When I’ve heard enough buzz about a writer that I’m ready to start buying, I want know where to start with their work. For some writers, I think you start with their strongest work and for others I’d recommend working your way in, trying one title before another. Maybe this is because of the way their work evolves or complicates. Read more »

This is what the internet is for: David Mamet wrote a memo, in all caps, to the writers on his show The Unit. It’s about the definitions of drama, about what drives a narrative. Of course, someone posted it online. Mamet’s clearly frustrated, but there’s tons of great advice. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Not all of it is relevant to fiction, but some—here are my favorite points (picture Mamet yelling each one):

THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA. Read more »

Breaking News from The Onion:

Privileged Little Artiste Writing Something Oh-So-Precious Into His Moleskine Notebook

SAN FRANCISCO—After gently unfastening the elastic strap keeping his dearest musings safe from prying eyes, little literary artiste Evan Stansky penned a few more darling thoughts into his clothbound Moleskine notebook Wednesday. “These are much higher quality than the notebooks you find at CVS,” lilted the auteur, who couldn’t be bothered to use—dare it be said—a journal of lesser craftsmanship or pedigree, or one not famously used by such legendary artists as van Gogh and Hemingway. “They’re a little more expensive, but I try to write on both sides so I don’t go through them as quickly.” At press time, the princely scribe was seen finishing his apricot jasmine tea, asking a mere mortal sitting nearby to watch his literary accoutrements, and then prancing off to the Starbucks powder room, light as a feather.

Recently I had to stop myself from typing an idea into my phone while driving. My worry about recording whatever seems so momentarily brilliant ebbs and flows, and when it’s higher I’ll interrupt a conversation or drive with my knees. Other times, I’ve believed the best will be back, and that if I treat ideas a little less anxiously they are more likely to return. What’s your Inspiration Recording Device? What’s your worry level? Right now I’ve got  a note for every story I’m working on in my cell phone and one note for first sentences. Worry level: orange.

David Foster Wallace vs. The Amazing Race

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A couple of months ago I expressed interest in Barry Hannah to a friend, wondering where to start (the consensus seems to be Airships), and he said, “I like him because he’s got a real fuck-you tone, as opposed to the abundant, tender, pinched-sphincter tone most writers these days have.” Exactly. Read more »

René Magritte's The Human Condition

Shya Scanlon started a nice discussion over at Big Other about writers obsessing over craft to the neglect of other issues: “I hear fiction authors talk far more about, say, the structure of metaphor, than about the moral or existential predicament of their characters, and sometimes it gets depressing to hear all these fastidious little creatures go on about their backstage pulleys and gears as though the play itself were of secondary importance”

He’s responding to a quote from Elif Batuman, author of the new book The Possessed, who writes: “‘What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning? All it had were its negative dictates: ‘Show, don’t tell’; ‘Murder your darlings’; ‘Omit needless words.’ As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits — of omitting needless words.’” Read more »

A Common Pornography is the perfect title for a memoir that reminds us there is no such thing. Following his father’s death in 2008, Kevin Sampsell’s family began to speak more honestly about their history, its “disturbing threads,” and Sampsell was compelled to expand his sixty-page memory experiment of the same title into a collage of both his youth and the experiences of his family. The memoir, recently published by Harper Perennial, strings together vignettes, some only a paragraph, some five or six pages, to tell Kevin Sampsell’s story. Read more »

Recently I read two articles online that reminded me about the mystery that surrounds the creative process—a reminder I need when writers are doing things like solving the mathematic formula for great fiction.

The first was reprinted from Field on Blackbird: “Notes on the Gazer Within” by Larry Levis

“I don’t want to know how I write poetry. Poetry is dangerous: talking too much about it, like naming your gods, brings bad luck” – Margaret Atwood

Larry Levis sets out to examine in himself what happens at the moment of writing. Where do poems come from? Writing demands subjects, landscapes, but these are interpreted by the poet, according to Levis, toward the final invention of oneself. He finds using the perspective of an animal helpful toward merging the landscape with one’s perspective. “When animals occur in poems, then, I believe they are often emblems for the muteness of the poet, for what he or she cannot express, for what is deepest and sometimes most antisocial in the poet’s nature.” Later in the essay he explains, “To write poems that come back out again, into society, to write poems that matter to me, I must become, paradoxically at the moment of writing, as other as a poet as any animal is in a poem.” Read more »

There are certain phases I think are mandatory for children of the nineties. I wore flannel and grew my hair long for a grunge phase. After convincing my parents to pay too much for a Gibson SG, I learned a couple of The Doors’ opening riffs for my classic rock phase. I bought a FUBU jersey, some Sean John and Tupac’s Greatest Hits during my hip hop phase, and I read a professional wrestling almanac for its corresponding phase (Don’t look at me like that).

I’ve also been through a couple of literature phases: Read more »

Found in a used copy of Larry Brown’s Joe: “The characters in this book could be real people that live on Boston Avenue in Immokalee, Florida. No Kidding!”