What To Do After Your Heart Gets Bored With Your Mind posted by Martin

The way we brand ourselves is to buy the t-shirt with the attending graphics of the group to which we claim membership. I’m a writer, so I’ll put paperclips and manuscript brads on my website. This will tell the world, and other writers, that I’m one too.

The cliché comes first, and the expression comes with the repeated use of the cliché. In design school, our instructors castigated us for going to the easy solution. They demanded fifty variations, from whence the strongest would make itself known. The class would groan in unison, but I was secretly excited by this. Walking this path means madness but also reward and work that pays returns by surprising its author.

Our mind will convince us that the easy is the best. That the first move is the strongest. But just like chess where the first move opens a door but engages no opponent, so does the first draft need continued attention. Like a carving, it needs to be held up, turned around, and viewed from every angle to discover flaws. Which we may find beautiful and worth leaving in place.

Then we make another mark, another cut, another hand deep in the bag to pull out the next pretender.

As a writer I’m enamored with what I most recently wrote. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t want to write. That self-blindness is the mark of the desire to create. If the beginning violinist could hear themselves the way that others do, they would back slowly away from the bow and never return. Becoming mature at your craft is when you have the ability to see the flaws. Like that time in life nearly everybody has when a potent self-realization presents itself and will not be ignored. Like John Prine said:

Say you drive a Chevy. Say you drive a Ford
You say you drive around the town ‘till you just get bored
Then you change your mind for something else to do
And your heart gets bored with your mind and it changes you

The art of writing is in persistence and quality. Refining the work until it is the best it can be. How do you know when to stop? Walter Mosley says

When you see the problems but, no matter how hard you try, you can’t improve on what you have.¹

So the dedicated writer says to herself “I know that my writing is not good yet, but I will work and make it the best that I can.” In doing so, she iterates over the possibilities until the choice of narrative presents itself. Until that narrative has been styled in a way that will be ambiguously referred to as her “voice.” And maybe, if she’s good, she will present this work to the world with a smile and an attention that will lead people to believe that the work itself was no big deal. That it was easy for her.

This public face confuses many nascent writers. Like a friend of mine who took a series of classes, but complained about the rewriting. She wanted to be like fill-in-the-famous-writer’s-name who doesn’t rewrite (or so she claimed). The truth is, this friend didn’t want to be a writer. She wanted to get attention for having been creative, and thought that writing might be the path to that attention. Writing was the club she wanted to join, with paperclip and manuscript brads, but she picked these symbols of the group as a flag to wave and attempt membership because the actual work of the group was too difficult for her.

You are what you do. The quality of the person you are, in my view, is intrinsically tied to the quality of what you produce. If you put mindless crap into the world, can we blame the world for reflecting those qualities back? Or, my personal issue: if I produce work that is obscure for obscurities sake, can I be surprised when the world scratches its head and doesn’t get it? My peccadillo is that by making my work obtuse, I can prove that I’m a genius because nobody will understand it, therefore they are obviously too dim to appreciate it. Which is a stupid way of managing my fear of people rejecting my work. Like the guy who breaks up with his girlfriend first because he thinks she’s going to do it anyway, so he may as well beat her to the punch.

The beneficial side of this is my drive to create work with multiple layers. Something for superficial readers, but with items that will reward attentiveness. I check myself constantly on that edge between readability and depth, and when I’m lacking, I rewrite to clarify.

The hope is that by producing clear interesting work there will be a group of people who will respond to it. Maybe differently than you had hoped for. Maybe in a way that surprises you. And maybe their voices will be few in a chorus of boos. But they will be there. And they’ll come back next time you have something to say.

So the manifesto is for words over paperclips. Content over style. For a hand digging in the bag until you pull out the most compelling thing you’ve ever seen and you work it until it’s polished and reborn under your hands. Maybe it won’t be the a thing for the ages, but it should be the best that you can do and isn’t that why we do it at all?

Illustration by Christine Marie Larsen

1. Walter Mosley. This Year You Write Your Novel. Little Brown and Company, 2007, page 95. ↩

Comments (0) — Category: writing

Quick Look Dictionary / Thesaurus feature in OS X posted by Martin

If you’re a Mac user, here’s a great little-known tip for quick access to the built in dictionary and/or thesaurus.

Place your cursor over the word you’d like to target and hold down command + control + d.

A window with the dictionary definition of the word under the cursor will pop up.

At the bottom of the window is a pulldown where you can select thesaurus, or at the right more....

This will open your selection in the Dictionary application.

This is hands-down the most used trick in my book.

Comments (1) — Category: software

Writers on Twitter posted by Martin

Just a list I’ve collected over the past month or so. Not exhaustive. These are the ones whose work I was familiar with before seeing their names. Feel free to add more in comments.

SCREEN

• Todd Alcott: http://twitter.com/toddalcott
• Diablo Cody: http://twitter.com/diablocody
• John August: http://twitter.com/johnaugust

FICTION

• John Hodgman: http://twitter.com/hodgman
• Neil Gaiman: http://twitter.com/neilhimself
• Cory Doctorow: http://twitter.com/doctorow
• Holly Black: http://twitter.com/hollyblack
• Warren Ellis: http://twitter.com/warrenellis
• John Scalzi: http://twitter.com/scalzi

NON-FICTION

• Susan Orlean: http://twitter.com/susanorlean
• Stephen Fry: http://twitter.com/stephenfry
• Steven Johnson: http://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson
• Kurt Andersen: http://twitter.com/KBAndersen

TECHNOLOGY

• John Battelle: http://twitter.com/johnbattelle
• Jeffry Zeldman: http://twitter.com/zeldman

JOURNALISTS

• Scott Rosenberg: http://twitter.com/scottros
• David Pogue: http://twitter.com/Pogue
• Andy Ihnatko: http://twitter.com/Ihnatko

Comments (0) — Category: inspiration

Spitball! Parade of Writers #1: Ruth Gordon posted by Martin

That Ruth Gordon? The divinely lethargic cadence, the smoke-microplaned rasp, the Tanas Root pusher, the young-boy despoiler, the best-actress-in-a-supporting-role Oscar winner, with her tiny opprobrium and hand flapping dismissal, of whom her husband Garson Kanin (fifteen years her junior) wrote: “Married to this versatile creature, I enjoy many of the advantages of polygamy without having to deal with its complexities.”¹ That Ruth Gordon was also a writer.

Most famously with Mr. Kanin, she penned the Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy vehicles Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, although she had a respectable run as a playwright before that. “Since the playwrights have been notoriously faithless this season,” said The New York Times in its 1944 review of her first play Over Twenty-One, “this season the actresses now are put to creating their own roles.”²

Another Times article a few days earlier talked about her process:³

She took to writing when she was stationed with Mr. Kanin in Washington D.C. while he served in the Army during the war.

“You start writing a play excitedly enough,” she confided, “but it’s seeing it through to the finish that takes will and energy.”

Perhaps it is because Miss Gordon is a New Englander, and New Englanders are notoriously husbanders of time, that “Over Twenty-One” was born in the first place.

Doing the daily shopping, tidying the rooms, and attending the cooking still somehow left her wanting something to fill the day’s schedule. She settled for writing a play…

“But what could I write about? Certainly not my childhood,” she said. “And then I thought of a play. How about getting something of Washington into it? No one could live in an immensely timely city like Washington and not be alive with its thrilling impact.”

Forthwith she busied herself on an outline. It would be a comedy, she was determined, and before long the play began to take shape. It emerged from her pad as the simple story of a man trying to get through officers’ training school with his wife helping him in his darker moments.

Despite her assertion that she couldn’t write about her childhood, she did exactly that in her autobiographical second play Years Ago. Set in Wollaston, Massachusetts in 1913, it dealt with her father, a former sea captain and plant foreman, and her fear of telling him she wanted to be an actress instead of a teacher as he desired. The play is written completely in first person:

MY MOTHER. Ruth, do you or do you not want your father to know you want to be an actress?

ME. No.

MY MOTHER. Well then, don’t go appearin’ before him in a hobble skirt with a slit! You’ll not only look like an actress, you’ll look downright fast!

ME. If it wasn’t for you and Papa, I’d go to Boston and be fast right this minute!

The notices from when the work was put up were good, especially in regards to her capturing the roll of her father.⁴

This lively free-hand sketch of a stage-struck suburbanite Bostonian derives from Miss Gordon’s passion for acting. It is a fondly amused portrait of a high-school girl in a pinched and unlovely household that is about as remote from the theatre as any environment could be.

…

As a popular comedy designed for entertainment, “Years Ago” does not plumb the soul nor utter profound observations about life. But amid its sentimental playmaking it does have a certain ethical integrity. Miss Gordon portrays candidly the environment out of which she came. It was colorless and unimaginative, hedged about and with worry about money. It was worth than genteel poverty. It was a kind of dull poverty that enclosed the family in a kind of dull, paralyzing anxiety.

…

[Frederic] March’s performance in [the roll of the father] is superb… Mr. March is contributing his personal admiration and respect for a human being who is doing the best he can in a world he cannot control. There is something more solid than popular comedy in the part and in Mr. March’s enlightened acting.

She adapted the play into a movie script titled The Actress, which it was released in 1953 staring Spencer Tracy and Jean Simmons (and the first film appearance of Anthony Perkins). It gained her a Writers Guild of America award for Best Written American Comedy.

By that time, she had penned three movies with Mr. Kanin (the two previously noted and 1947’s A Double Life), all of which were nominated for Best Writing Oscars.

That recognition came despite the collaboration being difficult:⁵

“We began to quarrel a lot,” Kanin recalls. “We rarely quarreled in our married life, but when we were writing together, we began to question each other’s tastes and humor. ‘What’s funny about that? we would say. That’s far behind us now, because we don’t collaborate any more and never will.”

…

Once, in a joint interview, Ruth said: “I just think the theater’s something where all the girls are gorgeous and all the boys are cute.” Garson said: “I think the theater ought to be a place where you learn something.”

Garson Kanin speaking:

“I don’t know very much about myself; I know more about Ruth. And looking at Ruth, it seems to me that her acting gains a good deal from her writing, and conversely her writing is stylish and lively because of her acting. For example, in her playwriting, she knows how, because she’s an actress, to write a speakable line. And because she writes, she has a sense and feeling about the written word which many actors lack.” Ruth’s stories and plays are written in 20 to 30 drafts because, she says, as an actress she is used to achieving results through repetition in rehearsal.

They chose one partnership over the other, and stayed married until Gordon’s death in 1985.

So why then, of all the writers in the world, did I choose inaugurate this series with Ruth Gordon?

Besides of my childhood memories of this strange lady and how much I loved her in every movie, she is a writer who started late. By the time her first play was produced in 1944, Gordon had over thirty years in the theater. She was forty-six years old. Not only that, I like reading about writers who collaborate, given what Mr. Beeson and I are trying to accomplish. How does collaboration work? How do different personalities fit together?

I don’t think there is any irony at all that the couple’s best known work is remembered for its battle-of-the-sexes fighting. They may have always made up, but we watch those movies to see Hepburn and Tracey snarl at each other in such a fun way. You have to wonder if what made it to the screen was slightly tweaked version of what was happening in their office.

Of that, Gordon didn’t speak too much (unlike her acting, of which she spoke a great deal). Maybe she took the advice of her husband: “When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.”

1. Marilyn Berger, “Garson Kanin, a Writer and Director of Classic Movies and Plays is Dead at 86”, The New York Times, March 14, 1999. The article also notes his love of Frank Capra, of whom he said “I’d rather be Capra than God, if there is a Capra.” ↩
2. Lewis Nichols, “Ruth Gordon as a Brisk Army Wife in a New Play, ‘Over Twenty-One,’ by Ruth Gordon,” New York Times, January 4, 1944 ↩
3. Nat N. Dorfman, “Ruth Gordon’s Career,” The New York Times, January 2, 1944 ↩
4. Brooks Atkinson, “Little Miss Jones”, The New York Times, December 15, 1946. The title refers to her full name (and the name of the protagonist), Ruth Gordon Jones. ↩
5. Susan Lydon, “The Faa-bu-lous Long Run of Gordon and Kanin,” The New York Times, October 5, 1969. Another gem from this article: “On Ruth’s daily five-mile walks, she practices her singing lessons, ‘because I hope some day I’m gonna be in a musical. I can let loose and sing at the top of my lungs, cause ya know, dear, in Beverly Hills, no one’s out walkin’ but me.’”↩

Comments (2) — Category: Parade of Writers

A Place to do Your Thing posted by Martin

I have a studio in downtown Seattle where I write. It’s in a ragged historical building — once an infamous club and now a hip hair salon. It is less than fancy. It has a window, a door, is painted funny colors. There’s power and light, and thanks to a line-of-sight neighbor, I can piggyback an open wireless that makes me sign a EULA once an hour. I have an electric kettle, a table that my grandfather and father made and which I ate nearly every childhood meal on, and thanks to Mr. Beeson, I have a pinboard and a white board.

At home, I have an office. At work, I have an office. Why did I choose to pay $175 a month on a third place? Because I want to write every day.

Of course I don’t write at work. I work. At home, I used to write quite a bit, but it’s a small apartment and that space is shared with a person that I want to pay attention to when we’re around each other. And oh crap, I have to do the dishes and when am I going to watch that movie, and I wonder if I should go and dig through that stack of bills?

What I needed was a place to go shut the door where I am the only inhabitant. A place that is solitary, but not locked away from the world.

For a while I would write in coffee shops, libraries, steal time at home. Sometimes I would be on a tear and get a lot of work done, sometimes I wouldn’t. When I read Walter Mosley’s brilliant This Year You Write Your Novel his advice hit home. Write every day. He says:

If you skip a day or more between your writing sessions, your mind will drif away from these deep moments of your story. You will find that you’ll have to slog back to a place that would have been easily attained if only you wrote every day.

I dedicated myself to doing just that. Christine, who has kept a painting studio in the building for over a year, recommended that I reach out and see if they’d rent to a lowly writer. Now I’m surrounded by painters. When I’m good (which, lately, has been a challenge) I come after work each day and write for an hour-and-a-half or so. It’s almost exactly half way between home and work.

On Saturdays, Mr. Beeson and I have a standing 9am meeting where we talk about our latest screenplay, swap music and read each other bits of our fiction. On Sundays, depending on what’s going on, I will spend all day locked up and dreaming up wicked fates for my characters.

I love my office. It’s a dedication to the goal of writing, and a physical space that stands for one purpose. If I were wealthy, my fantasy would be a vintage detective-style office with a name painted on the glass door, but for now I’m happy. I’m a few floorboards away from the waxing studio, and surrounded by painters. There is always a line to get your hair done. I can walk out the door and be in the city.

Comments (0) — Category: writing

Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Spitball! posted by Martin

Welcome to sptbll.com, the new home of Spitball!

For those of you who followed us in our old digs, this is a whole new bag. New look, new structure, new content. For those of you who didn’t follow us, welcome. There’s lots of old stuff to dig through if you find it interesting, although not all of it is relevant anymore. Look up the “about” section for a quick overview.

One question you may have: “Hey! Are you guys all retro web 2.0 by removing the vowels in your URL?” Answer: No. We just couldn’t think of a better one. So, the url is disemvoweled, but the name is still Spitball!

You’re still going to find areas where the finish of the old site peek through, or you might find errors or issues. We’d kindly ask you to report them. I’m tweaking as we go, and there is always more to do.

The new system is essentially two blogs: Spitball!, our longer, digression focused pieces, and Fastball! our new link blog. They’re integrated for your pleasure on the homepage and the rss feed. Please abuse them.

Also, we’ll be opening comments on the Spitball! posts. We hope to generate some conversations around the ideas of collaboration and authorship, creativity and writing, technique and focus. You’re welcome to join in at any time. We hope you do.

Comments (2) — Category: About