The first week of the 2015-2016 academic year is upon us, and already I find myself behind schedule! My apologies for the late posting of Kit Bakke's interesting essay.
Kit Bakke’s most recent book is Dancing on the Edge. Although she lived a peripatetic life for many
years, she’s pretty much returned to her Seattle birthplace.
*****
Have Words, Will Blog
by Kit Bakke
I’m working on a tricky historical
nonfiction project, and my editor suggested I read Stephen Pyne’s book Voice& Vision. Which I have just done. Terrific book!! Well, if you are into
that sort of thing. But a lot of his advice would work for fiction writers as
well.
He’s not a writing teacher, he’s an
environmental scientist who’s won a MacArthur fellowship and writes about
wildfires among other things. He doesn’t sugar coat anything.
After providing lots of examples and
thoughts about the craft and the art of writing, his last chapter is full of
this sort of thing:
Writing is about
choices,
and among the first of those choices is
to assure yourself time
to work.
Otherwise you are
writing a diary or a blog.
There you go. If you spend all your time
on the small stuff, the big stuff never happens.
He says that writing is like politics:
it’s all about the art of the possible. Writers have to live with the “time,
funds, sources, ideas and talent” that they have available to them. And it’s
different for each of us. If you know what you have available, then you can
tailor your writing project to those resources.
Like most books on writing, he makes the
point that “If you don’t actually write, you don’t get anything written.” The
old butt-to-the-chair advice.
One bit that I liked a lot was the
observation that “ideas come from writing as much as writing comes from ideas.”
For his nonfiction-writing audience, he adds “Writing is a means of
understanding that ought to accompany research, not appear magically at its
end. With practice, you will trust your ability to make the text happen. If you
write, the words will come.”
Pyne addresses the question: “When to
push on and when to pull back?” by which he means, how do you know when you’ve
done your absolute best. Because it’s disastrous to stop before that. Again, he
says, it’s a matter of choosing—“It’s about constantly making calls regarding
what is good enough. Assessing the unstable gap between what you desire and
what you can do is the hardest call of all.”
Wow, no wonder writing a good book is
hard … all those choices, all that risk, juggling all those slippery inputs,
the dangers of stopping too soon or never really getting going at all.
OK, back to the real work.
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