Q and A

I’ve written a lot and taught a lot and answered a lot of questions from different audiences. Kids will ask anything:

“Are you gay?” “How much money do you have?” “Did your first dog actually like you or just pretend to.”

I’ve been on panels at writing retreats where I heard every kind of question and answer. Some writers say they eke out every word. (Eke out means “to manage with great difficulty.” Yikes!) Others claim, “It just pours out of me,” and once in Iowa the scribe beside me muttered, “Well, get a mop, for Christ’s sake.”

What follows is advice of various kinds from a few different writers: Virgina Woolf said, “Listen to the way people talk. Carry a little notebook.” At a conference once, an essayist opened his satchel, pulled out half a dozen of those marble-patterned composition books and said, “I’ve been eavesdropping most of my life.”

Stephen King says, “Details, details, details. Weeds growing in the cracks of a library’s steps say more about the town and its citizens than pages of exposition.”

Hemingway said, “All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Dr. Seuss: “Nonsense wakes up the brain cells.”

Neil Gaiman: “Finish what you start.”

Ray Bradbury: “Stay drunk on writing so reality can’t destroy you.”

Natalie Goldberg: “Write about what disturbs you, what you’re afraid of, what you’d never tell anybody.”

Some of the recommendations above seem silly, some tongue-in-cheek, some earnest, some - like Stephen King’s - really good! But I’d venture to say there’s something in all of it that a young writer could use. But Knowing what to pay attention to is half the battle.

My advice about writing poetry is in the form of a poem

where I do what I suggest. See what you think.

“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just

Starting Out?”

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave your house

or apartment. Go out into the world.

It’s all right to carry a notebook but a cheap one is best,

with pages the color of weak tea and on the front

a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than three

people are wearing turtlenecks. Avoid snow-covered

chalets, especially those with deer tracks across

the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.

And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle

where a child a few years old is playing as his

mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.

The title, the author’s name, the brooding photo

on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray

book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher

it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower

falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody

in the world frowns and says, “Shhhh.”

Then start again.

The advice for young writers in this much-anthologized poem of mineis solid: don’t take yourself too seriously and shrug off rejection. I felt this poem needed a light touch, so I poked a little fun at leather-bound journals with silver clasps as well as what I consider two of the most dangerous subjects for poetry: snow and deer!

* * *

Let’s end with something from the poet Alan Shapiro. It’s not about HOW to write but about how he feels about HAVING WRITTEN: “To me, the only thing that has kept me going through the years, as a writer, is that deep, private, self-forgetful joy that I feel when I’m working. When you sit down at the table and it’s eight o’clock in the morning and then you look up and it’s, God, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. All that time has gone by as if in a single moment. And in that prolonged moment, you were completely given over to the task at hand, you were joyful, even if you were writing about how joyless your life has been. Because you had totally forgotten everything but the poem you were trying to make.”