The Writer's Portable Mentor

A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life, Second Edition

Priscilla Long

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780826360069
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Écriture créative

Designed to mentor writers at all levels, from beginning to quite advanced, The Writer's Portable Mentor offers a wealth of insight and crafting models from the author's twenty-plus years of teaching and creative thought. The book provides tools for structuring a book, story, or essay. It trains writers in observation and in developing a poet's ear for sound in prose. It scrutinizes the sentence strategies of the masters and offers advice on how to publish. This second edition is updated to account for changes in the publishing industry and provides hundreds of new craft models to inspire, guide, and develop every writer's work.

PART I

Your Move

Care of the cow brings good fortune.

—The I Ching

1.

Daily Writing

Practice is something done under all circumstances, whether you’re happy or sad. You don’t become tossed away by a high weekend or a blue Monday. It is something close to you, not dependent on high-tech gyrations or smooth workshop leader talk. Writing is something you do quietly, regularly, and in doing it, you face your life.

—Natalie Goldberg

Writing every day is the key to becoming a writer. Writing every day is the key to remaining a writer. It is the only secret, the only trick. Don’t despise the fifteen-minute write. Don’t despise writing in your journal. Don’t despise writing down your complaints for fifteen minutes before going to work. Any writing counts.

Keep a timed-writing (or writing-practice) notebook. In it, write for fifteen minutes every day. Of course on some days you will write for longer than fifteen minutes. But—and this is important—a long session one day does not apply to the next. The day after a long session, sit down once again to your fifteen minutes. Decide the night before when those fifteen minutes will be. The next day, when the time arrives, say at four o’clock in the afternoon during your coffee break, stop whatever you are doing and write. This advice does not originate with me—I got it from Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer. Ever since I read that inspiring book some thirty-five years ago, I have written every day (excepting one or two migrainous days per year). I write early in the morning, in the silence of dawn, soon after pouring that indispensable mug of strong hot coffee.

Write without stopping. Do not be concerned about being good, interesting, or correct. Writing is a discovery tool that belongs to you. If you can’t think of the next thing to say, write your hesitations, write “okay, let’s see, what else, well, maybe . . .” Do not lift your pen into the air. (What would happen to a bird in flight if it stopped flapping its wings?) Do not rush, do not stop. Write continuously for fifteen minutes. You can continue if you want, or you can stop. It is not better to continue. It is not better to stop.

Writing in your notebook for fifteen minutes a day is a practice that continues no matter what article or book you are working on, no matter where you are with that poem or novel. In other words, the timed writing in the notebook is not superseded by work undergoing revision on the computer.

Writing practice in your notebook underlies all your other writing. It keeps you connected to your writing no matter what else is going on in your life. It keeps you connected to the external world and to your interior life. It provides you with a resource base, ever expanding, out of which you produce finished pieces.

It keeps you generating new writing. It forever eliminates the sporadic work habit. It recognizes that generating new work is qualitatively different from rewriting, and that both need consistent attention. The fifteen-minute write makes the difference between being a writer and wishing to be a writer. It makes the difference between being an author who no longer writes and a writer who may also be an author but who still takes up the pen every day, for better or for worse. Writing practice moots the concept “writer’s block.”

I have found that fifteen minutes is not a token span of time. I once had a client who wrote for two hours every day for about five years. She was really making progress! But then she underwent a major, exciting career change and took on massive new professional responsibilities. There was no way she could get to her two hours. Sadly, she stopped writing for a decade. Fifteen minutes is obtainable. It’s obtainable whether you are a physician with a grueling schedule or a working mom with three toddlers (or both).

The fifteen minutes is not token, I’ve found, because it keeps you connected to what you are working on, no matter what your current circumstances. In a busy life, a week and then two weeks can go by in no time at all, with little or no writing done. The practice of writing for fifteen minutes per day simply deletes this problem.

Why a notebook? Why not a computer or your device? I argue that we writers should keep on using or begin to use a nonelectronic notebook, that quaint old thing with pages sewn together that asks to be written in by hand. We should keep using our computers and devices of course. But we should also carry a notebook.

A notebook is quiet. It does not ding or ping. It does not deliver texts. It does not serve as a phone, calendar, clock, weather forecaster, or means to chat. It does not enable you to interrupt yourself to look up something on the internet, leading to something else, leading to . . . we all know how that goes. It does not provide access to social media. Writing in a notebook, we are with our own thoughts, our own words, our own observations, our own spellings, our own hesitations, our own ways of saying things. Time in the notebook is quiet time, time with our own plans, dreams, thoughts, lists of plants or types of dogs seen on the walk today. A notebook has no spellcheck. It cannot reformat. It cannot be lost in the cloud (it can be lost on a bus). And later you can sit quietly and turn its pages (different from scrolling) and underline interesting ideas or observations for later use. A notebook allows for a different type of thought process. And shaping letters, writing words by hand, actually activates more parts of the brain than does tapping a key, according to the latest neuroscientific findings.*

Mind you, I am quite wired. I have bonded with my laptop. Even though I write daily in a notebook, I have some eight thousand Word files containing my writing, all on my laptop. I also carry and use a device. I am subject to the dings, the texts, the urge to look it up. I know the territory.

But I also savor the daily connection of hand to page, body to page, breath to page that comes from writing by hand. Norman Mailer said, “It’s hard to explain how agreeable it is to do one’s writing in longhand. You feel that all of your body and some of your spirit has come down to your fingertips.”* A quick internet search brings up numbers of writers who compose by hand—Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, Andre Dubus III, to mention three. The brilliant Lauren Groff composes the first ten to twelve drafts of a novel by hand.† So, despite the electronics revolution, we writers, many of us, still compose by hand. And not just the old, the Luddite, the clueless.

I encourage you to purchase a notebook, a nice notebook, not too heavy, one that opens flat and has pages you like. Then you must purchase the perfect pen. Now you are all set to write in that notebook every day.

The writing done in writing practice can be about anything. It can be a journal-write (here I differ with one of the originators, Natalie Goldberg). It can be an observation exercise. It can be work on an essay, story, article, or scene. It can be used to conceptualize new work. (“The story I want to write next is . . .” Set your timer and write.)

Often I hear, “I’m sick of moaning and complaining in my journal.” There is no need to moan and complain (I enjoy doing so once in a while) and there is no need “to journal” at all if you are sick of it. Writing in your journal can involve describing what is in front of you. Describe the gooseneck lamp, the pile of books, the turned mahogany- wood mug bristling with pens. Do a recapitulation in which you detail the previous day from beginning to end (an exercise from Ira Progoff’s The Journal Workshop). Or set the timer, begin a short essay, and write it straight to the end for a fast first draft. Or write for fifteen minutes a single unpunctuated sentence that begins, “What I want to do with my life is . . .” That’s what Buckminster Fuller did before going on to become Buckminster Fuller.

There are ways to shape your writing practice so that it better serves your own goals.

•In your notebook, begin each practice session on a new page. (Do not run the sessions into one another.) Date each session and when you’re finished, if obvious, give the writing a descriptive title or label (Thoughts on Cloning, Remembering Susanne). These labels become clarifying when you are looking back through your notebooks for themes, concerns, bits of writing.

•If you are working on a story, essay, review, or other piece in your writing-practice notebook, type what you’ve written as soon as you can, the same day if possible. Soon after you’ve handwritten a scene, type that scene. Then draw a line through the handwritten version. You can still read it but you know it’s typed—superseded.

•Observation exercises should be part of every writer’s practice. Every time you go to a new city or a new country, do the Observing the Here and Now exercise (see page 38). Spend fifteen minutes describing your teenager. If you are a teenager, spend fifteen minutes describing your parent. Go to a coffeehouse and do the Observing Gesture exercise (see page 49), an exercise that trains you to observe and describe body language.

•Plan. Conceptualize new work. Organize your day. Where would you like to be as a writer a year from now? What pieces or chapters do you plan to complete this month?

•Join or start a writing-practice group, which is entirely different from a critique group.

The Writing-Practice Group. Every Tuesday and Friday at Seattle’s Wayward Coffeehouse at 65th and Roosevelt, at 2:00 p.m. or a bit after, the writers gather. Everyone is welcome. (We buy coffee, or have lunch beforehand. We want this establishment to stay in business.) Seattle authors and master-teachers Jack Remick and Robert J. Ray, friends of Natalie Goldberg, established this writing practice (at a different coffeehouse) nearly thirty years ago.

Each arriving writer writes a start line on a piece of paper and puts it on the table. For example: “Her lips were blue” or “He slammed the door” or “I lied.” At 2:30 sharp the writers begin writing, all using the same start line. (You soon discover that you can quickly go from any start line to any piece you want to work on.) When the timer goes off, each writer reads, in turn. There are no comments and ...