My Two Greatest Writing Lessons
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Around 1986, I interned at the L.A. Weekly. This was pre-... well, pretty much pre-everything. Wednesday was layout day; the entire production crew was quarantined for the duration. Some of them were locked in a separate room of typesetting machines (you read that correctly) transcribing articles written on "type-writers" (these were loud and could not play MP3s) which were then spat out in sheets to be x-actoed into columns, waxed on the back (the original "galleys" were quite hairy) then pasted up--yes, physically pasted up-- onto large graph paper boards. Each weekly issue was a stack of these paste-up boards that was roughly waist high when hauled off to the printers. Production took place within a cordoned-off phalanx of drafting tables manned by the Weekly's Oz-like flying monkeys.Trendy, counter-culture flying monkeys with fashionable eyewear and Black Flag t-shirts.
Yes, kids, that's how it was back in the day. Bowler hats and monocles were in fashion, everybody was named Thadeus or Ambrose or Rowland, and if you missed the 8:00 a.m. dirigible to Silverlake then you were pretty well screwed.
But I digress.
Michael Ventura, one of the paper's founders and an essayist whom I greatly admired, had never kept copies of his articles that he had been writing since the birth of the paper. I was tasked with filling out requisition slips for every goddamned issue ever printed and waiting for the mouth-breathing homunculus at the archives desk to drag his knuckles down to the cellar and bring 'em up for me, in six-month heaps. I would then make duplicates of Ventura's articles on our steam-powered copy machine (Professor Peppercorn's Magical Clonerator... state of the art shit). Every day for an entire summer. I was a young man with a dream, and permanent damage to some chromosomes (I thought the lead apron was a joke).
But I digress. Again.
Years later, I sent him a letter (Michael Ventura, not Professor Peppercorn), asking him if he would be so kind as to look at some of my work. Several months went by, but he did reply with a longhand note on a small piece of 5x7 spiral notebook paper that I still have tucked in my hardcover copy of Night Time Losing Time. I regard the following as one of my two greatest writing lessons, ever:
12-28-87
Dear Craig Clevenger,
Being a writer means that you spend many years alone in a room doing work that no one on earth can assure the worth of. I began writing seriously at 14. I was 29 when my first piece was published in a small bi-weekly in Texas. I was 32 before I began to earn even a subsistence wage at my work. 40 before my first, and still only, book was published. There are no short-cuts, there's no help, there's nothing you can be sure of except your own passion for the work. All that can really help you at this stage are experiences worth writing about. You must ask your own life the questions you'd like to ask me (including the technical, literary questions). And your life may answer back, "Live me more deeply, and you'll know." It is not always a problem of how one writes, but how one lives. With enough work, the writing will follow.
You've already made one likely mistake- you went to college. It will probably take a decade to rectify that.
Good luck.
(signed)
Michael Ventura
Once more: "It is not always a problem of how one writes, but how one lives." Twenty years later, I finally get it.
Oh, my other greatest writing lesson ever came a couple of years after when, at long last, I had the chance to attend a reading by Ariel Dorfman. When I met him during the signing, I introduced myself and he asked me what I did. I said, "Uh, I'm a writer. I guess. You probably hear that a lot, though." I was twenty-three that year and around eight-inches tall that moment. He smiled, signed my book, shook my hand and that was that. Outside, I read the inscription:
To Craig, who writes. These words from someone who tries to write.
Word.
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Eric Nichols says:
Adrenalin
Dear Craig:
Probably nobody on Earth understands free enterprise like the freelance writer...at least the American type. We choose to work without a net because we know the rewards of fear, horror, and risk are worth every lean moment. We like the adrenalin rush that can only come from doing something nobody has done before.
I understand French writers get government subsidies, which includes footing the bill for paper, ink, and presumably these days, hard drives and CDs. However, like everything else in life, with shekels come shackles. I can't imagine the French government gleefully subsidizing an author who might be critical of the French government (not that there could CONCEIVABLY be anything to criticize, of course).
I was attempting to explain free enterprise to a Frenchman once, and the experience was akin to reciting Shakespeare to a fire hydrant. Let's call him "Maurice" to protect the guilty. Somehow we got on the subject of road maintenance. French people foot a staggering tax burden to maintain their roads, which, admittedly, are fine roads. Maurice, however, was under the impression that the government actually did the maintenance. I said, "No, I've never seen a government bureaucrat running a steam-roller (or, more aptly, for us Alaskans, a snowplow). The government merely redistributes the money to someone who DOES know how to run a steamroller, and I can guarantee you , it's not another bureaucrat." I then directed Maurice's attention to my own situation. I live on an unimproved stretch of road...basically a ribbon of dirt. My few neighbors and I LIKE our ribbon of dirt, because it's not going to become a thoroughfare...the potholes do wonders to keep the riff-raff out. I would prefer not to pay for someone to pave his road who DOESN'T like potholes. If he wants a nice red carpet, he's more than welcome to pay someone to improve the road in his neck of the woods. And that's exactly how they do it around here. Now, I do like to have my driveway plowed in the winter. I don't have a snowplow, but there's a toothless guy three houses down who does have one, and he's in his glory shoveling snow around with his testosterone-fired pickup. A couple of times a year I pay the toothless guy $35 bucks to plow my driveway. I'm happy, because my snow is gone and the toothless guy is delighted, because he gets to race his pickup around my yard and ends up with an extra 75 bucks to do whatever he wants with it (which obviously does not include visiting the dentist).
When I described this transaction to Maurice, I could literally hear the blood trickle out of his head, as he blanched at the thought of this transaction having occurred without any government involvement whatsoever.
The good news is, after a little more discussion, there was a hint of a glimmer of understanding in Maurice's eyes. Hope springs eternal.
What does this have to do with writing? EVERYTHING.
Eric
Heather Goyette says:
I Just Missed Paste-Ups
- Heather Goyette, redroom.com
Shana McLean Moore says:
Thank you
Thank you so much for sharing that letter with us-- it's something we all know, but can't be reminded enough of, either.
By the way, I laughed out loud at: "Yes, kids, that's how it was back in the day. Bowler hats and monocles were in fashion, everybody was named Thadeus or Ambrose or Rowland, and if you missed the 8:00 a.m. dirigible to Silverlake then you were pretty well screwed."
Shana McLean Moore, redroom.com
Tony DuShane says:
Love the letter. He nails
Love the letter. He nails it.
Walt Buchanan says:
"Oh, How I Miss Typesetting and Pasteup"
...just an additional comment on the good old days of the waxer and x-acto knives...
even moreso, I miss my gigantic photostat camera...we shared many a moment in the old darkroom!
Robb Todd says:
Exact-o
Printing this out, will slice it up with an x-acto, wax the back, and stick it on my wall. Great column, great lessons.