Sunday Funnies: Where Did It Go?!

Motivational Monday: How Maya Gets Her Muse Back

Motivational Monday: Taking the Risk

 

[Link] Famous Writers From John Steinbeck to Maya Angelou All Swore By This Weird Productivity Trick. You Should Steal It

These literary greats solved the riddle of work-from-home productivity decades before the rest of us.

by Jessica Stillman

John Steinbeck may have won a Nobel Prize but he still preferred to write at an unstable little desk on his fishing boat. Another giant of American letters, Maya Angelou, liked to rent out hotel rooms and write perched on the bed. Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws, outdid both of them -- he penned the thriller from the clanging back room of a furnace factory. 

All of which might make you conclude that writers are a bunch of odd ducks. That might be true, but according to a thoughtful recent New Yorker piece from best-selling author and Georgetown professor Cal Newport, that's the wrong lesson for less literary types to take from these writers' unusual approach to productivity. 

Newport insists that decades before our recent switch to remote work these authors discovered something many of us are going to learn in the coming months and years: Working close to home beats actually working at home. 

Read the full article: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/productivity-remote-work-john-steinbeck-maya-angelou.html

Movie Reviews for Writers: The Adventures of Anais Nin

After watching this docu-drama, I regret not having a deeper bench of Nin's work rattling around in my brain. She seems like a very experiential writer who saw with world with the sense of wonder that C.S. Lewis called Sehnsucht, with almost a sort of magical realism-tinted glasses, although her experience was far more sensual than Lewis's spiritual. 

While this film covers Nin's sexual life in detail, it also has a remarkable depth in exploring her writing life. Of course, for Nin, those two were intertwined, almost symbiotic, though I'm willing to bet that's not the case for most of us. 

But we're here for what the movie says about the writing life and the act of writing. 

My favorite line from the film is this one taken from Nin's diaries: "Few know how many women there are in me. When ordinary life shackles me, I escape one way or another." 

To me, this sums up the writer's psyche perfectly. Others have phrased it as there are worlds within me. Other, less spiritually tinged writers simply say that they are filled with stories. But I really love the way Nin calls these other women out as, well, other women. Of course she would; it ties in perfectly with her more experiential approach as a writer. 

One of the experts interviewed in the film sums it up like this: She needed the writing to make sense of the experience, but also she was having the experience to do the writing. Nin herself explains in her diaries that she often feels she is become another women inside her, that one is mild and calm and pure and a dutiful wife, and that the other is wild and free, a demoness. 

I wouldn't go that far in my own writing, but I do feel there are parts of me than can only escape through my work. I will never be a hard-hitting hero like Rick Ruby. I could never explore the wonderings of what my life might have been as a women like Fishnet Angel. Nor could I ever commit the vengeful atrocities some characters have in my horror stories -- but I don't need to. I have my stories to let me experience those things. 

Nin writes that "writers make love to what they need," and for me that act of love is a metaphorical one, but still valid nonetheless. I need the adventure, I need the magic and even the science that might as well be magic, and I need unfettered heroism, but I also need to function in the real world as a father, husband, granddaddy, hire-able adult, etc. 

But, and this is the most amazing part I think, when the realities start to ground us as writers too much, we always have the escape into our work. Or, as the thoroughly liberated Anais Nin said, once she is rooted down to the ground again, she feels her hair pulled up to the stars again. 

Motivational Monday -- The Writer, The Inner Critic, & The Slacker [Link]

by Alexander Weinstein

One of the greatest fears that writers share is a worry that the writing won’t be good enough. We fear our poems and stories will be boring and we’re not meant to be writers because our work, to put it simply, will suck. To help overcome this fear, I suggest we think of our writing selves as three distinct roommates who share an apartment—The Writer, The Inner Critic, and The Slacker. Unfortunately, these roommates don’t get along. The Writer hates The Inner Critic. The Inner Critic wages a quiet battle against The Writer. And The Slacker annoys both by watching TV too loudly and sleeping all day. To solve the problem it’s best to separate the three personalities so we might learn the benefits that each can bring to our writing home.

Read the full article: https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/the-writer-the-inner-critic-the-slacker

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #351 -- Writers on the Writing Life (Bio-Journals)

What do you consider the best books about the writing 

life (not those about "how to" or that kind of thing)?

Excellent question. I love reading writers writing about the world as they experience it specifically as writers. (Hmm... I wonder if I can get the word "write" in that sentence one more time...)

For my money, Stephen King's ON WRITING is fantastic. It almost goes without saying to include this one is you are a contemporary writer. But that's only because it's such a great story of his life of crafting stories.



Another I absolutely adore is Eudora Welty's ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS. This one is as much a biography as it is a journal on becoming a writer. And trust me, it's prose is pure beauty.



Next would be one from my all-time favorite non-fiction writer, Annie Dillard. Here THE WRITING LIFE captures the beauty of creation through both the natural world and the internal world of imagination.



But perhaps no one understand the writing life better than that beagle of all authors -- Snoopy (with a little help from some of his biggest fans).