Sarah Wrote That | The Writing Life

Ward 6 Says Goodbye

Cornell’s J. Robert Lennon and Rhian Ellis are bringing their wonderful lit blog Ward 6 to an end:

[T]he main thing, aside from time, is that internet writing is stressful. We don’t blame writers, in the end, for their passionate advocacy of their own work online; the publishing industry is forcing them to do so. Publicity and marketing budgets are down; writers are asked to promote themselves, ad nauseam, on Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. This isn’t a good thing, we don’t think. Writers should never ask other writers for blurbs: that’s what publishers are for. Writers shouldn’t be responsible for what is said about them online. They should put their heads down and work on their art, without regard for the vicissitudes of commerce.

But that’s not the way the wind is blowing. We receive many requests each month for quotes, and are sent a lot of galleys, and we find ourselves having to tell people over and over that Ward Six is not a promotional blog, but a labor of love.

I will greatly miss having their insight and generous reading spirit as a regular part of my reading (though I only lurked on Ward 6—I am terrible at comment threads). But perhaps they will surface with a Tumblr?

We’ve made a lot of friends here, and look forward to keeping in touch with them. And we won’t be disappearing from the internet. So you’ll be seeing us again before long.

They leave a four and a half year archive well-worth perusing.

27 Apr 2011 00:16

Zadie Smith’s Rules for Writers

thessaly:

1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3. Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.

7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

(via The Guardian)

Ah, #1 is the original sin, isn’t it?

I’ve been thinking a lot about #2 recently, or something like it. I think it is so important, and sometimes disconcerting, for prose writers to hear how our work sounds aloud, to jolt ourselves out of a sort of traveling companion comfort with words we could do better without. (This does not mean giving readings to anyone but yourself! ZS’s #6 is so important. Neither does reading to yourself in your head suffice; only you need to hear the words, but they need to enter as actual, embarrassing sound). I read publicly infrequently enough that I usually want to show something new, and invariably my practice sessions turn into edits. I tweak sentences, get rid of dialogue tags, remove context that seemed necessary but aloud impedes narrative flow. Reading aloud, I cannot help but be aware of that my words are taking time; and often I catch (or don’t) a different momentum than what I thought I was writing.

Reblogged from Thessaly

"My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower."

- Jennifer Egan, in the Wall Street Journal, just minutes after winning the Pulitzer. (via emmainpictures)

Reblogged from Emma in Pictures

emmainpictures:

I went to Albany today. Read all about it.

Reblogged from Emma in Pictures

"Atria" →

Ramona Ausubel’s story is non-stop pitch-perfect and absolutely ruthless:

The girl handed her a piece of notebook paper with a list of names on it. In the girl column: Grace, Honor, Constance, Mary, Faith. And in the boy column: Peter, Adam, David, Axel Rose.

Hazel thought about a giant bird of prey with the name Constance.

New Yorker fiction editor Cressida Leyshon interviews Ausubel:

This week’s story, “Atria,” is about Hazel, a teen-ager eager to leave adolescence behind who has decided to say “yes” to growing, and the complications that ensue. Did it take you long to understand the mind of your young protagonist?

I knew right away what would take place in the story, but it took a long time to really understand why. All the under-layers emerged slowly, like Hazel’s relationship with her mother, sisters, and deceased father. Over the years that I worked on the story, those were the parts that kept getting deeper.

29 Mar 2011 23:52

f***yeahjoandidion:

Credit: Los Angeles Times, 1970/UCLA Digital Collections.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photo in which she so resembles the way she writes.

Reblogged from jessanne collins

salon:

Snapshots from a rock ‘n roll marriage

The ex-wife of Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney tells her side of the heart-wrenching divorce with a heart-wrenching first person account

So, so good. Tumblrers, follow Denise here.

Reblogged from Soup

Aimee Bender's Writing Exercises →

denisegrollmus:

I drove Aimee Bender to the airport this morning. She was in State College for a reading. It was incredible. My friends here — Jake and Jo — had both been raving about her work. I had found a signed, hardcover copy of “Willful Creatures” in LA — where Aimee (and I!) are from. I bought it and gave it to Jake. At the reading, she read one of her stories from the Creatures collection: “The Meeting.” I don’t think I took a breath for the whole 10 minutes. It was really amazing.

On the drive to the airport, we began talking about Aimee’s writing philosophy, which is largely about freeing oneself from the self-imposed structure of a story, allowing one’s unconscious to take their tales to new places if that is where they must go. For a journalist, this sort of a idea is terrifying. So I asked her how: How, Aimee, can I do that? She suggested writing exercises. And, wah-la!, I went to her site to find that she posts new writing exercises each month.

Reblogging because a) Aimee Bender! b) I met Aimee on the other end of this flight

Reblogged from mah blog

kaash asked: Hi Sarah, I came across this: http://www.slate.com/id/2275733/pagenum/all/#p2 and thought of you. What do you think? Do you agree, for starters, with the very idea of America having two distinct literary cultures? Is it fair, or even correct at the very least, to distinguish "MFA writers" from "NYC writers"?

Ah, the n+1/Slate piece. In some particulars it was accurate—the focus in MFA curricula on short stories and preference for Amy Hempel versus Jonathan Franzen; the interest by the few remaining big American publishers in only blockbuster novels; but I don’t see the separate ‘cultures’ the piece wants these differences to add up to. More or less accessible writing, yes, to a degree; but people still ~~drink~~ hang out together and have the same Facebook friends. The article’s ‘NYC writers’ still write short stories; many of them teach, and most of them have MFAs. Many ‘MFA writers’ live in New York, and not just for a few aspirational years after getting their degrees. I’m wary, too, of ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ kinds of arguments:

MFA programs today serve […] more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.

That may be an effect, but nobody intends that. Universities fund MFA programs because they’re an excellent source of teaching assistants (and for Columbia and a few others, tuition). Also of panache; and a lot of people, including me, believe that workshops and ‘craft study,’ however flawed, really do improve writing.

Certainly, there is a stylistic and often passionate philosophical divide between ‘realistic’ and formally ‘experimental’ fiction. Since at least the 1970s, ‘experimental’ work (a style as much as a credo) is less likely to glean a book contract with a major publishing company. But increasingly, accessibility is no guarantee of long-term publishing success; not meeting sales projections, even if through no fault of one’s own, is enough to get one dropped, and the precariousness of ‘mid-list’ fiction is unfortunate not just for writers, I think, but for the culture, because the mid-list is where most literary fiction ends up: well known, even popular, but not that popular.

If there’s a cultural divide, it’s between the kinds of books published online and by small/independent presses versus those published by the big houses; much less so between the writers themselves. Only a few (‘NYC’) stars get offers for “gaudy salaries and propitious working conditions.” (Since many MFA programs are at public universities and professors’ salaries are public record, and ‘gaudy’ doesn’t come to mind.)

I’m not sure about the article’s predictions. It dismisses digital literature:

Who wants to reread Faulknerian sentences on a Kindle, or scroll back to pick up a missed plot point?

This seems to me too quick.

(BTW have you read Jessanne Collins’s piece for Capital New York? Reporting! Also, Sam Lipsyte).

18 Dec 2010 13:41

This week has been a marathon of term papers, first finishing my own, now grading my students’. I’m behind on presents and cards, I’ve missed multiple readings and holiday parties that I actually wanted to attend, I have more work to do between now and when classes resume mid-January than I can conceivably finish (sssh!).

And since Tuesday morning, when I pulled up the shades and OMG SNOW, I’ve been happy. A___ and I made ourselves a mimosa brunch to toast the end of the semester. Going out to dust the snow off my car (which I rarely need to use; one tank of gas all fall, not counting Thanksgiving), I seemed to hear the shapes of the still snow-covered streets, the spaces between the trees and frost-windowed houses, sounded out by my boot steps. Then cars and snowplows and the PVTA bus and voices from down the street snapped on all at once. The traffic light at the main intersection had changed, but I was inside before I realized that was what had done it.

16 Dec 2010 23:55