What a nude “gesture sketch” class taught writer Rachel Howard. Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one. —Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and …
The paradox of persona—which you is speaking—devils nonfictionists. Especially memoirists and essayists, but apparently fiction writers, too, more than I’d supposed. From Pico Iyer’s superb April 11 “Voices Inside Their Head” column in The New York Times: At its core, writing is about cutting beneath every social expectation to get to the voice you have when no one is listening. It’s about finding something true, the voice that lies beneath all words. But the paradox of writing is that everyone at …
Spirituality, authenticity & Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. — Letters to a Young Poet As a broody kid, growing up in a Florida beach town and grieving my family’s exodus from our farm in Georgia, I found a library book by a guy about his hobby farm. I loved it, probably sensing …
Lee Child: Write What You Feel. Having just featured Lee Child on using questions to propel narrative, I was intrigued with this explication of more of Child’s advice by blogger Wilson K.
William Zinsser affirms a truth: intention trumps craft. A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet In this blog largely about craft, sometimes I must remind myself that intention is more important than craft. That is, the spirit behind the work is at least as important as that which makes it visible. I saw this …
Bonus: Jake Adam York offers a fine minute of writing advice. We’re living in the golden age of essays, proclaims a February 18 essay by Adam Kirsch in New Republic. In “The New Essayists, or the Decline of a Form? The Essay as Reality Television,” Kirsch immediately invokes as an example John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, which in another day, with its roots in magazine pieces and celebrity profiles, might have been labeled journalism—but which, as an exciting hybrid of …
Chronology is useful but hostile to thematic content, the writer says. You can build a structure in such a way that it causes people to want to keep turning pages. A compelling structure in nonfiction can have an attracting effect analogous to a story line in fiction.—John McPhee, in The New Yorker “There’s nothing wrong with a chronological structure,” McPhee explains in a recent New Yorker essay. “On tablets in Babylonia, most pieces were written that way, and nearly all …