel remembers how hard it was at the beginning, how she wondered if she should even be writing. (1)

Samuel Beckett: I can’t go on, I’ll go on. I can’t look at it, I’ll stare at it. Hempel: “That’s a very compelling duality. I think that’s something a lot of writers have in common, repulsion and attraction.” (2)

Sources:

1) http://theinnerwriter.com/27/amy-hempel-on-being-a-writer/

2) http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/forty-eight-ways-of-looking-at-amy-hempel-by-dave/

Maya Angelou

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:37:10 -0800

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 anticipation. It is frightening. It is what I am. I sit at a little table and play solitaire. My grandmother used to say when I was young, ‘You know that’s not even on my littlest mind.’ And so I determined that the human being has a big mind and a little mind. The cards occupy my little mind so I can get to the big mind and hear the language.”

By two or three o’clock she packs up her things and returns home. In the evening she often edits, whittling 10 or 12 pages (longhand) down to 3 or 4. And the process continues the next day.

Rejection

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 15:11:00 -0800

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.

Eckhart Tolle

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:36:00 -0800

“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”

David Lynch

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:10:00 -0800

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, but if it doesn’t sit in there long enough, it’s runny,” he said. “At 2:30, you’ve got a chance for it to be just great.” Only 3 perfect milkshakes out of more than 2,500.

“The coffee and the sugar would really get me going. And I would try to catch ideas.” (He doesn’t eat sugar anymore). Mapped out, at least in part, on Bob’s napkins–was Blue Velvet.

K. Silem Mohammad

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:59:56 -0800

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 consciousness.

Leo Babauta (Zenhabits.net)

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:40:00 -0800

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.