Slimejam

The point, the bit I live for, is the rare moment of satisfaction when a smell or a quality of sadness comes into perfect verbal focus. That’s how my family know the day has gone well: I have a lightness which comes from the absence of panic, the knowledge that, for once, I did what I’m best at doing.

I was much relieved to realise that the first paragraph of Charlotte Mendelson’s ‘My Writing Day’ entry for the Guardian was a wind-up. On the other hand, the final paragraph, quoted above, feels perfectly genuine.

From Bill Hayes’s New York Times essay on maintaining what might be termed ‘writing fitness’:

Then I woke one day, and a line came to me. It didn’t slip away this time but stayed put. I followed it, like a path. It led to another, then another. Soon, pieces started lining up in my head, like cabs idling curbside, ready to go where I wanted to take them.

I like this as a description of how it feels when a new project starts to find its form and shape.

Our early conversations and the revisions Roald made had to do with the shape of the story, the major characters, how the story began, how it ended, and what was missing. One significant change involved two chapters about problems the hero had at school. They were good stories, but I didn’t think they belonged in this book. Roald disagreed, strongly, and we argued about it. That was not fun. Eventually he agreed and the two chapters disappeared, but not forever.

Stephen Roxburgh, president and publisher at Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers during the 1980s, on editing Roald Dahl’s The Witches. (Via @pintadoguy)

It’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a doorway that fits us both.

Stephen King on writing first sentences.

What is most real is the process, not the written representation, but the writer’s attention to the process of writing. That is what gives a work its vitality, and what gives the reader a heightened awareness, an experience of life.

Author Jane Mendelsohn on one of the most fascinating parts (to me) of the writing process: finding a story’s style, the bridge between its conception and execution. Or as Mendelsohn puts it, ‘solving the problem’ of how to tell a particular tale.

Writers, like all artists, are Platonists. We have an inkling of something perfect and ideal, which haunts our imaginings and prompts every stroke of the pen or keyboard. We are aware that with a great effort of attentiveness, formulating and reformulating, listening closely to our own voice, modulating it into more tuneful harmonies, we might do something not just good, but perfect. And occasionally in phrase or sentence or paragraph we do just that. But I know of no writer who is not, finally, just that little bit disappointed with the final product.

Rick Gekoski, on trying to bring a concentrated light-heartedness to the act of composition.

Some teens are tremendously smart, with searing curiosity and vocabularies that exceed their horizons, others not so much. Hence we don’t write for teens, so much as for a subset of teens. Most often, this subset closely reflects the teens we ourselves once were.

Author Bernard Beckett touches on some interesting points about adults and their interest in teen fiction in this post for the Writing Teen Novels blog about the difficulties of defining young adult literature.

Some hard and beautiful observations from Rachel Cusk in a considered piece for The Guardian about the value of creative writing courses:

Language is not only the medium through which existence is transacted, it constitutes our central experiences of social and moral content, of such concepts as freedom and truth, and, most importantly, of individuality and the self; it is also a system of lies, evasions, propaganda, misrepresentation and conformity. Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language; the student feels the need to assert a ‘true’ self through the language system, perhaps for the reason that this same system, so intrinsic to every social and personal network, has given rise to a ‘false’ self.

A piece of music or a work of art might echo to the sense of a ‘true’ self, but it is often through language that an adult seeks self-activation, origination, for the reason that language is the medium, the brokering mechanism, of self. The notion of ‘finding your voice’, simplistic as it may sound, is a therapeutic necessity, and for many people a matter of real urgency. It is also – or ought to be – a social goal. If the expansion of creative writing courses signifies anything, it isn’t the cynicism of universities or the self-deception of would-be students: it means, simply, that our manner of life is dishonest, that it offers too few opportunities for self-expression, and that, for some people, there is too great a disjuncture between how things seem and how they actually feel.

A writer may be someone who has never lost their voice, or has always had it; for a number of reasons, they have withheld themselves from immersion in the social contract.

Jenny Diski writing for the London Review of Books blog on writer’s block, panic and productivity:

(W)riting is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head. Almost always, you do eventually start to write, and it seems that you’ve been considering after all. It’s not as comfy as writing a thousand words in half an hour, but it seems to work OK, so long as you think of it as part of a process of writing rather than writer’s block.

You as the narrative voice put in a simile under the pretext that you’re helping the reader to understand better what something looks like or feels like. In fact, it’s just an excuse to put in a little espresso shot of what you hope is lyrical beauty.

From a GQ interview with Ned Beauman about his second novel, The Teleportation Accident.

(It) is something, perhaps, about their entitlement that makes these freaks so unbridled. They have been bred up within the establishment, they know the rules intimately, and so they know, precisely, how to break them. Also, their confidence attracts the less socially secure… from less elevated backgrounds, who are constantly ill at ease in any social situation. Then, the freak emerges — beautifully tailored or, in Withnail’s case, looking somehow stylish even in a sweaty suit he hasn’t changed for months, riddled with aphorisms, squandering their privilege with such sophistication, such intelligence, that it is fascinating to observe.

The Withnail character from the film Withnail & I is compared with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and Evelyn Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte in this examination of the ‘my friend the freak’ genre, in which a first-person viewpoint character narrates the (mis)adventures of another, more compelling, eccentric, self-destructive and generally wildly entertaining character.

The fiction acquisitions editor at a prominent UK publishing house once casually told me that if the voice of a novel manuscript was totally convincing, he could forgive almost anything else that might be wrong with it.

Chris Flynn, author of A Tiger In Eden, writing on ‘authorial voice’ for Meanjin. Flynn is also featured, along with The Chef author Wayne Macauley, on a recent Radio National Books and Arts Daily segment examining techniques for establishing voice (first person, in Flynn and Macauley’s case) in fiction.

The biggest challenge is getting the word out, and that comes as a huge depressing surprise to many people.

Independent Mac software developer Daniel Jalkut (creator of the blogging app MarsEdit) interviewed on the Mac Power Users podcast. As well as expressing a clear-eyed view about the pros and cons of things like the Mac App Store, his comments about self-promotion are not entirely without relevance to authors and other self-employed creatives.

Fascinating post on different approaches an editing team takes with three different authors to plot and plan a new project.