Neil Baker

Why blog? Sullivan's answer

I'm probably really late in linking to this, but wanted to flag Andrew Sullivan's piece in the November edition of The Atlantic, Why I Blog.

It's a thoughtful piece about blogging as a new form of writing and includes this rather tasty quote:

"In some ways, blogging's gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all."

I hope so, Mr Sullivan, or it'll soon be time to sell my house.

In the meantime, why do I blog? Well, I reckon the future is grim for a freelance writer who can't or won't. And there's only one way to learn. Plus, it's fun. As Sullivan adds:

"Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach – instantly – any reader on earth."

Fear, anxiety and writing

Here's Terence Blacker writing in the Autumn edition of The Author, house magazine of the Society of Authors:

"A writer who lives without fear (of idea loss, energy sag, creative burnout, professional humiliation) is an amateur. For those who do it for a living, anxiety is what gets them to the desk every day"

Why I don't read my articles once they've been published

I don't read my articles once they've been published. Or I try not to. At least not when they first come out. Why? Because there's a lot to lose and nothing to gain. Here are some pros and cons:

Cons:

1. I'll just be reminded of the good stuff I had to leave out because I didn't have enough space
2. I'll just be reminded of the holes in my story that I didn't have time to fill
3. I might spot a clumsy change made by an editor
4. I might spot a clumsy mistake made by me (hopefully very, very rarely)
5. I'll come away with a general feeling of dissapointment

Pros:

1. I might get a cosy glow of satisfaction as I reflect on what a good job I did.

In my experience, the cons always outweigh the pros. If I do read a piece when it is first published, I tend to regret it. Not because it is full of those errors listed in points 1-4, but because of point 5 - that strange, nagging feeling of disappointment.

Anne Enright describes it brilliantly in the Guardian:

"It doesn't matter what you think about your work. This is one of the weirdest lessons a writer has to learn, that the emotions that push you to write better, with greater accuracy, truth, verve, wit; the despair that makes you cast your eyes to the ceiling and then plunge back to the keyboard; the running pleasure of one good word being followed by a better; the glee as you set a time bomb ticking in the text; the glorious megalomania with which you set out to describe and yes! conquer! the! world! ... are all completely redundant once the piece is finished. More than redundant. They are dust and ashes. The thing you have written is a piece of shit. Can I say this louder? And then repeat it really, really quietly? The thing you have just written is a piece of shit."

After a decent interval, I will sometimes re-read a published article. Then a different kind of disappointment takes hold. Again, Enright captures it well:

"Five years, say, after you have written some piece of junk; some fraudulent, spatchcocked, scrap of literary debris, you come across it again, and you read it in an idle way, and you say, with a terrible sense of loss and shock, "I used to be able to write. I used to be quite good. Where's all that gone?"

You just can't win.

(note: the exception to my don't-read-your-own-stuff rule: when writing my first piece for a new client or publication, I check and see what edits they have made)

"I love your work"

Thanks to everyone who was at the reading last night. I don't think it could have gone any better.

I read the first scene of my story, but wish I'd taken the rest of it. Ah well, better to leave them wanting more. Hopefully, the people who asked me how it ends will have acted on my suggestion that they buy the book.

I wanted to record my session to post here, but in the excitement I forgot. Instead, I'll upload the practice read that I did, because I did record that.

It was a real boost to hear those four magic words - "I love your work" - said by so many people in the audience, especially when they are talented writers.

And it was so motivating to meet so many dedicated and enthusiastic people who had decided to put the idea of a conventional career on hold, or to abandon that path completely, and to focus on writing instead, by taking the MA. Maybe humbling would describe them.

Is writing supposed to be fun?

Is planting alfalfa easier?

Just how hard is writing supposed to be? Here are three very different reports from the coal face of the writing industry:

1) In Slate magazine Garrison Keillor tells writers it's easy, so stop moaning:

"The fact of the matter is that the people who struggle most with writing are drunks. They get hammered at night and in the morning their heads are full of pain and adverbs. Writing is hard for them, but so would golf be, or planting alfalfa, or assembling parts in a factory."

2) While over at Columbia Journalism Review Robert Boynton interviews the painfully unproductive Gay Talese and reports how:

"Displaying equal parts pride and self-loathing, Talese reports he wrote barely fifty-four-and-a-half typed pages between 1995 and 1999."

(Note: Boynton's view is that "any fool can write, but only the wisest of writers knows when not to." I know such writers - and have edited them!)

3) Meanwhile, over at the Guardian, Orhan Pamuk waxes lyrical about the joys of putting words on paper:

"If you leave aside sensual pleasures, sexual pleasures, good food, good sleep, and so on, then the happiest thing is that I have written two and a half, three good pages. I am almost assured that they are, but I need confirmation. My girlfriend comes, we are happy, I read to her, she says, 'This is wonderful' - that's it! That's the greatest happiness."

My view? If you want to make a living, go with Garrison.

Technorati Tags: writing

Gone to the dogs

Chuckling to myself on the train to London yesterday, while reading Richard Hoggart give advertising and PR people a vigorous kicking. He's particularly fun on novelists like Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie, who started out as advertising copywriters:

"Copywriting as a suitable preparation or background for serious writing hardly compares with Spinoza's lens-grinding, is more like serving in a massage parlour as a training for marriage."

The chuckling died down a few pages later when he laid into writers involved in PR, something I've dipped into:

"Any search for a sort of 'truth' yields to the promotion of specific angles for the sake of the paymaster. PR writers deal with words, but abuse them; they are the fallen - gone to the dogs - cousins of honest writers."

It gets more painful:

"Such "authors" would be better employed in the local councils' cleaning departments; in their spare time, perhaps, trying to write honestly about something; anything."

Quotes are from Mass Media in a Mass Society

Is he as crazy as I am?

Researching a link for my post on Philip Roth, I came across this great quote. It's from a 1971 speech:

"I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, 'Is he as crazy as I am?' I don't need that question answered."

Thanks to wikipedia

Philp Roth says he's not idle but he is

So I was rummaging around my hard drive this afternoon, trying to find ways of avoiding a particularly dull article that I'm researching. And I found a quote that I thought I'd lost. It's from Philip Roth. "I can't be idle," he says in the article from the Guardian. But the way he talks about writing I reckon he is: "brain spinning like a car wheel in the snow," I know where you're coming from, Phil!

Here's the full quote (long, but worth it) 

"I have to have something to do that engages me totally.  Without that, life is hell for me.  I can't be idle and I don't know what to do other than write.  If I were afflicted with some illness that left me otherwise okay but stopped me writing, I’d go out of my mind.  I don't really have other interests.  My interest is in solving the problems presented by writing a book. That's what stops my brain spinning like a car wheel in the snow, obsessing about nothing. Some people do crossword puzzles to satisfy their need to keep the mind engaged.  For me the absolutely demanding mental test is the desire to get the work right. The crude cliché is that the writer is solving the problem of his life in his books.  Not at all.  What he's doing is taking something that interests him in life and then solving the problem of the book -- which is, how do you write about this?  The engagement is with the problem that the book raises, not with the problems you borrow from living.  Those aren't solved, they are forgotten in the gigantic problem of finding a way of writing about them."

Full article is here: