By Brendan O’Meara
So…this will be an ongoing blog post whereby I embed Mary Karr’s invaluable—and free!—writing advice. You usually have to drop $20 at a bookstore for this kind of stuff.
She’s somebody so wise and so forthcoming about the process and how many drafts it takes her to finish a poem.
Enjoy!
Writing tip #1: Jack up your verbs. Too many passive verbs (to be, have, make) flatten yr page like a steel wheel roller. Witness Lowell: ‘The night attendant, a BU sophomore/ROUSES from the mare’s nest of his drowsy head…He CATWALKS down our corridor.’ #AmWriting #writingLife
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 18, 2018
Writing tip #2: Whatever haunts you (other than your current divorce) often makes the best subject. Unless yr talent & person shoot whiz bang sparks (think Nabokov), an ornate project will read as showoffy. Let yr heart be your geiger counter: feel it. #writingtips #Amwriting
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 19, 2018
#WritingTip 3: When you start, yr pounding on a corpse’s chest & may take a while sit up. For 25 years when Roth turned in a book, he picked up American Pastoral. The last time he started, he held 40 pages on his lap & sd ‘Don’t panic.’ 9 months later, it drew breath #WritingLife
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 20, 2018
WritingTip 4: Because film now dwarfs other media with stuff blowing up, writers often only ponder external action as if plotting a script out. The page kicks the screen’s ass w/ nuanced psychological interior. Don’t forget the inner life esp. when working in 1st person #Writing
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 21, 2018
#WritingTip #5 You can’t make general statements nonstop, but don’t flee starting w/a rhetorical truth that can serve as a driving premise:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 22, 2018
Writing tip#6 Make a time to write & stick to it. When my son was a baby & I had 3 jobs plus writing, it was 4 or 5 in the am, & sometimes, I was so whipped, I sat over books that inspired me while the cursor blinked for 60-90 minutes before he started to cry. Suit up and show up
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 24, 2018
#WritingTip 7: Read! Reading will not ‘pollute’ your pristine talent. It will save you time and help to keep your standards high. Without reading, the head becomes an echo chamber that can only hear itself.#Read
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 25, 2018
#WritingTip #8: Ignore the fickle marketplace, focus on finding your place in history. Current fashion stuffs our shelves w/ posers & phonies& pages you read once & toss. So forget hip platforms & projects. Study what you reread over & over. You wanna last, not flash in the pan.
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 26, 2018
#WritingTip #9 Don’t waste a reader’s time w show-offy embellishment. Once you start stapling sequins on sentences to frou-frou the page up without deepening or advancing your tale, the reader’s reaching for her cell phone. Don’t pick out wallpaper: build the house.
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 27, 2018
#WritingTip 10. Revise. My first drafts could get sold as tranquilizers at an insomiacs’ convention (i.e. I am sad, the end, by Mary Karr). By honing that notion—unpacking details, refining setences—a few books have bloomed into being. My writing secret comes in one word: again.
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 28, 2018
#WritingTip 11. Cram dull info into vivid images. Not ‘Mother drove me to college.’ but ‘Mother’s yellow station wagon slid like a monopoly icon between chlorophyll green fields of Iowa corn. I bit my cuticles raw facing the private college no one had believed I’d get into.’
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 30, 2018
#WritingTip 12. Craft keen details & they magically accrue metaphorical force. When Chekov’s cad has left the married woman he’s seduced sobbing in bed about her religion, he coolly cuts a piece of watermelon. That melon placed as it is telegraphs her ruin, embodies it.
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) October 31, 2018
#WritingTip 13 Never waste a reader’s time. Read revised facsimile pages of great poets such as Yeats & Eliot & Bishop to learn the wisdom losing the dull parts. I tossed 178 pages in July, 101 this week–hard at first, but today, I feel closer to the angel hiding in the stone.
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) November 4, 2018
#WritingTip 14–The harder to write, the better to read.
The capital-R Romantics schooled us in the axiom that whoever digs deepest (emotionally speaking) unearths the shiniest gems. In 3 decades teaching that’s 99% true. Swashbuckling ease at the keyboard tends to yield treacle.— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) November 5, 2018
#WritingTip 15–Conflict generates story. Scriptwriter Mike Nicols claimed there were 3 types of scenes—negotiations, seductions & fights. On the page, psychological strife adds subtler layers. Ask yourself: what does a character want & what’s thwarting that desire?
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) November 7, 2018
#WritingTip 16. Package dull fact in image or scene. Instead of stating height show a character’s arm reaching up to swipe at a basketball net. Information is the enemy of beauty. So master peppering it in instead of dragging a reader thru story-stalling exposition.
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) November 11, 2018
#WritingTip 17. Believe your editor. Your workshop does not ‘misunderstand’ your radical genius. As @StephenKing says: Write with the door closed and edit with it open. If they don’t get it, ask yourself what’s in your head that’s left off the page.
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) November 14, 2018
#WritingTip 19. Before application of ass to chair, find some meditative ritual to tamp down fear. Try drawing or dogwalking, third-eye pondering or steel guitar. Nonverbal, non-social acts keep the unconscious coals burning. (I’ve won the occasional solitary twist contest)
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) November 19, 2018
#WritingTip 20. Dissent gives energy and volition to any work. Dissent in character, in image, in plot, in structure, in syntax. Everything I put down gets deeper the minute I think ‘but’. Argue against your first urge, i.e. He was an asshole, but….
— Mary Karr, Author (@marykarrlit) November 24, 2018
