Hello Panic, Welcome

Netflix has a special documentary streaming titled The Mind Explained. It’s done by Vox, so it has the same skimming-the-surface-feel to it that most things Vox has. Basically, yet another quick explainer.

And while I question some of the statements and conclusions—I don’t think it’s possible to talk about the mind with regard to depression and anxiety and not have people have conflicting opinions—there are some interesting moments.

The moment I want to mention here is in the episode on Mindfulness. For some reason, this has become quite the loaded word because so much gets projected onto it and so many freeloaders with their own agendas so easily co-opt it.

I’ve written on the scam of self-helpers in the writing world, but there is a much larger world of scammers in the world of Mindfulness and they can be hard to tease out when one is looking for information and some help.

For me, as a cancer survivor who goes for routine cancer screenings that cause a lot of stress, I’ve used Mindfulness concepts to keep my thinking mind in the present and away from the disaster planning what ifs that are the root of fear and anxiety. And there is and can be a lot of anxiety.

One method I use when I wake in the not with an anxious mind is to say that right now is not the time to solve/resolve the issue my mind is ruminating on. I tell myself that this is the time to rest and sleep and that my body needs this. The time to worry over and try to solve or resolve the ruminating thought will be the next day. And to be good at that, I need my sleep and a clear mind.

It works, most of the time with a couple other tricks.

And then in this episode on Mindfulness a Buddhist monk—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche—said that he still suffers from anxiety and panic attacks. But that he has a strategy that includes welcoming the panic and anxiety.

As he said, “Hello Panic, welcome.”

One must go deeper on this line, but just rolling it around in my head while doing a deep breathing exercise felt like a new, wonderful tool.

So, why write this on a blog dedicated to the writing life?

The writing life is filled with fear and anxiety. We constantly must overcome it to succeed, even in many cases just to get ourselves in the seat writing.

A True Editor: Susan Kamil

When I first started writing—actually, when the dream of being a writer first took hold—I wanted both the experience and act of writing, the creative moment, as much as I wanted to be accepted in one form or another by the literary world. I did not dream of Rushdie or Didion-like praise and lifestyles, but I wanted to be engaged with the world of people who write and edit and agent and publish… all whom create a wonderful reading experience.

To say the least, I’m not yet there.

But I believe that most writers seek this experience as well. And part of that dream is to have a supremely talented and eminently respected editor such as Susan Kamil fall in love with my writing to the point where she would tear it apart, break my heart, and help me create something worthy of being read.

She has died of the old bastard cancer, but we can still learn from her. The link below offers some wonderful and worthy insight into the process:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/books/susan-kamil-publishing-ruth-reichl.html

Habits of Effective Writers

If you don’t have a subscription to the New York Times, you probably should, if for nothing else to take a look at the Books section every few days.

Posted (actually, out and out stolen) below is a good story on what a handful of writers do to be productive. To say the least, it’s incomplete. I think someone should probably look at how people think about writing as they are in the act of writing. Not an interview after the project is complete and published, but as they are working asking questions about word choice, theory of the moment, and so on. But, probably hard to do.

At any rate, the below shows that there is no one way to finish a project and finish it well. Some outline and others see that as a catastrophe. Some write every day and others a few days a month. The key here is to let your intuition work and try different things, though I like Jia Telentino’s idea of going away for four days once a month.

Enjoy:

By Tina Jordan

Sept. 6, 2019

Some always outline; others never do. Some write in cafes or Airbnbs; others don’t leave the house. Here’s a peek at the writing habits of authors on this week’s best-seller lists.

Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker journalist whose essay collection, “Trick Mirror,” has been on the list for four weeks, told The Creative Independent that when she got her book contract, “I found that I couldn’t switch into book-writing very easily … in part because I work at home. I needed to physically be totally alone and be in a different place to get going.” So she “started renting upstate Airbnbs for four days at the beginning of every month, as a way to bang out” her rough draft.

The novelist Ruth Ware, whose latest thriller, “The Turn of the Key,” is at No. 8, writes on her website that room arrangement is key: “My desk faces a blank wall, which is deliberate, because I prefer to make sure the pictures in my head are more interesting than the view in front of me.”

David Baldacci, the author of the No. 6 novel, “One Good Deed,” told Writer’s Digest, “During the course of the day I might work on three or four different projects, but only when I run out of gas on one do I move on to another. I write until my tank is empty each day. I don’t count words or pages or whatever — that seems like an artificial goal for me.” He doesn’t outline: “I’m very much a writer who lets the story develop,” he once told The Daily Beast. “I have no idea how the book is going to end. … I don’t know what my characters are capable of until I spend a hundred pages with them.”

For his part, Colson Whitehead — whose new novel, “The Nickel Boys,” is at No. 7 — shoots for eight pages a week, though he doesn’t sit down to write every single day. “That seems sort of fascistic and not very fun,” he recently told “CBS Sunday Morning.” He is a big believer in outlines: “It’s hard enough to find the right words. If you don’t actually know, like, where the story’s going, it seems sort of useless.”

Alex Michaelides, the author of the No. 9 novel, “The Silent Patient,” told The Big Thrill magazine earlier this year, “I tend to outline a great deal. ... It might not work so well if you want to be surprised during the writing, but for the kind of book I write ... everything needs to be planned meticulously.”

National Book Award Challenge

Okay. I hate to use the word challenge in the title, but will keep it for the moment. The reason why, I believe it should be a pleasure for any writer and avid reader to work through the list of National Book Award winners.

So what is it?

Basically, the award is issued by the National Book Foundation and is one of the most, if not the most prestigious awards in the US. Categories include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translations, and young people’s literature. The awards for fiction began in 1950 as did the category general nonfiction, though that has changed a bit.

I’m starting with the fiction award and the first book is The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren.

Can’t wait to get started and see what I learn as a writer and reader.

Daily Rituals & Productivity

I’ve enjoyed reading the first of Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals books. As noted, this one includes men and women but is far more focused on the rituals of men than women. Ergo the second book that focuses exclusively on women.

Personally, I found the book on creative women’s daily work rituals far more illuminating and more like my own life than the one focused more on men. First, the women live a life closer to my own. As a single parent trying to maintain a life as a writer and pay the bills I constantly feel that I’m like the guy who balances spinning plates on sticks.

This guy appeared every so often on the old Ed Sullivan Show. He’d spin a plate on the end of a stick and balance it on a table. Then he’d add another and another until he was chasing down plates at risk of toppling over while he added even more spinning plates. The guy was running all over the stage trying to keep everything up in the air.

Being a parent is a lot like this. Being a single parent is very much like this. Being a single parent who wants to write for a living is… well, I have to hand it to the women in the second book because for the most part they also had to wrestle with the patriarchy and spoiled men, even if they loved the spoiled man.

In the first book, there are too many men who work from about 9 am to noon and call it a day. The remainder of their time is spent writing letters, socializing, exercising, thinking deeply, eating and drinking. I wonder what their put upon wives were up to?

The one lesson that does come through is it doesn’t matter what your routine is, just have something you can stick to so you can get work done. Even if it is just an hour in the evening, do your best to never give that hour away.

And then, of course, there are those fanatics out there who sleep for about two hours and get up and work every waking moment before sleeping for another restful two hours.

If only…

One of these folks—the evolutionary biologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould—said something I thought was worth noting:

“You have to have high levels of bodily energy and not everybody has it. I’m not physically strong, but I have very great intellectual energy. I always have. I’ve been able to work all day. I don’t have to get up and get a drink of water or watch TV for half an hour. I can literally sit and work all day once I get going. Not everybody can do that. It’s not a moral issue. Some people seem to see that as a moral question. It isn’t. It’s a question of body type and temperament and energy levels. I don’t know what makes us what we are.”

We should all be so blessed with such productivity.

And yet, I like that he says his work ethic is not a moral question. It is what he likes to do and is capable of doing. I think that really is the key to it. What are you capable of doing to move the ball forward on your writing? It’s not a challenge to consume yourself in writing work as much as it is a supportive question to consider.

What can I realistically do?

Once you have your answer, figure out how you can do at least that much.

Living a Creative Life: Daily Rituals of Women

If you haven’t read Daily Rituals: Women at Work by Mason Currey you really should.

This is the follow up to his first book of a similar bent titled Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, which he explains omitted many, many talented woman artists leading to a significantly male focus to the book. This second go is an attempt to right the record, and he does a good job of it.

With about seventy-five artists and writers of all ages and eras, the book makes for a good survey of the consistent work rituals that led these women to successful careers. What is most interesting, is that there is no consistent ritual among the women that one could identify. They are quite literally all over the place. There are those who operate on three or four hours of sleep a night and work for hours at a time and then there are those who will go days, weeks, months, and even years without working, but when inspiration hits they follow their instincts.

Then there are those who write or create work at a phenomenal pace—sometimes a thousand or two words per day—and those that create work at a more methodical, years’ long pace. Some need absolute silence. Others can create with the cacophony of kids and life sounding around them. Some require the perfect office or studio while others sit at the kitchen table or create whenever and wherever the urge strikes.

I love this because it says something that I love: Fuck rules.

The writing world—and I assume all other creative worlds—are filled with people who want to give you rules. Write every day. Keep a journal. Do this. Do that. Frankly, it’s all bullshit and there are very few rules that are true, but even still, they can be broken. Off the top of my head mine would be don’t modify dialogue and use as few adverbs as possible. Otherwise, create and let it flow.

Oh, I guess one big rule I write with is: Make it interesting and compelling to the reader. Really. Tell a good story and tell it well.

Below are some nuggets I pulled from the book that struck me as true:

Sheila Heti

At various times in this process she will send the computer file to a local print shop and have them spiral-bind the document, which she’ll carry around and read in different locations for further edits.

Toni Cade Bambara

The short story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.

[While working on a short story] will narrate the basic outline while driving to the farmer’s market, work out the dialogue while waiting for an airline to answer the phone, draft a rough sketch of the central scene while overseeing her daughter’s carrot cake, write the first version in the middle of the night, and edit while the laundry takes a spin…

Margaret Walker

“To choose the life of a writer,” Walker wrote in the early 1980s, “a black female must arm herself with a fool’s courage, foolhardiness, and serious purpose and dedication to the art of writing, strength of will and integrity, because the odds are always against her. The cards are stacked. Once the die is cast, however, there is no turning back.”

Joan Didion

“I’ll work for a couple hours and get three or four sentences, maybe a paragraph.” The slowness of the writing process stems, Didion has said, from the sheer difficulty of thinking clearly. “Writing,” she said in 2011, “forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through.”

Erin Lee Carr: Very Good Memoir Advice

Today is Sunday and while I am not one of those people who turns each Sunday to the New York Times’ books section, I did this week. And very glad for it.

One of the things that I do with my clients who are writing memoirs is discuss what a memoir truly is, how it can work (in writing there are very few definitive rules and answers), and help them understand what their story is. To this latter point, it is not that you survived cancer, it’s that thematic element that came from the experience to which you can tell a true story that describes that as yet unsaid truth.

Well, in today’s Times there is an interview with Erin Lee Carr—her father was Times journalist David Carr—who has just published a memoir about her relationship with her father that delves into her own alcoholism and his influence on her. The memoir is titled All that You Leave Behind. I have not read it yet.

She’s a documentary filmmaker and when revising her first draft—she thought it was too rosy—she sought a way to take a deeper dive into what her story is and the deeper truth it reveals. This is very good stuff and well worth reading.

The key piece of advice is that she started writing down phrases such as, “I’m mad at you,” to see how it felt and what thoughts came to mind. I would suggest—as a way to get past the front of brain and more into the intuitive subconscious—revising it slightly to read, “I am mad at you because…” then writing what thoughts appear. Perhaps the better way is to say the phrase to yourself and then write what immediately comes out. This should give a good starting point.

She also describes—and they have a photo that I used above—how she used note cards to layout the chapters for her book and a few other organizational and motivational details that I think are of real value to any writer or creative person.

The interview is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/books/erin-lee-carr-david-carr-all-that-you-leave-behind-memoir-interview.html

Howard Frank Mosher's Northern Borders

I’ve been on a string of good books lately and the latest is Howard Frank Mosher’s Northern Borders.

If you love New England, as I do, and especially Vermont, as I do, then this is a great book. If you simply love a good story well told, then this book is also for you. I won’t go into much detail other than to say it takes place in the 1940s through the 1950s and includes some of the most idiosyncratic and wonderfully developed characters in literature.

I suppose, in its own way its a northerner’s take on a southern Gothic.

A Gentlemn in Moscow's Achilles Heel

I’m in the midst of reading A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles and for the most part like it. He creates a version of Soviet era Moscow that is overly benign, to the point of being cute, and the premise that the protagonist would be confined to house arrest for years if not decades in the finest hotel in Moscow is a bit much.

But he isn’t trying to recreate reality. He’s using a real place and time to pursue an ambience and atmosphere similar to movie director Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel. The similarities between the movie and book are fairly stark though not in the stories they tell, largely.

Anyway, what struck me through the first third of the book—and my point—is that Towles displays a significant writer’s Achilles heel. These are issues that all writers have and they consistently pop up in our work almost no matter what we do to get rid of them. In my case it’s the repetition of certain phrases or words such as suddenly, additionally, merely, etc. To help me avoid their overuse I’ve created a list that I add to as I identify additional problematic words and phrases. When I finish a piece of writing I search for these phrases and words and revise to remove them.

Common Achilles heels include overloading sentences and/or paragraphs with too many ideas or concepts so that they are long and unreadable or book and chapter openings that meander as the writer works to find their way.

In Towles’ case, he uses the phrase had been to such a degree that it became hard to read the book. In one paragraph he used had been five times. Ugh. Too much. One would think that his publisher would have noticed this and encouraged him to revise some of these instances, but it didn’t happen.

Obviously, people still love this book and I like it, too. But I had to put it down a few times. The over use of this phrase—as well as passive voice in general—was enough to pull me out of the narrative and show that Towles is an excellent storyteller but relatively new to creative writing. Perhaps he isn’t, but that’s the effect it had.

The Light Between Oceans

I read this after seeing it in my mom’s collection of books—she had good tastes—and thought I’d make a quick note of it.

I liked it, though it is prone to melodrama. But, it does very well one critical thing that I think a lot of writing misses: It tells a very good story. The desire to find out what happens next to these characters and the emotions (empathy for their plight) it pulled from me were true.

It’s a good read that shows the power of simply telling and telling simply a good or great story.

Mom, Books and Regret

My mother passed away recently at age 84 after a long illness. She loved reading, but she did not write. I’m not sure why other than to say that I guess she was never bitten by the bug. Maybe, too, she believed books held a certain magic and if she wrote it would somehow break that magic.

But knowing my mom, she probably didn’t have the time. She loved people—teaching middle schoolers was her perfect job—and always wanted to be around people and engaged in some pursuit, whether it be politics (an ardent Democrat and Quaker, Trump is her antithesis), improving her local library, substitute teaching (everyday after retirement from her job as principal at Westtown, a Quaker school), to singing with the choir at the local Congregational Church (Quakers don’t have choirs).

The exception was reading. I’ve often compared her to a tomato because both thrive on hot, humid weather with lots of sun. When I was a kid, she would lay out on her metal folding lounge chair with a diet Pepsi reading. Then she would talk for hours with her mother and her friends (Kathy, Kit, Robin) about what she and they were reading.

Eventually, I joined her ad hoc book club. I first had to pass through my relatively terrible teen years, but by about age twenty I’d discovered how lovely it was to talk with mom about books.

In her last months, I took care of her. She couldn’t read but she still loved to talk about books and reading. My greatest failing as a son is that I didn’t take more time to read to her. I regret that deeply.

She was surrounded by books in her shared room at the skilled nursing facility as well as photos of her grandchildren (when I asked her what she would like me to say to them she said, “There’s so much I want to say, but that I love each and everyone of you so very much and am proud of you all.”) and many other reminders of how much she was loved.

The day she died, in an emotional state whose color I would say was slate gray, I packed her belongings and brought them to my house. The books, by far, are the heaviest and most numerous items. I didn’t cry that day. I was numb. The next day I saw her favorite sweater among her things, and for the rest of that day my sadness came in deep sobs.

I miss her terribly and so does Kathy, the last of mom’s friends. She called this morning to say that she and mom would have had an open line going during the Michael Cohen hearings today to lament the disaster that is Trump (these are women born during Franklin Roosevelt, lived though Eisenhower as kids, became adults and parents with Kennedy then Johnson, sobbed at the loss of Bobby Kennedy, knew Nixon was a crook and deeply admired Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama) and just talk, deeply, laughing, about life and stories and in ways that only they could understand.

“Where did she go, Jamie,” she asked rhetorically but with some seriousness. “There isn’t anyone else I know who just gets it, who gets me, that I can talk to like that.”

The things I would do or trade for just ten minutes with her. One more chance to read to her and talk about stories.

The Orchard: A Memoir

It is hard for me to fathom that I have not yet used a blog post to recommend (very highly) a book that I have loved for many years.

The Orchard by Adele Crockett Robertson (not to be confused with a book by the same name) is beautiful. What more could I say? It will teach you more about great writing than anything I or anyone else could say.

The Hyper-Important Top Ten List of Why One Book Fails and Another Succeeds

1. I don’t know.

2. Couldn’t even begin to guess.

3. Scratching my head.

4. What do I know?

5. Beyond me.

6. Well, don’t that beat all.

7. Dunno.

8. Too many adjectives?

9. A conspiracy?

10. I can only guess.

Obviously, with this list I’m being kind of a jerk.

But the point is, it’s hard to say when all things are equal—quality of writing, etc.—why one book can slide through the publishing process and find a large audience when an equally as compelling book can’t even get published or goes unnoticed. There are factors but at the end of the day I absolutely hated (hated) Eat Pray Love. The whole thing was phony, contrived, and narcissistic. And yet, many hundreds of thousands of people loved it and found something in it they couldn’t find anywhere else.

Meanwhile, The Orchard by Adele Crockett Robertson—a stunningly beautiful and meaningful memoir—is virtually unheard of. Why? Couldn’t tell you*. But I would say to anyone: GO READ THE ORCHARD. It truly is an incredible book of beauty that offers more true lessons (and more true sentences) in one paragraph than that other book musters in its entirety.

But what does any of these mean to writers?

Write for love and beauty, write for your reader, and do your best. The business of writing is tough and fickle so love the process.

*Obviously, the publisher for Eat Pray Love wanted to make back their advance—which paid for the author to go on her (hokey and completely inauthentic) trip—so they put a lot of marketing resources behind it whereas the author of The Orchard (actually her daughter) probably didn’t get the same level of backing. So I could ask, why would a publisher pay an author to go on a hokey year-long journey of discovery and then spend on a big marketing push for one book, but not do the same for an incredibly beautiful (and non-hokey narrative journey) book? I have no idea, but it’s a shame.

Real versus Stock Dialogue

I’m working on turning a narrative nonfiction book I wrote into a movie screenplay and as I prepare to write I’ve been going through the manuscript again to identify scenes, set pieces, etc. As I’ve done this, I’ve noticed some truly cringe-worthy dialogue moments. Fortunately, not a lot, but enough to identify yet another Achilles heel in my writing.

First lesson learned is that it is really important to give any piece of writing time to cool before going back and editing. These mistakes aren’t mortal to the piece, but now that I’m coming back to it some years later, my perspective is clearer and I can see things that I could’ve improved. I don’t think a writer needs to wait years, it’s more that a writer needs to take enough time away to regain perspective.

The dialogue issue I noticed is subtle. I think. Basically, I want to convey a sense of the emotion of the moment through a character in conversation with another but failed do so in a way that does not create a sensation for me that resembles a skip in a record. The dialogue conveys—without being obvious or overly direct—what I wanted conveyed but as I read it back it feels as if the character isn’t truly speaking to the other person in the conversation.

The feeling is that the character is trying to speak to both the reader and the other character simultaneously, which no character in dialogue should do. Dialogue should be aimed at whomever the person is trying to influence or in conflict with. The reader should—if done properly—easily infer the emotional quality that the writer wants to communicate via the dialogue and contextual circumstances (micro-expressions, prior dialogue, etc.) without getting in the way of the expression.

To fix these instances, I would shorten and tighten the dialogue and do whatever else is required to ensure the dialogue reads true, that it is directed at the other character and not the reader.

After all, the reader and narrator are eavesdropping on the conversation. They are not part of it.

By way of example, consider to two photos below:

Conversation 1

Conversation 2

The first photo feels exactly like what it is, a posed stock photograph where the emotions are too transparent to be real.

The second looks and feels true because it is. And therefore, I find it far more fascinating and artful than the first photo.

To be fair, the second photo is of Willem and Elaine de Kooning from the 1950s, so there already is some interest. But that’s kind of the point. I want my writing to read true, not feel like the stock photo. So anytime I write dialogue—or anything, really—I have to hyper focus on ensuring the needle doesn’t skip for the reader and they feel like I’m creating a staged stock photo as opposed to a real moment that they are eavesdropping on.

To do that with dialogue, the characters must always speak directly to each other. Anything else is staging showing through.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

In the fall, I read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, a beautiful and true story of the West and striving.

But then a few weeks ago I read Crossing to Safety and I was deeply moved, affected, and entertained by this book. It takes place in Wisconsin and Vermont during the middle of the 20th Century. It is, on its surface, the story of two young couples—the men are professors at the same college in the beginning and the women easily their intellectual equals—who fall in love with each other one evening during the last few years of the Great Depression. And it moves on from there to explore the meaning of friendship, marriage/love, and the vagaries and tragedies of life.

I should note that when I say they fall in love, it is a deep friendship not a sharing of spouses or some other bit of sexual intrigue.

And, it feels true.

One note, I did find myself jealous of each couple. They live and breath an intellectual life, principally in academia, which is a life I’ve dreamed of living myself. So, I suppose this story hit a lot of buttons for me.

Theme: Avoid Cliche, Dig Deeper

As with all things writing these days there is a lot online at various writerly websites on the subject of theme.

This isn’t one of those posts.

The definition of theme is quite simple. It is an idea that recurs or pervades in a work of art or literature. Another way to say that, which comes from Websters, is that theme is a specific and distinctive quality, characteristic, or concern [in a piece of creative work].

I thi9nk of it as an idea or question that runs through a piece of written work. For example, when writing about a single survivor of the Holocaust is the theme survival, the Holocaust, struggle, or some similar idea? I think that writers who only take a glancing blow at the theme they are writing on would come up with a list like that. Instead, taking a deeper dive the writer would first ask what is it that would compel a person in a hopeless situation to endure. This writer would then go out and look for that answer and probably learn that it could be because the person has someone whom they love and that loves them that they believe they must live for. A classic example is a mother fighting all odds to live for her children.

But I don’t think that goes deep enough. It rings like cliche because you don’t have to go looking very far to find all sorts of stories where a mother survived for a child or a person survived some ordeal because they believed another person needed them to. Instead, dig a bit deeper. Look for an inobvious truth. Yes, the protagonist is driven to live for the love and needs of another, but they will still encounter hopelessness. What keeps them from laying down and dying?

Do some research and you might find someone who argues that love cannot exist in the presence of despair and that despair cannot live in the presence of love. There is an ever-present battle between love and despair—whether we know it or not—and so the theme can be centered on that battle.

Therefore, your story is an examination of the ebbing and flowing of love versus despair where one is always on the verge of winning out over the other. This theme will then color every scene, bit of dialogue, scenery (scenery is how the character/narrator sees it and is colored by their emotional state), and so on.

Now, if you were to hunt the internet for thematic ideas you will get lists such as this:

Love
Death
Good vs Evil
Coming of Age
Power and Corruption
Survival
Courage and Heroism
Prejudice
Individual vs Society
War

This is really just a list of words. And if you as a writer decide that your story will have a theme of, say, power and corruption, the Bible beat you to it as did everything written by the Greeks and Romans. You’re not being very original and because you aren’t being very original, you are making it harder for you to write a story that moves a reader’s emotions.

You have no connective tissue nor a guiding principle—a north star—to organize your writing around. It makes crafting good dialogue harder as well as good everything harder.

So, do the work. Dig deeper. And then dig deeper again. Find a meaningful and original theme.

Yes, Women Can Shred a Bass

Not that it needs to be proved that women can play at the highest heights, but the video below is an incredible demonstration of how to play the bass.

Goddamn Smart Effing Phone

I'm not sure if I hate my cellphone or my daughter's cellphone more. My cellphone is a complete pain in my ass with its ringing, beeping, and seductive news, weather, and access to limitless distractions. Or my daughter's cellphone that keeps her perpetually connected to social media--nonstop social anxiety, bullying, and limitless ways to feel like you are less than everyone else--and inability to pull the thing from her face.

Fuck you Steve Jobs.

I have said--I think here previously, too--that there will be a booming industry of providing places for people--Millennials, Gen Xers, and whoever the new generation is--to unplug and find out what life was like before the Internet and cellphones. It is amazing to me that there is a generation of digital natives who have no idea what it was like to be bored and go for a walk. Or to have to go find a person to hang out rather than use an ap. Or simply not have this expensive, hurtful tether attached to you that requires constant tending.

Anyone want to invest?

So, then I saw the drawings above and below and thought I'd share them.

Pawel Kuczynski

Writers Need At Least Four Cats

This is why writers need at least four cats. And, they don't need to be walked.

Edward Gorey with cats

Jules Renard on How to be a Great Writer

In 1887, Jules Renard wrote the following in his journal:

"Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred. No novel exists which an ordinary intelligence could not conceive; there is no sentence, no matter how lovely, that a beginner could not construct. What remains is to pick up the pen, to rule the paper, patiently to fill it up. The strong do not hesitate. They settle down, they swear, they go on to the end. They exhaust the ink, they use up the paper. This is the only difference between men of talent and cowards who will never make a start. In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses--the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring. Fame is a constant effort."

It is amazing to me that the book, the written word remains as powerful as ever, as does the draw of being a writer, and yet the advice of how to succeed has not changed in one hundred thirty years. It is a matter of doing the work. Just do the work.