The Writer August 2018

Certainly the very best thing we can do for our writing careers is to commit to writing every single day. Of course, we’d also read for pleasure, exercise for 30 minutes, walk 10,000 steps, eat plentiful heapings of green vegetables, and never lose our temper, succumb to lesser emotions, or sit for hours at a time – all while holding down a full-time job, no less. In a perfect world, all of these things would happen. In real life, however, something’s gotta give. And I sympathize greatly with readers who confess sometimes it’s writing that falls on the chopping block. Sometimes, too, the creative well runs dry for a spell, and writing sessions seem to yield little result. If you find yourselves struggling to meet daily writing goals, one thing…

“As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.”—Dani Shapiro MY HUSBAND IS AN ARTIST, and I am a freelance writer, and there’s a lot of chatter in our house about our careers. What do we need to get done that day or that week? Where would we like to be by next year, or five years from now? Occasionally we talk about other artists and writers we know, some of whom are having great success, and some of whom should be but aren’t. Over time, we’ve started to see some patterns in how we and others think about and approach creative work, and we realized there are some common myths that, if not challenged, can impede or completely derail a career. Read on to discover…

“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”—Maya Angelou William Finnegan is an award-winning author and journalist. His most recent book, the 2016 memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, won him the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, and his four other books and 30 years as a staff writer at The New Yorker have earned him numerous other honors and nominations, including the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism (twice) and the Edward M. Brecher Award. His other books include Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid, which the Times Book Review chose as one of the 10 best nonfiction books of 1986; Dateline Soweto; A Complicated War:…

“Writing is frustration – it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.”—Philip Roth WARNING: The following quiz is a powerful scientific tool that’s to be used only with extreme care. Our research team has performed extensive longitudinal studies on the following questions and answers such that the results are guaranteed to be 100 percent accurate.* *Except if they’re not. So with that in mind, read on and see if you’ve got what it takes to be a writer today: QUESTION 1: Are you hooked on any of the following? a. Coffee. b. #2 pencils. c. T-shirts that say things like “Lit Happens!” d. Thesaurus.com. ✓ Give yourself 122 points for each answer. ✓ Add 1 point if you worried that one of the answers was…

Dating and writing tend to breed unattainable visions. We expect passionate kisses during a rainstorm. Instead, we get stilted conversation over slowly congealing appetizers. We think our piece can change the world. Instead it’s “this isn’t the right fit for us” or “the structure is off” or “can you turn this 2,000-word, multiple-sourced feature into a 750-word listicle?” For both, the silence – that awful, endless stretch of uncertainty – can crush your self-esteem to dust. I spent a healthy portion of my twenties dating. I was spectacularly mediocre – my dad once referred to my travails as 50 First Dates, after the Drew Barrymore-Adam Sandler movie. But what I learned in coffee shops and restaurants has segued nicely into freelancing, where remaining open to joy while protecting yourself against…

I magine you are obsessed with your grandmother. She emigrated from Ireland at the age of 15 and then labored to earn money to bring over her 10 brothers and sisters. Or perhaps she came to this country and invented a new type of paper clip. Or maybe she was a bit more rambunctious and had an affair with a local politician. Her illegitimate daughter is now considering a run for Senate. Perhaps she did all three! You find yourself thinking about your grandmother’s story all the time. Talking to people about her. Jotting down notes. Sometimes you sit at the computer and research her hometown. You want to write something about her, but what? A novel? A memoir? A biography? Maybe a poem? How do you decide what form…