January 2012
9 posts
Guys. OK. I’m no oracle here, but I’m fairly certain I’ve unlocked the secret to ultimate writerly productivity: yoga pants, a Goliath-sized wool sweater, the ugliest socks ever manufactured, day-old makeup and M83.
No additions nor substitutions.
“If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there...”
– William Styron (via theparisreview)
I just took a risk that I wouldn’t have taken if I didn’t have confidence in my writing. I’m not the kind of person who asks for much, but, if you have some knuckle-mobility to spare, keep your fingers crossed for me, please.
Will You Remember
A bizarre feeling for which one never prepares herself, because she doesn’t exactly anticipate it coming: elimination of all traces of a character trait you’d built in from before the silly conglomeration of words you haphazardly threw on a page one night even became the skeleton of a novel. It’s more of a misfit detail than a character trait, I suppose, but it isn’t...
“At a certain point, while you’re failing miserably, you do find a kind of engine...”
– Jeffrey Eugenides at Le Conversazioni, 2006 via the New York Times Magazine’s 6th Floor blog
Infinite Jest, pages 692-698, Back Bay Books 10th anniversary paperback edition. OR The most flawless pages of fiction I’ve ever read.
Convincing Ourselves In Sleep
One a.m., wide awake. I’m slipping back into an old pattern of not sleeping again, my body not physically able to feel tired at night, though in the mornings I can barely get through a paragraph in my book without my lids going heavy. When the sleep does come, it’s staccato and sweat-drenched.
I spend the hours horizontal but awake writing stories in my head, future plot lines for my...
“‘Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around...”
– Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
“Writers are often ashamed at who they are and what they do. Other people are out...”
– Chuck Wendig, “25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now)”
December 2011
6 posts
The Light That's Growing From the Ground
Wow. A hell of a lot can change in a year. But I’ve come to learn that if you’re doing things right, the change doesn’t stop when you switch out your calendar. Keep healing. Keep growing.
…just know I found a better place to rest my head.
MT
Three For the Road
Still with roughly six-hundred pages left in Infinite Jest, I’m now fully-aware that I won’t be finishing any more books this year. So, before I get lost in the time-sucking insanity that is the next couple of weeks, I wanted to remark on the books that’ve made the most impact on me this year, and which chord they struck. I’m not one for year-end countdowns—I’m...
“I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a...”
– Jonathan Franzen (via libraryland)
“After completing a book you won’t be the person you were before trying to...”
– Sean Ferrell, “Pathetic email.”
This morning, I got in line at my daily coffee stop, roughly fifteen people ahead of me in the queue. About standard. My attention was in my book as I heard the woman behind me sigh, “This is going to take forever,” gesturing to move out of line and leave. She was a tourist—I knew it much before catching a glimpse of her California license as she paid.
“It...
November 2011
5 posts
Today is shaping up to be an all-around You Have to Be Kidding Me kind of day, but when you start the morning standing next to someone on the F train who is not only also reading Infinite Jest, but is on the exact same page—the exact same footnote—as you…well, how do you expect the rest of the day to go?
I mean. Really.
“…in our desire to think great things about our IT ‘cloud’,...”
– Simon Ings on The Brain is Wider Than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don’t Work in a Complex World by Bryan Appleyard in the Guardian
Reversible Souls
Allow me a banality for a second: Things are rarely what they seem.
While I’m still working on substantial revisions on the novel, I started research for a new project. “Project.” Sparing the details for now, I ran across someone who was too fascinating not to talk to, despite it not being the right time to get myself engrossed in something else. But I followed my instincts and...
“Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose...”
– Infine Jest by David Foster Wallace
(Is it okay to start dreaming again?) (When do I know, exactly?)
October 2011
7 posts
Des Lignes Parallèles
When one spends as much time with literary fiction as I do, she’s bound to question what her own work is “about.” Or at least I am, and certainly have been since starting this novel. When caught up reading stories about history and war, social conflict, political commentary through previously-unimaginable worlds, I sometimes find myself asking, “Is my plot substantial...
Today’s toast is to the kindness of strangers who allow us writers to enter their lives before we’re invited. (And another toast to us for taking risks to venture in at all.)
Extremely Deliberate and Incredibly Curated
First: Hi, new followers. There are many of you and I’m overwhelmed and humbled and excited. That reply button is enabled for a reason, so please use it and tell me about you.
Next. This week has turned into one long conversation about craft. Wednesday, I saw Adam Ross speak about Mr. Peanut on a panel at Housing Works. I read the novel earlier this year, and by the end, couldn’t...
Have Heart
Tonight, I hit 80,000 words—a number that I haven’t been able to reach since I started this major revision months ago. Of course, a quantitative measurement isn’t always the best one (hell, most of us could stand to lose a few thousand characters, though that’s another conversation), but as someone who’s been in the process of adding missing pieces, I’m marking...
“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not...”
– Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Things that feel ridiculously good to say, Part 1: I am on editorial deadline for fiction.
November first, you’re not even going to know what hit you.
You Know You Have a Permanent Piece
Raging Bibliohalism: Speaking of tattoos, I think it’s groovy that you get a different tattoo for each book you write. Is that an extension of the story, in some way? Or is it an act of closure?
Joshua Mohr: Probably a little of both. I’m pretty tattooed and to me, human skin is our cave wall. How do you want to decorate it? What are the pictures/hieroglyphics/words that speak to what...
September 2011
7 posts
“Being in love is like leaning on a broken reed. It is to be precariously...”
– Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel by Hilary Thayer Hamann
Chicken and Egg
What came first: the kindred or the momentum?
I’m currently in the best situation I could ask for: I’m feeling the heartbeat of what I’m both reading and writing. As my revisions have been taking shape and picking up speed, I’ve also had my nose in a book (Hilary Thayer Hamann’s Anthology of an American Girl) whose voice and style has resonated with me more than...
“It was no longer a surprise to him that every one of the women he met was a...”
– “Madeline” by Sam Allingham, n+1
I’m beginning to realize why, this time around, my writing is feeling more substantial. And it has everything to do with honesty.
1 tag
“I’m more surprised more of us aren’t crazy. I didn’t see...”
– Adrienne Walsh (FDNY), as told to Chris Smith in New York magazine’s “9/11 One Day, Ten Years” issue
August 2011
7 posts
Creepy literary nuances, take 1: This morning while getting dressed I listened to Slate’s Audio Book Club discussion about Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, in which both Goon Squad (obviously) and Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story are discussed at length. About twenty minutes later when I boarded my morning train, I sat down across from a woman reading Goon...
“For a long time I thought I would be a philosopher too. To be a philosopher...”
– The Dubious Salvation of Jack V. by Jacques Strauss
And Your Body It Leaks Like a
One of the many things I’ve found unique to New York is the effect it has on the notion of private versus public spaces. In a city so vast and so fast, rarely do many of us have a moment to carve out a private place, and many simply forget that the option exists at all.
While crossing Broadway at 42nd Street today during my lunch run, I walked past a tall, thin blonde woman on the phone;...
““But why you asked me about the tightrope walker?”
“Because...”
– The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley
What It Is We See (What Is It We See?)
While getting dressed this morning, I streamed ABC National Radio’s The Book Show, which tackled the fact versus fiction debate—why readers gravitate towards non-fiction versus fiction, and what about fiction turns off readers. (Philip Roth recently said he stopped reading fiction because he “wised up.” So there’s that.)
There are about a million different,...
a) A semicolon bridges two separate-yet-related clauses.
b) A semicolon-obsessed girl in transition—in her life and her writing—is searching to bridge her past and present into one fluid thought.
c) Coincidence? No; in this case, I think not.
July 2011
7 posts
Overhearing snippets of conversation between strangers that seem like they should exist only in fiction is like a sporadic, surprise Christmas to a writer.
“Hey, I have a question. You know when you see someone in a dress and you’re like, ‘That dress was made for them?’”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Well, when you walked in I thought to myself, She just looks...
Four Parts; Part Four
This weekend, I got my voice back.
Funny how the simple ritual of perching oneself on a barstool in a Brooklyn cafe (Laptopistan, if you will) and opening a document can mean so much. In short: I’ve not only started a totally fresh round of revisions—approaching, let alone working on the manuscript for the first time in months—but I see the story, the book, the characters, the...
“So, why aren’t books dead yet? It helps that e-books are booming…But that...”
– Bill Keller, “Let’s Ban Books, or at Least Stop Writing Them,” New York Times, July 13, 2011
“And if you don’t know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away...”
– Your Voice in My Head: A Memoir by Emma Forrest
On Your Mark
After a weekend of ingesting so much aspartame that I can feel my insides glowing (such is the case for a non-drinker during a holiday), my half-awake self Tweeted the following at ridiculous a.m.:
@meredithturits: July goal: Because productivity > cancer, for every diet soda I drink, I owe 200 words of prose. (Related: Newest novel may be done by Aug.)
I’m not sure if this is the...
June 2011
11 posts
An Even Keel
On a Brooklyn-bound F around nine last night, I sat next to a couple with a baby in a stroller, who were talking to the people across from them, also a couple, also with a baby in a stroller. The entire ride from Fourteenth Street to back to Brownstone Brooklyn, they talked about babies: Whether the other couple had wanted to know the sex in advance, if they were planning to expand their families,...