Blog, Shelley Evans, Page 16

Posted on by Shelley

I read Dani Shapiro yesterday. Still Writing. It was incredibly helpful. The deceptively difficult task of staying on track*. The holy grail of practice. The sense of fraudulence.

She said trust yourself as a writer, and, helpfully, you will probably never fully trust yourself as a writer.

Find a few good friends to read your work, and use them.

The internet is crack.

You will resist the practice. That is part of the practice. The secret of your story is hidden in the resistance. Try not to walk away. Because if you walk away, and you come back, you will still be lost. Maybe more lost, depending on how long you walked away for, and how you walked. (Walking, for example, is better than walking to the Internet, or lunch with friends, or a house cleaning project.)

The internet is crack.

And she said something that sounded like “practice is everything” (my new favorite saying): you think the goal is finishing this novel. You think it’s getting published. You think it’s getting good reviews, and watching it rise up on the best-seller list. But those are just the flotsam and jetsam side-effects of the actual and only goal: practice. After you finish, you have to begin again. And again. And again.

The Internet is crack.

And the fact that she said those things, and I already know those things, made me think, in a different way than I have before, oh. I must be a writer. And then she said the thing that made me love her less: real writers don’t make outlines. Oh no, I thought. I make outlines.

Well, we all fall victim to it. The ironic habit of saying, there is no right way to do this, let me show you the right way. She should have said trust yourself and stopped there.

(*You think that the number one requirement for being a good writer is skill, but actually, the first and possibly only requirement is stamina. She called it endurance. Are you still here, doing it, after all the failures that will inevitably pile up around you?)

Posted on by Shelley

Right now reading Okay For Now. A really beautiful book. The narrative voice is perfect: a tough, decent kid who somehow never learned to read, and loves to draw. I like how he talks to the reader: “which you would know why if you were paying attention.” Or, “you got that?” Or, “I bet you didn’t catch that, did you?” Or, “She called me an artist, which you probably wouldn’t have noticed if I didn’t point it out.” I fall in love with the character because of the way he talks: So what? Big deal. Terrific.

What does that teach me? Get out of the character’s way? Don’t explain everything? Don’t worry so much about making sense? Your character has an affair. He doesn’t think, I’m sick of my wife, but I’m too cowardly to leave so maybe I can give myself a tiny vacation by flirting with this woman. No. He thinks about the dress she had on, the way it caught on the back of her calf, and the run in her stocking that she didn’t even notice. His wife would never leave the house like that, with a wrinkled dress and a torn stocking. She would feel contempt for the woman who did.

Posted on by Shelley

In the end, the only thing that matters is how long you stay at it. By how long I mean biographically, like, years, and I also mean how many hours in a day, like from when you get up to when you go to bed. I’ve been at it for an embarrassing number of years, but I still have trouble with the daily part. Fifteen minutes can often seem overwhelming. The problem is, nobody gets to be a professional tennis player on fifteen minutes a day. Forget professional tennis player. Nobody gets a job in a pro shop on fifteen minutes a day.

Posted on by Shelley

I hate it when people say things like, I became a writer because I was a terrible house painter. Which means “it’s the only thing I’m good at,” which is another way of saying “I’m too good at it to do anything else.” Maybe I’m just jealous. I’m not especially good at writing. I don’t even have a mind full of stories. It’s more like a peculiar tic, ocd, a refusal to give up the idea of myself as a writer, in spite of any encouraging signs. Like a person who talks in rhyme because some part of her brain malfunctioned and she can’t stop.

Writing and Story Development

Contact