Guests start to arrive for the dinner party. They all received invitations asking them to bring their knowledge of writing and a side dish. First Anne Lamott, author of "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life" knock on the door, she brought a vinegar salad along with a copy of her essay and a notebook. She sits down at the table as the next person arrives. In through the door walks Ray Bradbury, the man who wrote “Zen in the Art of Writing” he also has a copy of his work, along with some note cards and a breadbasket, plus candle as a gift to the host. We sit down to the table in silence as we wait for the last guest to show up… One minute… Five minutes… Ten minutes… The doorbell rings, Maria Popova, the creator of “The Daily Routines of Great Writers” appears at the door, along with E. B. White, Simone de Beauvoir, Don DeLillo, William Gibson and Susan Sontag. They brought vinegar broccoli, meatballs, cannolis, biscotti, wine cookies, and rum cake. They must have thought I’d forget about dessert.
Rebekah: Maria, you brought friends... Maria: For more wisdom from beloved authors! Rebekah: Okay, well welcome everybody! Anne: So, what’s this about you needing us to bring our knowledge of writing with us? Rebekah: Yes, I was going to get to that, but grace first. We thank the heavenly father for the food, provisions, and company. Rebekah: Dig in. Everybody stuffs their plates with ravioli and gnocchi. Rebekah: So, clarification time, in my writing class we’ve talked a bit about writing process, and how we can improve, but I always get stuck on the motivation to write one thing or the other. I know how I want to go about it, but I have ten different directions that I can go and they all sound great. Other times I just have no idea what I’m trying to convey. William: Generally, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. Rebekah: That’s true, but it’s all in the wording of things. Notice, you just said generally, I’m talking about the exceptions, what do you do when trying to get started up? Ray: Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs. Through those years I began to make lists... Maria: Simply notes. Ray: ...To put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations, finally, the caused my better stuff to surface. I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper. Anne: Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. What I’ve learned to do… is quiet the voices in my head. Ray: Well, if you are a writer, or would hope to be one, similar lists, dredged out of the lopside of your brain, might well help you discover you. My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life. Maria: Ernest Hemingway, who famously wrote standing, approaches his craft with equal parts poeticism and pragmatism. Rebekah: What about those times you have the slightest idea of what you want to do, and you can feel it trying to burst out of you but it just won’t come, then when you try to force it out you lose it. There is such a feeling of disappointment, and you never get the idea back and if you do, it’s way too late to use it. What do you do then? Especially when you have to move on and yet you are discouraged by your work because you can tell it isn’t as great as your other idea would have been. How do you go about the confidence to not only continue on, but know that your newer work also has a shot at success? Susan: I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. E. B. : A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper. Don: A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. To break the spell I look at a photograph… A great photograph sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tóín. Ray: Admired by some and criticized by many, I was a “people” writer. We can certainly see now, can’t we, that it is the personal observation, the odd fancy, the strange conceit, that pays off. The last person finishes their meal, stands up, and gathered everybody’s plates. E.B. then walks into the kitchen and begins to do the dishes. Everybody votes to continue the conversation and wait a while before bringing out dessert. Ray: A series of nouns, some with rare adjectives, which described a territory unknown,an undiscovered country, part of it Death, the rest Life. If I had not made up these prescriptions for Discovery I would never have become the jackdaw archaeologist that I am. Did I write stories based on every single noun in my pages and pages of lists? Not all. But most. Rebekah: So then, you truly accredit all of your writing achievements to your lists? We could all tell this wasn’t as much of a question to be answered by them, as much as it was me making sure I had all of it in my head. Anne: People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published, and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all of the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much...One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, you do—you can either type or kill yourself.” At this point E.B. walks back into the room with the desserts and clean dishes. Most everyone goes for the rum cake, but I head straight for the cannolis. Anne: So I’d start typing without reining myself in. It was almost just typing. just making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible. I’d write a lead paragraph that was a whole page, even though the entire review could only be three pages long, and then I’d start writing up descriptions of the food, one dish at a time, bird by bird, and the critics would be sitting on my shoulders, commenting like cartoon characters. Rebekah: Quick question, because I know you all have to leave soon. How do you go about time management? Or even just avoiding wasted time? Ray: I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. Rebekah: Okay… (That really didn’t help, I think to myself) We all stand up and walk to the door. Ray: I leave you now at the bottom of your own stair, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pen, and a list to be made. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness. Your own Thing stands waiting ‘way up there in the attic shadows. If you speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page… Your thing at the top of your stairs in your own private night...may well come down.
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Dr. Mangini not only asked us why do we write, but what is our writing process? Our required reading material included “How Can You Create Fiction When Reality Comes to Call?” by Carolyn Chute, and “6 Ways to Be a Hemingway-Level Productive Badass” by Drake Baer.
Please excuse my use of a curse word, I was required to use it due to the title of the essay. In my previous English class, I was the teacher's pet, and if you’d met my classmates, it wouldn’t be hard to understand. Even just by showing up to class, I earned myself an A, literally, I’m pretty sure there were three papers that I never even turned in, and I managed to get A’s on all of them. Now don’t get me wrong, I was a very good student, I turned my work in on time, I marked my papers -- The class required us to underline and mark strong verbs, quality adjectives, adverbs, who/which clauses, what we called a www.buuba.asia clause, and vocabulary words -- and, I’m naturally strong as a writer for my age and grade, hopefully it stays that way now that I’m a week into being fifteen and on my second week of college. Anyway, back from my rabbit trail, my writing process usually includes a lot of procrastination, and way too much time spent on ‘sentence dress-ups’. I may have also tried to fit every vocabulary word ever in my papers because we earned one extra point on our grade for every vocabulary word used in our paper. I mean we were required you use three, but after that each one earned a grade point. I believe that a new year is a new start though, and I believe that there is room for me to become a much better writer than I already am. I have definitely become lazy over the summer, I’m barely dressing up my sentences, I’m not using special openers, and I am not including any of my vocabulary words from past years. I have a few ideas on what I could do to improve my writing, but even they could use some work and improvement. So here’s what I decided on.
Basically, there are tons of things I can do to help make sure I do my work to the best of my ability, I just have to make sure I look back on these ideas and be sure to utilize all of the opportunities I have to do my work and to help it out. So yeah, I’m not perfect, and I definitely have room to improve my writing, I just have to have a push in the right direction. |
Rebekah W
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