Category Archives: working method
The 10,000-hour rule of thumb
Listen, do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell? Closer, let me whisper in your ear . . . —“Do You Want to Know a Secret,” from Please Please Me, 1963 By the time the … Continue reading
Filed under immersion, NOTED, working method
The Beatles were all about this
For Meg The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, … Continue reading
Filed under essay-collage, essay-lyric, music, MY LIFE, NOTED, working method
Bret Lott’s ‘Against Technique’
If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be … Continue reading
Filed under discovery, NOTED, scene, technique, working method
Revising, from the top
Last summer, in Italy, I stood gaping before Michelangelo’s David and reflexively took a photo—no flash, but forgetting that all tourists’ photos of him are banned—and got chastised. Supposedly Michelangelo said he made the immortal statue by just chipping away … Continue reading
Igniting your need for words
From Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing: It doesn’t bother me that the word ‘stone’ appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that ‘wind’ and ‘gray’ appear over and over in … Continue reading
Filed under NOTED, poetry, discovery, emotion, working method, vocabulary
Getting words down & revising them
I can’t remember how I came across a wonderful vimeo video on Writer Unboxed by Yuvi Zalkow on his breakthrough in revising his born-dead novel. Zalkow describes himself on vimeo in his “failed writer series” as a “writer, storyteller, novelist, … Continue reading
Filed under editing, revision, working method
The quotes on my desktop
There are quotes about writing on my desktop. Actually, they’re in a Word file, at the top of a journal I’ve kept for the last year as I produced a fourth version of my memoir. I don’t make journal entries … Continue reading
Filed under Dillard—Saint Annie, MY LIFE, reading, spirituality, working method
Charlotte Roche, Mick Jagger, creativity
Charlotte Roche introduces her interview with Mick Jagger in German, then talks with him in English. Charlotte Roche is the author of Wetlands, a novel, according to The Guardian, that “makes the Vagina Monologues sound tame,” and which has been … Continue reading
Filed under fiction, NOTED, working method
