Commonplace book entry
From The Art of Fiction: Marilynne Robinson (The Paris Review)
ROBINSON
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
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Last night at 8:20 p.m. I finished the second draft of my godforsaken book. I didn’t think it would be all that big a deal, since I have so much work left. (There’s no way I’m letting an agent see it until at least draft 3.5. Panic at the very thought.)
But on Thursday afternoon, about to take a day off so I could finish the second draft in one go, I thought “This probably will be exciting. I will probably jump up and down and need to call someone. I should pick out, in advance, someone to call.”
Instead I typed the last sentence. It was the first time I had typed the last sentence as the last sentence, since draft #1 is a million out-of-order pieces half in longhand. I futzed with a pronoun, changing it back and forth. I thought “Oh, just leave it the ungrammatical way you like. You can deal with it later.” And then it hit me that maybe I was futzing in order to not acknowledge that I was done with the second draft, and then it dawned on me that I was done with the second draft, and then I started to cry.
That was the first in a cascade of minor but unexpected reactions. As soon as each happened I thought “Oh yeah, of course. This makes sense. Why am I surprised?” And yet. I’m sure everyone’s experience is different, but if the following things happen after you finish your second draft, don’t be surprised:
1. You burst into tears. You try to come up with any other way to describe the event because that is so cliché but fail and feel like a boring untalented hack, except that at the same time you feel like Lily at the end of To the Lighthouse: You have achieved your vision. And the last paragraph seems so perfect and true and you said what you had to say even though everything else in the book except the last paragraph needs to be reworked, and the final sentence has that impossibly janky pronoun.
2. You close the spreadsheet you have used to organize the million pieces of draft #1 for draft #2, realize you don’t need it anymore, and say, out loud, “Bye, sweet little spreadsheet.”
3. If you finish your second draft on a Friday night, there will be two consequences: No one is answering their phone, and if you are unmarried, they will all think you are calling to say you are getting married. No one actually came out with the latter but I suspect.
4. Despite the healthy leftovers that are sitting on the counter, you are devoured by an all-encompassing need for a pizza.
4a. It takes you 15 minutes to decide on which pizza place and then on which kind of pizza.
4b. Boyfriend: “You’ve already finished two slices of pizza? It’s not good for you to eat that fast.” Also, when you tell him “Did I tell you it’s 140,000 words long? I can’t believe I typed 140,000 words. I mean, how long would it take me to say 140,000 words?” he answers “I’d guess about a minute and a half.”
5. Exhaustion, and weird dreams. You may dream first that the most beautiful person you know, a person too beautiful to actually notice you in real life (except maybe to notice that you act really weird around them), is kissing you; followed by a dream in which terrible random violence has broken out in your city and you have been given the opportunity to delve into it for publication but if you do that you will certainly be killed; followed by a dream in which you and the only writer friend you forgot to alert keep missing each other on planes to and from Los Angeles while you are trying to get her take on the grown child actor whom you met in L.A., and also she has your cellphone.
6. Inability to get out of bed or change out of pajamas or run all the errands you put off yesterday in order to finish your second draft. But there is a distinct possibility the second-draft thing is an excuse.
7. Your loved ones, when they finally respond to your emails and tweet and voicemail and texts (not Facebook, though. That would be tacky), all of which emphasize the 140k words stat, will say “When can I read it!” and after thanking them profusely for their support you have to say “NOT FOR A VERY LONG TIME.”
Which means I should really work for my usual Saturday three hours on draft 2.5 today. But we’ll see. The laundry is sneering at me and I’m still in my pajamas.
xx
djd
p.s. This post brought to you in part by rereading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird this week for moral support. The first day I was rereading she was in studio for a radio interview! Apparently I went into journalism to have a reason to talk to impressive people, because when I’m entering a green room with a paperback and a Sharpie instead of a steno pad I am, well… not feeling like I have a good reason to be there.
p.p.s. Unfortunately my book is not the kind one can sell on three chapters and an outline.
Filed under: my brilliant career | 2 Comments
In the last 24 hours I’ve dug up a bunch of poems I wrote in 2003/4. As a rule I quit writing poems when I got into college — it didn’t work for me anymore — but to my surprise there are quite a few of these. This in particular made me laugh obnoxiously loud in the newsroom (one of my favorite occupations) so I am sharing it here. Also, it’s SXSW week. Copyright me and all that.
diary Saturday 1/3/04 (written the next day)
True False
Yeah my novel. I can’t believe I’m giving this pitch
in my living room I’ve given this pitch like, like
TWENTY times but never—I’m looking for
the Gillian Welch DVD. You really want
the Pixies? OK but it’s really loud and you said
you didn’t want loud. You’ve NEVER—how old
are you again? Where did you grow up? Look at us
we’re having one of those conv—I never have these—
are you going to Hot Stove on Sunday? Well do you
want to? You’re really—look, I haven’t
done this in a long time, I haven’t asked
someone out in over a year and I’d be trying
to kiss you right now in fact I probably
will try before you leave only I’m so wasted—
it’s been so long since I found someone so
attractive while having such a good buzz on
I’m sorry I sound really stupid don’t I? This
is so—this is like a model for relationships
between men and women in fiction. I write about that
a lot—look at you you’re dismissing me
you’re dismissing your beer you’re dismissing
men’s music—where did you grow up?
Look if that’s your only concern can I call you
in a month because it’s really not a concern
at all—something something from the Globe
is married to someone some at the Phoenix.
Well I’ll have to call you before two weeks
because you have my Johnny Cash box set.
Can I get you another beer? Man you really—
you WORK those Levi’s. I’m going to TELL you
about the novel, I’m going to tell you,
I’ve given this pitch like twenty times I can’t believe
I’m in my living room I’ve given this pitch
SO many times.
xx
djd
p.s. On the off chance the subject sees and recognizes this, dude, it’s OK, we’ve all grown up since then I hope.
p.p.s. “You’re dismissing your beer.”
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Tags: poetry, ridiculous music critic experiences
I miss this story. Not at all incidentally, I was the same age as the guy I focused on.
Filed under: obsessions, sox | Leave a Comment
1. Google Voice, you are so puzzling.
HI for them, bye. Hello, bye bye hey. Hello. Hey, I’ll talk to you later. Yeah her. Hello. We were Hello We’re, peace. But hey, that day. Hey there, okay. Hey there, rent, okay there Yeah, okay man. About, bye bye. Well over here. We were Well here You know I didn’t listen. Okay bye. But I don’t know that So I will. Luau so I don’t, Hi there, so. Well, I want to know I a lot. Bye, you know later, into the new books.
2. An eager young space cadet asked me for advice on becoming a music journalist. It is weird to be asked for advice on this, since I quit when critics were still getting new music from publicists via snail-mailed CD, but he’s my friend’s student. Subject line of this post is his email’s subject line. The young man said that he had published a few pieces on a friend’s blog, plays music, loves hip-hop, and:
Being that my appetite for new rap music is insatiable, I am pretty certain that this line of work would be something that I would love doing for a living income.
A living income.
I’ll wait while you react.
After emailing about 10 different friends in a state of comic despair, I responded thus.
–
Hi [NAME] —
I have to say I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I got to the part of your email that said “… a living income.” That is a tall order in music journalism, where the pay scale and job prospects are both pretty tragic. I’m joining in the tradition of the many, many journalists who did this to me: I’m going to start off by discouraging you. Journalism is a rough career field and music journalism is even worse. Now, it’s not like no one gets living-income jobs — someone has to be Sasha Frère-Jones. But it’s usually a long road. Be prepared to do music journalism on the side, on top of whatever pays your rent, for years. Seriously years.
The rest of this email is in no particular order.
Location… you should be somewhere that has enough of a scene, or enough publications, or at least has a lot of national artists coming through on tour. Part of this is the question of what kind of publication you see yourself working on. Do you want to be a music critic for a mainstream news outlet, for an alt-weekly, for a music magazine, for a style webzine? That changes things significantly. If you want to work for, say, Vibe, you’re better off in the centers of the music and publishing worlds. If you want to be the #1 hip-hop writer in northern New England, the person called on to review every relevant album or concert for, say, the Portland Press Herald and the Portsmouth paper, then stay where you’re at and establish yourself in that way. This question also determines how you write each piece: Are you addressing specialists/insiders or not?
There are advantages to being a big fish in a small pond and there are advantages to being in the big pond.
In this day and age it never hurts to be a fantastic photographer, audio recorder or videographer. (I am none of these things, myself.)
Never get too cool for the room. It kills your ability to see what’s really going on.
Having a specific genre is a mixed bag because on the one hand you can get known as an expert — but on the other hand there are even fewer outlets and opportunities. Don’t rule out these possibilities:
- A music journalist with a specialty in hip-hop
- A general news journalist who writes a hip-hop column in addition to a main beat — this is what [NAME] does. Similarly, [NAME] got a full-time entertainment writing job but started out reporting and editing for community newspapers.
- Non-writing jobs at music publications — if you go to New York or L.A. this is far, far more likely than getting a staff writer job. You want the lousy entertainment listings editor job if you can get it.
- If you’re a musician, well, it certainly opens up opportunities in the larger “career in music” department. You do have to be more careful about conflicts of interest, though. I’m not a musician and in the end I wanted a career in journalism, not a career in music.
Beyond that…
- Write for free if you have to, but strategically. I wrote for one local magazine for free because they would let me do anything I wanted, including 3500-word cover stories. When I had enough clips and enough paid work elsewhere I quit.
- Don’t be afraid to reach out to writers and editors whose work you admire. I started writing for the Nashville alt-weekly and then No Depression because I emailed a total stranger who wrote a great New York Times Magazine profile of the Dixie Chicks.
- Publish as much as you can. Otherwise you don’t get better.
To conclude, I can’t emphasize enough that you have to be a good writer. You need to be able to explain to your audience, whether it’s insiders or the general public, why an album is great, or a disappointment, or why a particular artist you’re profiling is worth notice. You need to be cogent and persuasive and smart. Critics who trade in cliché and stale language never get beyond the lousy-local-free-magazine-you-get-at-clubs level. My best editor — the Dixie Chicks writer — used to make me rewrite 150-word calendar spotlight descriptions until they looked like mini New Yorker essays, with a single point to make and a narrative throughline. I got paid $25 per. I’d get the check and shriek “Burritos on me!” Yeah. You don’t have to be good right away and you probably won’t be but you won’t get a shot at those living-income gigs until you are.
I hope this is not too depressing. I think it’s better to know what it’s like out there! Let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Danielle
—
Thoughts?
The cadet has not yet responded.
I decided not to tell him that the best editor I’ve yet had is working full-time for a nonprofit social services agency now. Burnout can wait.
djd
Filed under: media, my brilliant career | 1 Comment
Tags: eager young space cadets, epic despair, google voice
is an obsession with creative communities. I want to live in all of them. All of the ones I read about. I probably live in a creative community now but unfortunately I am unable to perceive it. It must be something similar to what the author of that NYT magazine story about déja vu pointed out: that there is a patina over a particular mental scene that connotes memory. I want to live in the patina.
So I am listening to Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon on Spotify and googling photographs of Laurel Canyon to see if it really looks the way I imagine from, oh, Weetzie Bat and Diane di Prima’s memoir.
NYT, 4/20/1969, Susan Gordon Lydon:
“Joni Mitchell lives in Laurel Canyon, in a small, pine-paneled house lovingly cluttered with two cats, a stuffed elk’s head, stained glass windows, a grandfather clock given her by Leonard Cohen, a king’s head with a jeweled crown sticking out from the brick fireplace, votive candles, blooming azaleas, a turkey made of pine cones, dried flowers, old dolls, Victorian shadow boxes, colored glass, an ornamental plate from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where she grew up, an art nouveau lamp in the shape of a frog holding a lily pad, a collection of cloisonné boxes, bowls and ashtrays, patchwork quilts, Maxfield Parrish pictures, various musical instruments, and Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash.”
xx
djd
p.s. Isn’t Nash’s appearance at the end of that paragraph an unfortunate shoe-dropping >thunk<? In context, who cares about his presence in this scene?
p.p.s. Recommended: Emma Forrest's memoir Your Voice in My Head.
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