Salon.com > Writers on writing

My awful past keeps me from writing

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

This letter is super-long even by my standards. In comparison, the reply is not actually so very long but it is all sort of one long uninterrupted piece, which I hope you will examine structurally and see how I am connecting clauses with semicolons and looping recursions and looping recursions and looping recursions, trying to create an unbroken thread even as it meanders and loops and recurs and recurs and loops and recurs.

Hi Cary.

I'm a big fan of your work. I read all your new advice pieces because, regardless of how I relate to the letter-writer, I always find a ubiquitous nugget of beauty and hope in your responses. When I saw your call for more creativity-related letters, I felt like this was my moment to try and write to you myself.

I'm 28 years old. I've been reading since age 2 and began writing not long after that. I love it with all my heart; it is the craft that defines me. I was determined to be the youngest novelist and be published at age 13, and while I did indeed finish a murder mystery novel (I use the term loosely) by then, of course it was not in any condition to be published. But ambitions for my writing have been high since I can remember. And more than that, no matter what trouble I've faced in my life — and I've faced quite a bit — writing has always been there for me, to save me. But suddenly it's becoming difficult in a new and frankly traumatic way.

How do I start writing poems?

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Hi Cary,

I'm a nonfiction writer who has dabbled in fiction writing over the years. I hope to do more of both, but now I also feel called to write poetry. I enjoy the idea of packing big ideas into small spaces, which is what poetry represents to me. I know there is long-form poetry from "Beowulf" to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," but the more traditional short-form poetry appeals to me. I'm neutral on rhyming poetry, but I think a good poet can make that work without seeming sing-songy.

For now, I'm not necessarily interested in writing for show or exposure, as I am with prose writing. I'm mostly interested in experimenting and flexing my creative muscles in a genre in which I have no experience and thus feel less pressure.

However, I basically don't want to waste my time writing clichés or other crap. Do you have any tips for me? I know it's a balance between being practical by practicing often and letting myself be vulnerable and inspired, but I don't want to go down any side roads that take me to a cul de sac. If I were giving advice to a prose writer, I would offer tips like, your writing will leap off the page if you use active voice, or show, don't tell. Do you have any similar concrete tips for me? Aside from analyzing poetry in school or reading it in the New Yorker, this genre is pretty new for me.

Maurice Sendak on publishing: “Outrageously stupid”

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:54:00 +0000

Maurice Sendak was known not just as a literary icon, but as a larger-than-life curmudgeon who refused "to cater to the bullshit of innocence." The Believer has published a contemplative but hilarious interview with the "Where the Wild Things Are" writer and illustrator, who died last May, in which he opens up about childhood, literature, old age and more.

Sendak on why publishing has become "an outrageously stupid profession":

MS: Well, nobody knows what they’re doing. I wonder if that’s always been true. I think being old is very fortunate right now. I want to get out of this as soon as possible. It’s terrible. And the great days in the 1950s and after the war, when publishing children’s books was youthful and fun… it really was. It’s not just looking back and pretending that it was good. It was good. And now it’s just stupid.

BLVR: Why?

MS: Because of Rupert Murdoch. His name should be what everything is called now.

BLVR: But he publishes you!

MS: Yes! HarperCollins. He owns Harpers. I guess the rest of the world, too. He represents how bad things have become.

Eugenides on Denis Johnson: “Blistering, brilliant”

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 18:01:00 +0000

A short story must be, by definition, short. That’s the trouble with short stories. That’s why they’re so difficult to write.

How do you keep a narrative brief and still have it function as a story? Compared to writing novels, writing short fiction is mainly a question of knowing what to leave out. What you leave in must imply everything that’s missing.

If you’d like to learn how to do this, you’d be well advised to study Denis Johnson’s blisteringly acute “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” In this story — and indeed, in all of the stories in Johnson’s brilliant collection, "Jesus’ Son" — Johnson found a way to leave out the maximum in terms of plot, setting, characterization, and authorial explanation while finding a voice that suggested all these things, a voice whose brokenness is the reason behind the narrative deprivation, and therefore a kind of explanation itself.