Where is Your Batcave?

This post first appeared on the Queens Council on the Arts blog

my desk at the Writers Room

Are you an urban ninja?

If you live in a jungle, you will need to know where to find food and shelter.  If you spend time underwater, it is helpful to know where the coral reefs are.  No matter what world you are a citizen of, your survival depends on your knowledge of the environment and, more importantly, how to navigate it.

I am a writing machine.  I may appear to be a slightly flustered nonprofit executive director en route to another meeting but no! – do not be fooled by my facade.  Its my way of gathering material.

And what I need in my environment is a place to write.  Enter the Writers Room, an urban writing colony on Broadway and that is a picture of the desk where some of my best writing emerges.

Feel like taking a coffee break?  Slip into the kitchen and sip your brew while talking a little shop with other writers.  How about a nap?  There are several large inviting recliners and a couch where you can relax by a large window with a great view of the city.

This is one of my secret gardens of bliss in New York City.  If you are a writer who needs a place to write, check out the Writers Room.

Katherine’s field office

Meet before you pitch

If you have a merry-go-round of meetings like I often do, here’s another way to get off the ride and regroup.  This is the time Katherine, my consultant extraordinaire, and I spend a lot of time sitting with legislators doing a one two punch round of funding request pitches.  Clearly, we needed a bull pen of some kind to get our game together.  Katherine found this little place on the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway tucked in the back of a Starbucks.  It is great place to get it together.

This is a city with a lot going on all the time.  If you are part of it, you will need to stop the pinball with your flippers every so often and halt the game, take a deep breath, take in the moment -

- and then let the game resume.  When you are ready.

You need places like these.

photo by Leandro

Where is your batcave?

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Hoong Yee

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How To Write The Great American Sentence

photo by knowsnotmuch

Make each one matter

A sentence is a literary thought.  It is a tiny universe that reveals enough to convince you of its reality and entices you to explore further.  What is not said is as important as what is said, for that is the space the author leaves for the reader.

Readers skim.  Make sure whereever their eyes land, they will land on a great sentence whether you are writing a ghost story or a grant.  I keep reminding myself that great writing happens, one sentence at a time.

Be a verbal ninja.  Wield words like weapons.

Be brief

Strunk & White taught me to cut out unnecessary words.  Adjectives, adverbs.  Use nouns and verbs.  Powerful ones.  Where one word suffices, use only one word.  This advice is harder than it sounds.  How much easier it is to convey the image in your mind through miles of descriptive narrative.  Much more difficult to strip all that away and to trust the reader to use her imagination to create her own image.

To be brief is to be bold.

Study great models

David Foster Wallace

I read an article by Sam Anderson who reviewed “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace in the New York Times and he listed six great sentences by Wallace:

“Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist”

“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the object and pursuits themselves.”

“What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.”

“The top seed this weekend is Richard Krajicek, a 6’5″ Dutchman who wears a tiny white billed hat in the sun and rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane.”

“One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.”

“What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”

James Wood

My favorite favorite favorite literary critic writes brilliant, thorny, metaphoric sentences that grab you by the throat and leave you panting for more.  Here are a few of my favorites:

“J.M. Coetzee’s distinguished novels feed on exclusion; they are intelligently starved.”

“English modernism must be measure in units of exhaustion or negation.”

“Chekhov may be divine, but he is responsible for much sinning on earth.”

“The hypocrite, among other things, may be a deformed ambassador of the truth.”

Saul Bellow

Does anyone make you feel alive like Bellow does?  His prose puts your nose in the essence of living.

“The old flooring burned gratefully – the funeral of exhausted objects.”

“Trying to breathe, he gripped the table and rose on his toes like a cock about to crow.”

“Oh so much human thread being wound on the most trivial spools.”

Get more Wow!

If you want style notes and more for people who change the world, please check out:

Getting to Wow! to feel good, do good and look good

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Style Notes from me, your artspy

Hoong Yee

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Word of mouth is the best way to share, don’t you agree?

Do You Have the Sitzfleisch to Write?

photo by Morten Brunbjerg

What do you need to write

I look at it the other way.

I write because I need to.  Everything that is necessary for me to do this I somehow make happen because I have no choice.  If I don’t write, something inside of me becomes very upset and this is not a good thing for me, my skin, the universe.

But sometimes just having everything you need in place can jumpstart your process and here are a few suggestions:

You may need a space that you can collect your thoughts and focus on your writing.  If you have a busy life, and who doesn’t? – this may seem like a mission impossible thing.  Take a look at The Writers Room, an urban writing colony located in a bright airy loft with partitioned writing desks, a library, comfy chairs and community of literary spirits in the heart of Greenwich Village.

People write for different reasons.  Once I figured out why I write for you it transformed what I took away from each day, each conversation, each unexpected story.  Suddenly, I had so much stuff to write about and not enough time to write.  Why can’t I ever win?

Still can’t get going?  OK, time to throw down your glove and take a writing challenge.  Maybe you are one of those people who has to lose weight or write a novel in the public eye so that your journey is fueled by group competition, one upmanship, humiliation and accountability.  Some sites even ask you to name an organization you absolutely detest as the recipient of a donation from you if you don’t meet your goal.  Talk about incentive.

What you can look forward to

I have done all three of the above and what is working for me consistently are writing challenges.  I am inspired by doing them and by people who do them.  Last winter I decided to do five posts a week until I had 100 posts.  The interesting thing that happened was that this rate of blogging became so second nature that before I knew it I had 200 posts.  The challenge grows as my blogging skills grow.

Here are the results of two bloggers I greatly admire, Kivi Leroux Miller and Katya Andresen.  They both shared a blogging challenge and the learnings from Kivi’s blogging experiment and Katya’s 100 posts are worth checking out.

Check this out this post by Marcus Sheridan if you want to be a Freaking Awesome blogger as well.

Get more Wow!

If you want style notes and more for people who change the world, please check out:

Getting to Wow! to feel good, do good and look good

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Style Notes from me, your artspy

Hoong Yee

– Subscribe and get a little Wow! every day

– Forward the link to someone you think would be interested

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Thanks so much! I really appreciate your help.

Word of mouth is the best way to share, don’t you agree?

What Is Your Sexy Six Word Story?

photo by my photo books

Less is more.

And a lot less, like a story told in six words, is more sexy.

One of the best ways to stand out in a world of too much is to do exactly the opposite.  Less.

Not less in quality or content.  Less of what does not fit in a single laserlike moment that delivers your story with intriguing and instantly memorable impact.  Less adjectives that leave less for you, the reader, to imagine.  Less surface drag on your sentences.  More space for you to offer someone to stand in, look around and say, “Wow!”

I live and die by my commitment to the juste mot, a fancy schmancy way of saying the perfect word.  And no more than seven of them.  The next time you find yourself at a well endowed tiki bar along the ocean  shoulder to shoulder with a handsome stranger who looks up at you with a smile and says,  “What’s your story,”  don’t you just want to casually toss back your hair and say something like,

“For sale, baby shoes: never used.”

That is Ernest Hemingway’s famous six word story and the springboard of inspiration for a set of virtuoso pieces written by the composer Lisa Bielawa entitled Synopses.  She has given the pieces a six word subtitle as a nod to this larger than life master of the diminutive form.

For those of you who would like some tips on how to tell your story,  short and sweet,  read You, in Seven Words or Less.

This is a process, just like life.  If you are in the habit of reinventing yourself which you are whether you realize or not, rewrite your story.  A lot.

I will leave you with a post by Mary Jaksch about creating a writing habit as you recreate yourself which starts off with another of my favorite sexy six worders:

Habits are first cobwebs, then cables

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If you want style notes and more for people who change the world, please check out:

Getting to Wow! to feel good, do good and look good

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Style Notes from me, your artspy

Hoong Yee

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Thanks so much! I really appreciate your help.

Word of mouth is the best way to share, don’t you agree?

The Secret of a Great Sentence

photo by penmanila

Take a single step

Remember that saying, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”?

You can see how that applies to great works of literature which all begin with – a single sentence.

A single sentence is not as daunting a task as writing the great American novel.  But it is also not a simple task to write a great sentence.

Nouns and verbs

I keep going back to my well worn copy of “Elements of Style” by Strunk and White and revisit the praise of brevity, economy of words, wit and that elusive quality that transcends – style.  These are lessons well worth learning and relearning.

Here’s one of my favorites:

Nouns and verbs. Verbs and nouns.  Well chosen, vigorous and unapologetic ones will lift your writing off the page.

A place to wonder

This is something I find difficult to explain.

A great sentence does more than state a fact or describe something.  It invites you into a world.  And it makes you wonder, curious, and intrigued.  It leaves a place for you, the reader to fill in.

Here are  some recent gems:

Yesterday afternoon the six-o-clock bus ran over Miss Bobbitt.

from “Children on Their Birthdays” by Truman Capote

I have friends who begin with pasta, and friends who begin with rice, but whenever I fall in love, I begin with potatoes.

from”Potatoes and Love: Some Reflections: by Nora Ephron

When I got there they were burying the lion in the back yard again.

from “A Need for Gardens” by Richard Brautigan

Sentence to Story

The reason we write sentences is for story.  They are the footsoldiers in the grand army in pursuit of your imagination, your captive readership.

Steve Errey wrote a great piece at Men with Pens about how to think and rethink the story you really want to tell.

“The story you tell is up to you. You can either have that story enable you to move forwards in ways most important to you, or you can have that story remind you of the pain, the struggles and the reasons why you can’t have what you want.”

You can read the full post here.

Get more Wow!

If you want style notes and more for people who change the world, please check out:

Getting to Wow! to feel good, do good and look good

Nonprofit Knitwear for all things knit and nonprofit

Style Notes from me, your artspy

Hoong Yee

– Subscribe and get a little Wow! every day

– Forward the link to someone you think would be interested

– Link to a post on Twitter (follow me @hylkrakauer)

– Put a link to the blog in your Facebook status update

Thanks so much! I really appreciate your help.

Word of mouth is the best way to share, don’t you agree?