RE: Burning Words: Podcast Reviews

Come check out my new monthly review column at Metaxu Cafe!

Resolutions Checkup

It's time, once again, to consider my Creative Resolutions to see if I've progressed at all.

...stars indicate scale of success

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1. Refuse new projects that don't further my current goals. Both a strength and a weakness for me. Update: Believe it or not, I've refused a lot of projects lately and still, I'm overwhelmed with extra projects. Just a case of bad timing overall, nothing I could have foreseen.

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2. Eat smart, exercise daily and leave the house every day. Quality of health improves quality of creativity! Update: Not precisely improved in this area, but March always makes me crave my greens, so that's something. Exercise daily? Hasn't quite happened like that, though I've been doing yoga and yardwork. Leave the house every day? Nothing doing these last few weeks, but next week I'm on Spring Break and I'm leaving my Internet at home. Wahoo!

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3. Continue the daily schedule (work, family life, personal life) I started last fall but drop all aspects of creative working at night (save classes and social events like readings). Update: Lots of unexpected work (read: paying) projects mean my schedule's still in transition. That's okay, I'm richer for it anyway, even if I haven't slept as much.

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4. Acknowledge that June, July, August, September, November and December are crazy months and lighten up my schedules and goals then to reflect my lifestyle. Update: This is ridiculous. All months are busy, anymore. This resolution is therefore cast off my list. Begone!

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5. Have more fun! Creative burnout is no fun at all. Update: Okay, I can say that! Family fun, neighborly fun, and more on the horizon.

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6. Work harder at keeping the household organized so that it doesn't cripple my own productivity. Update: Expected Spring Cleaning energy has arrived. I cleaned up my office yesterday and did major clutter patrol over the weekend, among other things. Not a perfectly spotless domicile, but much better.

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7. Read more. Update: Client work makes this hard, but I have been reading and foresee more time for it in the coming weeks.

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8. Manage my media time. Update: Not too bad, though for a short while I had to put email on vacation hold so folks would knock elsewhere for a few days.

49/56 stars. I'd say that's a B+ on your typical grading scale. How did you do?

Writers w/o MFAs; Winterson on the alchemy of reading; Writers' strategies for working through first-draft mysteries

• Here's the link to my recent discussion at Third Place Books in Seattle on achieving a successful creative writing career without an MFA.

• Lauren Elkin offers this wonderful start to a discussion on the alchemy of reading. Of particular interest is the section discussing the virtues of reading other writer's reading diaries (Alberto Manguel's, as one example), which follows on the heels of an observation from Jeannette Winterson which Elkin captures here:

"…that there are far too many books being published these days for anyone to read all of them, and indeed, quite few that are worth reading. How is one to cut a swathe through the literary bracken? The only real way to read, Winterson writes, is to 'follow [your] eccentricities,' wherever they may take you."

However open-minded Winterson appears in this statement, she apparently bristles at the idea of reading other reading diaries, arguing "if there are so many books to read and not enough time to read them, why spend time reading about [someone else's] reading?"

Personally, I don't mind the idea of a shared reader's diary. There are so many books out there to read, and many of them are actually quite good, if not well known. But this is exactly the reason why someone else's reading diary is useful; it can bring, front and center, titles of work that might otherwise go overlooked. Reading diaries by experts like Alberto Manguel are a practical resource for narrowing down one's reading list because they seem to be interested in putting good books first, above what is merely popular or commercial. This is not to say that all popular or commercial books are subpar; it only asserts that there are still many others that aren't popular or commercial which are still of high quality.

I don't agree with Ms. Winterson that "quite few…are worth reading." Sure, there are plenty of mediocre titles out there, but if one were to find an objective way to cordon off the high-quality books from the rest of the dreck, there would still be an ample pile left to read. Of this I am certain.

Anyway, I don't read only the latest, greatest titles; currently I'm reading a nonfiction title first published in the 1960s that's now considered a classic; a short story collection released last year; a recent e-book of short stories; and another novel that's neither "classic" nor "contemporary." If anything, it's obscure.

I look forward to reading further what Ms. Elkin has to say on the subject.

• Finally, an observation: Creative people often avoid projects where there's more mystery in the making than they're comfortable with. Instead, we should listen to our peers to learn about alternative ways of doing things. By taking the road less traveled...

Last night at one of my writer's groups, a fellow writer discussed how he'd written an entire novel in narrative and now was going back and filling in the dialog. For some in the group, this seemed an impossible task to bifurcate from the original draft writing task.

I can't say that it would be a successful strategy for me, but then I can't say that it wouldn't work, either. I've never tried it that way.

One objection to that process came of the fact that so many writers start with characters talking in their heads. Writing these dialogs down is the first thing many writers do.

However, I almost always start with place. Setting, landscape, surroundings, weather: these are the parts of the creative wellspring that "speak" to me first. That doesn't mean my novel or story is always going to start with "The day was..." In fact, I don't usually worry about the first five pages of a novel until the whole darned thing is completed. It means, instead, that the plot, the characters, the story question almost always rise from the setting. There, inside the place, resides everything I need to complete my narrative.

For the other writer last night, it was within the plot that all his clues reside. And for the third writer, who objected to this approach, it was through the characters. This doesn't mean that any of these three approaches are going to fail or will find their story outcomes lacking. I still write characters with voices and have a way with dialog. My plots have their arcs. It's just that I don't start there first. My other friend doesn't start there first either because he can "read" the forward motion of his story and it unfolds on the page; and as for my other friend, the plot, setting, etc. are all found in the vocalization of their characters.

My response it "don't knock it 'til you try it!? Maybe I'll put myself through a narrative assignment where there is no dialog or landscape. It'll definitely put me out of my comfort zone, but it might also teach me a thing or two about doing things differently. And that's something all creative people should be comfortable with.

Writer's Commandment #1: Know Thy Language.

Slate Magazine has been running an exclusive selection of Clive James's essays from his book, Cultural Amnesia, which explore 20th century intellectualism. I've found these interesting and useful for creative folks who like to delve into intellectual discussion.


For instance, James's essay on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ("Lessons on how to write")
addresses something that bothers me constantly: the modern writer's inaccurate use of language.


Now, far be it from me to stake any claims to perfection within my own prose! I know I've made my share of writerly gaffes. There isn't a writer alive who hasn't, and that means counting the best of them.


But some of these errors in usage may be unavoidable, by all of us, simply because inaccuracies of language, as Lichtenberg posited, are often absorbed into the language we use without our even being aware of it.


[I remember writing my first resume at the end of my senior year at Columbia, and Nat Lehrman, the journalism department head at that time, pointed out to me that "I graduated" was not correct, that the phrase is actually "I was graduated," and that the eagle-eyed woman at Playboy from whom I was soliciting a copyeditor's position would definitely toss my application in the round file for such a mistake. No, I never got the job. I probably made some other, equally egregious errors, and didn't know it.]


As I said, I'm positive I've committed these gaffes, but I don't think that we, as writers, should take this lying down. We should, in fact, work all the time to be better ambassadors to language; after all, it's at the heart of what we do. Who better to shine the light on accurate usage than writers themselves?


One might argue this is actually the role of the editor, and in fact, they do a lot of this sort of revision because they are paid to know the difference between "I graduated" and "I was graduated." But these days, writers who want careers need to learn the art of self-editing because, frankly, publishers' budgets for editing are just as lean as they are for marketing. If your own writing needs that much work, it's going to see the inside of the round file before it sees the light of day on an editor's desk.



But this is beside the point. We're talking language here, language that everyone uses. Editors live and breathe behind the scenes; they are not groomed for the spotlight that writers hope to claim for themselves. That is not their job. After all, if a building is difficult to maintain, it's not the janitor's fault, it's the architect's fault.


It's the job of writers to be masters of the trade, and when I say trade, I mean language and ideas. I don't mean masters of marketing and self-promotion; I don't mean masters of philosophy or entertainment. I don't mean masters of celebrity. I mean masters of the written word.


Finally, Lichtenberg makes the point that I often make when I teach beginning writers, for which I own him my gratitude.


"Better-than-competent writers—good writers—examine their effects before they put them down: They think that way all the time."


Good writing is clear thinking. (I just ran across this point recently in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as well.)


If you are always examining your writerly flaws, then that awareness will lead you to the point where you no longer commit those mistakes because you've internalized their lessons. Simply put: you learn from your mistakes. How else to do this than to write, then examine what you write, then think about it and question it, then repeat the process continuously?

Mp3 players are not meant for music alone

As I prepare to launch a new podcast review column later this month for MetaxuCafe [working title: "Burning Words"], I am thrilled not only to have listened to a wide variety of wonderfully produced podcasts recently, which feature well-written creative material, but to note the increasing amount of positive attention that the podcast format is getting.

This is just a reminder for all you composers of the written and spoken word: podcasting is fast becoming a preferred way for audiences to encounter poetry, fiction and the like.


Get thee to iTunes and start downloading some wonderful free programming! Remember, you can listen directly from your computer as well.