Gay Talese: One Page a Day. That's it. Really.

Running in the Summer issue of The Paris Review is a wonderful long interview with Gay Talese about his writing process, career, influences, and thoughts on nonfiction. Here's a small sample of the exchange. It picks up with questions about Talese's spartan home office, which he calls The Bunker.

"INTERVIEWER (Kate Roiphe): Do you like that the bunker doesn’t have windows?
TALESE: Yes. There are no doors, no time. It used to be a wine cellar.
INTERVIEWER: How do you write?
TALESE: Longhand at first. Then I use the typewriter.
INTERVIEWER: You never write directly onto the computer?
TALESE: Oh no, I couldn’t do that. I want to be forced to work slowly because I don’t want to get too much on paper. By the end of the morning I might have a page, which I will pin up above my desk. After lunch, around five o’clock, I’ll go back to work for another hour or so.
INTERVIEWER: Surely there must be some days in the middle of a project, when you’re really going, that you write more than a single page.
TALESE: No, there aren’t.
INTERVIEWER: But your books are so long.
TALESE: I take a long time. I have published relatively little given how long I have been working. Over fifty-five years I’ve only written five long books, two short ones, and four collections. It’s not that many.
INTERVIEWER: Is that because you spend a lot of time editing?
TALESE: Not really. I type and I retype. When I think I’m getting close, that’s when I put it on the computer. Once it’s on the screen I make very few changes. It’s the reporting that takes so much time. "

A longer excerpt is up at The Paris Review website, and you can purchase a copy of the Summer 2009 issue here, to read the entire piece. There is also a fascinating visual here of Talese's original handwritten outline for his famous genre-defining piece of literary journalism, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.

Gold in Them Notebooks, Part 3

The is the third in a continuing series of posts presenting writing advice I'm finding as I randomly flip through several years of notebooks, including those from my MFA program.

Today's notes are from a session on writing the personal essay:

Think longer before you begin writing.
Don't "wind up" on the page. Know what you want to write first.
Periods don't cost money.
Unfold the story like dealing a deck of cards; turn over only one at a time.
End a sentence with the most powerful word.
Think of scenes in terms of visual frames; what image next? Next?
It's not that interesting for the reader to hear what the writer doesn't know.
Write as you'd talk, only say less.
Trust the reader to get it.
- Joyce Maynard, author of the new novel Labor Day, and of this past Sunday's
Modern Love column in the New York Times

You can read the first and second installments here.

An Organized Room of My Own. Mostly.

Whoever said that everything takes longer than you think it will might have had children, a house, a spouse, several consulting clients, a visiting mother, balky electronic gadgets, classes to plan, books to review, two editing assignments, and a distracting habit of occasionally enjoying sleep and regular meals. This person was probably also trying to write something. Ha! This same person likely also was too smart to try, amid the above named chaos, to do a complete office de-cluttering and overhaul, thinking X number of days was probably enough.

Still, I did promise photos after the deed. Well, the deed is about 80 percent done.
And this is how the office looks now,

in contrast to how it looked then.

Then, there's this -- piles still awaiting sorting (yes, I know I am ridiculously lucky to have such a large home office...) and this mass

of electronic messiness (where are those cord bunching thingees Santa brought?).

No, it still hasn't been painted, the comfortable corner reading chair a friend is giving me is still not here, and it's still mostly filled with cast-off furniture and bins, and makeshift shelving my husband's company once used to display merchandise at his retail clients' stores. But now it's a room of my own in which, for the first time in a long time, I can see where my own stuff is stored. And not piled on my desk and floor. That's a start.

I thought at this point, I'd have some nifty ideas to pass along about how to best organize things, some ingenious new system I'd share, a few terrific tips. I don't. I can only offer that the tried-and-true advice works; toss out a lot (12 bags and counting), group what's left in ways that make sense, and be ruthless about what's necessary and what's just nice to have around.

Today's the first day in the "new office". I did find it easier to get through the to-do list and – except for that one file folder I could swear I put in the top drawer -- I spent almost no time looking for something I know is "here somewhere."

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Book publicity, indie bookstores, prompts, genre-blurring, funny punctuation and more

A whole lot of links for a lazy, humid Friday afternoon (at least here in Jersey).

> How Larry Smith managed to wrest a Six (not a five!) Word Memoir from the late Frank McCourt for one of the upcoming installments in what has now become a series of Six Word Memoir compilations.

> If you are an author and doing some (or all) of your own book publicity (and who isn't?), then these tips from Maria Schneider, about how to approach book bloggers and a list of 25 worthwhile book blogs, might be useful.

> Writer Mark Fitten, on an extensive (and one assumes, self-financed) tour to promote his new novel, is blogging about the best 100 independent book stores he visits. He's at store number 40, and working his way through the Pacific Northwest right now, providing great photos and commentary on each store, until he reaches the East Coast.

> Does Ben Mezrich's newest nonfiction book, The Accidental Billionaires, belong on the fiction racks? In this Boston Globe interview, he notes, “I see myself as attempting to break ground. I definitely am trying to create my own genre here. . . . I’m attempting to tell stories in a very new and entertaining way. I see myself as an entertainer.’’ Ahem.

> Need writing prompts? Or better yet, curious about how to find dozens of writing prompts by looking around your everyday life? Cameron Chapman can help with both here.

> Find all kinds of inspiring yet realistic writing advice, tips, stories about the writing life, and other good stuff from Barbara Abercrombie over at her blog

> Just for fun: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. Just what it says. Enjoy.

Have a great weekend.

Gold in Them There Notebooks, Part 2

As I explained yesterday, I'm randomly leafing through all the notebooks I filled during the two years I spent in an MFA program, and posting what I find.

Here, a few gems, in no particular order, from a faculty presentation.

•When writing dialogue, leave out anything the reader can intuit from previous dialogue. Stop before the reader is really ready to leave the scene.
•Change pace.
•Alternate sentence structure.
•Please leave out all the boring details and descriptions of everyday activities, such as "she got into bed," "he got in the car."
•Don't try so hard to explain things. When the writing is good, the reader will be engaged.
•Incongruity is more interesting than symmetry.

– Kelly Link, author of the short story collections, Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, and winner of Nebula, Hugo, and Small Fantasy Awards

Gold in Them There Notebooks, Part I

Over the last month or so – the time when I would have, in previous years, been prepping for and then attending the summer residency portion of my MFA program – I've been nostalgic. Missing the anticipation and nerves and frantic reading and critiquing leading up to the intense 11-day session, and longing for another chance at the mother lode of knowledge, camaraderie, motivation, and magic which made up each day.

This week, while in the middle of a massive office reorganization project, I had the chance to unearth the notebooks I filled over the two years I spent in that program. There's one from each residency, and one from each semester in between. Residency notebooks are filled with notes from faculty seminars, peer workshops, visiting author talks, guest lectures, and graduating student presentations, as well as tidbits culled from conversations during lunch, carpool rides, and evening coffees. Semester notebooks include advice from my faculty mentors on my work-in-progress, and ideas for the annotations I needed to produce on a dozen books.

Opening those notebooks brings up many mixed emotions, but the overriding sense is one of finding treasure. Sure, I have already acted on much of the advice, incorporated many of the tips and techniques into my writing process, and clearly remember some of the best-phrased counsel. But I was amazed at how much I had either forgotten or filed away in a far part of my brain.

Rather than read through each notebook from beginning to end, I thought it might be more fun, over the next few weeks, to open them up in a completely unsystematic and arbitrary way, and see what I'd find. And, I'll blog about it.

First up -- from a seminar on vision and a possible approach to the prewriting process:

Get a huge sheet of paper or white board. I call it a Chaos Board. Write down all the key words about your subject. Have absolutely no order. Write words, prompts, ideas. Sketch in visual things too. Keep it uncensored. Use placeholders if you can't think of the exact idea. Make sets and subsets. Make word webs, by drawing connecting lines between words and phrases. Notice the high traffic areas. - Debra Marquart, author of The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere

Read me, see you. That's the goal, anyway.

Recently I was asked if the 12 years I spent working in public relations has had an influence on my current literary work. Answer: Absolutely.

One of the key mandates in a client-focused communications business is this: On the other end of every single piece of work I produced – a news release, press kit, public service announcement, press event invitation, client report – there was going to be an individual (or, hopefully, a whole lot of them) – reporters, editors, talk show bookers, programming directors, consumers -- with only one thought in mind: What's in it for me? If I answered that question poorly -- made it all about the client's product and never showed those target individuals what was in it for them -- I'd have been out of a job.

I try to remember this now when I am writing, whether it's memoir or personal essay, literary journalism, or even a prose poem. At the other end are individuals who are reading with the question in their mind of whether the work will deliver anything for them. I constantly try to remind myself that people don't read creative nonfiction because they care about what happened to me, but because they care about whether what happened to me might have some meaning for them. It keeps me honest, sometimes.

An (Unorganized) Room of My Own

Over the years, I’ve been told by well-meaning friends and business colleagues, "you're the most organized person I know.” Truly, I cringe when people say this. Though they are probably talking about being mentally organized, I always hear it as being physically organized. And that's the problem.
First, because it’s certainly not true. Second, because I don’t aspire to it. Third, and most important, because I don’t consider it a compliment.
Taking these three objections in reverse order:
(3) I have always equated extreme organization with negative characteristics -- being closed-minded, dull, lacking in curiosity, creatively stuck, and a lot of other not-so-great traits which of course intellectually I know cannot be so easily assigned to all organized persons. Still, you can understand how the “most organized person I know” comment would drive me a little crazy. And feel more like a judgment than high praise.
(2) I don’t particularly want to be that organized; I always wanted to be creatively quirky (see above), and I suppose to rebel against an upbringing during which I constantly heard, "put that away," "get this out of here," and "why is this here?" So I've sort of become someone for whom once physical objects are neatly and logically stored away from sight (a file folder, notebook, photos, book), they are forgotten. The notes on a potential new essay? Once inside a folder, tucked in a drawer, will easily slip from the part of my brain where urgency resides. (Funny how this does not seem to happen when I slip the secret stash of peanut butter fudge behind the seldom used condiments in the back of the basement refrigerator, but I digress.)
(1) It’s not true. I am NOT as (physically) organized as people seem to think based on other factors. See for yourself. These photos are of my a few areas of my office as it appears this morning. And yes, I do realize how extremely lucky I am to have this generous and private room of my own, and the guilt over how I've let it get overrun is huge.


Oh, I can find what I need; but often it goes like this: Let’s see, the last time I saw that proposal/clipping/notebook/magazine/business card was when we had that barbecue and I showed it to Mary along with the advance copy of such-and-so's book, so it’s probably on (or near) the shelf where I keep ARCs. Or not.
So you can see how my leave-it-all-out-where-I-can-see-it methodology can be a time-waster, and frankly, visually annoying. Which is why over the next week or so I am going to make a major organizational assault on my office. To keep myself accountable, I will post the “after” photos.
As for why so many think I deserve a medal from the Organization Olympics, maybe some folks mistake other characteristics for organization, such as being punctual and prepared, being well-researched and curious, having a good memory and keeping copious notes, planning ahead and anticipating problems, being resourceful and asking enough questions to amass a mass of both useful knowledge and useless information.
Not that I’m all those things. But toss a few of them together, along with a tendency to be rather intolerant of disorganization in others, and maybe that’s where the overly organized label derives.

So I'm asking – what are your best tips for organizing the office of a writer/editor/consultant/teacher? Obviously I need them.

Update: The after photos and post are here.

Stuff I Like and You Might Too. You know, writer stuff.

>Women writers in the New York City area might want to think about this October weekend conference/workshop. Saturday, a full day of intensive discussion on one key issue – “Plot: The Structure of Story in Fiction, Memoir, and Narrative Nonfiction” and Sunday, it's Meet the Agents.
>I love this new-to-me blog, Three Guys One Book. So much great advice for writers, plus author interviews, reviews, and some fun.
>Ellen Neuborne, ghostwriter, editor, and almost-there-novelist, has a fun new blog in which she is chronicling her quest to (at least once in her writing career), command one of the most coveted pieces of literary nonfiction real estate – the Modern Love column in the Styles section of the Sunday New York Times. Ellen is forthright, open, and sometimes hilarious. Her Monday Morning Quarterbacking feature is a must-read for nonfiction writers everywhere who already spend a portion of their Sunday evenings dissecting what ran in that day’s column. (For those who don’t know, scoring a Modern Love clip often leads to serious agent inquires and book deals.)
>And finally, some days I feel like a relic. Like when my 11-year-old teaches me how to use the shortcut to some feature on my cell phone which I didn’t even know I had, much less ever used. Other times, it's because, as much as I love my computer (and my blog, my Facebook page, LinkedIn, Twittering and all of that) I can also actually still remember the sound of typewriter keys and putting -- 30 -- at the end of an article. So that might explain why I occasionally enjoy checking in over at When Editors Were Gods, where even I get to feel kind of young in comparison.

And now we come to the end. Or - This is the end. Or - This story is now ending. Or...

“Leave well enough alone.” – my mother
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” -- my husband
“Remember to stop while it’s still fun.” – my son’s preschool teacher

A writer in a workshop was frustrated because she felt unable to write a satisfying ending for her nonfiction. Hers were some of the common mistakes writers make when it comes to endings, such as…wrapping things up a little too neatly…overwriting and explaining too much…forcing the material to come “full circle"…fitting in that one really terrific line which just doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else…sticking on a tagged ending which screams “and the lesson is…”

This was really holding her back, and rather than a lengthy discussion about how to craft endings, I wanted to give her some tips she could put into action quickly, because if you always feel every piece has no ending, it's difficult to move on.

So here are three really great “tricks” I find myself returning to when it comes to nonfiction endings. Each has served me well.

1. Don’t end, just stop. (This is not an attempt to be cute. When exhausted by the topic, stop writing and don't try to craft a perfect ending.)
2. Stop tinkering. (What’s on the page may actually already be working.)
3. Lop off the final sentence or final paragraph (or two). This is one of the best pieces of advice I received from a one-time writing mentor of mine, Joyce Maynard. Over and over, I find I’ve already written a pretty good ending, but it’s usually about 50 words or so above the final line.

Next time you are stuck – or more precisely, can’t seem to find a sticking point – try one, or all, of the above. What are your tricks or techniques for endings?