From the Nobel Prize-winning author's diary Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, Maria Popova excerpts Steinbeck's musings about the relationship between a writer and his pen: "Here is a strange thing — almost like a secret. You start out putting words down and there are three things — you, the pen, and the page. Then gradually the three things merge until they are all one and you feel about the page as you do about your arm."
Writers and writing
Beginning writers tend to show off, and Tommy Tomlinson says he was no different before learning simplicity: "I wrote stories that flashed back and flashed forward and might have flashed sideways. I wrote sentences that twirled like an Olympic figure skater. Sometimes I still do those things if I’m tired, or if I’m trying to write around a lack of reporting, or if I get the big head and start to believe that the world does not have the proper appreciation for my prose."
Dorothy Parker Society president Kevin Fitzpatrick writes about how the acerbic poet and critic broke into the business at Vogue and Vanity Fair: "Her education stopped when she was 15. Her mother died when Dorothy was 4 and her father, a successful rag trade entrepreneur, when she was 20. But the biggest fib was that she was a neophyte writer. The truth was that she had been writing poems since she could pick up a pencil, even if the only audience was her family."
Before he became the celebrated author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez aspired to be a musician, and when his exasperated mother suggested writing become his vocation, he put up a fight, Maria Popova writes, quoting from his memoir: "'If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones, and they don’t make them anymore,' I told my mother. 'After all, there are better ways to starve to death.'"
Few people spend more time at writers' conferences than Roy Peter Clark, who offers some tips for making them pay: "I remember seeing the late great Richard Ben Cramer sitting on a rug looking over the story written by a young writer he had just met. He’d do it for hours. I saw Norman Mailer sitting alone at a table. I approached him politely, asked him a question about one of his essays, and got a warm response." This year's best conferences.
In a 1969 Paris Review interview excerpted by Maria Popova, the author of Charlotte's Web said that children "are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly." Even when there's a talking mouse (Stuart Little) or a friendship between a spider and a pig (Charlotte's Web).
Have you ever read a story that used a word like "sprezzatura?" John McPhee has, and he writes about how writers can irritate their readers by tossing out obscure Italian terms or including random celebrity mentions: "You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness. If you say someone looks like Tom Cruise — and you let it go at that — you are asking Tom Cruise to do your writing for you. Your description will fail when your reader doesn’t know who Tom Cruise is."
Nieman Storyboard interviews author and terrorism expert Jessica Stern, whose memoir dealt unblinkingly with the unsolved rape-at-gunpoint that she and a sister experienced when they were teenagers: "In order to write that book, I had to be in a kind of trance to find feelings that I’m normally too embarrassed to feel, or to, certainly to articulate … I think some of those feelings are the sequelae of violence. I decided it was important to put them out there."
Did the Alice author anticipate the modern era of digital communication? No, Maria Popova concedes. But she says that Carroll's exhortation to re-read a letter before replying, for example. remains wise: "Of all the emails you regret firing off in a reactive fury, how many could have been abated by a deliberate pause for rereading your correspondent’s points and contemplating your own reply?" Also, Carroll’s tips for overcoming creative block.
How hard is it to make a living as a writer? It's so hard, Ann Bauer writes, that a lot of writers have undisclosed sources of income — an inheritance, maybe, or a spouse with a well-paying full-time job with benefits: "Those with privilege and luck don’t want the riffraff knowing the details. After all, if 'those people' understood the differences in our lives, they might revolt. Or, God forbid, not see us as somehow more special, talented and/or deserving than them."