Today has not exactly been the greatest. So I’m escaping into the world of Catalog Living, L.A. comedian/writer/actor Molly Erdman’s look at lives of the fictional people behind those ridiculously staged and stylized catalog photos. You know, the ones where the picnicware being sold is artfully displayed on a sled. Or where the fashionably oversized glasses are stored under a giant bell jar. Or where vintage-style road signs are held up by a rustic tree branch. You know, the usual.

I’m getting slightly better at navigating the freelance writing thing. I’ve been fortunate enough to have some pieces published locally (ranging from essays to short informative articles to a couple of profiles). What I’m not getting better at is learning how to communicate with editors.

When you’re a writer, you don’t necessarily spend a lot of face time (if any) with the people who publish your work. You might never even talk to them over the phone. Most of the editors I work with are busy people who communicate with freelancers primarily over email. Now that I’m out of the grad school bubble, I’m still getting used to not receiving much (if any) feedback about my work. Depending on the editor, when changes are made to my pieces sometimes they’ll be run by me before publication (and sometimes I’m even asked for suggestions about how to reword an awkward sentence or clarify a still-obscure statement). Other times, I won’t know what changes have been made until I see them in print. Lots of times the changes are improvements. Editors are great, and have saved me from awkwardness and embarrassment. But sometimes, I don’t like them at all – a tone is used in a new sentence that I would never have adopted, rewording of a final paragraph takes away from my intended meaning, etc. But by this time, the editor has moved on to other things, often very quickly, to keep up with the pace of weekly or monthly publication.

All things considered, this is a very good problem to have. But I’m still not sure what to do when I disagree about the edits that have been made to my work, particularly when I don’t know about them in advance. Up till this point, I’ve been of the, “well, I took the money” mentality I borrowed from my thesis adviser. When you’re writing for a for-profit publication, you make certain artistic concessions that you wouldn’t necessarily have to with a literary magazine or a university press. You might not hear back on the quality of your work. You might not be asked to approve changes. You might never hear a peep about your piece once you’ve sent it off on deadline day. Currently when I notice a change I don’t like, I just grimace and move on. But what do you do?

The Round Five winner of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest has been announced. Michael Cunningham, this round’s judge, has selected “Roosts” by Zach Brockhouse. (All of the 5,000+ submissions were read, thanks to help from students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.)

This contest had a few very specific parameters. The story had to begin with the line, “Some people swore that the house was haunted,” and end with, “Nothing was ever the same again after that.” Submissions had to be 600 words or less.

You can read the winning story here. Brockhouse is a copywriter with an ad agency; this is the first piece of fiction he’s had published.

Read more »

On the day after election day, I thought I’d post a link to one of my favorite sources of creative nonfiction, This American Life. (Want to argue that TAL doesn’t “count”? You’re wrong! But let’s talk.) Check out their most recent podcast, a thorough and funny investigation into the ins and outs of our two-party system’s two parties.

Mine’s To Kill a Mockingbird, hands down. Last summer I picked up a copy on CD from the library before a four-hour drive to Seattle. I’d read the book at least twice before and liked it quite a bit, but I had no expectations – I just wanted to listen to something that would make the drive pass quickly. Read more »

It’s depressing how fast I can drop good habits. A mere four months out from finishing my MFA, I’m spending approximately 0 hours a week writing essays. My time is divided between my regular job, journalistic writing and copy editing for freelance work, and all of that plain old regular life stuff. Creative writing, begone.

I was in Vermont for a wedding last week, and the usual “What do you do?” small talk-y questions kept coming up, followed by: What do I like to write? Where would I most like to be published? What East Coast authors would I recommend? I stammered and stuttered my way through the answers, completely ill-prepared because my mind has been elsewhere so much of the past several months, giving only so-so responses and thinking about how quickly I went from writing at least half the days each week to where I am now, where I struggle to fit in anything beyond what I’m doing for a paycheck. And thank goodness for paychecks, but I miss the old kind of writing, a lot.

And so I think it’s time for me to make a good, old-fashioned list of goals – the essays I’ve been waiting to write, the pieces I need to send out, the books I’ve been meaning to read – and set myself some deadlines. I don’t want to make the writer’s life a project, a timeline with milestones, five year plans, and checklists, but if I don’t, I don’t think the writer’s life is going to happen.

All of this back-to-school-y MFA talk (like this, for instance) got me thinking about things I’ll miss this fall, and one particular thing I won’t: in-class writing assignments.

I hate in-class writing assignments. Partly this is just a symptom of my personality; there’s not much that appeals to me less than taking 20 or 30 minutes to write on some prompt, then read that brain spaz out loud to people I respect. When I write I want to weigh and deliberate and redo. For me, writing is revising.

But, that’s obviously not the point of these exercises. The point, I think, is getting the juices flowing, hearing each other’s words, seeing what happens when you follow your gut wherever those 20 minutes take it. And, even though I hated the process, there were times when I held on to what I created during those hand-cramp-inducing speed-drafting sessions. There were more times when I scrapped it. Many times I was impressed with what other writers wrote. Often I wished they’d kept it to themselves until they’d had their own revision time. But regardless of how nervous and audience-wary the whole thing made me, there was always something I liked about seeing what other writers came up with in the same time with the same prompt, how many different directions we’d go, how some of us would get stuck after three sentences while others could write five hilarious and thoughtful pages. In-class writing reminds me of Project Runway and similar shows, where challenges are so short and intense that they are ultimately about instinct, not refinement.

What do you think about in-class writing?

I listened to this David Mitchell interview (summary and full interview available via the link) on Fresh Air several weeks ago. It’s worth a listen, particularly if you’re interested in Mitchell’s shift from the experimental (like Cloud Atlas‘s nested doll structure) to the (more) traditional in his newest work, The Thousand Autumns of David de Zoet.

One highlight, in which Mitchell addresses that shift:

I think it’s natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them. There’s a feeling that you can take part in shaping it and turning it into something new in your image. But then you age, inevitably, and … these sort of messy, human, muddy scenes become much more interesting. And you also realize that structure and originality and innovation is not actually a story: they’re useful ingredients in art, but it’s not art itself.”

This New York Magazine post, about the striking (too striking?) similarities between Annie Leibovitz’s Jones New York ad and a Mad Men season 2 promo, caught my eye earlier this month. I’m curious about how these photos came to be – did Jones New York request the Mad Men vibe? Is this art promoting commerce mimicking art where the characters promote commerce? Or were the similarities totally subconscious? If you’re of the “it’s a rip-off” mindset, there’s something so fittingly ironic about the idea that a rip-off advertisement would rip off a series in which the characters sometimes rip off advertisements.

The exact story here is anyone’s guess. I’m wondering, though, how to avoid unintentional rip-offs in my own writing. I often get a bug in my ear about certain sentences or phrases, things I’d like to use in a story or essay but that I can’t nail down to a source. Did my best friend say that one time two years ago? Did I overhear it on the bus? Did I pick it up on a TV show? Did I read it in a novel when I was in high school – or last week?

I tend to err on the conservative side, cutting the things I can’t place, that I might have lifted from a published source. But I hate the idea of being so cautious that I lose something good, something usable, something I could make my own. How do you handle those issues?

Yesterday NPR posted rules for the fifth round of their Three-Minute Fiction contest. As in previous rounds, all stories must be 600 words or less and must incorporate a prompt (past prompts have included a list of words and a photo). This time, the judge is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham (The Hours, Specimen Days, the upcoming By Nightfall, and others), who also selected this round’s prompts. The story must open with, “Some people swore that the house was haunted.” The last line must be, “Nothing was ever the same again after that.” Entries are due September 26.

Anybody thinking about entering? Sounds fun to me. For inspiration, check out the story Ann Patchett chose as the winner of Round Four, Yoav Ben Yosef’s “Not Calling Attention to Ourselves.”