1) Make sure you can spell. If you can put a sentence together, that's even better.
I can't spell. Ask anybody. Well, it should be someone who knows me, although the news has very likely spread. Anyways, I prefer to see myself a sort of Shakespeare-like maverick. Me and John McCane. And how many ways are there to put words together to say what you mean? What if you want to say what you feel instead of what you mean? Or what you see? Or what is, will be, was, might have been? Writing is so incredible because it doesn't say just what it says, but how it tastes, sounds, feels in your hair and dampens your face, leaving droplets on your eyelashes, your gloves dampened when you push back the hair whipping across your eyes, escaped from your scarf with the aid of the cold and engulfing wind. So when you say know how to spell, it's too late for that I think. But word processors help those of us less spelling-inclined. And know how to put a sentence together? Really?
2) Writing is not simply about words. Are you observant? Can you tell the difference between a sparrow and a sparrow-hawk?
To be quite frank, I couldn't identify either. Especially since those bird books don't look anything like the real things. Even when I see a bird whose name I know, look it up in a book and I don't recognize it. I do know when someone is upset though. I can hear it in her voice and see it in her face. And I ask what's wrong, and I want to know. And when she says 'nothing', sometimes I let it be.
I know how self conscious I am, and most of the time I know how people see me, how I see myself, and the distance between the two. Sometimes I'm surprised though.
3) Are you interested in anyone other than yourself? Writing about oneself has its limitations.
I know what this means, and I agree in a way. It's funny though, because I just read this:
“A serious author deals only with 'real' experiences and 'real' emotions, though they are usually assigned to people with fictional names. I cannot believe, frankly, that one could – or would want to – write about experiences the emotional equivalents of which he has not experienced personally. Writing is a far more conscious form of dreaming, and no one dreams dreams that are of no interest to him, however trivial and absurd they may appear to someone else.” Joyce Carol Oates
I think what Mr. Bond is suggesting is that you can't write about yourself in isolation, without consciousness of yourself in relation to others and other things. We don't exist in a vacuum. Duh. It's like any art form- I don't think you need to be tortured or suffering pain to create art. I think that the idea you do is ridiculous, pretentious. I do think, though, that beautiful art comes out of a knowledge of great pain and great happiness. Everybody experiences great loss, sadness, hunger, emptiness and loneliness.
There is another way I can think about this though. What does it mean to write for someone else? When you write something that someone else will likely read, don't you write with a level of self-consciousness? When you write about yourself for someone else to read, are you writing out of self involvement? Consideration of others? Artistic inspiration? All of these? Probably. When given a list like this, it's seldom appropriate to pick just one option, not really.
4) Are you prepared to wait years, maybe a lifetime, for recognition? If you want instant recognition, become a model.
Well, I'm already famous so that's that. Right?
5) If you're convinced that you are an unrecognized genius, remember this: everyone feels the same way.
And I suppose that, in a way, everybody is. Everybody has a story to tell, a special way to tell it, a way that nobody else ever thought of. Everybody makes choices, the only choices they could make, precisely because those are the decisions that they made. By the same token, nobody else could ever make those decisions because nobody haswillcould ever make those decisions through the eyes of the person that makes them. That makes every decision that every person makes very special, doesn't it?
6) Writer's block. Everybody asks me about this. What do you do when stuck? That's easy. Just make sure the waste-paper basket is within throwing distance.
When I had the great fortune to meet with author Stephen Alter, he said something illuminating. Writing is very simple, he explained. You sit down at a desk, table, on a blanket, even the ceiling is acceptable if you can work it out. He didn't mention the ceiling bit, but I thought it was relevant. Anyway, you sit down, with a pen and paper. You put the pen on the paper and draw it along the surface of the paper, not so hard that the paper rips, but just hard enough that the ink rubs off and makes a line where the pen has been. That's writing. Alternatively, you might prefer to sit in front of a computer and press the keys, which cause letters to appear on the screen. With this option, it's important to remember to save your writing, because if you don't, it might be lost. This is not such a worry with writing with pen and paper. Mr. Alter continued by explaining that the only surefire way to not be able to write, is to not write. Because when you sit down to a computer and press the keys, or put pen to paper and scrawl, you are writing, you can't help it. But when you don't do either of these things, you're not writing. There's no way that you will be until you move your fingers, or if you're very talented, your toes. Start with your fingers though. We don't want to get discouraged before we start.
There's another thing about writing which I think applies to life in general. Most things do though, don't they? As Mr. Bond so succinctly put it, it's very likely that a good portion of your writing will be bumph. Will end up in the garbage. Will make you cringe if you have the misfortune to come across it again sometime in the future. But here's the thing- if you didn't write all that bumph, you wouldn't have come to the good stuff, the good phrase or sentence, or maybe even a paragraph. I once heard author Anne Lamott speak. She said, you write a lot and end up with a really horrible first draft, and you're half-way there. Kate writes about 'necessary spaces.' What more prefect way could it be described? The time you spend between getting started and being finished; the time you spend reevaluating all the decisions you've made up until this point, wondering if you aren't in fact pretty severely unstable to have thought this was a good idea. The time you spend banging your head against a wall, throwing papers in the bin, hating what you're writing, yourself for thinking you could write. You can think of all this as wasted time. But you can also think of it another way; it was a necessary space for you to get to the place where you wipe your tears and actually sit down to write, the place where you look at the screen and think, oh, that's not bad, is it?
Dear Baby,
I wanted to let you know something before you even begin. You likely won't understand it until much later, but there that is. Every step and every misstep you take, every action you take and mistake you make, will bring you to the most beautiful thing: yourself.
7) And finally, remember Red Smith's immortal words:'Writing is very easy. All you have to do is sit in front of the typewriter till little drops of blood appear on your forehead.'
Enough said.
*Italicized, numbered sentences from Ruskin Bond's "Landour Days."
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