He's Right, You Know

John Scalzi is a smart man. When asked what one has to give up in order to write, he responded thusly:

What you really need to do is cut an hour of TV watching out of your day. Seriously, now: Keep your job, keep your marriage, keep your friends, keep the kids. Just drop an hour of TV.

It's that easy. He's right. Of course, there's more to it, but without committing a little time, no writing gets done, and if one is spending one's time watching reruns of South Park, one has nobody to blame but oneself for one's lack of writerly output. I'd recommend reading the whole post, but here's a little more:

Because, look: If you’ve got an hour a day to write uninterrupted, you can probably manage between 250 and 500 words a day. Do that five days a week, and in the course of a year that’s between 65,250 and 130,500 words; i.e., hey, you’ve gone and written a novel. All while keeping your day job and not turning into a hermit. This is not complicated.

I think the whole “you must be willing to suffer for your art” thing is overrated and is generally bruited about by people who want to make writing look like some amazing, holy process or whatever. My response to this is, sure, writing can be a wild, transcendent thing, but at the end of the day it’s also about putting your ass into a chair and typing. Writing is a process, and like most processes, if you do it on a regular basis, you generally increase your facility for it.

I have a good amount of grading to do this weekend, but I'm going to make sure I spend an hour a day with my ass in my chair, writing on those projects I keep obsessing about.

Weighty Issues

This week in one of my Comp II classes we discussed Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." I've read the story I don't know how many dozens of times over the years, but a discussion like that one will always make me think more deeply about it. This time I was captivated by O'Brien's notion of the conditions of our lives adding weight, and a corresponding desire in people (especially the soldiers in the story) to shed that weight--to relieve ourselves of the burdens we take on, whether they're chosen or forced on us.

I'm not sure why this time through it occurred to me, but I wondered if O'Brien was responding to Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I've also read this novel a number of times, and I've always gotten carried away with Kundera's treatment of weight--which is almost completely opposite O'Brien's. Instead of the conditions of our lives adding weight to our lives, Kundera posits that since we only live once, everything we do is ephemeral, weightless. Especially the choices we make. It's the fact that our lives are so weightless that causes our real anxiety.

I'm sure someone's already juxtaposed these two, but I'm smitten with this idea now. I'll have to read Kundera next.

Mixed Reaction to Life of Pi

I finished reading Yann Martel's Life of Pi yesterday, and I've spent some time thinking about my reaction. I liked some of it and I found other parts obnoxious. It's written in three sections, but the second is the only one I cared for. The first involves a bunch of background and setup and the third pulls the string on a really clumsy religious allegory.

But that middle section (which, to be fair, is most of the book) is great. Description, pacing, action, exposition, invention--it's all there and it's all good.

Too bad Martel framed it with hack philosophy.