7/25/2019 How to Write_ A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic.pdf
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19/12/13 How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini , and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic
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Conservatives,
Liberals, and
Polygamy
By Conor
Friedersdorf
Midwives for the
Dying
By Richard
Gunderman
I Am a Teacher
With Really Bad
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JOE FASSLER DEC 17 2013, 3:37 PM ET
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This year, I talked to nearly 50 different writers for the By Heartseries, a
weekly column about beloved quotes and cherished lines. Each author shared the
life-changing, values-shaping passages that have helped sustain creative practice
throughout his or her career. T heir contributions were eclectic and intensely
personal: Jim Crace, whose novelHarvestwas a finalist for the Man Booker prize
this year, shared a folk rhyme from his childhood, the investigativeNew Y ork
Timesjournalist Michael Moss (Salt, Sugar, Fat) close-read the Frito-Lay
slogan, and This American Life host Ira Glass eulogized a longtime friend and
collaborator. Though I began by asking each writer the same questionwhat line
is most important to y ou?their responses contained no formula.
There was also no specific requirement to talk about
craft. And yet writersbeing writersoffered agenerous bounty of practical writing advice. T hey
shared exercises. They discussed principles of
revision. Some presented ways to beat
procrastination, or fight back against wr iting-desk
ennui. And a great many shared their thoughts on
How to Write: AYear inAdvice fromFranzen,King, Hosseini, and MoreHighlights from 12 months of interviews with writers about their craft and the authors they love
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How to Write_ A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic.pdf
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19/12/13 How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini , and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/how-to-write-a-year-in-advice-from-franzen-king-hosseini-and-more/282445/ 2/13
An AtlanticSpecial Report
Read More
Elena Seibert
the most crucial craft question of all: Why does
some writing feel dead on the page, while other
words thrum with life?
Taken together, these conversations were like attending an MFA programI
learned that much. Here are the best short pieces of writing advice I heard from
writers in 2013, a whole years worth of wisdom.
Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite
Runnerand this yearsAnd the MountainsEchoed, reminded us that we can only
approximate the book we want to writethe
final product will never capture the
excitement of initial inspiration. His tribute to
Stephen King explained how he deals with that
familiar disappointment.
You write because y ou have an idea in your
mind that feels so genuine, so important, so
true. And yet, by the time this idea passes
through the different filters of your mind,
and into your hand, and onto the page orcomputer screenit becomes distorted, and
it's been diminished. The writing you end up with is an approximation, if
you're lucky, of whatever it was you really wanted to say.
When this happens, it's quite a sobering reminder of your limitations as a
writer. It can be extremely frustrating. When I'm writing, a thought will
occasionally pass unblemished, unperturbed, through my head onto the
screenclearly, like through a glass. It's an intoxicating, euphoric sensation
to feel that I've communicated something so real, and so true. But this
doesn't happen often. (I can only think that there are some writers who
write that way all the time. I think that's the difference between greatness
and just being good.)
Even my finished books are approximations of what I intended to do. I try to
narrow the gap, as much as I possibly can, between what I wanted to say
and what's actually on the page. But there's still a gap, there always is. It's
very, v ery difficult. And it's humbling.
But that's what art is forfor both reader and writer to overcome their
respective limitations and encounter something true. It seems miraculous,
doesn't it? That somebody can articulate something clearly and beautifully
that ex ists inside y ou, something shrouded in impenetrable fog. Great art
reaches through the fog, towards this secret heartand it shows it to you,
holds it before you. It's a rev elatory, incredibly moving experience when this
happens. You feel understood. You feel heard. That's why we come to artwe feel less alone. We are less alone. You see, through art, that others have
felt the way you haveand you feel better.
Jim Shepard, author ofLove and Hydrogen,
argued against the conventional literary
wisdom that has prevailed since Joyce: that
short stories should be structured around a
life-changing epiphany. In his reading of
Flannery O Connors classic story A Good
Man Is Hard to Find, suggests moments of
insight dont lastand knowing this is key to
crafting realistic characters.
O'Connor really believes that we can flood,
momentarily, with the kind of grace that
epiphany is supposed to represent. But I
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3/13
19/12/13 How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini , and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/how-to-write-a-year-in-advice-from-franzen-king-hosseini-and-more/282445/ 3/13
Random House
Tracy Chevalier
think she also believes that we're essentially
sinners. She's saying: Don't think for a
moment that because y ou've had a brief instant of illumination, and you
suddenly see y ourself with clarity, that y ou're not going to transgress two
days down the road.
I find this idea enormously useful in my own work. My characters are all
about gaining an understanding of the right thing to doand avoiding it
anyway. T hat sense that we can be in some ways geniuses of our own self-
destruction runs, in some ways, counter to the more traditional notion of the
epiphanywhich tells us that stories are all about providing information to
characters who badly need it. Epiphanies are, in some ways, staged and
underimportant.
Tracy Chevalier, author of The Girl With
the Pearl Earring, praised the minimalist
designer Mies van der Roheand his famous
mandate Less is more. She shared how she
trims the narrative fat, and why concision
matters.
Taking away concentrates what's left.Restraint is powerful. In Girl With a Pearl
Earring, the two main characters touch just
twicea hand, an earbut readers tell me
those are some of the most erotic moments
they've read. In my new novel, The Last
Runaway, the heroine is a Quaker and says
little, in keeping with the tradition of silence at Quaker meetings. Through
the drafts I kept cutting her lines, so that now when Honor Bright speaks,
you notice.
By using fewer words, I am also giving readers the chance to fill the gaps
with their own. "Less is more" encourages collaboration, which is what a
book should bea contract between writer and reader.
Chevalier also showed us this process at work:
1 I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside
the Justice System
2 When Minority Students Attend Elite Private
Schools
3 How to Write: A Year in Advice from
Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More
4 Anxiety About Certain Things Can Be
Hereditary
5 Experts Decisive Against Multivitamins:
'Stop Wasting Money'
6 The Strange Politics of Polygamy
7 NORAD Tracks Santa's Path on Christmas
Eve Because of a Typo
8 Why C.S. Lewis Never Goes Out of Style
9 This Chart Blows Up the Myth of the Welfare
Queen
10 The Great American Gender Debates of 2013
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Fay Weldon
Ed Kashi
Fay Weldon acknowledged that, on a day-
to-day level, writing can seem like pointless
drudgery. She describedhow Camuss
aphorism One must imagine Sisyphus happy
helps her fight back against unproductive
feelings of meaninglessness.
If we consider, like Camus, Sisyphus at the
foot of his mountain, we can see that he is
smiling. He is content in his task of defyingthe Gods, the journey more important than
the goal. To achieve a beginning, a middle,
an end, a meaning to the chaos of creationthat's more than any deity
seems to manage: But it's what writers do. So I tidy the desk, ev en polish it
up a bit, stick some flowers in a vase and start.
As I begin a novel I remind myself as ever of Camus's admonition that the
purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. And even
while thinking, well, fat chance! I find courage, reach for the heights, and if
the rock keeps rolling down again so it does. What the hell, start again.
Rewrite. Be of good cheer. Smile on, Sisyphus!
For Mohsin Hamid, author ofHow to Get
Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, physical exercise
helped break through writers block. Following
the counsel of literary ultra-marathoner
Haruki Murakami, Hamid foundthat long,
daily walks made him more creative.
I needed to get unstuck. And, nearing the
age of 40, I'd already used up many of the
usual tricks writers before me had
employed to shake things up when they
were in a rut: trav el chemically, break your
heart, change continents, get married, have
a child, quit your job, etc. I was desperate.
So I started to walk. Every morning. First thing, as soon as I got up, which as
a dad now meant 6 or 7 a.m. I walked for half an hour. Then I walked for an
hour. Then I walked for 90 minutes
Murakami's quote is about writing long novels. I write short novels. So it
made sense that while he has to run to get fit enough to do what he has to do,
I could manage with just walking. And, the significant speed difference
notwithstanding, a daily five-mile walk turned out to be exactly what I
needed. My head cleared. My energy soared. My neck pains diminished.
Sometimes I texted myself ideas, sentences, entire paragraphs as I walked.Other t imes I just floated along, arms at my sides, stewing and filtering and
looking.
Walking unlocked me. It 's like LSD. Or a library. It does things to you. I
finished my novel in only two more y ears (for a total of six), walking every
day. And I don't plan on stopping. If the choice is between extended periods
of abject writing failure and prescription orthotics, I know which side my
man Murakami and I are on.
Michael Pollan advocatedgett ing ones hands dirty. For him, the act of
starting a garden helped him develop the questions he never could have posed
abstractlythrough gardening and the work of Wendell Berry, he uncovered his
subject and approach.
I'd learned a set of values from Thoreau in the library, but it was only when
I tested themin the crucible of an actual garden with actual pests on an
actual patch of landthat I was able to form
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Alia Malley
Nina Subine
my values more fully.
It was in reading Wendell Berry that I came
across a particular line that formed a
template for much of my work: "eating is an
agricultural act." It 's a line that urges you to
connect the dots between two realmsthe
farm, and the platethat can seem very far
apart. We must link our eating, in other
words, to the way our food is grown. In a
way, all my writing about food has been
about connecting dots in the way Berry asks
of us. It's why, when I write about
something like the meat industry, I try to
trace the whole long chain: from your plate to the feedlot, and from there to
the corn field, and from there to the oil fields in the Middle East. Berry
reminds us that we're part of a food system, and we need to think about our
eating with this factand its implicationsin mind.
Ultimately, this revelation led to a change in my career. I was an editor at
Harper's, and I loved editing magazines. I didn't think it was ev er realistic
that I could make a living as a writer, but my editorial workhelping writers
with their prose, watching the process of revision, finding a narrative pathsthrough a complex subjectmade me increasingly curious to try it myself. I
didn't have a subject until I kind of hit on the garden by mistake. And by
engaging with my own agricultural struggle on a small scale, I became
reoriented: I learned a way of thinking and living that I didn't know before. I
wanted to write more and more about the agricultural and political realities I
am joined to by my eating.
Jessica Francis Kane has taken solace over
the y ears in the Stoic philosopher Marcus
Aurelius. His injunctionWhat is there in this
that is unbearable and bey ond
endurance?helps her rememberthat facing
the blank page is not so relatively painful, and
this helps her stop procrastinating.
Writing is hard, but is it unbearable? Who
would say that it is? Even asking the
question, I'm reminded of the one
exclamation in the passage: "You would be
ashamed to confess it!" His words helped me
navigate rejection, which is certainly no fun, but if you ask y ourself if it's
unbearable, you find yourself preparing the next self-addressed stamped
envelope pretty quickly. The words helped me survive the protracted sale of
my first novel, and they reminded me to start writing again after a long
hiatus after the birth of my first child. I wasn't sure how to make room for
writing with a baby. It is difficult, but beyond endurance? I got myself back
to the desk.
Stephen Kings classic craft memoir On Writingaddresses almost everything
the master storyteller knows. But one key topic is not covered in that book: how
to write a perfect opening sentence. King shared his thoughts, developed over
many y ears of writing, on how books should start and why beginnings matter.
A book won't stand or fall on the very first line of prose -- the story has got
to be there, and that's the real work. And yet a really good first line can do somuch to establish that crucial sense of voice -- it's the first thing that
acquaints you, that makes you eager, that starts to enlist y ou for the long
haul. So there's incredible power in it, when you say, come in here. You want
to know about this. And someone begins to listen.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/07/why-stephen-king-spends-months-and-even-years-writing-opening-sentences/278043/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/05/marcus-aureliuss-one-question-to-beat-procrastination-whining-and-struggle/276288/7/25/2019 How to Write_ A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic.pdf
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Shane Leonard
Lauren Go ldenberg
Greg Martin
Paul Harding, author ofEnon, explained
how juxtaposition and contradiction underlie
great fictionand held up John Cheever as a
sterling example of this principle at work.
Contradiction is the essential move or
method for art. In music its counterpoint.
In landscape painting its the contrast
between the foreground, which is always
dark, and the background, which is light.And in writing, its death and life. The
imminent arrival of deathwhat greater
thing to set life in relief against? In Enon,
the whole thing is just a sonataits just one
voiceagainst the threat of utter darkness.
The darker it gets, when we arrives at just
one remaining pinpoint of light, that pinpoint
becomes all the more beautiful and
resplendent for its rarity and clarity against
the gloom. You put contradictory things
next to each other, and in the intermingling
of them you get something like the mysteryof human experience.
The same kind of principle works for
juxtapositionthe infinite with the
infinitesimal. This works in writing, when
you describe something on the scale of the
universe, and then describe something as
tiny as a grain of sand. So you could take a t iny, intimate domestic scene
someone drinking a cup of tea at a deskthat scalability, that intuitive
human truth that the great and the small, the good and the bad, the light and
the dark, are all intermingled.
The poles must be structured around the truly irreducible questions
mysteries you cant get to the bottom of. Otherwise, youre in danger of
explaining yourself away. Second-rate writing will tell you which pole to pick:
Be kind to strangers! T hen youre in the realm of propaganda or received
opinion or truisms. I think the definition of kitsch, or sentimentality, is
denying either pole in favor over the other. It goes back to what Cheevers
character, is attempting but failing, to dotrying to deny the dark part and
show only the light. But in the model, that conceptual model, no subject has
any meaning if its been separated from its opposite. I ts Einstein, its
relativity: Nothing has meaning without being relative to its opposite.
In the digital age, people are more seamlessly
connected than ever before. Jonathan
Franzen remindedus that fiction writers
must be singular. He ex plained why great
writing happens far from the cloud, the
crowd:
The I nternet is fabulous for a lot of things.
Its a fabulous research tool. Its great for
buying stuff, its great for bringing together
people to work on communal things, like
software, or people who share a passion or
are all suffering from the same disease and
want to find each other and communicate.
Its wonderful for that. But the Internet in
generaland social media in particular
fosters this notion that everything should be
shared, everything is communal. When it works, its great . But it specifically
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/jonathan-franzen-on-the-19th-century-writer-behind-his-internet-skepticism/280168/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/think-about-characters-like-a-sphere-how-john-cheever-wrote-inner-turmoil/279541/7/25/2019 How to Write_ A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic.pdf
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Marion Ettlinger
doesnt work, I think, in the realm of cultural productionand particularly
literary production. Good novels arent written by committee. Good novels
arent collaborated on. Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily
isolate themselves, and go deep, and report from the depths on what they
find. They do put what they find in a form thats communally accessible,
communally shareable, but not at the production end. What makes a good
novel, apart from the skill of the writer, is how true it is to the individual
subjectivity. People talk about finding your v oice: Well, thats what it is.
Youre finding your own individual voice, not a group voice
And this is true, especially true, for anyone who aspires to write serious
fiction. When I first met Don DeLillo, he was making the case that if we ever
stop having fiction writers it will mean weve given up on the concept of the
individual person. We will only be a crowd. And so it seems to me that the
writers responsibility nowadays is very basic: to continue to try to be a
person, not merely a member of a crowd. (Of course, the place where the
crowd is forming now is largely electronic.) This is a primary assignment for
anyone setting up to be and remain a writer now. So even as I spend half my
day on the Internetdoing email, buying plane tickets, ordering stuff online,
looking at bird pictures, all of itI personally need to be careful to restrict
my access. I need to make sure I still have a private self. Because the private
self is where my writing comes from. The more Im pulled out of that, the
more I simply become another loudspeaker for what already exists. As a
writer, Im try ing to pay attention to the stuff the people arent paying
attention to. Im try ing to monitor my own soul as carefully as I can and find
ways to express what I find there.
Andre Dubus III made the case against
outlining. In his warning against
intellectualizing ones workDo not think,
dreamhe insistedthat fiction comes to life
when you stop trying to control it by working
towards an ending planned out in advance.
Were all born with an imagination.
Everybody gets one. And I really believe
this is just from years of daily writingthat
good fiction comes from the same place as
our dreams. I think the desire to step into
someone elses dream world, is a universal
impulse thats shared by us all. Thats what fiction is. As a writing teacher, if
I say nothing else to my students, its this.
I began to learn characters will come alive if you back the fuck off.
Heres the distinction. Theres a profound difference between making
something up and imagining it. Youre making something up when you thinkout a scene, when y oure being logical about it. You think, I need this to
happen so some other thing can happen. Theres an aspect of controlling the
material that I dont think is artful. I think it leads to contrived work,
frankly, no matter how beautifully written it might be. You can hear the false
note in this kind of writing.
This was my main problem when I was just starting out: I was trying to say
something. When I began to write, I was deeply self-conscious. I was writing
stories hoping they would say something thematic, or address something
that I was wrest ling with philosophically. I ve learned, for me at least, its a
dead road. Its writing from the outside in instead of the inside out.
But during my very early writing, certainly before Id published, I began to
learn characters will come alive if you back the fuck off. It was exciting, and
even a little terrifying. If you allow them to do what theyre going to do,
think and feel what they re going to think and feel, things start to happen on
their own. Its a beautiful and exciting alchemy. And all these years later,
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Chase Jarvis
Aimee Bender
thats the thrill I write to get: to feel things start to happen on their own.
So Ive learned over the years to free-fall into whats happening. What
happens then is, you start writing something you dont even really want to
write about. Things start to happen under your pencil that you dont want to
happen, or dont understand. But thats when the work starts to have a
beating heart.
Sherman Alexie, author ofLone Ranger
and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, explained howwriters are kept captive by the things that
torment themin his case, it was his
upbringing on an Indian reservationbut in
our childhood prisons lie the seeds of
inspiration. He urged usto reclaim our
traumas and make great art.
We tend to revisit our prisons. And we
always go back. This is not only true for
reserv ation Indians, of course. I have white
friends who grew up very comfortably, but
who hate their families, and yet they goback everything Thanksgiving and Christmas. Every year, theyre ruined
until February. I m always telling them, You know, you dont have to go.
You can come to my house. Why are they addicted to being demeaned and
devalued by the people who are supposed to love them? So you can see the
broader applicability : Im in the suburb of my mind. Im in the farm town of
my mind. Im in the childhood bedroom of my mind.
I think ev ery writer stands in the doorway of their prison. Half in, half out.
The very act of storytelling is a return to the prison of what torments us and
keeps us captive, and writers are repeat offenders. You go through this
whole journey with your prison, revisiting it in your mind. Hopefully, you get
to a point when you realize there was beauty in your prison, too. Maybe,
when you get to that point, Im on the reserv ation of my mind can also be
a beautiful thing. Its on the rez, after all, where I learned to tell stories.
Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master,
saidthat the best writing is enigmaticshe
lets the music language guide her, rather than
traditional notions of plot, character, and
knowing where shes going.
The writing I tend to think of as good is
good because its mysterious. It tends to
happen when I get out of the way-when Ilet it go a little bit, I surprise myself. I feel
most pleased with my language when I dont
understand it completely. When it sustains
hope that theres more to write about, that
theres an open door for me to explore.
Thats when the writing gets really fun. I
feel like its all about waiting for a kind of discovery that takes place on the
sentence levelas opposed to having a light-bulb about a character. Thats
the thing that drives me from first sentence to last sentence.
I know my own writing is working when I feel like theres something
hovering beneath the v erbal, that my sterious emotional place.
Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built
out of language. If y ou write a page a day for 30 days, and you pick the parts
where the language is working, plot and character will start to emerge
organically. For me, plot and character emerge directly from the wordas
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/how-aimee-bender-feels-after-memorizing-a-poem-caffeinated/281861/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/the-poem-that-made-sherman-alexie-want-to-drop-everything-and-be-a-poet/280586/7/25/2019 How to Write_ A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic.pdf
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Rick Smolan
opposed to having a light-bulb about a character or event. I just dont work
like that. Though I know some writers do, I cant. I ll think, oh I have an
insight about the character, and when I ll sit down to write, it feels
extremely imposed and last for two minutes. I find I can write for two lines
and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something
comes through the sentence level, and sticking with the sentences that give a
subtle feeling that theres something more to say. This means Ive hit on
something unconscious enough to write aboutsomething with enough
unknown in there to be brought out. On some level I can sense that, and it
keeps me going.
Some of those mysteries clarify, but theyre not all going to clarify. I think a
good poem will always stay a little mysterious. The best writing does. The
words that click into place, wrap around something mysterious. They create
a shape around which something livesand they give hints about what that
thing is, but do not reveal it fully. T hats the thing I want to do in my own
writing: present words that act as a vessel for something more mysterious. I
know its working when I feel like theres something hovering beneath it the
verbal, that myster ious emotional place.
Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club,
believesin the value of small details. She
shared a wr iting exercise involving family
photographsa practice that inspired her new
noveland explains why she likes to move
pixel by pixel.
I really admire the ACLU, and I value the
important work they do. But I said, You
look at things universally, telescopically,
macroscopically. Im microscopic. Im at
that tiny end where stories begin. I wouldnt
be able to sayit should always be this way,
for all people. Generalizations are just notpart of how I think. Stories begin with
microscopic-level detail, in the particularities that make up each individual
life. Thats my territory.
As I write a story, I have to be open to all the possibilities of what these
characters are thinking and doing and what might apply. For me, the best
way to do this is writing longhand, the way I wr ite the early drafts of a novel.
Writing by hand helps me remain open to all those particular circumstances,
all those little details that add up to the truth.
So much of my work through the beginningand especially through the
middleof writing a story is establishing what the characters believe as they
go on and face ever-changing situations and hardships. Whether they fall inlove, or have a death that occurs, or think that theyre dyinghow do they
respond, and what experiences shape the way they respond? I have to be
open to their beliefs, whatever framework they might come up with to
respond to the circumstances of their lives. As Whitman says, Perhaps it is
everywhere on water and on land: I dont try to confine myself to one
particular road, but instead allow myself wide-ranging exploration.
Theres so much chaos in my early drafts. As I try to open myself up to all
possibilities, anarchy tends to reign. So how do I know when Im moving in a
productive direction? If anything might happen in a characters life, how do I
determine which details will serve me well? I err on the side of going into too
much detail when I do research and write. I abandon 95 percent of it. But I
love it. Its part of my writing process. I never consider it a waste of time.
I try to see as much as possiblein microscopic detail. I have an exercise
that helps me with this, using old family photographs. Ill blow an image up
as much as I can, and work through it pixel by pixel. This isnt the way we
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/amy-tans-lonely-pixel-by-pixel-writing-method/282215/7/25/2019 How to Write_ A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic.pdf
10/13
19/12/13 How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini , and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/how-to-write-a-year-in-advice-from-franzen-king-hosseini-and-more/282445/ 10/13
Craig Nova
Elizabeth Gilbert
typically look at pictureswhere we take in the whole gestalt, eyes focusing
mostly on the central image. Ill start at, say , a corner, looking at ev ery detail.
And the strangest things happen: you end up noticing things you never
would have noticed. Sometimes, Iv e discovered crucial, overlooked details
that are important to my familys story. T his process is a metaphor for the
way I workits the same process of looking closely, looking carefully,
looking in the unexpected places, and being receptive to what y ou find there.
Craig Nova, author ofAll the Dead Yale
Men, offered advicefrom Robert Graves:There is no good writing, only rewriting. He
explained how making radical changes
changing genre, voice, narrator, and so on
helps him learn about his subject and move
towards a final draft.
Take point of view, for example. Let's say
you are writing a scene in which a man and a
woman are breaking up. They are doing this
while they are having breakfast in their
apartment. But the scene doesn't work. It is
dull and flat.
Applying the [notion] mentioned above, the solution would be to change
point of view. That is, if it is told from the man's point of view, change it to
the woman's, and if that doesn't work, tell it from the point of view of the
neighborhood, who is listening through the wall in the apartment next door,
and if that doesn't work have this neighbor tell the story of the break up, as
he hears it, to his girlfriend. And if that doesn't work tell it from the point of
view of a burglar who is in the apartment, and who hid in a closet in the
kitchen when the man and woman who are breaking up came in and started
arguing.
It seems to me that each time you add a new point of view and tell the story
again, you will discover something you didn't know before. And if this is true
for point of view, it should hold true for structure, language, and all the other
elements that go into a piece of fiction.
Finally,Elizabeth Gilbert disputedthe idea
that great art is rooted in suffering. For her,
maintaining stubborn gladness helps her
back away from self-hatredand become a
more productive, fulfilled art ist.
Writing can be a very dramatic pursuit, full
of catastrophes and disasters and emotionand attempts that fail. My path as a writer
became much more smooth when I learned
that, when things arent going well, to
regard my struggles as curious, not tragic.
So,How do we get through this puzzle?
Thats funny, I thought I could write this
book and I cant, instead of,I have to drink a bottle of gin before 11:00 to
numb myself at how horrifying this is. You could almost call it a spiritual
practice Ive cultivated over the years. I really worked to create that kind of
relationshipso that its not a chaotic fight. I dont go up against my writing
and come out bloody- knuckled. I dont wrestle with the muse. I dont argue.
I try to get away from self-hatred, and competition, all those things that
mark and mar so many writers careers and lives. I try to remain stubborn
in my gladness.
We have this very German, romantic idea that if youre not in pain, and if
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/the-stubborn-gladness-of-elizabeth-gilberts-favorite-poet/281158/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-good-writing-craig-novas-radical-revising-process/276754/http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/http://www.craignova.com/7/25/2019 How to Write_ A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic.pdf
11/13
19/12/13 How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/how-to-write-a-year-in-advice-from-franzen-king-hosseini-and-more/282445/ 11/13
youre not causing pain by making your art, then youre not really doing it
right. Ive always questioned that I mean, listen to the language we use to
talk about creative process: Open up your v ein and bleed. Kill your
darlings. I always want to weep when people speak about a project and say:
I think I finally broke its back. That is a really fucked-up relationship you
have with your work! Youre trying to crack its spine? No wonder youre so
stressed out! Youve made this into battlefield! We should know enough
about the world to realize that anything that you fight fights you back.
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JOE FASSLER, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is a writer living in
Brooklyn. His fiction has appeared in The Boston Review, and he regularly speaks to authors
for The Lit Show. In 2011, his investigative reporting for TheAtlantic.com was a finalist for a
James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism.
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13/13
19/12/13 How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini , and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic
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