What I Learned from Teaching Writing This Week
1. We want to be published so it feels like it matters. We don’t care if we are ready or the work is ready. It’s like sex. It just seems like a really great idea to have happen.
2. If you are alone in the evening and your heart is broken, that is a good time to write. (But not about your heart probably.) But grief screws with concentration. And so does joy. A boring life, this is the writer’s goal.
3. Rick Moody writes every day, but what about? How to keep the projects going and finish one on Friday and start on something, deep, slow, serious, worthy, fabulous, the very next day? This is called genius. Good writers have a plan.
4. Talk like you talk to your best friend. Don’t encode the work, don’t try to turn it into writing. Stay with the true thing you yearn for and worry and know and do not know. What you want to explain about the work goes in the work. Resist the urge to tell yourself what triggered it, what it is. That goes in the work! Put your secrets and the plain things in the first sentences.
5. People who talk to a child at least once a day have an easier time focusing on their work.
6. Don’t decorate. Instead, collect things that you like (it always feel more like items find you). They will always match. This applies to the living room and it applies to the poem.
7. Slice time into smaller parts. Slower, slower, slower.
7b. Tango moon!
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Oh, how I miss being in a writing class with you! (And, also, being in a writing class of any kind which forced me with deadlines to create some writing every day . . .) Thanks for the observations; they just may inspire me to put down on paper two separate pieces that have been swirling in my head, keeping me awake at night, for a week.
I really think that kid thing is actually very true. It’s one of my new revelations.