Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

By Brendan O’Meara

There’s this great quote from William Faulkner, who admittedly I’ve never read, where he says:

“Read, read, read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!”

I love that he even says read trash, though we should be spending most of our time reading the great writers. Imitating them. Playing with them. Having conversations with them.

It’s through this process that you find your voice, but asking yourself why Jesmyn Ward focused so strongly on the white pit bull mother in Salvage the Bones, or why Dave Eggers wrote his characters in the way he where he did in The Parade.

Because art is intentional and the finished product is a document full of decisions, what to leave in and what to leave out.

So read and pay attention to all the decisions.

By Brendan O’Meara

So, this entire project started as a daily micropodcast. And over the past the several weeks it has largely been just that.

But the past few days, maybe the past 10 days or so, I’ve been slacking.

I’m sorry.

I did am not holding up my end of the bargain.

I said it would be daily and it has not been daily of late.

I will do better and see this thing through to the end.

I’m very sorry if my missing my daily pod let you down.

And so we move on…

Okay, it means you probably are.

I know I am, and it hurts to admit it.

I’m reaching a point in my writing life where I look like the pathetic junior varsity kid who is still delusional that he thinks he can play varsity despite ALL evidence to the contrary.

Eventually, he’ll get his bat blown out of his hands by a superior fastball, but ultimately he must come to the conclusion on his own that maybe this isn’t for him.

But until then, we go after it because there’s a hunger and an itch, no matter how average we are.

By Brendan O’Meara

When I see my favorite musicians getting after it on the big stage, I often think to myself, “Man, what must it be like to be good at something, like, really good at something.”

What you don’t see is that lead guitarist, when he or she was coming up the ranks and had their first guitar, they were playing six, seven, eight hours a day. Unless they were like Eddie Van Halen, but we must avert our eyes in the face of true genius.

Hours and hours of bad notes and buzzed fret boards. And then, maybe, they reach the big time and we see them and wonder how they make it look so easy, the way their hands and fingers magically land on the perfect spot along the fret board.

Eight hours of practice is a bit much and not realistic for most working adults, but how many wasted minutes were on your schedule today? How many of those minutes could’ve been spent writing bad words, buzzing the fret board? Do a time audit. The TRS—the time revenue service—comes knocking. They want to know where your time went and how you can account for it.

What will you tell the TRS? Can you look the TRS in the eye and say you spent it on the right path? Are you squared up? I’m not. But I’m working on it. Better today, better tomorrow, win the hour, win the day.

So on we go.

By Brendan O’Meara

There’s a difference between writing and typing. Writing is artful and can be a bit stifling.

Typing is mechanical. Fingers moving over a keyboard.

Instead of writing, why not try typing? Why not sit in your chair, set a timer for 20 minutes, and see what comes out of those fingers. You might type 1,000 words if you don’t stop. And those words will be free and they will be bad, but they will be something.

And something is better than nothing.

For example, the other day I worked on this children’s sports book for 30 minutes straight and didn’t stop. That was a significant amount of volume. Most it is garbage, but I’m good with garbage. It was liberating to sit there and not think, just type, and let the writing come later.