Tag: writing (Page 4 of 4)

Book review Tuesday: An ode to Stephen King

Quick note before I jump into the normal Tuesday book talk: I am so upset, like everyone else, by the Boston Marathon bombings. I lived in the Boston area for three years and love that city, even though its people can be a wee bit prickly – hey, that’s part of its charm. I feel blessed that none of my friends who still live in the Boston area were hurt in the bombings, but I know that a lot of other people weren’t so lucky. My heart hurts for everyone affected by the bombings, and for our country. I take some comfort in stories like this, about the kindness that springs out of tragedy. Hang in there, Boston.

Today’s book review is a salute to one of our greatest and yet most maligned authors, Stephen King. I never considered myself a real King fan until the past year or so, but now I take every opportunity to defend the guy when he is smeared by schmancy literary types. I think Stephen King’s a genius, and I don’t care who knows it.

I became a Stephen King fan after being exposed to his work by Al’s dad and step-mom, David and Ginger. They live in Bangor, Maine, the same little city where King lives in his grand — and perhaps slightly spooky looking — red house with white trim and spidery front gate.

Stephen King's house in Bangor

Stephen King’s house in Bangor

Whenever Al and I are in Maine visiting family, I insist that we take a run or a walk past King’s house, first, because it’s awesome, and second, because I live in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the man himself.

David and Ginger also happen to be big Stephen King fans and have read most of his books (and there are a lot of them). I hadn’t read any of his books when I first started coming to Bangor, but I had seen a bunch of the movie adaptations: Carrie, The Shining, It, Misery, Dolores Claiborne. I remember for my birthday one year (I think it was my thirteenth) I had a sleepover with a bunch of girls during which we ate pizza, drank pop, and watched Carrie. My birthday is four days before Halloween and thus, I had some sort of “spooky” party nearly every year, so it seemed appropriate. Carrie, by the way, is an excellent — and SUPER scary — movie. That last scene? Holy mackerel. Gets me every time. *Shudders.* (By the way, they’re remaking Carrie and, to my surprise, it doesn’t look half bad).

Anyway, it wasn’t until Ginger gave me King’s 2000 book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft that I began to really appreciate Stephen King. I read the book in early 2012, just as I was starting to eke out the rough ideas that would eventually become my first manuscript, and it was incredibly inspiring. On Writing is part memoir, part practical writing guide, and it includes a post-script discussing Stephen King’s horrific accident in 1999, when he was hit by a van while walking along a rural road in western Maine. Shortly after reading the book, in February 2012, I wrote this short review on Goodreads:

As someone who is about to embark on the slightly terrifying (but very exciting) journey to become a professional writer, I find King’s story immensely inspiring. His message is that to succeed in writing on a professional level, one must be persistent, dogged, and, to some extent, rigid. He insists on writing a minimum amount each day, for example, which is probably difficult on some days but has obviously worked to his advantage, considering how prolific he has been and continues to be. The book was also engaging because of King’s personal history: he writes about his struggles with alcoholism and his recovery from a near fatal car accident, but he also writes movingly about his relationship with his wife (who convinced him to get his draft of Carrie out of the trash can and give it another go) and reflects personally on some of his books. His writing advice tends toward the basic, in terms of grammar, structure, syntax, but the process-based advice is valuable. I especially like his perspective that stories exist in the universe and are waiting to be unearthed, and it is through the process of writing that we uncover them. Highly recommended for would-be writers and fans of King’s books.

Re-reading what I wrote then, it’s striking to me how much of King’s advice I have followed over the past year, and how helpful I’ve found it. For example, King writes a minimum of ten pages (or 2,000 words) a day when he is working on a novel. If it takes him an hour to do that, fine; if it takes him all day, fine. He explains:

On some days, those ten pages come easily; I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day’s work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the words come hard, I’m still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.

Since I started writing my first manuscript, I’ve followed King’s formula: 2,000 words per weekday, minimum. It’s worked like a charm. I started a second manuscript last week and so far I have almost 29,000 words written. Thank you, Mr. King, for the excellent advice.

King also stresses that to be a good writer, one must read a lot and write a lot. Check and check. I love that my compulsive, drinking-from-the-fire-hose-style reading — a former guilty pleasure — is now part of my job. And I love the way King discusses how reading helps us become better writers:

One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose — one novel like Asteroid Miners (or Valley of the Dolls, Flowers in the Attic, and The Bridges of Madison County, to name just a few) is worth a semester at a good writing school, even with the superstar guest lecturers thrown in.

Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development  the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy — “I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand” — but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing — of being flattened, in fact — is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Oh, I could go on and on about all of the utterly practical yet deeply inspiring advice in On Writing that has helped me so much over the past year, but I’ll let you read it for yourself. It’s a wonderful book.

stephen_king

After reading On Writing, I decided to delve into some of King’s fiction, and so over the last year I’ve read Bag of Bones (spooky but a bit long), The Dead Zone (a classic, also a bit long), and Salem’s Lot (creepy and, well, a bit long). Now I have The Shining sitting in my Kindle queue and I’m looking forward to reading it. Now, say what you will about King’s flaws — he’s long-winded, his dialogues can be cringe-worthy, why do all of his books have to involve a writer living in Maine?, his prose can be a tad clunky at times — but I dare anyone to argue that the man’s not a storytelling genius. Think of all the classic stories that came out of his brain, stories that are now so entrenched in popular culture that they’ve become truly iconic: Carrie, Cujo, Pet Sematary, Misery, The Shining, The Green Mile, Christine, Salem’s Lot, Needful Things, Thinner. I mean, you know you’ve made it when Family Guy does an episode parodying a movie based on one of your books, or Eminem works a reference into one of his songs (“I cannot grow old in ‘Salem’s Lot!”). Seriously – one dude, Stephen King, has come up with all of these stories. The mind boggles at the creativity.

As a writer, I feel indebted to King for his practical wisdom and for the admirable example he’s set: he’s prolific, he’s dedicated, he’s humble, and dang, he’s a unique thinker. I encourage you all to check out King’s work — starting with On Writing, if you’re at all inclined toward putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) — and see what you think. I’ll leave you with some of King’s closing wisdom from that book:

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy… Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.

Drink and be filled up.

Revising. Again.

I am back at revising my novel, hopefully for the final time. Exciting! It has been a long and challenging process, but I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel. This week should hopefully be The Week that I send the damned thing off to agents. Finally.

So, in order to focus, I won’t be blogging today. But I’ll be back with new and fascinating things to say later this week.

For now, I’ll leave you with this article in the New York Times about writers, including Junot Diaz and Michael Chabon, and the temptations of the internet. (See? This is why I have to sign off now.)

Lady of Leisure

Yesterday I took a break from writing. Well, not entirely. I wrote a blog post in the morning, and then frittered away an hour reading blogs and news, and then I went to the gym, and then I got a pedicure and had lunch with a friend. And then I came back home and thought, What shall I do now?

The reason I took the break from writing was because the previous evening, I had finished the latest round of revisions on my novel and had sent it to one of my readers/critics to look over before I did anything drastic, like send the manuscript off to agents. Now that my revisions were done, at least for the moment, I didn’t feel like writing anything, but I also didn’t feel like just sitting there, useless. I had to think of something to do.

I thought, Maybe I’ll pick up my knitting again. I have some nice knitting books and I figured I could do some knitting exercises and practice a bit before attempting to dive into the world of sweaters and bunnies. I searched our apartment and realized that I had not actually brought my knitting needles to South Africa. I brought the knitting books, but not the knitting implements. Which is like me, really.

Then I thought, Maybe I’ll read. But I read every day, a lot. All the time. I had just spent my entire pedicure reading (and ignoring the pedicurist’s snarky comments about my dry heels). A crossword puzzle? I do those every day, too, when I watch TV or listen to podcasts. Watch TV? Too defeatist. Cook? It’s 3:45 pm. Go for a walk? I live in Johannesburg, so that’s not gonna work. Go to the gym? Already did that.

Photo on 2012-07-29 at 14.15

Sigh.

The problem is, there’s this urge in me to always be doing something, to always be busy, to always be thinking. It’s hard to suppress it. At times when there is genuinely nothing for me to do – for example, when I am waiting for feedback on my manuscript – I feel that I must occupy these quiet periods with something useful, or at least creative, or else I am just taking up space, and then what good am I? Point being, I could definitely never be a Lady of Leisure. I would go bonkers. I’d probably end up institutionalized by how bonkers I’d go. But I realize, of course, that this is a good problem to have: deciding how to pass my afternoon when there are no demands on me. But, to be honest, it’s a struggle.

Eventually, I decided to compromise by watching Brideshead Revisited (the 1981 miniseries with Jeremy Irons, not the ghastly movie version with Michael Gabon – the horror!) and doing a crossword puzzle. Not exactly what you’d call productive, but at least I’m not watching The E True Hollywood Story: Lindsay Lohan (again). Eventually, I ended up planning and cooking dinner. I made this, one of my all-time favorite Middle Eastern dishes, which I used to chow down on with some frequency when I lived in Detroit. It turned out well, but next time I’d add sultanas, I think.

Anyway. I really wish I had brought my knitting needles.

Revising

Oof, you guys, I don’t have much energy for blogging today, since I’ve been working on a bunch of side writing projects and — sigh — revising my novel.  I got some really great feedback from the few people I gave the manuscript to for comments, which is fantastic . . . but implementing those comments? UGH.

This process of revision is all for the good, because my novel is going to be so much better when I’m done revising,  but it’s hard. I’ve ended up rewriting whole sections, adding in weird plot twists that I didn’t see coming, and fleshing out relationships between characters.  This takes effort, but it also takes more thought than just writing with no plan, which is how I wrote the first draft of the novel.  Revising requires me to think hard about other people’s reactions to what I wrote and try to find a way to integrate changes, some of which are narrow and others of which are quite broad.  So it’s a process that forces me to be creative while forcing the story into certain constraints that will make it work better.

In short, it’s exhausting.  But it’s almost done!  So now I am going to let my brain rest and enjoy a little get-away with Al.  We’re going to the hilariously named Hartbeestpoort and are eating dinner here tonight.

Catch you all later!

Drudgery

“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
-Logan Pearsall Smith

I saw this quote the other day and it spoke to my little writer’s soul.  Isn’t it the truth?  You know that you’re meant to do a job if you can stand the mind-numbing tedium that comes with it.  And let’s face it — every job includes some dose of mind-numbing tedium.  I bet even an exciting job like being an astronaut comes with a fair amount of boring nonsense.  I mean, I bet astronauts have to do a lot of paperwork.

I should have known early on that I wasn’t cut out for law firm work when I found myself dreading even the non-tedious work involved in my job.  In fact, a weird inversion would happen at the lowest points of my tenure as a Big Law attorney wherein I’d look forward to the more tedious, less demanding tasks given to me (making PowerPoint slides, say, or reviewing documents) while facing more challenging assignments with white knuckles and gritted teeth, because I usually found them both difficult and dreadfully boring.  An assignment that is both hard and tedious really is the worst of both worlds, isn’t it?

Of course, I always did what I was asked to do and I’d like to think I performed adequately, but did I enjoy the process? Dear God, no.  I hated every minute of it.  Working at a law firm — both the drudgery and the brainwork — was an entirely miserable experience for me that often clouded my enjoyment of life.  Now, you might think I’m being a tad dramatic here, but no — something about the firm managed to spark some real Dark Night of the Soul-style existential wrangling for me.  Never did I fall to my knees and cry out, “Is this all there is, God?” because, you know, that would have been a little over the top, but, to be fair, I did cry in my office a lot.

It’s not just me who feels this way, by the way.  Sure, my hate for that particular job was probably more vehement than most of my colleagues’, but I’d venture to say that very few of the lawyers I encountered at my law firm genuinely loved what they did.  Many of us came to a firm in the first place because we had debt or we were trying to save money or we wanted to get training or we needed to have something prestigious on our resumes.  But the number of people who woke up looking forward to their workdays was quite small.  And almost no one I knew enjoyed the drudgery.  And oh, the sheer drudgery of being an attorney!  It’s indescribably dreary.

Now that I’m writing for a living, the Logan Pearsall Smith quote, above, makes perfect sense to me.  Some context: Smith was an essayist and critic who was known to take days to perfect a sentence.  (He also came up with some awesome quotes). So the guy clearly had a fondness for the drudgery of writing.  And gosh darn it, so do I.  Don’t get me wrong, writing is hard and it takes an effort, even as self-disciplined as I am, to make myself sit down and write 2000 words a day in my novel and then crank out a daily blog post.  But even when it’s a struggle, I enjoy it.  There’s something satisfying about gritting through, forcing my brain to shape words, digging ideas out of the attic of my subconscious.  And maybe the glow of writing will wear off eventually – after all, I’ve been doing this full-time for less than two months — but I don’t think so.  I think this is my vocation, as Smith would have it.  And so far I’m loving the drudgery.

Book review Tuesday: My Life in France (Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme)

As a writer, I feel that it’s part of my job to constantly read.  Which is good, because I would do this anyway.  Even during my law school and attorney days, after long days of reading dry-as-a-bone legal documents and cases, I’d come home and read fiction for hours. In fact, looking back over my twenty-five or so years of literacy, I can’t remember a single period where I wasn’t reading at least one book for pleasure. Simply put, I can’t imagine my life without good books.

In that spirit, and in the interest of keeping things spicy here on the blog, I am going to introduce the occasional book review.  I can’t promise the reviews will be weekly or even monthly, but I’ll try to write about books that struck a chord with me.

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Over the past few months of intensive international travel (first to Asia and now to Africa) involving long hauls on planes, I’ve torn through quite a few excellent books, some of which I’ll probably discuss here eventually.  But one of these books in particular struck just the right note of being inspiring, entertaining, and educational: My Life in France, by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme.

My Life in France is Julia Child’s memoir, which she co-wrote with Prud’homme, her husband’s nephew.  It covers the early years of her marriage, when she and her husband Paul were newlyweds living in post-World War II Paris, all the way through Julia’s immense success as a cookbook writer and TV personality, to Paul’s death in 1994.

Along the way, Julia and Paul lived in a number of places thanks to Paul’s job as an exhibits officer for the US State Department, including Marseilles, Norway, Germany, and Washington, DC.  But it was Paris that stole their hearts.  It’s clear from Julia’s writing about her time in Paris that the city, even in its bedraggled state after the war, was her soul’s true home.  The city energized and inspired her. She loved the language, the people, the wine, and, most importantly, the food.

Julia started off as a novice in the kitchen and, inspired by the food in France, decided to teach herself to cook.  She describes the initial process this way:

Surrounded by gorgeous food, wonderful restaurants, and a kitchen at home –and an appreciative audience in my husband – I began to cook more and more.  In the late afternoon, I would wander along the quay from the Chambre des Députés to Notre Dame, poking my nose into shops and asking the merchants about everything.  I’d bring home oysters and bottles of Montlouis-Perle de la Touraine, and would then repair to my third-floor cuisine, where I’d whistle over the stove and try my hand at ambitious recipes, such as veal with turnips in a special sauce.

Eventually, Julia went on to the Cordon Bleu to receive her formal training.  She then began to collaborate with two Frenchwomen, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, on a cookbook designed to teach American home cooks how to make French food (which later became Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which sits on my own bookshelf today).  The rest, as they say, is history, but it was great fun to read about how she made the transformation from home cook to famous chef, author, and television personality.  Part of the secret to her success, as it turns out, was good old-fashioned obsessiveness and attention to detail.  The lady did not give up until she was happy with the result, and it paid off.

What I loved most about this book – apart from its absolutely charming descriptions of day-to-day life in 1950s Paris and the mouthwatering dishes that Julia both created and consumed – was the picture it painted of Julia’s marriage to Paul.  They had a true partnership.  Paul encouraged Julia in her cooking, helping her to set up her kitchen at home and later to photograph her dishes for her cookbook manuscript.  And Julia supported Paul in his career, which was often frustrating and demoralizing.

They also had a tremendous amount of fun together, traveling the French countryside, cooking, eating, and enjoying each other’s company.  Julia describes traveling in Italy with her family, without Paul, and how different it felt from her trips with Paul:

Paul and I liked to travel at the same slow pace. He always knew so much about things, discovered hidden wonders, noticed ancient walls or indigenous smells, and I missed his warm presence.  Once upon a time I had been content as a single woman, but now I couldn’t stand it! . . . When we returned to Paris on May 3, I fell into Paul’s arms and squeezed him tight.

Julia and Paul’s annual Valentine’s Day card from their time in Germany

Julia and Paul both worked hard but also greatly valued their time with friends and family.  They hosted parties, organized weekend getaways, and attended dinners.  They cultivated close relationships with a variety of people and were loyal, thoughtful friends.  Perhaps my favorite paragraph in the entire book is the following, describing Julia and Paul’s decision to travel to France in 1963 to see friends, despite Julia’s incredibly busy TV and writing schedule:

“I just don’t know if we have the time for a trip to France right now,” I sighed.  Paul nodded.

But then we looked at each other and repeated a favorite phrase from our diplomatic days: “Remember, ‘No one’s more important than people!’”  In other words, friendship is the most important thing – not career or housework, or one’s fatigue – and it needs to be tended and nurtured.  So we packed up our bags and off we went. And thank heaven we did!

I love that attitude, don’t you?  Al and I also try to prioritize people over other things – life is so short and relationships are so precious – but this can be difficult to remember when career and chores and other stresses threaten to overwhelm.

This book felt particularly of the moment for me when I read it a few weeks ago.  Like me, Julia accompanied her (supportive, loving) husband to a new place because of his job.  She was not content to be a housewife and so she set out to do something productive and enjoyable with her time.  For Julia, it was French cooking, and for me, it’s writing.

I wrote a bit here about how I’m trying to take a page out of Julia’s book and throw myself head first into my work, my marriage, and my new surroundings.  So far, so good, although I feel confident in saying that Johannesburg in 2012 is a bit more of a challenge in the charm department than Paris in 1948.  But even if Joburg isn’t my soul’s true home, it may just be the place that I start to make my dreams come true.  And I’m so grateful to Julia Child for the inspiration.

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