A note from Nava: Here's one of my favorite posts, from a year ago. Not sure I agree 100% but there's a lot of wisdom in Vita Sackville-West's words, speaking to everyone's fear of taking risks with their work.
Dear Literary Ladies,
I’m plugging away at a modest but steady writing career, but sometimes I think about aiming higher. I admit that I’m afraid to fail— and then look foolish to myself and others. What about you? Do you think it’s better to stick with what you do best, rather than stick your neck out and possibly fail?
Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.
—Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf, Aug. 1928
Is it better to be a modest success than a grand failure?
How can a writer balance solitude and camaraderie?
A note from Nava: Here's a reprise of a post from about a year and a half ago that speaks to the need to balance a writer's need for privacy with constructive interaction with peers:
Dear Literary Ladies,
How can a writer balance the need for quiet and solitude, with the desire for camaraderie? When I’m alone, working, I feel the need for feedback; and when I’m among colleagues, talking about my work, I feel I’m seeking too much outside validation.
If you don’t keep and guard and mature your force and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. You must find a quiet place near the best companions (not those who admire and wonder at everything one does, but those who know the good things with delight!).
You need reassurance—every artist does—but you need still more to feel “responsible for the state of your conscience” (your literary conscience, we can just now limit that quotation to), and you need to dream your dreams and go on to new and more shining ideals, to be aware of “the gleam” and to follow it; your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia; the city, the country--in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up.
Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality—you can write about life, but never write life itself. And to write and work on this level, we must live on it—we must at least recognize it and defer to it at every step. We must be ourselves, but we must be our best selves.
—Sarah Orne Jewett, in a letter to Willa Cather, ca. 1909
How does keeping a journal help a writer's practice?
A note from Nava: Sorry for the months of silence! But I have a good excuse; I was writing two books, and the deadline pressure was excruciating as well as exhilarating. One was my next vegan cookbook, but the other was none other than The Literary Ladies' Guide to the Writing Life, the more fleshed-out version of this blog. Stay tuned; it is due out in April, 2011!
Dear Literary Ladies,
Do you think it's a good practice to keep a journal? What did you use your journal for, and how did it benefit your writing practice?
One of the most helpful tools a writer has is [her] journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal. A journal is not a diary, where you record the weather and the engagements of the day. A journal is a notebook in which one can, hopefully, be ontological.
A little more pragmatically, a journal, at least one that is not written for publication, and mine most certainly are not, is a place where you can unload, dump, let go. It is, among other practical things, a safety valve. If I am in the slough of despond, if I am in a rage, if I am, as so often, out of proportion and perspective, then, once I have dumped it all in the journal, I am able to move from subjectivity to at least an approach to objectivity, and my family has been spared one of Madeleine’s excessive moods. A journal is also a place in which joy gets recorded, because joy is too bright a flame in me not to burn if it doesn’t get expressed in words. And it’s where I jot down ideas for stories, descriptions of a face seen on a subway, a sunset seen over the Hudson, or our Litchfield Hills.
—Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet, 1972
How can a writer balance solitude and camaraderie?
Reprising a post from a year ago:
Dear Literary Ladies,
How can a writer balance the need for quiet and solitude, with the desire for camaraderie? When I’m alone, working, I feel the need for feedback; and when I’m among colleagues, talking about my work, I feel I’m seeking too much outside validation.
If you don’t keep and guard and mature your force and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. You must find a quiet place near the best companions (not those who admire and wonder at everything one does, but those who know the good things with delight!).
You need reassurance—every artist does—but you need still more to feel “responsible for the state of your conscience” (your literary conscience, we can just now limit that quotation to), and you need to dream your dreams and go on to new and more shining ideals, to be aware of “the gleam” and to follow it; your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia; the city, the country--in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up.
Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality—you can write about life, but never write life itself. And to write and work on this level, we must live on it—we must at least recognize it and defer to it at every step. We must be ourselves, but we must be our best selves.
—Sarah Orne Jewett, in a letter to Willa Cather, ca. 1909
What's the biggest mistake beginning writers make?
Dear Literary Ladies,
What is the biggest mistake or miscalculation aspiring writers make when first start sending their work out? There's usually no feedback, so what's the single most important lesson to keep in mind?
It was during the six years when I was editor of McClure's magazine that I came to have a definite idea about writing. In reading manuscripts submitted to me, I found that 95 per cent of them were written for the sake of the writer never for the sake of the material. The writer wanted to express [her] clever ideas, [her] wit, [her] observations. Almost never did I find a manuscript that was written because a writer loved [her] subject so much [she] had to write about it.
—Willa Cather, from an interview, Omaha World-Herald, 27 November 1921
Am I talented enough to be a successful writer?
A note: Occasionally, I will reprise favorite posts buried deep within this blog. Here's one I really like:
Dear Literary Ladies,
Sometimes I wonder if I really have what it takes to be a successful writer. The desire is definitely there, but I’m not sure I have the talent. For those of us who don’t feel particularly “gifted,” what hope is there?
I didn’t have any particular gift in my twenties. I didn’t have any exceptional qualities. It was the persistence and the great love of my craft which finally became a discipline, which finally made me a craftsman and a writer.
The only reason I finally was able to say exactly what I felt was because, like a pianist practising, I wrote every day. There was no more than that. There was no studying of writing, there was no literary discipline, there was only the reading and receiving of experience. . .
So I would like to remove from everyone the feeling that writing is something that is only done by a few gifted people . . . You shouldn’t think that someone who achieves fulfillment in writing and a certain art in writing is necessarily a person with unusual gifts. I always said it was an unusual stubborness. Nothing prevented me from doing it every night, after every day’s happenings.
Anaïs Nin, “The Personal Life Deeply Lived” (from a series of lectures, 1973)
Do you learn anything from reviews of your books?
Dear Literary Ladies,
Is there anything to be gained by reading reviews of your books? For most authors, it's hard to ignore reviews; first of all, one is curious, but also, with google alerts and such, everything's in your face 24/7. What was your experience with reviews, and did you learn anything of value from them?
Talk of reviews! I subscribed to a clipping bureau and they come in shoals every day. So far I have received sixty-six of which sixty were kind and flattering beyond my highest expectations; of the remaining six two were a mixture of praise and blame, two were contemptuous and positively harsh. However, the nice ones are so much in the majority that these adverse ones do not worry me much. One criticism was correct—it said the ending of the book was “too poor and commonplace” to match the “freshness and originality” of the first two thirds. One denounced the heroine as “impossible, mawkish and tiresome.” . . .
On the other hand a favorable critic called her “charming” “vivid” “original,” “one of the most delightful characters in juvenile fiction” etc. etc. One thing surprises me in the reviews and one thing disappoints me. I am surprised that they seem to take the book so seriously—as if it were meant for grown-up readers and not merely for girls. The disappointment come in this: —I had hoped to learn something from the reviews. I know the book must have faults which its author could not perceive and I expected the reviews would point them out. But there is no agreement. What one critic praises as the most attractive feature in the book another condemns as its greatest fault—and there I am no wiser than before.
—L.M. Montgomery, from a letter, March 19, 1906
Are women authors held to different standards than men?
A reprise of an earlier post—in conjunction with sharing this great YouTube video portraying the Brontë Sisters Power Dolls!
Dear Literary Ladies,
Not one of the top ten books of 2009 according to Publishers Weekly was by a female writer, and only about a third of the books on their extended best book lists were by women. Do you think women writers are (or should be) judged by different standards than men?
To value praise or stand in awe of blame we must respect the source whence the praise and blame proceed, and I do not respect an inconsistent critic. He says, “if Jane Eyre be the production of a woman, she must be a woman unsexed.’
In that case the book is an unredeemed error and should be unreservedly condemned. Jane Eyre is a woman’s autobiography, by a woman it is professedly written. If it is written as no woman would write, condemn it with spirit and decision—say it is bad, but do not eulogise and then detract. I am reminded of The Economist. The literary critic of that paper praised the book if written by a man, and pronounced it ‘odious’ if the work of a woman.
To such critics I would say, ‘To you I am neither man nor woman—I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.’
—Charlotte Brönte, from a letter, August 16, 1849
Isn't there an easy road to writing success?
A note from Nava: Occasionally I will cycle back to favorite posts from the early days of this blog, which are now buried within these pages. Here's one of them:
Dear Literary Ladies,
Like most writers, I want to be published, and truth be told, I’d love to be successful. But I’ve heard so many stories of long years of toil, false starts, and tons of rejection. Isn’t there an easier way? I’d prefer to become an overnight success, earn fame and fortune, and avoid all the struggle.
I can only say to you as I do to the many young writers who ask for advice—There is no easy road to successful authorship; it has to be earned by long and patient labor, many disappointments, uncertainties and trials. Success is often a lucky accident, coming to those who may not deserve it, while others who do have to wait & hope till they have earned it. This is the best sort and the most enduring.
I worked for twenty years poorly paid, little known, and quite without any ambition but to eke out a living, as I chose to support myself and begin to do it at sixteen . . . “Little Women” was written when I was ill, and to prove that I could not write books for girls. The publisher thought it flat, so did I, and neither hoped much for or from it. We found out our mistake, and since then, though I do not enjoy writing “moral tales” for the young, I do it because it pays well.
But the success I value most was making my dear mother happy in her last years & taking care of my family. The rest soon grows wearisome & seems very poor beside the comfort of being an early Providence to those we love.
—Louisa May Alcott, from a letter, 1878
Am I talented enough to be a successful writer?
A note from Nava: Occasionally I will cycle back to favorite posts from the early days of this blog, which are now buried within these pages. Here's one of them:
Dear Literary Ladies,
Sometimes I wonder if I really have what it takes to be a successful writer. The desire is definitely there, but I’m not sure I have the talent. For those of us who don’t feel particularly “gifted,” what hope is there?
I didn’t have any particular gift in my twenties. I didn’t have any exceptional qualities. It was the persistence and the great love of my craft which finally became a discipline, which finally made me a craftsman and a writer.
The only reason I finally was able to say exactly what I felt was because, like a pianist practising, I wrote every day. There was no more than that. There was no studying of writing, there was no literary discipline, there was only the reading and receiving of experience. . .
So I would like to remove from everyone the feeling that writing is something that is only done by a few gifted people . . . You shouldn’t think that someone who achieves fulfillment in writing and a certain art in writing is necessarily a person with unusual gifts. I always said it was an unusual stubborness. Nothing prevented me from doing it every night, after every day’s happenings.
Anaïs Nin, “The Personal Life Deeply Lived” (from a series of lectures, 1973)
How can I develop a distinctive writing style?
Dear Literary Ladies,
How do I go about developing a distinctive writing style—one that will blow editors away, and that readers everywhere will recognize as my unique voice?
I simply don’t believe in style. The style is you. Oh, you can cultivate a style, I suppose, if you like. But I should say it remains a cultivated style. It remains artificial and imposed, and I don’t think it deceives anyone. A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everyone knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself—or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. . . You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is emanation from your own being.
—Katherine Anne Porter, from Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1963
How does a writer face failure gracefully?
Dear Literary Ladies,
So many creative people are afraid to share their work with the world because they can't risk failing. What words of wisdom can you offer to those of us who are willing to take that risk, and to bear inevitable failures with as much grace as possible?
In the working-day life of a professional writer success or failure is very likely to sum up much the same at the end. I don’t mean that failure is as pleasant as success. I’ve known both. Success stimulates the glands, revivifies the spirits, feeds the ego, fills the purse. Failure is a depressing thing to face. The critics rip your play to ribbons, audiences refuse to come to it; reviewers say your book is dull, or trite, readers will not buy it. You read these things, you hear them, you face them as you would face any misfortune, with as good grace as you can summon.
Success or failure, you go on to the next piece of work at hand. There may be a day of brooding or sulking or self-pity or resentment. But next morning there’s coffee and the newspaper and your typewriter, and the world. What’s done is done. Win or lose, success or failure, all’s to do again. If a lawyer or a doctor or a merchant or an engineer fails at a task it is, usually, a matter of private concern. But the failure of a playwright, an actor, a novelist, a musician, is publicly and scathingly announced and broadcast and published over an entire continent and frequently the whole civilized world. Often the terms of that announcement are cruel, personal, or even malicious, though this last is rare. Yet next day or next week, there he is, writing, acting, singing, or playing again. That’s being a craftsman.
—Edna Ferber, from A Peculiar Treasure, 1939
How do you develop the discipline to write?
Dear Literary Ladies,
Some days, I just can’t find the resolve to work. I could blame all sorts of distractions and interruptions, but maybe it’s the discipline I lack. If words don’t flow right away, I’ll get up and find some fine excuse not to stick with it. How did you develop the discipline to sit down and just write?
Ultimately, you have to sit down and start to write. And even if all you do is type out “I can’t write this morning; I can’t write this morning; oh, bother, I can’t write this morning,” that will sometimes prime the pump and get it started. It is a matter of discipline. It is particularly a matter of discipline for a woman who has children or another job.
I think my years in the English boarding school where I had to create my own privacy were also a way of learning to create my own discipline. Now there are mornings when I joyfully sit down at the typewriter. But there are mornings when it is anything but a joy. There are evenings when I go to the piano and the music comes pouring from my fingers. There are evenings when I’m all thumbs and I have to make myself sit there and go over scales and finger exercises before I can play anything. The same thing is true with writing.
—Madeleine L’Engle, from Madeleine L’Engle Herself, 2001
How can I tell if what I'm writing is any good?
Dear Literary Ladies,
How can you guage, in the midst of writing, if your work is any good? It’s so hard to be objective, and see the forest from the trees. Should I compare my writing with that of other writers I admire?
Since we must and do write each in our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another’s work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to and to ask: Is it valid?
—Eudora Welty, from the essay “Words into Fiction,” 1965
What goes through you're mind when you feel blocked?
Dear Literary Ladies,
You seem like such a prolific bunch, but like the rest of us who live by our pen, you likely feel blocked from time to time. How does this funky, uncomfortable, and sometimes scary feeling play out in your mind?
The dark times that came to me as a writer, those sterile periods when it seemed that not only the inkwell but the wells within had dried, were suffered alone. There doubtless have been and are creative writers who have not encountered this dark experience. The sense of aridity, the mind a desert, that usually follows the completion of a book. That sudden panic when every theme or plot your brain has cradled no longer so much as stirs.
No matter how recurring these panics, or how false their alarms, you forget they have ever happened before. They strike new terror with each visitation. This is it! There will be no next book.
But to travel about without the impulse to write is akin to carrying about a secret illness. The divertissements of new scenes and peoples anesthetize for a while, but there is always that low-ebb hour when despair will not be detoured. Where am I running? Why?
You question writers, read autobiographies, scan the spacing between the books of the masters. There is the book-a-year, the one-every-two-years, the one-every-five group, the incredibly prolific Elizabethan writers, the one-book authors, the two-a-year serial operators. All put together, they tell you very little. . .
But this form of author malady has its cure. The relief that comes is as specific as easing the nerve of a throbbing tooth. That hour when the pen begins to vibrate, the ink to rise in the well . . .
—Fannie Hurst (1889-1968), Anatomy of Me, 1980
A note from Nava: Fanny Hurst's name and legacy may have faded, but she was one of the most prolific and financially successful writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps her best known novel (which became a famed film) is Imitaition of Life. F. Scott Fitzgerald was somewhat correct when described her as one of several authors "not producing among 'em one story or novel that will last 10 years." Hurst herself bemoaned her popular success, fearing that her work would be taken less seriously. Still, she enjoyed her fame, fortune, and adventures during the course of her life. Though her star faded, she left some touching thoughts on the writing life in her autobiography and other first-person writings.
How does it feel to achieve a breakaway success?
Dear Literary Ladies,
I dream of the day when all my efforts might come to a completely successful culmination. Like many writers, I've had some modest coups, but who doesn't long for that big breakthrough, a work that shines in the national spotlight, or climbs the bestseller lists? How does it feel when you first realize that your work has achieved this kind of dreamed-about success?
My strongest feeling seems to be incredulity. I can’t believe that such a simple little tale, writing in and of a simple P.E.I. [Prince Edward Island] farming settlement, with a juvenile audience in view, can really have scored out in the busy world. I have had so many nice letters about it and no end of reviews. Most of them were very flattering. Three or four had a rather contemptuous tone and three were really nasty.
One of the reviews says “the book radiates happiness and optimism.” When I think of the conditions of worry and gloom and care under which it was written I wonder at this. Thank God, I can keep the shadows of my life out of my work. I would not wish to darken any other life—I want instead to be a messenger of optimism and sunshine.
. . . It is a joy to feel that my long years of struggle and unaided effort have been crowned with success. But that success has also evoked much petty malice, spite, and jealousy. It does not hurt me, because none of my real friends have been guilty of it. But at times it has given me a sort of nausea with human nature.
— L.M. Montgomery, from The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 1, 1908
Should I write for an audience, or to please myself?
Dear Literary Ladies,
These days, publishers want to know how authors plan to find the audience for their book well before the final draft is submitted. It’s all about marketing and platform, which can be awfully daunting, as well as distracting. Do you think writers should focus on the audience or market as a work is being developed, or does that ultimately make for a less desirable outcome?
Those critics or well-wishers who think that I could have written better than I have are flattering me. Always I have written at the top of my bent at that particular time. It may be that this or that, written five years later or one year earlier, or under different circumstances, might have been better for it. But one writes as the opportunity and the material and the inclination shape themselves. This is certain: I never have written a line except to please myself. I never have written with an eye to what is called the public or the market or the trend or the editor or the reviewer. Good or bad, popular or unpopular, lasting or ephemeral, the words I have put down on paper were the best words I could summon at the time to express the thing I wanted more than anything else to say.
—Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, 1939
Can I produce good writing with serious time constraints?
A reprise from the early days of the Literary Ladies blog:
Dear Literary Ladies,
I always thought that one needed great swathes of time to get any writing done. Now I hear that some esteemed authors worked in short bursts and still produced an enormous amount of brilliant work. I want to hear from one of you. How did you do it, and what did you do with the rest of your time?
I work from two and a half to three hours a day. I don't hold myself to longer hours; if I did, I wouldn't gain by it. The only reason I write is because it interests me more than any other activity I've ever found. I like riding, going to operas and concerts, travel in the west; but on the whole writing interests me more than anything else. If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die. I make it an adventure every day. I get more entertainment from it than any I could buy, except the privilege of hearing a few great musicians and singers. To listen to them interests me as much as a good morning's work.
For me, the morning is the best time to write. During the other hours of the day I attend to my housekeeping, take walks in Central Park, go to concerts, and see something of my friends. I try to keep myself fit, fresh: one has to be in as good form to write as to sing. When not working, I shut work from my mind.
— Willa Cather, from a 1921 interview
