Writer at Work: Reflections on the Art and Business of Writing

By David Bouchier

Writer at Work is the book about writing that somebody had to write. It's a report from the front lines by a working writer with a lifetime of experience in everything from literary fiction to radio and newspaper reporting. Writer at Work is full of provocative opinions and unexpected diversions. It combines practical advice, based on the author's long experience as a writing instructor, with lively and often funny reflections on the writing life.

Writer at Work gives you the information, the excitement, the debates and the inspiration that you would find at a first-class writers' conference. This is the guide book you need to step up from being an amateur to being an professional writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 25, 2005
• ISBN: 9781462065332

David Bouchier

David Bouchier is the award-winning essayist for National Public Radio Station WSHU, and a popular workshop leader at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He is the author of five books including The Cats and the Water Bottles and The Accidental Immigrant, and has contributed a regular humor column to the Sunday New York Times. David lives in Stony Brook, Long Island with his wife and two cats.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION:Another Writer’s Beginnings

PART I

The Practical Writer

1.Where do you get your ideas?

2.On Creativity and Imagination

3.Finding and Losing Time

4.On Motivation

5.Writers’ Block—it’s All in the Mind, or…

6.On Reading

7.Your Fabulous Public Library

8.The Personal Essay: A Love Affair

9.Lighten Up: Put Some Humor in Your Writing

10.Aspirants of the Silver Screen: An Essayist Among the Scriptwriters

11.Writing About Your Own Life: The Seduction of Memoir

12.The Unsophisticated Travel Writer

13.The Best Editor you Never Had

14.Who Cares About Grammar?

15.Finding Your Own Voice

16.Writers’ Workshops and Conferences: A View from the Inside

17.Writers Do It In Groups

18.Writers’ Magazines Why Read Them?

19.Good Advice from Eudora Welty

20.The Writer as Publisher

21.Literary Agents: A Writer’s Best Friend?

22.The Writer as Performer

23.Out of Thin Air: Writing for Radio

PART II

The Impractical Writer

Reflections on an Improbable Occupation

24.Memory and the Uses of Amnesia

25.The Misinterpretation of Dreams

26.If I Only Had a Brain

27.Wit and Wisdom: The Secret Ingredients of Good Writing

28.Authenticity and Truth

29.Are All These Emotions Really

30.The Seven Deadly Sins—How to make them work for you

31.The Outsider

32.Putting on Appearances

33.A Room of One’s Own

34.A Writers’ Utopia?

35.Muse and Mews: Why a Writer Must Have Cats

36.Writer in Love

37.Do We Need Poets?

38.The Perpetual Novel

39.The Intimate Censor: Writing in Neurotic Times

40.Fame

41.Too Many Books? Episode One

42.Too Many Books? Episode Two

43.Columnist Interrupted

44.The Cult of Celebrity

45.Show and Tell

46.My Brilliant Career

47.Writing to Make a Difference

To my past and future students of writing

INTRODUCTION:Another Writer’s Beginnings

Once a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed.

(Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz)

Eudora Welty found the perfect title for her classic memoir: One Writer’s Beginnings. We writers are all curious about how others got started, thinking that their memoirs will offer clues to the secret of success. What we learn is that planning and rational choice have little or nothing to do with the process of becoming a writer, and even less with success. Most writers end up where they do by a series of accidents. The trick is to choose the right accidents.

Some writers blame their career choice on an accident of birth. This may be true for the sons and daughters of literary families, like Martin Amis, or Virginia Woolf. But school was the starting point for me. The purpose of education is to teach us which careers to avoid. The all-boys grammar school I attended in London was very good at this. By the age of twelve I had already accumulated a long list, certified by experts, of things I was absolutely no good at: sports, math, science Latin, chemistry, and much more. But we had a superb English teacher, Mr. Thomas, who was driven by a passionate enthusiasm for literature and language. In spite of everything we could do, he taught us. Mr. Thomas knew all the most modern educational methods, like grabbing you by the hair and banging your head on the desk. If there are any educators reading this I can testify that this is an infallible teaching method, well worth a bit of minor brain damage. Mr. Thomas taught us not just to read and half-understand the literary classics, but to memorize great chunks of them, which we had to recite in class. Children didn’t have any rights back then. Not even the right to silence.

Fragments of Shakespeare, Swift, Shaw, Wilde, and dozens more, embedded themselves into my brain cells, under the threat of Mr. Thomas’s strong right arm. Then, in later life, I found I had caught the habit of memorizing, almost without thinking, things that seemed beautiful or important. So my mind was stuffed with literature at an early age. Mr. Thomas also planted a fatal seed by using my essays as examples for the whole class (how I suffered for that outside the classroom!) and actually saying out loud that I ought to be a writer, because it was clear from my school record that I couldn’t do anything else. The bestselling novelist Stephen King tells a very similar story in his memoir, On Writing. So Mr. Thomas was the first good accident that happened to me.

The second accident was a writing machine. When I was about thirteen my mother brought home a very old, worn-out Underwood typewriter from her office. That typewriter was magic. I loved the way it made my words look almost like print—albeit very faint, uneven, purple-colored print. Almost at once I started writing humorous stories about things that scared me, including the mathematics teacher, the dentist, and space aliens. But I had literary aspirations too, and wrote poems and tragedies of an adolescent kind.

Humor came easily. Some credit for this must go to Adolf Hitler and his Luftwaffe—another productive accident in my life. We lived on the eastern side of London, which was heavily bombed during the Second World War. The first five years of my life were spent hiding in bomb shelters, or listening for sirens, or watching the amazing light show of searchlights and anti-aircraft fire over the rooftops. This childhood experience left me with the firm conviction that the entire human race is insane, and nothing any of them do or say can be taken seriously. I’ve never found any reason to change that opinion.

My family laughed a lot in spite of everything. An old aunt of mine once conducted some research into our genealogy. Everybody begged her to stop, but she imagined that, because our name is French, there might be some romantic French connection—Huguenot refugees perhaps, or even aristocrats fleeing from the French Revolution. The story she finally came up with was both disappointing and satisfying. The British branch of the Bouchier family sprang from a group of entertainers who came over from France early in about 1808 to make their fortunes. I say ‘entertainers,’ but it would be more honest to describe them as circus people. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were a bunch of clowns. It seems that they were such rotten entertainers that they could never make the fare back home to France, so they stayed and took up small-scale farming in the West Country. They failed at this, and moved to London to make money there. They failed at this, too.

I must say that this sounds just like my family—failed clowns all the way down. They were good, hard working people with a sense of humor, who were useless at making money, or hanging on to it if they did. But they loved to laugh and tell jokes. It makes you think about the scary power of genetic inheritance.

For all these reasons I was seduced by words from an early age, and was a precocious reader because we had few other forms of entertainment apart from the radio. This intense reading and listening created a lifetime habit of making critical and ironical observations that infuriated adults. Too much imagination they would say, shaking their heads. Of course I was just borrowing the imaginations of others—another bad habit which continues.

Finally, I had the great good fortune to be an only child. This imposed a valuable solitariness, especially because both my parents worked. I had plenty of time to think my own thoughts, although our lack of family drama turned out to be a disadvantage later, when I tried to write fiction. The combination of an overactive imagination with a quiet and solitary childhood gave me plenty of opportunity to think strange thoughts. It seemed to me that I saw the world more clearly, and I always wanted to explain my perceptions to others, who never wanted to hear them. Some very fine authors, like Proust, were physically delicate as children. All their energy turned into memory and imagination. I was robust physically but my life was so self-contained that it had the same effect. I never felt quite at home in the world, and that is a great blessing for a writer.

I suppose an old typewriter could have launched me into any number of occupations. But writer sounded much more impressive than secretary, and I imagined that writers did not have to spend all their working hours in stuffy offices. I was wrong about that. I also imagined that it would help me to impress girls. I was wrong about that, too. But most of all I wanted to be published because I thought I had something important to say, I wanted to put people right about the world. I’m still trying to do that. Norman Mailer says somewhere in his memoir The Spooky Art that writers are like priests or doctors: on one level they want to do good, but on another level they want to have some measure of power. He’s right.

These are the three irreducible requirements for any aspiring writer: a passionate teacher, a reliable writing machine, and a robust ego.

Money is optional, but useful. I always advise young writers to arrange for a large inheritance, a good marriage, or a winning lottery ticket. Thomas Mann, Upton Sinclair and Edith Wharton had a head start because they never needed to worry about the sordid commercial side of things. Unfortunately my family was quite poor. It wasn’t the kind of poverty that makes for a romantic story, but genuine enough to make me an early realist about work and money.

So another attraction of writing as a career was the low initial investment. Becoming an artist or a musician would take years of training and expensive equipment. But I could start being a writer at once, on the kitchen table, which I did. But I had enough sense to know that couldn’t hope to earn a living that way, at the age of thirteen.

So, anxious to be out of the classroom and in the full stream of life, I left school soon after my sixteenth birthday, to the absolute horror of my parents and teachers, and took a job as an apprentice journalist in London. This seemed like a practical way of being paid for writing, and it was. At five pounds a week it was a bargain. Journalism school is a total rip-off by comparison.

My first assignments were to report small disasters and traffic accidents, or to make them up when nothing was happening. Later I was entrusted with writing the letters to the editor, because nobody else ever wrote to our paper. The editor, Eric Lewis, had a slash and burn style of editing that left its mark on me forever. Most of my stories ended up on the spike. Everything had to be rewritten five times. I’ve never learned so much so fast, including how not under any circumstances to write in my own voice. This helped me to understand what my own voice was.

I recommend journalism as a training ground for writers. It thickens our delicate skins. Stephen King had the same basic training, joining the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise in Connecticut as a teenage reporter. It worked for him, and it worked for Mark Twain, who learned to write as a young journalist on the Hannibal Journal.

Later I wrote for a weekly magazine that served the motor cycling fraternity. This was back in the days when motorcycles were a means of transportation rather than a masculine virility symbol. My job was to test new machines and to report races and other sporting events. I hoped for rapid promotion in the company because, in the nature of the business, my more senior colleagues were regularly killed or maimed in accidents. But then I was drafted into the army.

This was another kind of education. The complete loss of freedom was startling, and I was disturbed to find that being a soldier, even a dozen years after the end of the war, was not at all safe. Our regiment was sent to Cyprus, where the Greeks were trying to kill the Turks, and vice versa. We were supposed to stand bravely between them and be shot at by both, which we stupidly did.

I wrote comical stories about our lives as failed soldiers in Cyprus. None of the stories survived, but some of the uneasy memories found their way into my imaginary chef d’oeuvre, an eternal and eternally unpublished novel called Suicide Note Update. What I learned in the army was that I had no taste for violence and no taste for giving or taking orders. This closed off a large number of orthodox career options.

In an attempt to blot out the sordid realities of military life I wrote a huge book about religion. I had been brought up more or less as an atheist, but the circumstances suggested that religion might not be a bad idea. So I spent my spare time researching the world religions, looking for the answer to the question: Does any of this make any sense? and coming up with the disappointing answer: No. When I was discharged from the army at the age of twenty-one I was left with a large manuscript and no more spirituality than I had at the beginning. I still have the manuscript, and I still can’t decide whether it is the work of a precocious genius or a driveling idiot.

So I made the natural transition from spirituality to fantasy, and started writing science fiction. This allowed me to relax on the philosophical front, and to accept the world as a complete absurdity. Two years of churning out very bad sci-fi stories taught me that absolutely anything goes in fiction, and that there are no outer limits to the craziness of one’s own imagination.

By now I was now seriously committed to being a writer, although it was clear that I still couldn’t earn a living at it. The science fiction escapade brought me close to absolute poverty, but I scraped enough money in 1961 to go to Paris to write my Great Novel. This was still a compulsory apprenticeship for young writers, as it had been for more than a hundred years. It was a very mixed experience. I loved Paris, and still do, and I made a bare living by repairing bicycles and showing English tourists around. At night I wrote my Great Novel in a genuine attic room close to the Jardin du Luxembourg. It proved to be rubbish (the novel, not the garden). I never got beyond the third chapter, and I tossed it into a toxic dump long ago. I’ve repressed all memories of that book. It was probably about money and sex, but my experience with both was so pathetically small that it wouldn’t have filled one page in a pocket notebook, let alone a whole novel.

The French immigration authorities eventually threw me out, and I returned to London still full of literary dreams. Marriage brought me down to earth with an almost palpable bump and I had to take a proper job again. At last I understood about money and sex.

This would be a good place to wind down this introduction. One can only keep on beginning for so long, and my twenties were certainly the end of the beginning of something. To keep bread and wine (mostly wine) on the table I took jobs in bookselling and publishing, so I could at least stay close to the literary world. When these proved to be much too much like hard work I went back to school, reluctantly, and collected some scraps of paper which allowed me to claim the struggling writer’s last and best refuge: I started teaching sociology at a British university in 1972. The great thing about sociology, from a writer’s point of view, is that it gives a wonderfully ironic perspective on the human comedy. My academic career produced a number of more-or-less unreadable books and articles. It was fifteen years before I could dig my way out of that particular linguistic trap and start writing coherent prose again.

During all my various day jobs, from journalism and bookselling to teaching and broadcasting, I’ve always stolen time to write: stories, nonfiction books, essays, a few scripts and some magazine articles. It’s an addiction. Most of what I wrote was never published, and was never intended to be, any more than a pianist expects his morning scale exercises to be issued on CD. Writing, like life itself, is mainly a matter of practice, and you never get it exactly right. But I’ve had a wonderful time all the way through, and I count myself very lucky.

I had an exceptional stroke of luck when a new and improved marriage brought me to America and to Long Island in 1986. Suddenly I had more material than I could possibly use. I began to write about Long Island life, first in newspaper columns, then for radio, and finally as a regular contributor of humor to The New York Times. I had never lived in the sprawling American suburbs before, and I thought it would be dull. I was wrong. Here was a whole lifestyle in which not only did common sense not prevail, it had clearly never been tried. Suburban life gave me back my sense of humor which I’d almost lost in years of academic writing and serious journalism, and I’ve enjoyed writing about it ever since.

The pleasures of writing, for me, are discreet and personal. I write to reduce chaos, to understand the world and other people, and to find the gleam of irony that lightens up the darkest situations. Writing, quite simply, makes me happy—or at least it saves me from taking happiness drugs. For the past two decades I’ve also enjoyed a measure of local celebrity, and the admiration of people I respect. I have, as you can tell, become vain and spoiled. You can do it too.

I dreamed about becoming full-time writer for so many years that I scarcely noticed when it finally happened. I have to thank my mother, the Underwood typewriter company, my teacher Mr. Thomas, and my dear wife Diane who brought me to this amazing country, who encouraged me do what exactly I wanted to do—and who had the good grace to laugh when she read this.

PART I

The Practical Writer

1.Where do you get your ideas?

An idea is a feat of association.

Robert Frost

A writer without ideas is nothing but a typist. Any literate person can write, in the sense of getting words down on paper. But writing is more than the chattering stream of consciousness or conversation. Writing is about ideas.

This may sound a bit formidable, in the very first paragraph of the first chapter of a book that claims to be friendly and helpful to other writers, but it has to be said. I can’t count the number of people I’ve met who claim that they want to be writers but, when questioned, have not the slightest clue what they want to write about, although they may have a fine computer. My response is that it’s rather like setting out to be a chef in a splendidly equipped kitchen, but without any recipes or ingredients.

Ideas are not difficult, although philosophers will tie you in knots if you ask for a definition. When you have an idea, what exactly do you have?

Plato said that ideas were the eternally existing pattern of any type or class of thing, of which all individuals were imperfect copies. For example the idea of woman embodies all the ideal qualities of womanhood, and individual real women deviate from this in various ways. But this, like all of Plato’s theories, only gets you into arguments at parties.

For the practical writer an idea is just a fragment of knowledge that can be fitted into a pattern. It may be an observation, a striking phrase, an image, a feeling, or simply a fact. But it has potential. For example, you may read a newspaper report about the growing number of people who, like most writers, work at home. This could be the beginning of an idea because it immediately raises other questions. Are people who work at home happier than those who work in offices? How do home workers manage to get anything done with all the distractions of domestic life? Why are some companies promoting work at home? What if everybody worked at home? Suddenly we have a whole lot of things to write about—some of them potentially funny, some serious, some fantastic. Has anyone ever written a short story about working at home? I don’t know, but you can see the possibilities. It’s an idea.

But where did it come from? Most writers get asked the question Where do you get your ideas?" Local people ask me quite often, because they have listened to hundreds of my radio programs and read hundreds of my columns—or at least they are kind enough to pretend they have. They seem to imagine that either I am an inexhaustible fountain of creativity, or that I am stealing ideas from somewhere. Both accusations are false.

The true answer is that I get my ideas in the following places, in order of fertility:

1. The Avalon Nature Preserve, Stony Brook, Long Island.

2. In the car, driving almost anywhere.

3. In the bath.

Different people find different places stimulating, but those are mine. I never have ideas when sitting at my desk, or in the library, or when I am deliberately trying to get ideas. The process happens, mysteriously, elsewhere. In the right situation, ideas just come popping into my head from the chaotic storeroom of the subconscious.

There’s an awful lot of nonsense talked about inspiration, especially at writers’ conferences. We are what is in our minds. There is no mysterious treasure house of ideas waiting to bubble up into consciousness at the right moment, any more than there is a gourmet meal lurking at the back of the refrigerator if you didn’t put the ingredients in there first. What is in the brain is everything we have put there over the years, by experience and reading and reflection. That’s what we have to work with. We get out what we put in, and no more. As they used to say in the computer world, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). You won’t write like Proust if you only read Stephen King, which I suppose is a good argument for not reading Proust. Many great writers of the past, like Melville, read almost nothing but the Bible.

If you wait to be inspired by an idea you may wait forever.

My daily walk takes about an hour. This is my thinking time. There are also health benefits, but they are more than cancelled out by the risks: deer ticks, west Nile virus, escaped Teddy bears, delinquent squirrels, and having a heart attack miles away from help. What matters is that the woods and fields are empty and quiet. In these surroundings the mind is emptied out and unexpected ideas can come in. A lot of thinking like a writer is not thinking, but blanking out and opening up.

Many people have their best ideas when they travel. That’s because traveling takes us out of the rut, and forces us to confront all kinds of new things. In fact, if you have an open and active mind, traveling may be the best source of ideas in the world.

The main thing is to stifle the idiotic mental chatter of everyday life, and let your brain do its job in peace. When you get an idea, never wait. Get it down instantly, no