Category Archives: Writing

Someone smart told me this the other day:

“Writers are always watching people. In order to have output, we need to have input.”

I love people who observe their surroundings and try to make sense of it. I love people who load up on input (people, books, ideas) and then process it, analyze it.

A similar thing could be said about entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs are always looking for problems. Always looking for things that can be done easier / cheaper / faster. They look at the world through the lens of improvement.

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The other week Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel Laureate in Literature, spoke at Claremont at the Athenaeum.

He said something really profound: When people ask him why he writes, he says, among other things, that he can’t not write.

Writing may make you miserable, but it makes you less miserable than other pursuits.

The day after Pamuk’s speech, I was on the phone with some business undergrads. They asked if I was going to start more companies in the future. I pondered the question, and then answered, “Yes. It’s not that I love business or entrepreneurship so much. In fact, I find other disciplines more stimulating. But it’s that I can’t not start more companies. There’s some entrepreneurial bone within me that I’m sure will force me to start more things in the future.”

What do you do not because you necessarily love it, but because you can’t not do it?

They always say it takes more time to write a short essay than a long one. I agree: brevity is hard. It also takes a lot effort to produce writing that appears effortless.

Fabrice Grinda pointed me to this wonderful YouTube clip of someone composing an email to a girl he met at a bar and trying hard to strike the right tone. "Dear Mimi" becomes "Hi Mimi" becomes "Hey Mimi". He re-writes sentences to appear as casual as possible while still conveying meaning. It’s great stuff:

The 2007 edition of the Best American Essays comes out in October, and I can’t wait. I’m a fan of all the "Best American" series books.

Most exciting is that the guest editor for this year’s edition is David Foster Wallace, the prominent American writer (and professor in Claremont). Houghton Millfin posted Wallace’s introduction online in advance of the book’s release, and it’s vintage Wallace. Below are my favorite parts from Wallace’s intro.

On essays which help us deal with the lazy worldview that can come from information and stimuli overload:

Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That’s about as clearly as I can put it. I’m aware that some of the collection’s writers could spell all this out better and in much less space. At any rate, the service part of what I mean by ‘value’ refers to all this stuff, and extends as well to essays that have nothing to do with politics or wedge issues. Many are valuable simply as exhibits of what a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular factsets — whether these involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids’ cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs, the near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake, the existential synecdoche of stagefright, or the revelation that most of what you’ve believed and revered turns out to be self- indulgent crap.

On how he, being the "Decider" (the guest editor), is probably biased:

I suspect that part of why ‘bias’ is so loaded and dicey a word just now — and why it’s so much-invoked and potent in cultural disputes — is that we are starting to become more aware of just how much subcontracting and outsourcing and submitting to other Deciders we’re all now forced to do, which is threatening (the inchoate awareness is) to our sense of ourselves as intelligent free agents. And yet there is no clear alternative to this outsourcing and submission. It may possibly be that acuity and taste in choosing which Deciders one submits to is now the real measure of informed adulthood. Since I was raised with more traditional, Enlightenment-era criteria, this possibility strikes me as consumerist and scary . . . to which the counterargument would be, again, that the alternatives are literally abysmal.

Hat tip to the Amazon Book Blog which rightfully thanks Wallace for not resorting to "blah generalizations" that we so often see in anthology introductions.

Curtis Pesman, a Boulder-based writer, has a beautiful first-person essay in today’s New York Times on meeting up with an ex-girlfriend and fellow cancer survivor. I like it for how it conveys the very real effect dealing with cancer has on someone’s life, and for the specific writing techniques Pesman employs.

I like the studying the art of the personal essay. Some things Pesman did that jumped out at me:

• Open with action. This is a common tactic: start the essay in the middle of an event to immediately engage the reader. In this case, it’s Pesman’s ex trying to light a candle but due to her chemo treatment she can’t keep steady hands.
• Repetition. "I think but don’t say…" is a phrase Pesman comes back to, and it’s a nice way of giving the reader a peek at the uncensored, interior voice we all have when interacting with someone.
• Paint a vivid image. He describes the two of them lying somewhat awkwardly on a bed "blankly watching TV". He captures the moment and then calls the silence between them "comfortable" — an adjective we don’t expect based on how he set it up. Surprising the reader is almost always a good thing.
• End with something provocative. It ends with a lovely scene and a last sentence which makes you wonder: I take a swirl-sip of the fragrant French wine that my ex-girlfriend has just poured for me. Didn’t notice: was it from a “good year”? No real reason to ask. Pretty much every year seems a good year about now. My back hurts a little as we sit scrunched side by side, moving our forks around. Outside, windblown leaves dance in the dark. Then I take another sip of, I don’t know, Bordeaux. I can’t taste it. I can’t taste anything.