Autobiography & Fiction with Electric Literature

I’m here at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, wrapping up a multi-week residency with Electric Literature.

Feeling incredibly fortunate to have an endowment sponsorship supporting my time here, as well as the support of my day job in being away for several weeks.

Being in a community of like-minded writers has been so lovely, but I’m also very thankful for our guest faculty, including Halimah Marcus, Jess Zimmerman, Susan Choi, and Meredith Talusan.

Two nights ago, Dionne Brand gave a beautiful talk about the meaning of autobiography and fiction in her work, and titled this lecture “To Look Again”:

Autobiography affords and allows one to look again at the materials of life — to look again and make sense of the act of living — unravel what simultaneity collapses… get out from under certain ways of thinking/knowing…..

How one is made and how one makes oneself.

She went on to describe the framing of autobiography as something that can be transformed, carrying the personal and molecular forward as a metaphor for the construct of history. This description resonated so deeply with me because it’s very similar to the way I write. I take my own experiences — what I know and what continues to shape me — and use these events, big or small, as dynamic forces to shape my work.

I’m carrying that spirit forward with me for the rest of this week as I work on several big projects.

Hope it sparks creativity in you, too!

NaNoWriMo 2016: Everything's Wrong, But It's All Right

Well, it finally happened. I signed up for NaNoWriMo. Here was my immediate reaction once I registered:

Kidding! It looked more like this:

My project is an anthology of 10 short stories, since I did not have enough prep time to work on this year's big novel. (That's gonna require a lot more research and time.) Still. I'm nervous, and I made myself start announcing it online to keep from backing out at the eleventh hour, haha.

Bottom line: although I've written novel-length stories before - hell, I've even written 50K in a month before - I'm still afraid of "getting things wrong" in a big unedited draft that's written over 30 days. Which is why this blog by Chuck Wendig is so, so timely.

...in getting it ‘wrong’ you may already be getting it right. We often like to think of ‘right’ as being a replicable thing, a series of examples from those who came before. But also remember that many of the greatest successes in fiction are those who took a hard left turn away from HOW IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN DONE — they drove right off the cliff, and in that, did something new, something different, something very much wrong. Wrong is right and right is wrong and nobody can much tell which side is up and which side is down. Dogs and cats living together. Go forth. Embrace wrong. Nobody knows anything. Seize the freedom that comes with that."

So I'm gonna keep that in mind this month: everything's wrong, but it's all right.

Let's rock Nano and get that 50K in the bank!

"The fact that writing is hard and there are many hobbyists doesn’t mean it isn’t a job either. It is..."

"The fact that writing is hard and there are many hobbyists doesn’t mean it isn’t a job either. It is very hard to be a professional athlete or a head chef, and many people practice sports or cooking as hobbies. But we would not pretend an NBA player or a head chef doesn’t have a job….Even if writing only makes up a tiny fraction of your income, it can still be a job and should be treated as such. Or, at the very least, if your writing is generating money for other people — publishers, magazines, corporate entities — then you should be getting paid too.”

- “Yes, Writing Is A Job (Even If It Doesn’t Pay Well)” - Electric Literature
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Where Does Creativity Hide? Amy Tan's TEDTalk

Wanted to post something inspirational today, and this 2008 TEDTalk from novelist Amy Tan is a perfect way to reflect on the evolution of the writing process and on the personal meanings of creativity.

Watch the video here.

What Do You Eat When You Write?

This article over at Catapult Community interviews their program instructors about their favorite writing snack. As a writer who loves snack food, it's cracking me up.

Read more here.

I also laugh because I have a weird quirk when it comes to food and writing. Whenever I set a scene in detail and describe my characters' meals, ten times out of ten that item of food is the one thing I end up craving for days afterward. This is why people find me baking cheese danishes at 10pm or running to the grocery store for butterscotch pudding after I've already been to the store twice in a week.

What kinds of things do you guys snack on when you write? My go-to is always tea and a couple of cookies or a handful of chips.

"The PEN Ten With Stephen Graham Jones"

Guest editor Natalie Diaz has a gorgeous interview with Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones up over at PEN America. They talk obsessions, linguistics, writing process, and more. But I think this quote is my absolute favorite:

While the notion of the public intellectual has fallen out of fashion, do you believe writers have a collective purpose? To say the truth, or something in the arena of the true. Something that feels true. To carve down to what’s real, and then fold the reader into that spot for a couple hundred pages. To write for the people of today, not the ones who aren’t born yet, and not the ones from generations ago, who can no longer be impressed with your talent. To—to be one of the ones Plato would have kicked out of his republic, because we won’t shut up, because we won’t stop stirring things up, because we insist on rousing emotions and thoughts in people that are inconvenient for those in power. And to do all this without seeming to be trying to do all this. Mostly, if we have a collective purpose, it’s to dream on the page, such that others might subscribe not so much to that particular dream, but just to dreaming in general. To asking What if? That’s the most dangerous question. The most necessary question.

Read more here.

Last night, I couldn't sleep because I had a story creeping into my head. Let's hope we can all hit the page running today.

Happy Wednesday,

CL

Image credit: PEN America

"How the Writer Researches: Annie Proulx"

I love, love, love behind the scenes looks into the processes of different writers, so this recent LitHub interview detailing Annie Proulx's method and overall career is fascinating.

Read more here.

Right now, I'm waiting for a word processor update to download so I can get back to writing. Hope you guys are having better luck with your work today.

Happy Sunday,

CL

"On The Slow Pursuit Of Overnight Success"

Victoria Schwab, on the heels of her first #1 NYT debut The Savage Song, has a great post on her blog about how failure and success throughout her writing career, and how the big successes don't happen overnight -- even when they seem instant to your readers.

Read more from Victoria here.

Her post reminds me of what my friend Aaron used to say about writing:  basically, that "you have to write a million words of crap in order to start getting good."

So, fellow authors and writers, let's keep plugging away toward those million words!

Happy Friday,

CL

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 208, Louise Erdrich

Great interview with Louise Erdrich from The Paris Review:

There’s something very wrong in our country—and not just in the book business. We now see what barely fettered capitalism looks like. We are killing the small and the intimate. We all feel it and we don’t know quite why everything is beginning to look the same. The central cores of large cities can still sustain interesting places. But all across our country we are intent on developing chain after chain with no character and employees who work for barely livable wages. We are losing our individuality. Killing the soul of our landscape. Yet we’re supposed to be the most individualistic of countries. I feel the sadness of it every time I go through cities like Fargo and Minneapolis and walk the wonderful old Main Streets and then go out to the edges and wander through acres of concrete boxes. Our country is starting to look like Legoland.