Tips & Answers to Qs

A NOD TO THE MASTERS OF THEIR CRAFT ON WRITING

Joan Didion

“In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.”

“In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill.”

Jury's Inn
Broad Street, Birmingham, UK
February 21st–23rd

ShiMMer 2020

From the Editor's Desk

Compliments

More times than anyone can count there are letters, notes, emails, tweets, postings, and GIFs about the lonely, solitary, cave-like life of a writer. The writer may have a day job, a spouse/partner, children, roommates, a huge extended family, dogs and/or cats. But, when they are writing, authors are alone. More than alone, they seek out the solitude necessary to create. Some write in the wee hours of the morning, others wait until everyone under their roof is asleep. Some have offices with doors that close and people who honor the closed door, and others write at the kitchen table, schlepping their laptop from pillar to post to find a spot where they can enter the world their brain is screaming to get down on paper/the computer screen.

When writers seek out other authors, more often than not, it’s for a critique or a beta read: a beat-me-up, not a lift-me-up. Then, armed with the criticism, the writer goes back to the MS and makes changes, rewrites entire chapters, inserts more dialogue, or trims the bloated exposition. When the turn-in deadline is yelling from the calendar on the wall, the writer sends the completed MS to their editor, hoping it’s as polished as it needs to be. The editor, who might be full of praise, turns back a bleeding document, and the writer is back to improving upon that which s/he had slaved for months. Even copy editors find fault, which requires more revisions.

And through it all, the writer is living inside her/his head, their concentration absolute as s/he tries to express all the emotions and plot twists the story demands.

Change the paradigm. Call a writer friend, send an email, or go old-school and send a card. Whatever avenue you choose, use that time to give the author compliments. Encouragement. A euphamistic chuck under the chin. A pat on the back. A verbal or written hug. In the vast desert of authorship, be the oasis from which the author can drink in your regard. It’s always so much fun to watch a flower bloom.