Category: Other Writers

Posted on by Shelley

This morning I read about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ernest Hemingway. Two such different men: one of them austere and puritanical, but generous, with a deep, connected, sexual relationship with his wife; the other insecure, bombastic, alcoholic, and cruel (or at least unkind) to the four wives he went through. What they had in common: each was disciplined, working four hours every morning, hurricanes and hangovers and death in the family notwithstanding. And each struggled to find acceptance. Both kept writing through rejection after rejection, finding and refining and polishing a style, until something finally clicked. By the time they found acclaim as writers the hard work had made them writers already, whether they had acclaim or not, the title writer could not be bestowed or taken from them. Hemingway wrote his mother– “you cannot know how much it pains me to think you are ashamed of this when I know it is not to be ashamed of.” And still he kept at it, over and over.

Anyone can make themselves a writer, just by having the resolve to show up for it, over and over, until they understand what they want to say, and how to say it.

Posted on by Shelley

Mark Twain came downstairs every night and read what he wrote during the day to his family at the dinner table. When I first learned that fact it seemed wonderful. I’d like to have a built in audience, every night. Now I wonder– when did his family read their stories? To whom? He was the only one who read, night after night, the whole edifice of his family about him and his career. Which is not to say he wasn’t generous, or that he wasn’t loving, but just that he had the Y chromosome advantage, a conviction so deep it wasn’t even conscious, that what he had to say was important, that it might be the most important thing at the dinner table, night after night, decades upon decades.

Something incredibly tragic, Shakespearean, about the end of his life– he died alone, his wife and two beloved daughters dead before him. The third daughter, the one who lived, described as willful and temperamental, was unable to enter, even to walk past, the huge house he built for them all to share.

Posted on by Shelley

I read a profile in an old New York Times Magazine that cheered me, grimly: Paul Shrader, former film lion who made Taxi Driver, directing a script by former literary lion Bret Easton Ellis, starring Lindsay Lohan, we all know who that is, and the amazing thing is, they were all down and out, each of them having achieved victories that did nothing to secure their futures, every day just another day when they have to get up and prove themselves again. The story told me, in a way I found reassuring, that there is no final victory, just the next day and what you do with it. In which case victory would be the ability to embrace the next day with hope and courage, as if you hadn’t lived through all the days before.