The Writer's Perspective by Maria Schneider

Hi Writers,
Please excuse me for abruptly ending My Archival Wanderings without proper closure, but I have a wonderful excuse: Our managing editor (and contributor to this blog) Kara Gebhardt Uhl had a baby this weekend. Congratulations Kara!

I'll keep posting My Archival Wanderings occasionally, when the spirit moves me.

But just to let you know, I'm now serving as de facto managing editor in addition to my regular gig as the Editor of Writer's Digest. And well, I'm busy. Really, really busy. The managing editor is the key person on staff responsible for all of the editorial trains coming in on time, so to speak.

One of the responsibilities I've had to take over for now is overseeing our general submissions including a two-foot high stack of good-old U.S. mail queries and submissions. Well, to make a long story short, I've had to confront how truly inefficient this system is.

Now because Writer's Digest has been taking mail queries since the days of the pony express, this wasn't an easy decision to make, but I've decided to change our editorial guidelines to state that we're now exclusively accepting e-mail queries. You can read our updated submissions guidelines here.

Here's the list of pros and cons I made to come to this decision:
Pros:
• E-mail queries are faster and more efficient to process
• E-mail queries save writers money (stamps and stationery)
• E-mail queries are better for the environment
• E-mail queries won't make me the victim of a tragic envelope-licking accident

Cons:
• Hmmm...can't think of anything to write here

OK, good decision or bad? Feel free to yell at me in ALL CAPS!!! I can take it--just don't mail it.

Keep Writing,
Maria

publishing news and views | the writing life | Writer's Digest news

4/2/2008 4:00:37 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [9]

Thursday, March 27, 2008

My Archival Wanderings: W. Somerset Maugham
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
Today, I’m sharing--from our world-renowned archives (see my previous posts)--an excerpt from a piece W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage author) wrote entitled “Write About What You Know” from the December 1943 issue of Writer's Digest.

The fact is that when you write about things you don’t know, you fall into ludicrous errors. Of course, a writer cannot have a firsthand knowledge of everything, but his only safety is to find out everything he can about the subject he proposes to treat. Sometimes he thinks himself to fake things; but to do that with plausibility needs skill and experience, and it isn’t really worth doing, for it is seldom completely convincing; and if the writer cannot convince his readers successfully, then he is done.

Now, the only way I have ever discovered he can do that is to tell the truth, as he sees it, about what he knows; and the point of this statement lies in the words as he sees it. There are no new subjects… but if a writer has personality, he will see the old subjects in a personal way, and that will give them interest. He may try his best to be objective, but his temperament, his attitude toward life, are his own and color his view of things.

So, with all due respect, what do you think? Do you, like W. Somerset Maugham, believe writers should stick to writing what they know?

Keep Writing,
Maria

Writer's Digest news

3/27/2008 5:40:52 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [6]

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

My Archival Wanderings: Gay Talese
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
Here’s a very recent entry to the WD archives, excerpted from one of my favorite interviewees of all time—Gay Talese. This is from an interview I conducted with Talese and it appeared in the August 2006 issue of Writer’s Digest.

If you were a young journalist starting out today, what would you be doing?
Well, I’d be doing what I’m doing, which is to try to write really well and trust that there are people who appreciate writing that’s very well done. My father, who was a craftsman with a needle and thread, said, “If you do good work, you’ll find that there are people who are going to support it.” Now, you’re not going to get rich necessarily; I mean, maybe you will, but if you’re a craftsman or an artist, you may not be recognized right away. But there are going to be enough people around who are going to appreciate the craft, who are going to appreciate quality work. So if you make a beautiful pair of shoes, a beautiful dress, a beautiful painting, there are some people who are going to have the eye and discernment to say, “Ah, this is quality work.” They’re going to buy it and appreciate it. They’re going to tell you they understand why you took the time, because it’s worth it to do quality work.

Keep Writing,
Maria

Writer's Digest news

3/26/2008 9:29:35 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [3]

Monday, March 24, 2008

Our New Website!
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
It's my great pleasure to announce the launch of our new and vastly improved writersdigest.com website. The new site is light-years ahead of our former website in terms of navigability, searchability and overall design. Check it out and have fun with it. We're going to start posting new content on a daily basis, so you'll want to check in frequently.

If you've linked to this blog or any other writersdigest.com blog, there are new URLs. This one is now: http://blog.writersdigest.com/writersperspective.

Also, on another happy note, there's a wonderful article about Writer's Digest running via the AP wire. Thanks to AP writer Hillel Italie for his thoughtful portrayal of our legacy magazine.

The AP story is running all over the place. Here are a few of the links:

International Herald Tribune

Yahoo! News

MSNBC

The Boston Globe

San Francisco Chronicle

The Town Talk (Louisiana)

The Oakland Press (Michigan)

Real Cities (Kansas)

I'd love to know if the story runs in your hometown newspaper. Please leave me a comment.
And I'll get back to my archival wandering tomorrow as scheduled.

Lots of great things happening!

Keep Writing,
Maria

Writer's Digest news

3/24/2008 10:52:33 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [3]

Thursday, March 20, 2008

My Archival Wanderings: Kurt Vonnegut
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
I was heartbroken when one of my favorite writers of all time, Kurt Vonnegut, died last year. He was a real friend to writers and he granted several interviews to Writer's Digest over the years.

In my archival wanderings, it was especially rewarding to come across this WD interview with Vonnegut (from the November 1985 issue of Writer's Digest; by Michael Schumacher).

It was difficult to choose just one short excerpt because Vonnegut was/is infinitely quotable, but here's one I think especially pertinent to writers. Enjoy.

WD: How do you see yourself?
VONNEGUT: I’ve customarily responded to life as I’ve seen something that made me very much want to write about it—not that it made me very much want to get into the writing profession.

WD: You’ve said that you have to have an ax to grind—
VONNEGUT: Well, you’ve got to have something to write about. I’ve taught writing at Iowa, Harvard, and City College in New York. One big problem is that people don’t have anything on their minds. They’re not concerned—which isn’t to say they need an ax to grind. Usually, a person with an ax to grind is kind of a crank of some kind, or a partisan of some kind. So I reject the ax to grind. But you must be passionate about some aspect of life, because it’s a high-energy performance to create something the size of a book. It takes energy and concentration—not an ax to grind. You should have something on your mind. You should have opinions on things. You should care about things.

So keep caring about things.
And Keep Writing,
Maria

Writer's Digest news

3/20/2008 3:13:03 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [6]

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

My Archival Wanderings: Upton Sinclair
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
It would be an understatement to say that I learn something new every day that I comb through the WD archives, and today was no exception.

Today’s exhibit: an excerpt from a 1938 essay by Upton Sinclair. A prolific nonfiction author of his day, and—to go along with our running theme for the past few posts—a social crusader.

Did you know Upton Sinclair self-published nearly all of his work? Apparently he had to because of the confrontational subject matter of his writings—exposing injustices and other inhumane activity.

Anyway, here is an inspiring excerpt from his essay entitled: "Changes I have Seen," which expounds on Sinclair's writer as social crusader belief.

Now, again, America is taking heart, and dreaming of some kind of society in which there can be security and freedom for all the people—something which not even the rich can enjoy today. There are millions now who do not believe in money-accumulation as the end and goal of human life. Good reason, you say, because they have no chance to succeed at it. But bitterness about one’s personal fate is the first step to thinking and trying to understand a world in which one-third of the population is condemned to misery, no matter how hard they work and scheme and struggle.

In short people are reading and thinking and talking about economics today. New writers are appearing, and fighting for the right of independence, and to say what they think about the system of exploitation, which has thrown some ten to twelve millions permanently out of work, and is making it necessary for us to heap up a deficit of four billions of dollars a year to keep the ratio of unemployment from doubling itself. Thoughtful books and honest books, fighting books for the cause of social justice are pouring from the presses, both here and in England, and in all the countries where freedom to think and to speak survives. I believe that America and the other democratic lands are soon to see a new birth of freedom, and I believe that the literary critics of that happier time will look back upon this age and call it the time of golden opportunity in the history of literature.

Among those who read these words are young writers who will thrill to the idea that their books may be read and their names be listed in that roll of honor. Get something vital to say, and learn to say it with power and appeal. You may help to make the future of humanity happy and noble.

How's that for inspiration...
Keep Writing,
Maria

Writer's Digest news

3/18/2008 11:51:02 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [3]

Monday, March 17, 2008

My Archival Wanderings: Erica Jong
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
Welcome to my wild rumpus through the Writer's Digest archives, in which I'm posting an excerpt each day throughout March.

Today's exhibit: a circa June 1981 WD Interview with poet/bestselling novelist Erica Jong, who had no Fear of Flying (interview by John L. Kern).

WD: What are the differences in disciplines between writing poetry and prose?

JONG: They are very different and they don't conflict with each other. There is a sense that poetry comes from the intuitive part of the brain. It is much more pleasurable and euphoric than writing a novel. You feel that you are tapping into the source of unconscious creativity. Nearly every poet that you talk to will tell you that it is, in a sense, an automatic process.

Writing a novel is a much more conscious thing. It's a daily job. You go to your desk at nine in the morning and work until three or four. I would say that one day out of ten you feel euphoric and the words just fly off of your fingers. The other nine days you wonder how the hell you are going to move your heroine from one place to another and what adventures will take place along the way. You find that a good part of your day is taken up inventing and devising and that most of the time you don't think it is any good.

Join me tomorrow when I realize why my job description listed: "must be able to lift 20 lbs."

Keep Writing,
Maria

Writer's Digest news

3/17/2008 3:56:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [3]

Friday, March 14, 2008

My Archival Wanderings: Eudora Welty
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
Welcome to my month-long journey through the WD archives, in which I'm posting (almost) daily offerings from the history of our magazine. There's no rhyme or reason to my choices.

As one loyal reader pointed out, there's been a lack of female voices so far. And sadly, my wanderings have led me to conclude there was a lack of attention given to women writers up until the ‘70s in the magazine—a sign of the times, I suppose.

Ironically, I was able to find a wonderful essay by Eudora Welty, published in the February 1970 issue of Writer's Digest, entitled "Must the Novelist Crusade?" It's about the writer's social responsibility, especially in regards to writing about racism and other forms of prejudice.

Here's a short but entirely lovely excerpt to ponder:

And so finally I think we need to write with love. Not in self-defense, not in hate, not in the mood of instruction, not in rebuttal, in any kind of militance, or in apology, but with love. Not in exorcisement, either, for this is to make the reader bear a thing for you.
Neither do I speak of writing forgivingly; out of love you can write with straight fury. It is the source of the understanding that I speak of; it's this that determines its nature and its reach.

What do you think? Should writers be social crusaders?
Keep Writing,
Maria

Writer's Digest news

3/14/2008 11:43:22 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [8]

Thursday, March 13, 2008

My Archival Wanderings: Mary Hemingway
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
Managing Editor Kara Gebhart Uhl here—Maria and Brian are wrapped up in HTML coding right now, gussying up our new website for its upcoming launch. So I took a break from reading Your Story entries to find today’s exhibit from the WD archives, a fascinating 1972 interview with Mary Hemingway who gave up a successful journalism career when she married Ernest Hemingway. I’ve skipped around a bit in order to share with you some of the more interesting questions—and answers.

“An Afternoon With Mary Hemingway”

by Marjorie Vandervelde.

Interviewer: Didn’t you ever hesitate to give up your own writing career?

(Mary Hemingway punched the air with her cigaret-holding fist.) Women take their careers too seriously. Don’t they know it is a great privilege to give their men affection, support, admiration? These things are more important than any woman’s career.

…

Interviewer: What were a couple of your assignments?

Mary Hemingway: I did a cover story for Time Magazine about Winston Churchill. Later, I covered the “Blitz.”

Interviewer: Wasn’t it difficult for a girl to be covering a man’s war?

Mary Hemingway: If you mean was it a matter of flirting to get stories, let me tell you it was not. Stories cam the hard way: by using your head, working hard, and being more alert than your competition. And, by staying healthy! It took plenty of hard work to cover the Munich Agreement. And, Hitler’s march into Czechoslovakia!

…

Interviewer: The occasional writing you did on your own, after you were married … what did Ernest think of it?

Mary Hemingway: Ernest liked my writing. And he approved of my doing it. Of course he also approved of a wife who was, above everything else, a wife.

As a writer I think it would be extremely difficult to marry a well-known writer and give up my own career in order to support his work. (Perhaps this is why my husband is a web developer.) Yet often, the writer-writer partnership works. Check out this 2002 New York Times article, “Making Books; Two Writers Under One Roof”

Are you married to a writer? Or has your partner given up their dream of writing to support your work? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Kara

Writer's Digest news

3/13/2008 2:36:21 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [3]

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

My Archival Wanderings: Jack Kerouac
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
Today’s exhibit from the WD archives, typing which put me in the mood to write very stream-of-conscious and use lots of run on sentences, is by everyone’s favorite beatnik, Jack Kerouac, from the January 1962 issue of Writer’s Digest; so here it is, dig it man:

Are Writers Made or Born?

by Jack Kerouac
Writers are made, for anybody who isn’t illiterate can write; but geniuses of the writer art like Melville, Whitman or Thoreau are born. Let’s examine the word “genius.” It doesn’t mean screwiness or eccentricity or excessive “talent.” It is derived from the Latin word gignere (to beget) and a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before. Nobody but Melville could have written Moby Dick, not even Whitman or Shakespeare. Nobody but Whitman could have conceived, originated and written Leaves of Grass; Whitman was born to write a Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write a Moby Dick. “It ain’t whatcha do,” Sy Oliver and James Young said, “it’s the way atcha do it.” Five thousand writing class students who study “required reading” can put their hand to the legend of Faustus but only one Marlowe was born to do it the way he did.
I always get a laugh to hear Broadway wiseguys talk about “talent” and “genius,” but the genius, the originating force, really belongs to Brahms; the violin virtuoso is simply a talented interpreter—in other words, a “Talent.” Or you’ll hear people say that so-and-so is a “major writer” because of his “large talent.” There can be no major writer without original genius. Artists of genius, like Jackson Pollock, have painted things that have never been seen before. Anybody who’s seen his immense Samapattis of color has no right to criticize his “crazy method” of splashing and throwing and dancing around.
Take the case of James Joyce: people said he “wasted” his “talent” on the stream of consciousness style, when in fact he was simply born to originate it. How would you like to spend your old age reading books about contemporary life written in the pre-Joycean style of, say, Ruskin, or William Dean Howells, or Taine? Some geniuses come with heavy feet and march solemnly forward like Dreiser, yet no one ever wrote about that America of his as well as he. Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through—originality.

As Kerouac writes at the end:
“But it ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”

Keep Writing,
Maria

Writer's Digest news

3/12/2008 4:52:10 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [2]

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

My Archival Wanderings: Ray Bradbury
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
Welcome to the archives of March, in which I'm posting an excerpt a day (more or less) throughout March.

Today's exhibit: A brief but exquisite excerpt from a February 1976 WD interview with science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury (interview by Robert Jacobs). Enjoy.

WD: You're terribly prolific, but a lot of writers produce one book in a lifetime. Would you advise young writers to spend all their time polishing one piece or to go for quantity?

BRADBURY: It simply follows that quantity produces quality. Only if you do a lot will you ever be any good. If you do very little, you'll never have quality of idea or quality of output. The excitement and creativity comes from a whole lot of doing; hoping you'll suddenly be struck by lightning. If you only write a few things, you're doomed. The history of literature is the history of prolific people. I always say to students, give me four pages a day, every day. That's three or four hundred thousand words a year. Most of that will be bilge, but the rest ... It will save your life!

Keep Writing,
Maria

Writer's Digest news

3/11/2008 2:29:10 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [4]

Friday, March 07, 2008

My Archival Wanderings: Stephen King on drinking
Posted by maria

Hi Writers,
You may be wondering how I’ve been choosing these daily excerpts I’ve been posting from the Writer’s Digest archives. Here’s how it happens: Brian (the Brain of Q&Q) spins me around and wherever I’m pointing at the end of my spinning is the year I choose from. It’s kind of like medieval divining or literary spin the bottle. But I digress…

Today’s exhibit: a wonderful, yet somewhat disturbing piece of ephemera circa 1978 (October). This is pulled from a feature called “Booze & the Writer.”

I’m not sure we could get away with doing this today: A questionnaire about the drinking habits of writers was sent out to a wide range of famous authors. Dozens of candid responses were featured in this piece, including responses from Erica Jong, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, James A. Michener, Gay Talese and Michael Crichton among others.

This was Stephen King’s response [remember this is 1978]:
Drinking Habits: Somewhere in that great middle ground between medium and heavy. Beer. A lot of beer.

Hangouts: I drink mostly at home. When I’m in Boston, I drink at the Baseball Tavern across from Fenway Park. When I’m in New York, I like to go up to the top of the Beekman Tower. But mostly at home.

Drinking Companions: I like to drink alone. I never get ugly when I drink too much, I never bore myself with a lot of dull conversation, and I have never yet invited myself to step outside. Otherwise, I like to go drinking with my editor, Bill Thompson. He also never gets ugly, never wants to lay on a lot of boring raps, and has never invited me outside. Of course, he spent a lot of time down South and as a result drinks a lot of very strange drinks, but this is acceptable. After all, the Civil War has been over a long time.

On Writing and Drinking: Yes, there’s an affinity between drinking and writing. You can see the connection in the lives of Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, and William (“Don’t ask me what that sentence means, I wrote it when I was drunk”) Faulkner. I like to write when I’m drunk. I’ve never had any particular problem writing that way, although I never wrote anything that was worth a dime while under the influence of pot or any of the hallucinogenics. I think that alcohol is an extremely benign poison. I wrote one novel, The Shining, that was more or less about the terrors of living with the destructive drunk —and I have known one of two in my lifetime—but I have never been particularly destructive while under the influence myself. Writers who drink constantly do not last long, but a writer who drinks carefully is probably a better writer. It may be that the main effect of the grain or the grape on the creative personality is that necessary sense of newness and freshness, that feeling that the world of sense and feeling can be grasped. Those are feelings we tend to lose as we grow older. I know that as well as anyone, I think, because I’m only 30—and you tend to start losing that crazy and wonderful sense of cocksureness sometime around 25 … at about the same time that you discover that sex may not be the only possible definition of living. Viewed in that way, drinking is a crutch. But nobody gets through life without a crutch or two. And basically, writers are no different from anyone else. If I were a plumber, my drinking habits would probably be the same.

Fascinating. What do you think about the stereotype of the drinking writer?

Join me next Monday for my latest spin through the archives.

Keep Writing,
Maria

blogs and online writing

3/7/2008 10:40:26 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [11]

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