Write Fearlessly. Write Within Yourself
Michelangelo supposedly said of his sculpture “David” that he did not carve the figure but released it from the marble. I’ve heard a number of writers quote this when talking about finding their stories – specifically fiction. It is a helpful way to look at writing, I think: the view that the stories we want to tell already exist, and we just need to put them into a form that everyone can see.
Read MoreFor a short time in my early twenties I thought I might want to be an actor. I was performing in a show I’d written with my brother, and I became increasingly interested in how you find and then stay in character. Even though it was a sketch comedy show and my characters were mostly clownish versions of myself, there was still a difference between what I inhabited on stage and what I inhabited offstage. I wanted the character to be as real as I was; I didn’t want the audience to ever see me “acting.”
Read MoreThe first writer I ever heard give a talk was Larry McMurtry, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Lonesome Dove I had devoured in a particularly fallow week while drifting jobless through the suburban wastes of Glendale, CA. I had since moved to Seattle where my then fiancé and I went to see him at the University of Washington. I was twenty-five, and just begun my first novel.
Read MoreI’ve noticed that if I’m flipping through television channels looking for something to watch, and I happen on a scene where a man has a gun pointed at someone’s face, I usually pause in my flipping. The same is true if I land on a scene of a man and woman in the act. In both cases I know absolutely nothing about the context for what I am seeing. I don’t know if the man with the gun is a villain or a hero, if he’s crazed or courageous; I also don’t if the man and the woman are in love or if they’ve just met at a bus stop. All I know is that someone might die, or that two people are having sex.
Read MoreMy younger brother and I were both interested as boys in the arts, but whereas I was drawn to the page he was drawn to the stage and eventually the screen. We were talking about our separate choices one day, and he admitted he was somewhat puzzled by mine. “I don’t get it, Bill,” he said. “With books all you get are words.”
Read MoreI rarely start writing with some idea burning bright in my imagination. Particularly with these essays, if I’m lucky I’ve scratched one sentence onto a legal pad to serve as a reminder about an idea that came to me the day before while I was eating lunch; just as often, I’ve got nothing. So I sit and drink coffee and stare at the blinking cursor.
Read MoreWhen I was a young man I was very interested in making my way in the world. There was something adventurous about learning how to succeed as an adult. Childhood felt a little pre-constructed, plopped as you are into your parents’ full lives and then sent to schools with their uniformity of ambition. Adulthood had no such boundaries, it seemed to me.
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