Keeping 'writer's blockages' at bay

“Many times, what people call 'writer's block' is the confusion that happens when a writer has a great idea, but their writing skill is not up to the task of putting that idea down on paper. I think that learning the craft of writing is critical.” –  Pearl Cleage

Cleage, who teaches drama at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, was born on this date in 1948, and while she is noted for her stage writing, she also has had a distinguished career as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist, particularly about feminism and topics at the intersection of sexism and racism.

Her plays, especially Blues for an Alabama Sky and A Song For Coretta, have earned her wide acclaim, and her novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day was a 1998 Oprah Book Club selection.  “…  I love being a writer,” she said.  “My imagination can take me places I may never see except in my mind's eye.” 

As for advice to new writers, she says after getting              

 the proper background training don’t hesitate to move forward with your ideas, regardless of what your built-in “censors” might think.

“One of the things that writers and creative artists generally have to deal with is the censors that we have in our heads, the voices that we have that say you better not tell that and don't tell that, and people will think you're not a good girl, and your grandmother's going to be mad at you and all of those things.”

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That 'lyrical' look at life and love

“One can be very happy without demanding that others agree with them.” – Ira Gershwin

When it comes to writing lyrics, few can surpass Ira Gershwin, who collaborated with his younger brother, composer George Gershwin, to create some of the most memorable songs of the 20th century.

Born on this date in 1896, Ira – along with George – wrote more than a dozen Broadway shows, featuring such hit songs as "I Got Rhythm,” "Embraceable You,”  "The Man I Love,” "Strike Up The Band," and "Someone to Watch Over Me.”   He was also responsible, along with DuBose Heyward, for the libretto to George's opera Porgy and Bess.

The success the brothers had with their collaborative works has often overshadowed the creative role that Ira played.   And his mastery of songwriting, especially wonderful lyrics, continued after the early death of George. He wrote hit songs with composers Jerome Kern ("Long Ago and Far Away),” Kurt Weill and Harold Arlen.

Ira’s critically acclaimed book Lyrics on Several Occasions, published in 1959, is an amalgam of autobiography and annotated anthology and an important source for studying the art of the lyricist in the golden age of American popular song.  If you haven’t had the chance to read it or read excerpts from it, I highly commend it to you as one of those “must read” books, especially aspiring writers. 

Ira Gershwin was a joyous listener to the sounds                          

 of the modern world, all which became key segments of his writing. "I guess,” he once said, “I had a sharp eye and ear for the minutiae of living."

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It's 'the texture' of the thing

“Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.” – Joan Didion

Born in Sacramento, CA, on this date in 1934, Didion has blended a career in journalism, creative writing, nonfiction and screenwriting, earning many accolades along the way, particularly for her acute attention to fine detail and honing each and every sentence into a work of art.

Didion views the structure of the sentence as essential to what she is conveying in her work. In a New York Times article, Why I Write, Didion wrote, "To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed...The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind...The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture."

Author of the much acclaimed The Year of Magical Thinking,       

 Didion started writing at age 5 though she claims that she never saw herself as a writer until after being published. She read everything she could get her hands on after learning how to read, even adult books by authors like Ernest Hemingway, who she has idolized throughout her career.    She recommends, of course, reading the great writers like Hemingway and James Joyce as a good tutoring in the writing arts.
 

“In many ways,” she noted,  “writing is the act of saying 'I,' of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, 'Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.' It's an aggressive, even a hostile act.”

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Interesting AND illuminating writing

“I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.” – A. Scott Berg

Born on this date in 1949, American biographer Scott Berg is one of our premier biographers and has done a remarkable job in “illuminating” the lives of other famous Americans – among them Samuel Goldwyn, the founder of MGM; aviator Charles Lindbergh; and actress Katherine Hepburn.

The son of longtime film producer Dick Berg, Scott grew up in Connecticut, graduated from Princeton, and then got into writing biographies by expanding upon a senior thesis he chose to do on longtime editor Maxwell Perkins, the editor who handled both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway for the New York-based publisher Scribner’s.   Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, his first full-length effort, not only is an illuminating look at the great editor but also the winner of a National Book Award.   His second book was Goldwyn: A Biography, and his third Lindbergh, the acclaimed New York Times bestseller about the Lone Eagle.  It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. 

 

A close friend of Hepburn, his 2003 book Kate Remembered, is a biography-cum-memoir about the friendship, and while it has received mixed reviews, I highly recommend it if you are like me and enjoyed Hepburn’s long (and terrific) acting career.

Berg set a goal at age 22 of writing “a series of biographies                    
 about the great 20^th Century American cultural figures from different parts of the country.”   So far, he’s done 5 – about one every 8-10 years.   “I am a compulsive worker,” he said.   “But I'm also a compulsive relaxer.”

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A simple task; so just 'do it'

“The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple:  To discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.” –  Craig Raine

Born on this date in 1944, Raine is an English poet and past Fellow of New College, Oxford (from 1991 – 2010) where he is now emeritus professor.  These days he keeps busy editing the literary magazine Areté, which he founded in 1999.   Raine credits his writing and love of literature to “a great teacher in my growing up years.”  We should all be so fortunate to have such a mentor set a life’s course that leads to great writing like his.

For Saturday’s Poem, and as a tribute to all                  

 the plantlife that is about done for the fall season as the winter months arrive, here is Raine’s,

Dandelions

Dead dandelions, bald as drumsticks,
swaying by the roadside

like Hare Krishna pilgrims
bowing to the Juggernaut.

They have given up everything.
Gold gone and their silver gone,

humbled with dust, hollow,
their milky bodies tan

to the colour of annas.
The wind changes their identity:

slender Giacomettis, Doré's convicts,
Rodin's burghers of Calais

with five bowed heads
and the weight of serrated keys . . .

They wither into mystery, waiting
to find out why they are,

patiently, before nirvana
when the rain comes down like vitriol. 

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Reeling in readers with real-life tales

“I think the best endings bring you back in rather than close things off with absolute finality. I'm not saying they necessarily have to be ambiguous, but we don't always need to know what happens when everyone wakes up tomorrow morning.” – T. C. Boyle

Born on this date in 1948, Thomas Coraghessan Boyle is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and Distinguished Professor of English (at the University of Southern California).  

A native of New York, Boyle earned his writing degrees both there and in Iowa before gravitating to the West Coast where he has lived most of his adult life.  His writing often focuses on Baby Boomers – their joys, appetites and addictions – and on the ruthlessness and unpredictability of nature and the toll human society sometimes unwittingly takes on the environment.  He has authored 14 novels, including the PEN/Faulkner winning World's End, which recounts 300 years in his home stomping grounds of upstate New York.  His most recent – and much acclaimed – book is this year’s The Terranauts, set in a glassed-in biodome in Arizona and closely similar to the real-life Biosphere II. The plot focuses on two of the inside crew and one jealous outsider.

Boyle’s short stories regularly appear in the major American magazines like The New Yorker and Harper’s and he has published 8 short story collections, including a great look at “the best of” in T.C. Boyle Stories II from 2014.  A much sought-after speaker, he said,  “I love performing in front of an audience. I like the questions; I like controversy.”

 His advice to those who hope to write is to be good readers.              

 “I read widely - for news, the arts, science, for entertainment, and the value of being informed - and, as a fiction writer, I can't help transposing what I learn into the scenario for a novel or story.”

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Getting the readers 'into the game'

“I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.” – John Crowley

Born in Maine on this date in 1942, Crowley went to high school and college in Indiana before moving to New York City “to make movies,” starting his career in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues.   In 1975, his first novel The Deep established him in the science fiction and fantasy field and he still writes in those genres, although he also has done well in fiction, and with his frequent essays.  And, he's been a longtime creative writing professor at Yale University.

His best-known book is Little, Big, winner of the              

 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.  The book melds the story of a New York family with a “fairy world” community over a hundred-year period and is a terrific study in family dynamics and compassion.  It’s been called “The best fantasy book ever” by one critic, and “The closest achievement we have to the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll" by another.  In 2006 – both in recognition of books like Little, Big and for his many other novels and short stories – Crowley was presented with the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.

“I've always had a compassion for characters in novels,” Crowley noted.  “ - The sense that they are, whatever they might think, living in a world that has a shape they don't know and can't finally alter.”

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