Do You Like Sentences?

Just ran across a fellow blogger who quoted a passage from the writer Annie Dillard. www.anniedillard.com It made me remember something she wrote that really influenced me when I started writing. Unlike so many authors of textbooks and writing courses, Annie always dishes up insightfully down-to-earth advice. Here's my favorite passage:

Write Till You Drop
By ANNIE DILLARD

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all. Strange seizures beset us. Frank Conroy loves his yo-yo tricks, Emily Dickinson her slant of light; Richard Selzer loves the glistening peritoneum, Faulkner the muddy bottom of a little girl's drawers visible when she's up a pear tree. ''Each student of the ferns,'' I once read, ''will have his own list of plants that for some reason or another stir his emotions.''

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote ''Huckleberry Finn'' in Hartford. Recently scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

The writer studies literature, not the world. She lives in the world; she cannot miss it. If she has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, she spares her readers a report of her experience. She is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write. She is careful of what she learns, because that is what she will know.

The writer knows her field - what has been done, what could be done, the limits - the way a tennis player knows the court. And like that expert, she, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. She hits up the line. In writing, she can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now gingerly, can she enlarge it, can she nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild power?

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ''Do you think I could be a writer?''

''Well,'' the writer said, ''I don't know. . . . Do you like sentences?''

The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ''I liked the smell of the paint.''

Martin Luther King Day

I was working on Madison Avenue in New York back in 1968 when the assassination took place. A friend came into my office the next morning. . . a really WASPY guy from the Connecticut suburbs and said he had this powerful urge to get off his commuter train at 125th street in the heart of Harlem and open his suitcoat and say "here I am, do what you want, beat the shit out of me. . . I deserve it." I'll never forget his reaction to this tragic event.

Haiti--They're Starving Now, Not Tomorrow

I just posted what follows on a New York Times blog:

Another day or two delay in getting food and water to these Haitians and another maybe 30-, 40-, 50,000 deaths. Isn't there some way small amounts of food and water, let's say Army K-ration packs and one-liter bottles, can be parachuted right smack into the crowds? Just enough to keep them going for another day or two without having to wait and wait for formal lines of communication to be established. If this had been done at Katrina thousands more would have survived. These people are starving right now. They cannot wait.

Advice to Beginning Novelists on Getting Started

The biggest hurdle for me as a beginning novelist was finding the right story—the kind that would inspire me and keep the juices flowing. Too many years were wasted floundering around trying to find a comfortable vehicle that would enable me to write the next "Lovely Bones," "The Great Gatsby," or "Farewell to Arms."

It was worst than writer’s block. Because I was dealing with architecture, not just words and ideas to move the plot forward.

I certainly tried. I had half a dozen plots outlined in my head, but only a page or two of writing. I kept seeking the great story from my own experience. And when I finally came up with something I could sink my teeth into, I realized at least 100,000 fellow copywriters were doing the same story.

Then I got lucky. My advertising agency in Philadelphia was constantly being courted to do public service ads and commercials. One of our clients was Fort Mifflin, www.fortmifflin.com an almost forgotten Revolutionary War outpost on the Delaware River that held the entire British fleet at bay for six long weeks. I became so enamored of the fort’s untold story, I simply had to write the novel. My dream was that it would be published and then made into a movie like "Rocky" that would bring thousands of new visitors flocking to Philadelphia to visit the fort.

I created my own characters to go with the real characters. I made a villain by stitching together a brutal British Marine colonel who was the bastard son of King George II. My hero was a natural—a young American naval lieutenant who as a child witnessed the colonel murder his mother. The headstrong Quaker beauty I gave birth to had both men fighting to the death for her hand.

I’m not saying it was easy. I did my research. I worked the plot to the bone. I rewrote the original draft fourteen times and threw out a dozen chapters. But the result, "The Lion and the Eagle," at 81,500 words, became a flesh-and-blood first novel I could be proud of.

Then it happened again.

A PBS documentary caught my eye. It was based on "The Johnstown Flood," a non-fiction account by David McCullough of how greed and neglect in 1889 by the first families of Pittsburgh—the Carnegies and Fricks, the Mellons and the Pitcairns—caused a dam to collapse and virtually drown a whole city.

The tragedy really got to me. And I vowed to tell the story to a whole new audience.

So once again I created my own cast of characters. And the result at 97,500 words was "The Lake," the story of how star-crossed lovers Caleb McBride and Annabelle Prescott try to prevent the flood from happening—and then become its victims. (Take a look at my first post. It features Caleb's clumsy first attempt to get the story across to Annabelle's father but in doing so finds himself crashing a party for the wealthiest men in America.

I’ve written three more novels since "The Lake" and "The Lion and the Eagle." But I’ll forever be thankful for the crutch I found—and impressed by how many accomplished authors resort to the comfort and predictability of history to get things moving.

MadMen I

I ran across Bryan Batt, in the Los Angeles airport, but before I could collar him our flight was announced and he was gone. Brian plays the role of art director on the popular MadMen television series.

As some of you know, I had a rather interesting career in the ad agency business before becoming a novelist. So it was no surprise I became more than a little hooked on MadMen. And more than a little critical.

It’s an eerie feeling watching actors play the parts when I was actually among the flesh-and-blood types in the thick of the battle back then, struggling to come up with great campaigns and then struggling to sell them to the agency suits and our clients. I wanted to say “You and Don Draper—what are you guys doing in our shoes? Do you have any idea what it was really like?”

Before MadMen almost all television series and movie roles were about doctors and lawyers, psychiatrists and CIA agents, cops and politicians. Maybe, just maybe, the time has come for those of us who spilled blood in the advertising trenches to receive our due.