I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist.
But be careful: if your intuition says that your story sucks, make sure it really is your intuition and not your mother.
When you are on the knife’s edge – when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worse – you take in today.
The whole game in the fifties and early sixties was for no one to know who you really were. We children were witness to the total pretense of how our parents wanted the world to see them. We helped them maintain this image, because if anyone outside the family could see who they really were deep down, the whole system, the ship of your family, might sink. We held our breath to give the ship buoyancy. We were little air tanks.
The redwoods are like organ pipes, playing silent chords.
You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. So.
Remember the scene in Cat Ballou where a very drunk Lee Marvin goes from unconscious to ranting to triumphant to roaring to weeping defeat, and then finally passes out? One of the men watching him says, with real awe, “I never seen a man get through a day so fast.” Don’t let this be you.
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere. While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public.
The basic formula for drama is setup, buildup, payoff – just like a joke. The.
I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer.
There’s freedom in hitting bottom.
Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can.
There really is only today, although luckily that is also the eternal now.
Also, I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I’d always had a thin waist before. Now there’s this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in there, like a fanny pack.
If it is someone else’s problem, you probably don’t have the solution.
If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you’re dying.
The lesson here is that there is no fix. There is, however, forgiveness. To forgive yourselves and others constantly is necessary. Not only is everyone screwed up, but everyone screws up.
They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.
Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate – as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want.
But in surrender you have won.