Elizabeth Gilbert: Advice for Writers

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Sometimes people ask me for help or suggestions about how to write, or how to get published. Keeping in mind that this is all very ephemeral and personal, I will try to explain here everything that I believe about writing. I hope it is useful. It's all I know.

I believe that – if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression – that you should take on this work like a holy calling. I became a writer the way other people become monks or nuns. I made a vow to writing, very young. I became Bride-of-Writing. I was writing’s most devotional handmaiden. I built my entire life around writing. I didn’t know how else to do this. I didn’t know anyone who had ever become a writer. I had no, as they say, connections. I had no clues. I just began.

I took a few writing classes when I was at NYU, but, aside from an excellent workshop taught by Helen Schulman, I found that I didn’t really want to be practicing this work in a classroom. I wasn’t convinced that a workshop full of 13 other young writers trying to find their voices was the best place for me to find my voice. So I wrote on my own, as well. I showed my work to friends and family whose opinions I trusted. I was always writing, always showing. After I graduated from NYU, I decided not to pursue an MFA in creative writing. Instead, I created my own post-graduate writing program, which entailed several years spent traveling around the country and world, taking jobs at bars and restaurants and ranches, listening to how people spoke, collecting experiences and writing constantly. My life probably looked disordered to observers (not that anyone was observing it that closely) but my travels were a very deliberate effort to learn as much as I could about life, expressly so that I could write about it.

Back around the age of 19, I had started sending my short stories out for publication. My goal was to publish something (anything, anywhere) before I died. I collected only massive piles of rejection notes for years. I cannot explain exactly why I had the confidence to be sending off my short stories at the age of 19 to, say, The New Yorker, or why it did not destroy me when I was inevitably rejected. I sort of figured I’d be rejected. But I also thought: “Hey – somebody has to write all those stories: why not me?” I didn’t love being rejected, but my expectations were low and my patience was high. (Again – the goal was to get published before death. And I was young and healthy.) It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism. Wasn’t that the point of the creation – to communicate something to the world? So PUT IT OUT THERE. Send your work off to editors and agents as much as possible, show it to your neighbors, plaster it on the walls of the bus stops – just don’t sit on your work and suffocate it. At least try. And when the powers-that-be send you back your manuscript (and they will), take a deep breath and try again. I often hear people say, “I’m not good enough yet to be published.” That’s quite possible. Probable, even. All I’m saying is: Let someone else decide that. Magazines, editors, agents – they all employ young people making $22,000 a year whose job it is to read through piles of manuscripts and send you back letters telling you that you aren’t good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT. Don’t pre-reject yourself. That’s their job, not yours. Your job is only to write your heart out, and let destiny take care of the rest.

As for discipline – it’s important, but sort of over-rated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you. You will make vows: “I’m going to write for an hour every day,” and then you won’t do it. You will think: “I suck, I’m such a failure. I’m washed-up.” Continuing to write after that heartache of disappointment doesn’t take only discipline, but also self-forgiveness (which comes from a place of kind and encouraging and motherly love). The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck. When I was writing “Eat, Pray, Love”, I had just as a strong a mantra of THIS SUCKS ringing through my head as anyone does when they write anything. But I had a clarion moment of truth during the process of that book. One day, when I was agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: “That’s actually not my problem.” The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.

I have a friend who’s an Italian filmmaker of great artistic sensibility. After years of struggling to get his films made, he sent an anguished letter to his hero, the brilliant (and perhaps half-insane) German filmmaker Werner Herzog. My friend complained about how difficult it is these days to be an independent filmmaker, how hard it is to find government arts grants, how the audiences have all been ruined by Hollywood and how the world has lost its taste…etc, etc. Herzog wrote back a personal letter to my friend that essentially ran along these lines: “Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you have to, but stop whining and get back to work.” I repeat those words back to myself whenever I start to feel resentful, entitled, competitive or unappreciated with regard to my writing: “It’s not the world’s fault that you want to be an artist…now get back to work.” Always, at the end of the day, the important thing is only and always that: Get back to work. This is a path for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.

Here’s another thing to consider. If you always wanted to write, and now you are A Certain Age, and you never got around to it, and you think it’s too late…do please think again. I watched Julia Glass win the National Book Award for her first novel, “The Three Junes”, which she began writing in her late 30’s. I listened to her give her moving acceptance speech, in which she told how she used to lie awake at night, tormented as she worked on her book, asking herself, “Who do you think you are, trying to write a first novel at your age?” But she wrote it. And as she held up her National Book Award, she said, “This is for all the late-bloomers in the world.” Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it’s not something where – if you missed it by age 19 – you’re finished. It’s never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the world – at any age. At least try.

There are heaps of books out there on How To Get Published. Often people find the information in these books contradictory. My feeling is -- of COURSE the information is contradictory. Because, frankly, nobody knows anything. Nobody can tell you how to succeed at writing (even if they write a book called “How To Succeed At Writing”) because there is no WAY; there are, instead, many ways. Everyone I know who managed to become a writer did it differently – sometimes radically differently. Try all the ways, I guess. Becoming a published writer is sort of like trying to find a cheap apartment in New York City: it’s impossible. And yet…every single day, somebody manages to find a cheap apartment in New York City. I can’t tell you how to do it. I’m still not even entirely sure how I did it. I can only tell you – through my own example – that it can be done. I once found a cheap apartment in Manhattan. And I also became a writer. In the end, I love this work. I have always loved this work. My suggestion is that you start with the love and then work very hard and try to let go of the results. Cast out your will, and then cut the line. Please try, also, not to go totally freaking insane in the process. Insanity is a very tempting path for artists, but we don’t need any more of that in the world at the moment, so please resist your call to insanity. We need more creation, not more destruction. We need our artists more than ever, and we need them to be stable, steadfast, honorable and brave – they are our soldiers, our hope. If you decide to write, then you must do it, as Balzac said, “like a miner buried under a fallen roof.” Become a knight, a force of diligence and faith. I don’t know how else to do it except that way. As the great poet Jack Gilbert said once to young writer, when she asked him for advice about her own poems: “Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say YES.”


Hat Tip to Michele Cline, the mother of 2 young published writers!

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (1945-present) studied theology and creative writing at Hollins College, near Roanoke, Virginia. She married her writing teacher, Richard Dillard, who Annie claims "taught her everything she knows" about writing. Her Masters thesis was 40 pages on Thoreau's Walden Pond. Thoreau's influence on Annie's writing of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is evident. She was awarded the Pulitzer for the book in 1975. Annie was twenty-nine at the time. 

Tinker Creek was the product of a serious bout of pneumonia which struck Annie in 1971. After she recovered, Annie wanted to experience life more fully and spent four seasons living near Tinker Creek where she journaled about the surrounding forests, creeks, and mountains. Her journal reached 20-plus volumes which she transposed to notecards. It took her about 8 months to turn the notecards into the Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Towards the end of the 8 months she was so absorbed that she was spending 15 hours a day writing, ignoring the outside world and living on coffee and coke. She was so absorbed in the project that she hardly ate and lost 30 pounds. Annie hesitated about publishing her book because she was worried that a theology book written by a woman would not be well-received. 

Today many readers enjoy Pilgrim at Tinker Creek because it is rich in images and details. Here are some excerpts from her award-winning book:

 

"The sky is deep and distant, laced with sycamore limbs like a hatching of crossed swords. I can scarcely see it; I'm not looking. I don't come to the creek for sky unmediated, but for shelter. My back rests on a steep bank under the sycamore; before me shines the creek- the creek which is about all the light I can stand - and beyond it rises the other bank, also steep, and planted in trees. 

I have never understood why so many mystics of all creeds experience the presence of God on mountaintops. Aren't they afraid of being blown away? God said to Moses on Sinai that even the priests, who have access to the Lord, must hallow themselves, for fear that the Lord may break out against them. This is the fear. It often feels best to lay low, inconspicuous, instead of waving your spirit around from high places like a lightning rod. For if God is in one sense the igniter, a fireball that spins over the ground of continents, God is also in another sense the destroyer, lightning, blind power, impartial as the atmosphere. Or God is one "G." You get a comforting sense, in a curved, hollow place, of being vulnerable to only a relatively narrow column of God as air." (p. 89) 

"The question from agnosticism is. Who turned on the lights? The question from faith is, Whatever for? Thoreau climbs Mount Katahdin and gives vent to an almost outraged sense of the reality of things of this world: "I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! - Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? The Lord God of gods, the Lord God of gods, he knoweth.... 

Sir James Jeans, British astronomer and physicist, suggested that the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Humanists seized on the expression, but it was hardly news. We knew, looking around, that a thought branches and leafs, a tree comes to a conclusion. But the question of who is thinking the thought is more fruitful than the question of who made the machine, for a machinist can of course wipe his hands and leave, and his simple machine still hums; but if the thinker's attention strays for a minute, his simplest thought ceases altogether. And, as I have stressed, the place where we so incontrovertibly find ourselves, whether thought or machine, is at least not in any way simple. 

Instead, the landscape of the world is "ring-streaked, speckled, and spotted," like Jacob's cattle culled from Laban's herd." (p. 144-145)

Related: Annie Dillard's Advice to Writers; 

Oscar Wilde in Florence

Painting of the Annunciation by John Collier

Ave Maria Gratia Plena
Oscar Wilde

Was this His coming! I had hoped to see
A scene of wondrous glory, as was told
Of some great God who in a rain of gold
Broke open bars and fell on Danae:
Or a dread vision as when Semele
Sickening for love and unappeased desire
Prayed to see God's clear body, and the fire
Caught her brown limbs and slew her utterly:
With such glad dreams I sought this holy place,
And now with wondering eyes and heart I stand
Before this supreme mystery of Love:
Some kneeling girl with passionless pale face,
An angel with a lily in his hand,
And over both the white wings of a Dove.

C.S. Lewis "On Being Human"

On Being Human
By C. S. Lewis


Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence
Behold the Forms of nature.
They discern Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities
Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.
Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying,
Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,
High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal Huge Principles appear.

The Tree-ness of the tree they know-the meaning of
Arboreal life, how from earth's salty lap
The solar beam uplifts it; all the holiness
Enacted by leaves' fall and rising sap;

But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us -
An angel has no skin.

They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it
Drink the whole summer down into the breast.
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The tremor on the rippled pool of memory
That from each smell in widening circles goes,
The pleasure and the pang --can angels measure it?
An angel has no nose.

The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes
On death, and why, they utterly know; but not
The hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold bilberries.
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf's billowy curves,
Nor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges.
—An angel has no nerves.

Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery
Guards us like air, from heavens too big to see;
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.
Yet here, within this tiny, charmed interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in a privacy
Forever ours, not theirs.

"Saint" G.K. Chesterton?

ROME, JULY 14, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) is well known for his clever and humorous writing, and his thought-provoking paradoxes. But he might also become known as a saint, if a proposal to launch his cause of beatification goes forward.

ZENIT spoke with Paolo Gulisano, author of the first Italian-language biography of the great English writer ("Chesterton & Belloc: Apologia e Profezia," Edizioni Ancora), about the origins of this proposal. Here, Gulisano explains why Chesterton might merit recognition as a saint.

ZENIT: Who is promoting this cause of beatification?

Gulisano: The cultural association dedicated to him, the Chesterton Society, founded in England in 1974 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the great author's birth, with the idea of spreading awareness of the work, thought and figure of this extraordinary personality. For years now, there has been talk of a possible cause of beatification, and a few days ago, during an international conference organized in Oxford on "The Holiness of G.K. Chesterton" -- with the participation of the best exponents in the field of Chesterton studies -- it was decided to go ahead with this proposal.

ZENIT: Why a beatification?

Gulisano: Many people feel there is clear evidence of Chesterton's sanctity: Testimonies about him speak of a person of great goodness and humility, a man without enemies, who proposed the faith without compromises but also without confrontation, a defender of Truth and Charity. His greatness is also in the fact that he knew how to present Christianity to a wide public, made up of Christians and secular people. His books, ranging from "Orthodoxy" to "St. Francis of Assisi," from "Father Brown" to "The Ball and the Cross," are brilliant presentations of the Christian faith, witnessed with clarity and valor before the world.

According to the ancient categories of the Church, we could define Chesterton as a "confessor of the faith." He was not just an apologist, but also a type of prophet who glimpsed far ahead of time the dramatic character of modern issues like eugenics.

Read it all here.

Wendell Berry on Stones

The Stones

I owned a slope full of stones.

Like buried painos they lay in the ground,

shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocks

where the earth caught and kept them

dark, an old music mute in them

that my head keeps now I have dug them out.

I broke them where they slugged intheir dark

cells, and lifted them up in pieces.

As I piled them in the light

I began their music. I heard their old lime

rouse in breath of song that has not left me.

I gave pain and weariness to theri bearing out.

What bond have I made with the earth,

having worn myself against it? It is a fatal singing

I have carried with me out of that day.

The stones have given me music

that figures for me their holes in the earth

and their long lying in them dark.

They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground,

and I must prepare a fitting silence.

-- Wendell Berry, Collected Poems 1957-1982, pp. 103-104

Kaleem Omar RIP

Celebrated poet and journalist Kaleem Omar died in Pakistan on Thursday, June 25 of heart failure at the age of 72. He had undergone a bypass only a month before.

Omar was born in India in 1937 to an affluent family that owned the vast construction firm, Omar Sons. He went to school in Nainital, India, and then to England. After completing his studies, he came back to Pakistan to work for the family company and then for Cessna. He became a journalist in 1982 with The Star and then joined The News.

Kaleem Omar was known for his investigative reporting and was also ranked amongst the top 150 English poets of the world and his work was published by Oxford University Press in 1975, under the title Wordfall. His poems also appear in an anthology titled Pieces of Eight.

The poem that follows is from Wordfall.

Trout
Kaleem Omar

By first light we are at the river’s edge,
Unsnarling tackle. Hands, with a new day’s life in them,
Choose favourite spoons and pocket sweets
For the thirst that will come later. Spacing out
Along the boulder-strewn bank,
We agree to meet for lunch sharp at noon
And leave the libations in a safe place underwater.
I head for Cunningham’s Pool,
Eager for the big one that got away last year.

The rock that marks the place is wet and huge.
Grass, too rough to lie back on,
Surrounds three sides;
The fourth juts darkly against the water.
Giving it the right degree of wrist,
I test my preparations and make a cast.
The line snaps out, sings thinly in coniferous air
And curves down short
Of the far side. My arm feels good;

And breath steams with anticipation. The eyes
Jump to the swirl where the sink goes in.
I wonder how big the big trout will look
In a photograph. Will it
Be a record for the valley? Will I be the only one
Who does not have to lie? I reel in empty
And sense no presence deeper than this morning.
Sunlight creeps down the face
Of the mountain opposite, tips the water

With the stirrings of a wispy sky. A fast cloud
Darkens the river’s surface,
Cancels my shadow, moves away. A moment happens.
O loose a spoon, replace it with a fly
And watch the line more carefully.
It tugs – once, twice, again. I have a bite.
A good beginning. Hours later,
I am still.doing alright. It is something to know
The hand retains its skill from other times.

I came here first with father. He is dead now.
The worms that hooked his flesh
No longer smell. He thought I was lost once,
On that first trip, and I heard his large voice
Echo and call till I was safe. I have carried
The sound of those words for twenty years.
But I am blank now,
Oblivious to everything except the need
To maintain silence, keep the rod at the right angle

And wait, never knowing when the next one will come,
For the heart-stopping pull
That signals something alive at the other end.
It is time. The sun is overhead and the brown beauty
From last year has escaped again.
But there are others. I heft my catch
And trudge upstream, thinking of nothing much –
Not a bad morning’s work and a lazy blue
Afternoon of love to look forward to.


For more poems by Kaleem Omar, go here.

Francisco's Farm and Wendell Berry's Farm

Each year I reserve the last weekend of June to enjoy Francisco's Farm, a well organized summer crafts fair hosted at Midway College in Midway, Kentucky. This year the weather was perfect!

I visited the booths, ate an Italian ice, sat in the shade an listened to jazz and R and B and bought Wendell Berry's book of poetry The Farm. Here is an excerpt from that volume.

Stay years if you would know
The work and thought, the pleasure
And grief, the feat, by which
This vision lives. In fall
You plow the bottomland
For corn, the heavy ground,
So frost will work the clods.
When it's too wet to plow,
Go to the woods to fell
Trees for next winter's fuel.
Take the inferior trees
And not all from one place,
So that the woods will yield
Without diminishment.
Then trim and rick the logs;
And when you drag them out
From woods to rick, use horses
Whose hooves are kinder to
The ground than wheels. In spring
The traces of your work
Will be invisible.

-- Wendell Berry

Another Poem by Fr. Longenecker

The Unreal City
By Fr. Dwight Longenecker

In a dream I walked though the unreal city,
Down streets that were silent and desolate.
Stone faces gazed on me without pity,
although I was poor and desperate.

They gazed from towers of marble and glass,
and watched as I wandered the empty lanes.
No one restrained me, they let me pass,
and then returned to their flickering screens.

Over the doors were the names of power:
Xanadu Bank, Mammon Securities,
Ozimandius Insurance Tower,
Iscariot’s Purse Global Equities.

I watched the towers grow and multiply,
and rise up in splendid magnificence:
Alabaster palaces in the sky,
for lords of omniscient opulence.

The towers stood--powerful and permanent.
Ageless against the swirling clouds,
their steel and concrete reigned omnipotent
over the helpless, huddled, plodding crowds.

Overwhelmed, I stumbled along afraid,
and came upon a garden in a square.
A lawn was surrounded by an arched arcade,
An ancient stone fountain stood sentry there.

I sensed a solemn silence in the sun,
except for one white bird still singing low.
On the side, a stairway beckoned down
To subterranean passages below.

I stepped into the darkness and I found
a vast vault above a bottomless abyss.
Light filtered in; and littered all around,
were bones and skulls--scraps of human nothingness.

Then looking up, I saw that the vaults,
spreading far and supporting the city floor,
were ancient, brittle and riddled with faults,
undermining what seemed so real and secure.

I saw how the towers of glass and steel
were built on arches of emptiness.
Their glamor and power were all unreal,
like specters conjured from the dark abyss.

Then I felt a tremor, and in my dream,
an earthquake shook the city, and it broke.
Souls fell into the dark. I heard them scream
as the towers crumbled into dust and smoke.

I rose and returned to the cloistered square,
and waited while the dread and terror passed.
I determined to dwell in safety there,
and build a humble household that would last.


From here.

George Herbert: Prayer as Banquet

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.

-- George Herbert

Glimmer Train July Fiction Competition

The Very Short Fiction competition closes July 31. First place wins $1,200 and publication in Issue 77 of Glimmer Train Stories. Second and third place winners receive $500/$300 (or, if chosen for publication, $700). Go here for Guidelines.

Winners and finalists of the April Family Matters competition have been notified, and the Top-25 list is posted! Our thanks to all of you for letting us read your stories!

1st place: "According to Foxfire" by Randolph Thomas
2nd place: "Chim Chiminy" by Amy S. Gottfried
3rd place: "A Month of Rain" by C. Abe Gaustad