On Writing

Back when I was a journalism major, William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well was required reading, along with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and the AP Style Guide. I love reading books on writing while procrastinating about writing. I also love reading books and watching documentaries on healthy eating while eating Sour Skittles and frosted Pop Tarts, but that is another story.  It’s a good diversion, rather than actually sitting down and doing the hard part, suffering through plot problems and getting the work done, you can lie to yourself about being productive while reading a book. That’s the trouble with creative endeavors, you just have to sit down and do it; inspiration or not.

In the past, I’ve tried to be what Zinsser called a “citizen of writing.” (Check out his article Life and Work; theamericanscholar.org). I own and have read a lot of books on how to write. I really only recommend three: Bird by Bird; Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott, On Writing; A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, and On Writing Well by Zinsser. All three are worthwhile. I have attended writer’s conferences, but I have found them to be suffocating, snobby and weirdly competitive. Conferences are a lot of talk about trends, marketing, self-publishing, agents and editors. As everyone gets more and more worked up, a quiet panic creeps over me, the kind you get when you have the worst batting average on the team and it looks like you will be taking the last-chance-to-win-the-game at-bat (personal experience, yep). Strike out: inevitable. 

I once took a class at the community college called, Write That Novel! and felt completely ridiculous about it while I did not, in fact, write that novel. I’ve joined writers’ groups with no good result except being bogged down by other people’s ideas about what I should write, and how to revise what I thought was actually just fine. Zinsser says “I do not show my writing to other writers; their agenda is not my agenda.” That succinctly sums up my writers’ group experiences. So much of it felt like talking about the writing we weren’t doing rather than actually writing. The big daddy of getting his writing done, Stephen King, says “In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not the pearl-making seminars with other oysters.” I love that. Zinsser describes himself as a “lone craftsman,” and maybe I’m like that. For Anne Lamott, “becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.” Maybe that kind of becoming conscious has to be done alone. What I like to do is meet my writer friends in coffee shops, preferably Coffee and Comics these days, drink lattes and write in each other’s company, without ever sharing our stuff or asking for critique. A sort of parallel play for writers.

What I love about writing is that it is the craft of making something out of nothing. Sometimes it sucks and sometimes it doesn’t. Jim Carrey says this about his art: “I am in control, I do it, and I’m done. And I go, Oh, something that wasn’t there. Fantastic.”  

We put so much meaning and pressure on this craft of writing. It’s funny. If you want to be a runner you put your shoes on, step out your front door, and run. Nobody tells you that you aren’t a runner yet because you aren’t on the cover of Runner’s World, you don’t make money at it, you aren’t fast enough, you haven’t run enough miles or registered for enough races, or your form is not unique enough. You are a runner because you run. For me, the same applies to writing. Blogging is fun for me because I have the constant, nagging need for an idea, a kernel, a paragraph, a motivation, a connection, a weekly post. And that is a comfortable need.

If you want motivation for writing, check out this advice written by freelancer John Scalzi.

Currently reading: The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley, Skipping Christmas by John Grisham (reread), I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet by Shauna Niequist

Two recent reads I recommend: Foe by Iain Reid and Eat, Drink, Run by Bryony Gordon (did I mention I also like to read books about running while not running)