Tag Archives: talent

Is Your Work Any Good?

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W.S. Merwin, the great poet, once asked John Berryman how he would know if his own work was any “good.”

Berryman answered that he wouldn’t. Writers never know. They guess.

Although it’s easy to think that your most popular work is your best, that is not necessarily true. Time is more telling than applause.

My own experience is that you can judge your work best years later. You can also find confidantes that you trust.

I tend to think my work is good if I remember it. But then sometimes I find a piece in my computer that I’d completely forgotten about and I’m happily surprised. I’ve even been astonished that I could have forgotten words so heart-felt.

Is your work any good? The only useful question is whether you can make it better. Little things a copy-editor can fix may make a big difference.

But obsessing over little things can keep you from seeing the big thing–what you have said.

We all want to believe that we are talented and lust for praise. I only feel the praise when I’m also excited about my work. Still, the praise helps–even when I don’t entirely believe it.

An editor that you trust can help keep you focused and engaged on the task you have set for yourself–and less distracted by worries about whether you are talented and will succeed.

Your best chances of happiness and satisfaction are in the process of writing and in reading yourself later, at the moment when you need to hear what you had to say.

Writing over a lifetime allows you to escape time. You can read your words from twenty years ago and think, “How did I know that?”  If you are a self-critical person, you will love yourself more.

Being Yourself–On Purpose

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It’s a funny phrase, “Be yourself.” How can you not be yourself?

I like the phrase “being yourself on purpose.” I’m going to be myself, the good and the bad, but if I intend to be myself, I can highlight the good.

One way to be yourself on purpose is to find the routine that is you and stick to it. Routine is the secret to better writing. Find a time that you can write every day. I wrote my first novel on a half hour bus commute. I wrote my second novel by waking up an hour earlier each morning. I write my journalism assignments by setting my own deadlines, well ahead of the deadline assigned by the editor, whenever possible.

Play around with it, and stick with the routine that works best. Many writers think they have a complicated psychological reason for “writer’s block” when the problem is simple: they’ve changed their routine or haven’t found the right one. If you haven’t found your routine, ask yourself, When do you think about your writing project? Just before you go to bed? In the morning when you wake up? Or after your shower and breakfast? Be attentive to the details and create forty minutes close to that time.

Write Like a Poet

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Whether you are writing an op-ed, business paper, nonfiction book, memoir or novel,  being alert to the sound of words is essential.

There is poetry in all effective language, even if it is not organized on the page to look like a poem.

Words are not just their meanings; they are sounds. As such, they can have the emotional power of  music. I believe that brain chemistry will one day explain what poets know, that words arranged with full use of their musical qualities allow us to think and feel simultaneously in a unique way.

Music with good lyrics isn’t the same, though related. And no one can argue with the power of “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”!

So why is it that most people today feel cut off from poetry? That’s a big topic. For now, as writers let’s recall that nearly everyone knows the lyrics to a favorite song and language is king among rappers and at poetry slams.

Even old-fashioned poems can still hit a popular nerve:  W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” captured a wide audience when it was recited in the film “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” Another popular poem is Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” Events like 9/11–or the death of Princess Diana over a decade ago–produced outpourings of poems scrawled on walls or safety-pinned onto teddy bears and bouquets.

Many people who do not ordinarily read poetry turn to it when mourning a death or lost love. A friend I’ll call Lily discovered the Robert Frost poem “Reluctance” during a painful break-up in her twenties. When another affair ended decades later, she sent the poem to her ex and found herself repeating its conclusion like a mantra: “Ah, when to the heart of man/Was it ever less than a treason/To go with the drift of things,/To yield with a grace to reason/And bow and accept the end/Of a love or a season?’”

Treason. Reason. Season. Rhyme links disparate themes. It’s a mental jump from treason to reason, helping us step (not jump) ahead emotionally in the process of getting over anger.

A metaphor describes one thing by calling it another, again linking our minds and emotions. Here, love is a season. The comforting message is that love will come again, as spring follows winter. The message is more comforting because it is unstated.

Use metaphor well and move your reader. Cliched and mixed metaphors have the opposite effect. Our emotions shut down.

We’ve all been taught to avoid repetition. It’s a good rule, unless you use repetition well.

Repetition can be soothing, like the rocking of a chair or a child’s lullaby. “That’s why we say ‘there,there,’ instead of just ‘there,'” says the poet Kate Light.

Another kind of repetition can be energizing. Think of the repetition in sermons in black churches or Churchill inspiring the British to resist the Nazis: “We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.” We shall fight, we shall fight – perhaps along with the rocking cradle, we feel the love that gives adults courage.

The key here is that the language builds to a crescendo, as in martial music.

As your editor or copy-editor, I will alert you to ways you can finetune the music under your words.

My Favorite Book About Being A Writer

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There are many books about writing. They inspire with the example of their eloquence as well as their advice.

A book (or a blog like this one) about writing can be your secret friend.

My favorite book of this kind is called Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Neither of the authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, are primarily writers, although the book is beautifully written.

And their observations about making “art” struck me as completely apt to writing.

At the time I found it, I was not a beginning writer. I had been slogging away for more than a decade, and my chest relaxed a little at the opening quote, from Hippocrates: “Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.”

Then the book begins: “Making art is difficult.”

Unlike so many others, this book acknowledged my difficulties and didn’t seem overly optimistic. It wasn’t written to sell books.

Many years later, the truths in this book still seem true to me.

Much of your work will seem a mistake.

“To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.”

“The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.”

The big danger is quitting.

“Those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue–or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.”

“Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail. And artists quit when the lose the destination for their work–for the place their work belongs.”

“Quitting means not starting again–and art is all about starting again.”

The best way not to quit is to find comrades and develop and stick to useful habits.

Share your work in progress with other writers or with a writing coach or editor. If you write best in the mornings, stick to the routine. Wear the same pair of slippers that seemed to make you write so well the other night.

“The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over–and that means finding a host of practices that are just plain useful.”

Keep revising.

“Tolstoy, in the Age Before Typewriters, re-wrote War & Peace eight times and was still revising galley proofs as it finally rolled onto the press….Lincoln doubted his capacity to express what needed to be said at Gettysburg, yet pushed ahead…”

“The piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse.”

Review your own work.

“Your work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work. There is no other such book and it is yours alone.”

“Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child.”

“Look at your work and it tells you how it is when you hold back or when you embrace. When you are lazy, your art is lazy; when you hold back, it holds back; when you heistate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes.”

Stay true to yourself.

“You make your place in the world by making part of it–by contributing some new part to the set….Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done.”

Be brave.

Brave is not the same as fearless. You will be afraid if you are taking risks.

“Sometimes to see your work’s rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind.”