Submitted For Your Perusal » writing

Writing at Home

Matt Thomas — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:26:33 +0000

“I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.”

—David Ogilvy

Filed under: quotes, work, writing

A Cascade of New Insights

Matt Thomas — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:21:48 +0000

“Innis’s technique, like McLuhan’s, forswears the building up of a convincing argument, or any attempt at ‘proof,’ instead gathering in a ton of disparate ideas from different disciplines that might seem irreconcilable at first; yet considering them together results in a shifted perspective, and a cascade of new insights.”

— Maria Bustillos, “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert”

Filed under: writing

Migraine Personality

Matt Thomas — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:49:12 +0000

“All of us who have migraine suffer not only from the attacks themselves but from this common conviction that we are perversely refusing to cure ourselves by taking a couple of aspirin, that we are making ourselves sick, that we ‘bring it on ourselves.’ And in the most immediate sense, the sense of why we have a headache this Tuesday and not last Thursday, of course we often do. There certainly is what doctors call a ‘migraine personality,’ and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organized, perfectionist. ‘You don’t look like a migraine personality,’ a doctor once said to me. ‘Your hair’s messy. But I suppose you’re a compulsive housekeeper.’ Actually my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.”

—Joan Didion, “In Bed,” The White Album (1979)

Filed under: quotes, writing

Low Theory

Matt Thomas — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:04:59 +0000

In an interview about his latest book, McKenzie Wark discusses his preference for “low theory”:

The American university is where so-called ‘French theory’ was actually invented, and not in philosophy departments but via comparative literature, other literature departments, sometimes media studies, and various other places. So you couldn’t quite call it philosophy—it got called ‘theory’ and sometimes ‘high theory’. You end up with this construct, based essentially around the reception of Derrida into the Anglophone world through these centres of intellectual power in the US. And this is interesting, but it occupies a certain kind of terrain, a certain space. It requires a certain training.

I’ve always been much more interested in something else: The self-conscious attempt to construct conceptual practices outside of formal settings. That is what Marx did, it’s what Freud did, it’s what Benjamin did; I’d even say it’s what Nietzsche did, because of course he’s on ‘permanent leave’ when he’s writing all these amazing books, when he’s already losing it. Somehow, these guys are all now ‘high theory’, but that’s not where they came from whatsoever. Marx is not a philosopher, Freud is not a philosopher, Benjamin is not a philosopher; I’d even say Nietzsche is not a philosopher. They’re all doing ‘low theory’, and I’m trying to tell stories that fit into that tradition, maybe not at that level, but as a whole other way of thinking about the practice of knowledge in everyday life. This puts on the table the question of the politics of knowledge in a way that can’t be directly asked, or answered, in the space of the university.

Yeah, me too.

Filed under: academe, books, philosophy, writing

I Don’t Take a Piss Without Getting Paid for It

Matt Thomas — Wed, 11 May 2011 16:52:37 +0000

(See also Mike Monteiro’s “Fuck You, Pay Me” talk.)

Filed under: inspiration, video, work, writing Tagged: Harlan Ellison

Coffee Is for Writers

Matt Thomas — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:48:53 +0000

“I don’t get people who don’t like coffee, and I distrust writers who don’t drink it. How can anyone be a writer without coffee? … Coffee has been an essential tool of almost all the greatest modern writers, and certainly of the most prolific ones. Voltaire reportedly drank 50 cups a day (and I’ve seen estimates as high as 72 cups a day). Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote what amounted to a love letter about freshly roasted coffee. Arthur Conan Doyle and his fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, loved coffee almost as much as they loved cocaine (Holmes: ‘A cup of coffee would clear my brain’). Anthony Trollope, admirably disciplined, rose every morning at exactly 5:00 and drank his coffee before writing for three hours, after which he went to work at the post office. Edgar Allan Poe drank coffee by the gallon (the tell-tale heart’s pounding: conscience or caffeine overdose?). Maigret’s creator, Georges Simenon, could write a detective novel in three days on the power of his bottomless coffee cup. Beethoven loved his coffee strong, and Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated a sonata (BMV 211) to the glories of coffee.”

—Joseph Finder

(Via.)

Filed under: coffee, endorsements, quotes, writing

Empires Rising and Then Crumbling to Dust

Matt Thomas — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:35:40 +0000

“I’m not exactly a slow writer – when I’m really cooking I can do 800–1,000 good, polished words in two hours, that’s not bad – but it can take me a long time to get cooking, and sometimes one sentence can hang me up for an hour. (Those are usually the first sentences, in the next draft, to be cut. You would think I might have learned by now.) I have a hard time writing an excuse to one of my kid’s teachers, a recipe for Dutch babies, an apologetic email, without sinking into a revisionary funk. I’m also slow to know what I think, and slow to know how I feel: we’re talking reptile time, rock time, empires rising and then crumbling to dust. I still haven’t decided how I feel about Sandinista!, for example, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off since 1980.”

—Michael Chabon

(Via Alan Jacobs.)

Filed under: quotes, writing

Article on Writer’s Block

Matt Thomas — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 21:30:03 +0000

That’s it. That’s the whole article.

(Via @edwardoneill.)

Filed under: writing

Morricone

Matt Thomas — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:25:03 +0000

“My best working-to music are the film scores of Ennio Morricone. You may know his sound from the Sergio Leone Italian westerns – A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, etc. – but you probably don’t know that he’s done almost five hundred film scores, songs, albums of background music, television tracks, arrangements, orchestrations, canonical and ecclesiastical works, full orchestra pieces for modern classicism, incidental music and whatall. His ‘sound’ ranges from the dramatic exuberance of, say, The Big Gundown, a 1967 Lee Van Cleef oater, to the exquisite loneliness of Terry Malick’s film Days of Heaven, for which work he was nominated for an Oscar. Morricone is my best companion when I’m deep in the world of what I’m writing.”

—Harlan Ellison, 1981

Filed under: music, quotes, writing Tagged: Ennio Morricone, Harlan Ellison

Do It Big

Matt Thomas — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:44:34 +0000

“It’s a writer’s responsibility to orient modern publics to the catastrophic world in which they live. But he cannot do this if he remains a mere specialist. To do it all, he’s got to do it big!”

—C. Wright Mills

Filed under: quotes, writing

Permission Is for Cowards

Matt Thomas — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:17:18 +0000

“Many people with an idea want others to tell them their idea is worthy. Why is their approval of your idea necessary? That’s a sales question, not a writing question. If you want thousands to know you, that’s an ego problem, not a writing problem. I say, if you find it interesting, do it. If you find it worthwhile or meaningful, that’s enough. Your idea is good because it’s yours, and it means something to you. If even one person gets value from what you make that justifies your efforts. That person might be a close friend, a distant stranger, or possibly even yourself, years later, when you rediscover this amazing thing you made, amazing simply because you made it. Your book idea is good because it’s yours. Whatever it is it’s good enough to be the book that you write. If an idea lingers in your mind, and won’t leave you alone, just do it. The only chance for sanity is to get the idea out of your mind and down on paper or on a screen.”

—Scott Berkun

Filed under: writing

Today I Wrote a Great Scene About a Flowing Stream

Matt Thomas — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 03:12:30 +0000

“Charles Frazier wrote Cold Mountain. He spent ten years writing it. Now, I resent the fact that his wife worked, and he could afford to take ten years to write a novel. My wife doesn’t work and I can’t afford to take ten years to write a novel that I haven’t even sold. So I resent that. And I didn’t like Cold Mountain. It wasn’t my kind of book. I don’t think writing about trees is that interesting. It’s a quest story, a string of pearls, and I didn’t believe any of it. However, it was a serious book. So I think that Charles Frazier deserves all the accolades and awards and money that he got for it, because it was a serious artistic effort. It didn’t appeal to me, I was a little personally resentful, but I admire that he had to delay his gratifications for ten years before anyone saw his book. He had to have the personal satisfaction of knowing, ‘Today I wrote a great scene about a flowing stream,’ and live with that. I can admire guys who are not my cup of tea as writers. But I’m furious with phonies.”

—Pat Jordan

Filed under: writing

Superglue

Matt Thomas — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 04:50:27 +0000

Jonathan Franzen’s writing routine:

He writes six or seven days a week, starting at 7 a.m. He’s often hoarse at the end of the day because he performs his dialogue out loud as he writes it…. Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the Internet, he not only removed the Dell’s wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. “What you have to do,” he explains, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.”

(Via.)

Filed under: technology, writing

Just Like Little League

Matt Thomas — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:56:49 +0000

“Read the clips first, then come up with questions, then do the interviews, transcribe the tapes, then read the notes and clips over again until I memorize them, then start outlining on a yellow legal pad of paper, like an artist making sketches before starting a painting. I’ll revise the outline again and again, just like you were taught in grammar school. Do that over and over until I find an outline I like. It’s a habit left over from baseball – as far back as when I played in Little League when I used to draw those stick figures that showed me how I was going to pitch the batter. Which doesn’t mean I’ll stick to it, it just means it’ll get me started writing. After I get the outline, I think for as long as it takes me, until I get the first line. I’ll memorize my notes and clips and then spend a week walking around the house jotting notes on how I want to begin it. Once I figure out how I’m going to begin it, the story is done.”

—Pat Jordan

Filed under: writing

You See Differently on Paper

Matt Thomas — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:03:55 +0000

“I draft prose on-screen, work it over until I can’t find much wrong with it, then double-space it and print it out. At that point I discover what’s really there, which is ordinarily hazy, bloated, and boring. It looked pretty good on-screen, but it’s crap. My first drafts on paper, after what amount to several drafts on computer, look like a battlefield.”

—Jan Swafford

Filed under: books, reading, writing Tagged: Marshall McLuhan

You Discover It for Yourself

Matt Thomas — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 04:35:12 +0000

“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.”

—Ray Bradbury

(Via.)

Filed under: books, quotes, reading, writing Tagged: libraries, Ray Bradbury

Expert Dawdlers

Matt Thomas — Tue, 04 May 2010 22:19:13 +0000

Even the most productive writers are expert dawdlers, doers of unnecessary errands, seekers of interruptions – trials to their wives or husbands, friends, associates, and themselves. They sharpen well-pointed pencils and go out to buy more blank paper, rearrange offices, wander through libraries and bookstores, chop wood, walk, drive, make unnecessary calls, nap, daydream, and try not “consciously” to think about what they are going to write so they can think subconsciously about it.

—Donald Murray

Filed under: quotes, writing

I Need Those Seven Hours

Matt Thomas — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:05:39 +0000

OK, it’s nine in the morning. All I’ve got to do is write. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four – this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning – I just try to write.

—John McPhee

Filed under: quotes, writing

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Daily Routine

Matt Thomas — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:00:54 +0000

“As the years passed he fell into a daily routine that seldom varied during autumn or winter. Each morning he wrote or read until it was time for the midday dinner; each afternoon he read or wrote or dreamed or merely stared at a sunbeam boring in through a hole in the blind and very slowly moving across the opposite wall. At sunset he went for a long walk, from which he returned late in the evening to eat a bowl of chocolate crumbed thick with bread and then talk about books with his two adoring sisters, Elizabeth and Louisa, both of whom were already marked for spinsterhood … In summer Hawthorne’s routine was more varied; he went for an early-morning swim among the rocks and often spent the day wandering alone by the shore, so idly that he amused himself by standing on a cliff and throwing stones at his shadow. Once, apparently, he stationed himself on the long toll-bridge north of Salem and watched the procession of travelers from morning to night. He never went to church, but on Sunday mornings he liked to stand behind the curtain of his open window and watch the congregation assemble.”

—Malcolm Cowley, “Editor’s Introduction,” The Portable Hawthorne

Every Academic’s Fantasy

Matt Thomas — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:49:51 +0000

From Write to the Top!: How to Become a Prolific Academic:

If only, right?

Filed under: academe, books, quotes, writing

Writing Will Make You a Better Writer

Matt Thomas — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:36:03 +0000

I’m a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn’t fucking matter! I happen to write in Emacs. I also code in Emacs, which is a nice bonus. Other people write and code in vi. Other people write in Microsoft Word and code in TextMate+ or TextEdit or some fancy web-based collaborative editor like EtherPad or Google Wave. Whatever. Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening – really listening – to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and – if you can manage to get anybody’s attention – get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more. One day your writing will get featured on a site like Reddit and you’ll go from 5 readers to 5000 in a matter of hours, and they’ll all tell you how much your writing sucks. And most of them will be right! Learn how to respond to constructive criticism and filter out the trolls, and you can write the next great American novel in edlin.

—Mark Pilgrim

Filed under: quotes, writing

My Idea of a Writer

Matt Thomas — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:34:56 +0000

My idea of a writer: someone interested in “everything.” I’d always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis than in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent universities I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren’t more people like me.

—Susan Sontag

Posted in academe, quotes, writing Tagged: Susan Sontag

Exclusively by Answering Machine

Matt Thomas — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 07:11:54 +0000

For a long time, he communicated exclusively by answering machine. I would leave him a message at some point during the day—he didn’t answer the phone—and then, late at night, when I was no longer at my desk, he would leave a very long response on my voicemail. I didn’t take this personally—it was a quirk of his, and I think he was perhaps more open and direct speaking to a machine than he would have been speaking directly to another voice.

—Deborah Treisman on David Foster Wallace

Posted in quotes, technology, work, writing Tagged: DFW

Sugar Rush

Matt Thomas — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:45:43 +0000

For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee – with lots of sugar. And there’s lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It’s a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob’s.

—David Lynch

(Via.)

Posted in coffee, movies, quotes, work, writing Tagged: David Lynch

A Semi-Hermitic Existence

Matt Thomas — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:34:50 +0000

From the Washington Post’s profile of Edward P. Jones:

“He makes his home near Washington National Cathedral in an apartment so disheveled that he allows only close friends inside. There is no bed (he sleeps on a pallet), no bookshelves, no couch, nor much to sit on other than a kitchen chair. He does not have a car, a driver’s license or any mechanized means of transport, not even a bicycle. He has no cellphone, no DVD player, and his Internet connection is sporadic. Though he loves movies and trash daytime television — in particular, those judge shows — he has only a 10-year-old, 13-inch TV and has never had cable. He has never been to a sporting event. He has no deep romantic attachments. He says his closest friend has been Lil Coyne, an elderly woman who for 20 years lived down the hall from him in an apartment building in Alexandria. She died this summer at age 90.”

(Via.)

Posted in TV, writing

Editing

Matt Thomas — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:15:48 +0000

“Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge” (Torontoist)

Posted in writing

Hotel Stationery

Matt Thomas — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:43:20 +0000

Recently, I’ve developed a weakness for hotel stationery. It’s rare enough to receive an honest to goodness letter in the mail these days. Getting one on hotel letterhead just adds to the romance. If you believe my stationery, I’m at the Hotel Ritz one day, Fontainebleau the next. And while a box of Crane’s correspondence cards will run you north of $100, hotel stationery is complementary, so I try to go home with a stack every time I’m on the road. (Some of the classiest joints like the Chateau Marmont will even print you up personalized stationery.) And if it’s a vintage find off eBay, all the better. I just got a box of stationery from the long defunct Eastern Steam Lines. Along the bottom of the paper it says, “Onboard Steamship.” That’ll keep ‘em guessing.

—Walker Lamond

(Via.)

Posted in quotes, style, writing

Best. Footer. Ever.

Matt Thomas — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:14:56 +0000

This page’s footer made me smile:

Hi, if you are coming to this site via Internet Explorer 6, you might not be getting the best experience possible. Honestly, I can’t even begin to think about what your entire experience on the internet must be like? (…probably like riding a bike on the highway while cars blow by you on their way to Costco to get gallons of mayonnaise and 60-inch plasma TV’s). How will you ever be able to use this website?????? You wont. You’re an asshole and your browser is an asshole. So look, I’m going to be honest: I kind of hate you. BUT we c-a-n make this work. Here is what I am going to need you to do: fire up your Toshiba ShitBook© that weighs about 45 pounds, wipe the Cheeto dust off the screen, download Safari, delete Internet Explorer from your computer, punch yourself in the face, and get me a pulled pork sandwich.

(Via.)

Posted in Links, technology, writing

Before > Prior To

Matt Thomas — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:29:59 +0000

Posted in video, writing Tagged: DFW

I Lie in the Dark and I Brood

Matt Thomas — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:03:58 +0000

I don’t have a cellphone. I have never used a computer, and I’m not lying to you – I have an assistant. I’m computer-illiterate. I’ve never been on the internet…. I don’t have a television set…. I ignore the world. I live in a vacuum. I don’t watch TV. I don’t read the newspapers. I don’t go to movies. I lie in the dark and I brood. I think about deep, dark torture, historical shit. I think of the holy conjunction of men and women, and I put all this stuff together in my head.

—James Ellroy

Posted in quotes, work, writing