The Word Collector

Quotes and Wisdom on Creativity and Writing/Curated by Joy Baglio (joybaglio.com)

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Writing is something you do alone in a room...If you’re Sharon Doubiago, your room is your van; if you’re the young Ernest Hemingway, your room is a café table; if you’re Emily Dickinson, your room is your garden; if you’re Marcel Proust, your room is your bed...But whoever you are, whatever shape it takes, that room is the center of your life and it’s very crowded. Everything you are and everything you’re not backs you up against the wall and stares at you. You stare back. And eventually you get some writing done.

Michael Ventura, from his essay “The Talent of the Room”

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Every dinner party by the end is a bit of a defeat...The bird, which was a bronze talismanic centerpiece, golden and thriving, is revealed as a collection of crazy bones.

from Rebecca Lee’s short story “Bobcat”

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If one of the things people do is establish a civilization out of nature, a way out of the chaos, then Ray was failing at being a person, falling back into the glut of the physical world. He'd been fooled by life. It had triumphed over him. I wanted to call it out to him, over his wife's head, Hey Ray, life has triumphed over you.

Rebecca Lee’s short story “Bobcat”

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They were messing with an uneasy threshold, prettiness and ugliness at the same time, and a ripple of awareness followed them through the park. Mothers glancing around for their children, moved by some feeling they couldn’t name. Women reaching for their boyfriends’ hands. The sun spiked through the trees, like always—the drowsy willows, the hot wind gusting over the picnic blankets—but the familiarity of the day was disturbed by the path the girls cut across the regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water.

The Girls by Emma Cline

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The writer cannot help but distort, and the best that the writer can do is hope that the distortions are illuminating rather than obscuring.

Michael Cunningham

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The role of the artist is not to look away.

Rob Spillman (via mythoughtsoup)

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All fiction is written to examine or illuminate some aspect of human existence, but...in science fiction the backdrop you work against is the size of the Universe.

Asimov’s Science Fiction 

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I have found that the stories of beginning writers usually bristle with emotion, but whose  emotion is often very hard to determine. Dialogue frequently proceeds without the assistance of any characters that you can actually see, and uncontained thought leaks out of every corner of the story. The reason is usually that the student is wholly interested in his thoughts and his emotions and not in his dramatic action, and that he is too lazy or highfalutin to descend to the concrete where fiction operates. He thinks that judgment exists in one place and sense-impression in another. But for the fiction writer, judgment begins in the details he sees and how he sees them.

Flannery O’Connor, from Mystery and Manners

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So we can accept the fact that we’re artists as a burden, or we can accept it as the best thing that could possibly ever happen to anyone.

Jericho Brown

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Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they’re being written. Or at least they do for me. They’re the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision

George Saunders

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What I Learned from Publishing My First Short Story

I recently had a short story published in New Ohio Review: it’s about a mermaid mother, her half-mermaid daughters, an arctic voyage, family struggle, and it’s now up online and you can read it here!

It’s strange to look back on the whole process, from its first conception to its multiple acceptances and Honorable Mention in Ploughshare’s Emerging Writers Contest. The whole process has been exhilarating, wonderful, eye-opening, and also a little scary. Ultimately, I remember how much I doubted this story. I wondered if it was too “genre” for literary fiction; if adults would want to read about mermaids; if it was too long; too flowery; if it succeeded in being something serious despite the fantastical premise. It’s gone through more drafts than any other piece of writing I’ve ever written, and I’ve been working on it for years (on and off) so there is something momentous about this, like I’m finally letting go of something that (maybe in part?) wanted to be more than a short story.

Here are some things I’ve learned over the course of this story’s growth:

1. Trust the ideas you’re most interested in. A lot of my ideas have a similar quality to the ones in this story, yet for some reason, I remained fascinated with possibilities for this undersea world. I had pages of description of plankton cycles and hydrothermal vents that were cut ultimately, but they were part of my fascination about this story that never faded. I loved finding out more, inventing more, and that obsession with the nuts and bolts of this world kept this story feeling alive for me even after years of

2. Get more on paper than you’ll ever use. This ties in to the above point: Because I had far more material for this story than ever made it to print, I felt like I knew the world and the characters deeply, and this made revision and figuring out eventual plot arcs so much easier. (Plus having a lot of great imagery and details to choose from makes it surer that the strongest parts will eventually end up in the story.)

3. Trust your own “cringe” instinct. This one is HUGE. It’s often hard to know what truly makes you cringe until you’re forced to reveal your story to others. For me, it was a reading wherein I was revealing this story for the first time, and I was suddenly struck by all the phrases, extra similes, superfluous adjectives that made me cringe. I reworked the story quite a few times and was as merciless as possible towards those cringe-worthy moments.

4. Give it space/Gain perspective. One of the best things that happened for this story was the fact that it lay dormant for almost two years. When I returned to it, I saw it with fresh eyes that helped me revise and rewrite with added wisdom. I’m not saying it came out flawless, yet much of what wasn’t working, the parts I’d really struggled with, suddenly became more apparent and the solutions were more apparent too. The goal, I think, is to try to gain this kind of perspective by taking breaks that aren’t quite so long as two years!

5. Find readers who believe in the story. A few of the things that kept me working on this story (instead of abandoning it, which could have easily happened) were the people who attested to its worth. From very early drafts, my advisor Jeff Allen at The New School told me it could be a great story (though needed more work.) Julia Fierro at Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop encouraged me to revise and seek publication. Grub Street mentor Cam Terwilliger gave me brilliant revision advice as well as positive encouragement. But probably the biggest boost of moral support came from my partner Eric, who continually talked to me about the meaning he saw in the story, how it was more than a fantasy but spoke universal truth about immigrant families, how it reminded him of his experience growing up with an immigrant father, how needed it was in the world. I didn’t share the story with those close to me whom I felt wouldn’t understand it or wouldn’t care. I needed to give it all the love I could to get it off the ground and into the world.

6. Don’t feel rushed to publish. Let the story grow into what it truly wants to be. In the beginning (as I’m finding for myself) it may take longer for something to be ready to send out. Yet ultimately, you’ll be much prouder of the result. Publication is not an end in itself. After the thing is out there in the world, you want people to love it, enjoy it, think and talk about it!

7. When sending it out to journals, aim high. Okay, so I love the diversity that exists among literary journals. I love that there are journals for every type of literature, every style, every reader. But the fact that there are so many is definitely a confusing thing when it comes time to send your story out. What I’ve learned from this whole process (a year of sending this story out to countless journals) is to AIM FOR YOUR TOP CHOICES FIRST. I received more acceptances than I thought I would, and it put me in some awkward situations. I realized I didn’t want this story that I had higher hopes for to be locked away in some obscure anthologies that I’d never heard of, though the resulting withdrawal of the story felt like a taboo in the publishing world. (One place even chided me and said “You’re supposed to go with the first acceptance!”) So, in retrospect, I’m never going to assume rejection from my first choice journals, but will always send my best work to them first.

8. Embrace your editor’s insights. Working with a brilliant editor at New Ohio Review was a new experience for me. It amazed me that I was emailing back and forth with someone, discussing nothing else but my own fictional world! He had things he loved about it too, things that bothered him, things that he thought could be better. Some of his suggestions and ideas drastically improved the story, and I’m glad I was able to be open to what he saw in it, since it ultimately improved the story immensely.

9. Stick up for what you don’t want changed. On the flip side, don’t let your story be edited into oblivion by someone who’s trying to make it what it’s not. There is a fine line here, though I think the thing to always keep in mind is “What is the story trying to be?” Does the editor also want the story to be what it wants to be, or is he/she trying to make it something else?

10. Write more bad first drafts! Back to the drawing board, and what better way to give yourself permission to explore all the ideas you find most interesting than by writing BAD first drafts? Because they will be, and that’s okay. They should be big, messy, unorganized, filled with bad writing and lots of ideas. If I had set out to write a safe and organized mermaid story, I know I never would have succeeded in maintaining my own interest in it. Keep it messy at first! Learn to be okay with messy, and let the story guide you! It somehow has a way of knowing what it wants to be.

(I recently created an author website, so if you’ve read this far and want to find me online outside of tumblr, visit me at www.joybaglio.com.)

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With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially, and I believe these are times when writers are more interested in what we are essentially than in the tenor of our daily lives.

Flannery O’Connor

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Hyatts, Sheratons--that's where all those stories take place in which there is no landscape, in which there is not the mention of a tree or the grass or the weather. There is no weather in a Hyatt. Stories that take place in no place--why would you leave out the thing that will most bring alive what you're trying to do? You think the most important thing is that confident voice of that "I" narrator who, let's be clear, is really you when you were twenty-two, and they didn't treat you right, didn't fuck you right, didn't love you right--Momma, first lover, Daddy, I don't care who it was. But I want the story to burn me...You were in that room with him when he said no, he did not want you, and you walked out of the room and it felt as if you were bleeding into your own belly...You went down the stairs, out into the night, and you smelled--what did you smell?...Is it torn-up weeds that you smell? Somebody was sitting on those steps earlier and she was crying, and she didn't have anything else so she reached down and pulled up the grass and ripped it, and you can smell the torn grass in the air.

Dorothy Allison, from her Tin House craft essay on Place

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I cannot abide a story told to me by a numb, empty voice that never responds to anything that's happening, that doesn't express some feelings in response to what it sees. Place is not just what your feet are crossing to get to somewhere. Place is feeling, and feeling is something a character expresses. More, it is something the writer puts on the page--articulates with deliberate purpose...Place is emotion

Dorothy Allison, in her Tin House craft essay on Place

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Plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.

Ken Kesey

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Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another

George Saunders

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The writer's main job is...to make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared--she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves.

George Saunders