Georgia Choate

[everybellthattollsme]

Readers: Great publication if you want to simply read a story through without ads or poems or pics, not that there’s anything wrong with those artistic forms of creation. They also still have a snail mail option.

Writers: They offer high quality, reasonably priced online classes.

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“To avoid starting work, I sometimes stop for coffee at a nearby cafe.”

Deborah Levy, South African born British playwright, novelist, and poet said the above title in today’s Guardian UK version. It’s forthright, and I like that. Below she explains a writer’s winding ways and byways:

“When I begin writing a novel, I usually know where I want to get to, I just don’t know how to get there. I plan a route and follow my directions. Sometimes this works well. Yet, it’s when I detour from the map and get lost that the writing starts to open its eyes. In case you think I like getting lost, I should tell you that I resist it with all my will. This is always a futile battle. Eventually I surrender to the unknown route, write for a few hours and take a look at the new view.”

As someone who is now working toward the end of the first draft of a first novel, I’ve had to embrace simple but difficult concepts, such as changing the course of a story or the way it’s told to suit the way it naturally wants to go. What it wants naturally will flourish, adding flesh to my original skeleton. Another, more physiological, change I had to make because I can’t sit still. Not moving often enough makes me ache. Our modern working model is a very sedentary one. Even with doctors telling us to get up from our desks and move often, I still had a gleaming idea of how I should be in my habits. This Fall, I’ve successfully worked this part of me into my writing schedule. I simply get up. At home, I leave my iPad to do laundry. Sit back down and write. I get up later to vacuum. Sit back down and write. The only difficult part was embracing it as part of my process. I don’t know why I hung on so long to an unnatural model of work. Who sits for four hours straight? People with no inflammation. Or people with an iron will which I do not have. If I go out to write, I start in one place, the library for an hour or more. Then I get up and walk or drive somewhere to get coffee and write for 2 or 3 more hours. The words are coming. It no longer matters how they get here.

You can read about Deborah Levy and her writing shed at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/01/deborah-levy-my-writing-day

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The Character of Writers: E.B. White

“Most of us, out of a politeness made up of faint curiosity and profound resignation, go out to meet the smiling stranger with a gesture of surrender and a fixed grin, but White has always taken to the fire escape. He has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea, and the Stork Club. His life is his own. He is the only writer of prominence I know of who could walk through the Algonquin lobby or between the tables at Jack and Charlie's and be recognized only by his friends.”

— James Thurber, E. B. W., "Credos and Curios"

From my reading, E.B. White literally and routinely took to the fire escape as a method of avoidance. Allow this to give you permission to be how you need to be to get your writing done, your goals met whatever they are.

A hangup of mine is a fear of promoting myself, promoting my book. When I’ve felt the suffocating pressure to compete with others for coveted publication spaces, I remember E.B. White. Perhaps there’s another way besides Facebook (insert today’s popular virtual hangout), a fire escape \o/

photo thanks to quinntheislander at pixababy.com

[everybellthattollsme]

Bit of Go-to Writing Advice

Roald Dahl, in a 1982 interview with the Irish Times, said about children’s books:

Such books must have humour; they must have a strong plot. “A child doesn’t have the concentration of an adult, and unless you hold them from the first page, they’re going to wander, and watch the telly, or do something, else. They only read for fun; you’ve got to hold them.”

I don’t write children’s books, but I see sound advice here for any writer, from Dickensian literary fiction to Ricoh copier/printer manuals. After all, the child in all of us is continually distracted. Even an avid reader is discerning from one book to another, which all beckon, “Read me!”

Here’s the link to the article, which includes even more precise writing advice:

thanks to the irishtimes.com and photographer Carl Van Vechten and wikipedia.org