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Colleen Fullbright
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Karla Oceanak
Leslie Patterson
Kay Rios
Debby Thompson
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Tracy Ekstrand
Kathy Hayes
Laura Pritchett
Laura Resau
Todd Shimoda
Greta Skau
Zach Zorich
all content copyright 2003
Slow Sand Writers Society
or individual authors
email:
info@slowsand.com
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Our tips on writing well...
Jean Hanson:
My favorite
tip comes via William Stafford: “If you're writing and get stuck,
lower your standards and keep going.” This may not sound
like advice for writing well - but it is. Keep writing. Then,
I'd amend, keep revising...that is, within reason. Someone else (a painter?
a scuptor? will someone please e-mail me with the source for this, one
of my favorite quotes?) wisely said works of art are never finished,
they're only abandoned. If you're like me, you'll tinker ad nauseum.
S.J. Perleman on how many drafts he wrote: “Thirty-seven. I once
tried doing thirty-three, but something was lacking…On another
occasion I tried forty-two versions, but the final effect was too lapidary.”
I think eighty-three is about right, but hey - that's just me.
Kathy
Hayes:
Schedule
time to write, then sit down and do it. Even if you're not in the mood,
sit down with your computer, tablet, or journal and begin. Start somewhere,
even if it's just stream-of-consciousness thinking. If all you hear
is your internal editor, close your eyes and write—just keep moving
forward. If you get stuck writing, then think. Do word associations.
Gather images in your head. No matter what, stay for the time you have
allotted, even if you don't write a single word or aren't pleased with
what you wrote. The time you spend today sticking with the task will
likely be rewarded tomorrow when you return to your writing.
Give yourself
tiny motivations for writing—or practicing your scales, as Anne
Lamott says. One of my motivators: After I've written for two hours,
then I can check my e-mail.
Write concretely.
Use tactile nouns. Active verbs. Precise adjectives and adverbs (and
only if they're necessary to convey meaning).
Paul Miller:
To write
well, read everything. Read cereal boxes, classic literature, billboards,
contemporary fiction, the tattoo on the arm of the woman sitting beside
you at the dog races. Read calendars, thesauruses, dictionaries, encyclopedias,
car-repair manuals, climbing and hiking guides to the Welsh backcountry.
Read comics, neon signs, advertising on balloons, graffiti on trains
and water conduits. Read the tiny, sincere pencil marks on the backs
of old black-and-white photographs curled at the edges. Read an author
you never heard of before, a hack who can barely form sensible sentences,
a genius who makes you cry because she's so damn good with the language.
Read the dog tags of a friendly stray, the tiny script at the bottom
of a legal contract, a child's poem, the scrap of weathered paper that's
stuck beneath the white fir in the front yard. Read the Bible, the Koran,
the Tibetan Book of the Dead, papal bulls, evangelical treatises, atheist
proclamations. Read the writing on the wall reflected backwards and
upside-down in a rain puddle. Read a big, thick book that weighs two
pounds; read a slender, heaving romance novel in two hours; read geeky
science fiction on the bus; read outrageous opinions in the newspaper;
read cutting-edge online magazines at work; read 18th-century literature
late at night when the dogs are quiet and the only noise is the rustling
of the page. Read everything, then write well.
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Leslie Patterson:
I find myself really struggling with the novel form, so I was pleased when I came across this quote from Don DeLillo-- "I was a semiconscious writer in the beginning. Just sat and wrote something, or read the newspaper, or went to the movies. Over time I began to understand, one, that I was lucky to be doing this work, and, two, that the only way I'd get better at it was to be more serious, to understand the rigors of novel-writing and to make it central to my life, not a variation on some related career choice, like sportswriting or playwriting. The novel is different....We die indoors, and alone, and I don't mean to sound overdramatic but you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It's not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there's no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that's all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is).
I had to grow into novelhood."
Laura Pritchett:
From Rick
Bass -- "I think it's good for a writer, or an artist, to stay on the
outside of things as much as possible. I also think this is a talent
or characteristic - this ability to get outside - that artists are born
with, or for which they have a predisposition. . . . Perhaps I am wrong
but it seems to me that as a child and then a teenager and then a young
man, I had no problem feeling slightly outside the world - slightly
ecstatic at being so - and that it is that wildness, that drifty freedom,
that strange combination of possibility and certainty, which I seek
to return to in the telling of stories. . . . I think an artist's outsiderness
is to a large degree innate . . . Your earliest inclinations have probably
almost always been to stay outside - to turn away, if only to set up,
in so doing, some greater distance across which yearning and other passions
can travel. . . . You sit in the back of the classroom. You do not raise
your hand, but listen. You watch for a long time before participating.
Such tameness creates the need for recklessness. Such stasis creates
the need for motion. A narrative emerges. You dream of shouting, but
no words come out. You wake up in the morning and pick up your pen"
(Rick Bass, Brown Dog of the Yaak 99-100).
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