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Category Archives: On Writing

May 18, 2018
On Writing

For Sarah

By Antoine Wilson

I was drinking coffee with a friend in Los Angeles, in an adorable cafe that also happened to sell books. On a whim, I decided to see if they had any of mine.

I made my way to the w’s, and there it was—my first novel—on the shelf. I felt happiness followed immediately by anxiety. Why had nobody purchased it?

I opened the book and realized it was a used copy. There was the inscription: “For Sarah—I hope you enjoy my twisted little book!” Followed by my signature and the date.

I went through a mental Rolodex, trying to figure out who Sarah might have been. I knew many Sarahs—it must have been one of the most popular girl’s names in the early seventies. I pictured first the writer Sarahs, several of whom I respected greatly as my peers or my same-age betters. I tried to remember whose names ended with an h and whose didn’t.

I wanted to impress these Sarahs. I wanted them to find my work as valuable as I had found theirs. It pained me to imagine one of them deaccessioning an inscribed copy of my first novel. Read More
April 20, 2018
On Writing

Leaves of Grass: Writing Under the Influence

By The Paris Review

To celebrate today’s holiday, we bring you an excerpt from our latest Paris Review Editions book, The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from “The Paris Review” Interviews. These quotes are pulled from the chapter “Do You Write Under the Influence?” Enjoy. —Jeffery Gleaves

“I’ve found that there’s only one thing that I can’t work on and that’s marijuana. Even acid I could work with. The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane. Either you function or you don’t. Functionally insane? If you get paid for being crazy, if you can get paid for running amok and writing about it … I call that sane.” —Hunter S. Thompson

“I’ve tried it long ago, with hashish and peyote. Fascinating, yes, but no good, no. This, as we find in alcohol, is an escape from awareness, a cheat, a momentary substitution, and in the end a destruction of it. With luck, someone might have a fragmentary Kubla Khan vision. But with no meaning. And with the steady destruction of the observing and remembering mind.” —Conrad Aiken

“The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts, and feelings. They are painkillers, pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers—the whole spectrum of sedative drugs. As for visions and heroin, I had a hallucinatory period at the very beginning of addiction, for instance, a sense of moving at high speed through space. But as soon as addiction was established, I had no visions—vision—at all and very few dreams.” —William S. Burroughs Read More
April 19, 2018
On Writing

On Becoming an American Writer

By Alexander Chee

Photo: Paulo Barcellos Jr.

My generation of writers—and yours, if you are reading this—lives in the shadow of Auden’s famous attack on the relevance of writing to life, when he wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” I had heard the remark repeated so often and for so long I finally went looking for its source, to try to understand what it was he really meant by it. Because I knew it was time for me to really argue with it. If not for myself, for my students.

*

In the winter before the Iraq War, I lost two friends, one old, one new.

The first friend died of cancer in December 2002. She was just thirty-six. She had been misdiagnosed by her doctor. First, she was told she had a rash and then that she was imagining the severity of it. She was told to take antidepressants. After further tests, she learned she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A lifelong hypochondriac who always looked to be in the bloom of health, she had finally fallen seriously ill and was not believed. And when she eventually was believed, when the truth of her disease was incontrovertible, there was not time enough to undo the damage, and she succumbed. She had once been my boss at a magazine launched in the early nineties. I had met her in San Francisco, when she was the girlfriend of my boyfriend’s roommate. When I moved to New York to be closer to my boyfriend, she and I sometimes spent whole days together. She herself dreamed of writing a novel one day and in the meantime wrote poems more or less in secret, showing them rarely. When I was an editor of an experimental literary journal called XXX Fruit, we asked her for poems and published some of them. I remember looking at the typeset page and thinking of it as a picture of her secret self.

By then, she had moved on to a job at a national weekly newsmagazine, which she loved, though the responsibilities often crushed what energy she might have had to write. Or at least this was what she said. Most writers I know say they don’t have enough time to write. It’s usually a feint. Read More
April 9, 2018
On Writing

On Telling Ugly Stories: Writing with a Chronic Illness

By Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Google “stock images of women with excruciating menstrual cramps,” “women having nervous breakdowns,” “women on hospital gurneys.” Make several of the women black even though your Google search will not produce these results. String them together on a chic laundry line with clothespins and hang it on your mantle, or maybe paste them into a photo collage, digital or print. Splatter the collage with blood. Untwist the women’s ovaries and take them away. Sew up their vaginal openings so their private parts look like the deformed hermetic triangles of Barbie dolls. You now have a visual rendering of life with endometriosis. It is a poor approximation. Throw the collage in the trash. Maybe it is too ugly after all.

In and out of invasive procedures to misdiagnose and then finally diagnose my symptoms—a colonoscopy, two upper endoscopies, a gastric emptying scan, an MRI, a vulvar biopsy, a dozen transvaginal ultrasounds, two mammograms before I was thirty-four, a laparoscopy, a laparotomy, a mosquito, a libido—I wrote a book. Several of its central characters are women suffering from chronic invisible illnesses, the kind of women in your collage. It means something to me to be able to produce when something is daily trying to take me out.

A chronic illness is a multilayered cruelty, especially when it is invisible. There are trips to the emergency room, to convenient care—which never ends up being as convenient as one might think—there is a lot of waiting around, and after all that waiting, there is a lot of “you’ll have to talk to your primary care physician during regular hours.” The emergency room is kept mausoleum cold. Read More
March 19, 2018
On Writing

On Writer’s Block: Advice from Twelve Writers

By The Paris Review

Our Writers at Work series, which spans sixty-five years of interviews with nearly four hundred writers, offers no shortage of advice. Should this multitude seem daunting, fear not! The editors of The Paris Review have combed through the series and sorted the best tips and tricks into tidy categories meant to guide you through the authorial landscape.

In The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from “The Paris Review” Interviews, readers can learn how Eudora Welty and E. B. White revised their prose, what Vladimir Nabokov and Dorothy Parker thought about their editors, how Elena Ferrante and Eileen Myles face success (and failure), how Kurt Vonnegut and Truman Capote dealt with their critics, and much more. The Writer’s Chapbook has it all, from tips on how to begin a work to advice for (and against) writing under the influence.

Below is an excerpt from the chapter “Do You Ever Get Writer’s Block?” If you’re hungry for more, you can preorder The Writer’s Chapbook today for $15. But hurry, this discounted price is only available for a limited time. Read More
October 16, 2017
On Writing

Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and the Benefits of Jealous Friends

By Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney

Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield

We consider ourselves fortunate to have become friends during our early twenties, back when we were at the very start of our literary journeys. We were both English teachers living in rural Japan, and we had both been writing in secret in between lessons, but it took us almost a year to pluck up the courage to “come out” to each other as aspiring authors. We made our mutual confession over bowls of spaghetti in an eccentric, garlic-themed restaurant. Our delight at discovering a friend with the same dream eclipsed any prospect of possible rivalry.

From that moment on, although our lives took us geographically in different directions, we trod a joint path as writers. After returning home to the UK, we lived many miles apart but helped each other from afar, reassured by the knowledge that our friend was also eschewing a well-paid profession and making do in the pokiest of apartments to buy some time to write. We shared and critiqued drafts of stories, passed on news of writing courses and contests, and soon confided in each other about our ideas for books.

Sweetest to us during these years were what we termed our “writing weekends.” On these occasions, we’d travel across country by train to hole ourselves away in one another’s homes. We spent hours engrossed in our separate worlds on the page but came together to discuss our chapters in cramped kitchenettes—one of us slicing vegetables, the other toasting spices, both of us sipping from large glasses of wine. Together, we’d celebrate any successes: an acceptance on a master’s program, a place on a competition shortlist, signing with a literary agent. As time wore on, however, we’d more frequently find ourselves commiserating over the receipt of yet another publisher’s rejection slip. Read More