Most Important Books for Writers

e I've been following with interest a thread on the Twitter/blog of Nathan Bransford, an agent with a lot of interesting thoughts, about what ONE book does a writer need?

The replies veer off into writing books, of which Stephen King's has been recommended the most often. Personally, I like William Zinser's On Writing Well, and several others of his books, far better.

But Nathan himself said it was The Great Gatsby. I suppose nothing is more inspiring than a great novel you can return to year after year, seeing new layers of meaning each time. People who teach great literature have this experience, and writers can too if they reread great books every so often. Others suggested The Bible (diversity of plots and characters), The Complete Works of Shakespeare (same but also the writing), The Sun Also Rises, Of Mice and Men. I would consider Little Women, Mrs. Dalloway, Pride and Prejudice but probably would choose a book of Chekhov's short stories.

Anyone out there have a favorite to suggest?

Going somewhere else

Nothing is better for me as a writer than traveling; I give up all my sitting time and take close looks at everything around me. What an amazing insect. Oh, look at that odd colored rose. People talk funny here. What's a flat white? Or a long black? (Aussie slang for coffee orders, it turns out). Is it dangerous to walk along the coast path here? Everyone says, "Ah, no." Can I trust that advice? So much of connotation and inflection need familiarity. If you're not from here, do you really "get it?" Probably not. Fun seems more fun when you are away. At home, it would definitely not be fun to have my bus break down in the rain, but in Sydney, it was an adventure. My energy level went way up from all this stimulation, and luckily it stayed high even after I came back home. Do you find the same? Or are you always at the same high (or low) pitch of energy and observation?

"Time change" is a good pair of words to think about. I don't just mean cherry blossoms, daffodils, spring breezes, lack of sleep. I mean, "Could it be time to change?" It's not just when we are in the midst of cancer or the like that we can consider change. It can come whenever we make space in our lives to welcome it. I just heard about the basketball coach at Boston University, who was a "six-figure salesman." He was assaulted late at night, coming out of a bar, by a broken-glass-wielding attacker. His face and neck still show terrible scars, and he says he almost died. In the hospital, he decided his life wasn't a good fit and he wanted to coach. Slowly, after his recovery, he built that life for himself. What's magical about the hospital? Time. The time for reflection isn't built into our lives. Maybe such time was never built into human lives, but it seems as if time to reflect has recently gone AWOL. I have heard many talks about using the 15 minutes parked outside the school, picking up the kid from his or her activity, to write. But you can also use it to do nothing but think. How well does your life fit? Is there a life you can imagine that would work better? How might you get there?

Live dangerously: Write

One of my inspiring teachers is writing a book linking danger and writing. My imagination has been at play with that connection for a while now. You need courage to write, not just because your cousin Joanne won't like how you portrayed her as a bitch (or she thought you did) in your novel or memoir. The deeper risk is that it shakes up your own soul. All of those things you could list that you DON'T want to write about are the things you need to confront, but each one takes an act of courage on your part. Even if you are not going to write any memoir, you need to mine these past events because their emotional freight is what makes your writing come alive. Digging into buried pain bombs is not easy. And it can be rewarding but there are no guarantees: you can't say to yourself, okay, if I think this through finally, my relationship with my dad will be fixed forever. It may not be. You may need to keep revisiting that healing sore on and on into the future because there is still shrapnel there. But some of the hurt area will recover the healthy pinkness of flesh and definitely, the emotions you uncover will spark up your writing. Go there, take the risk.

Moderation in Everything, Even Blogs

I resisted moderating the comments for a while, but I've suddenly been connected with a coterie of spammers and one advertised a smut site. I can't let that keep happening, so I am asking commenters to be patient for me to check that they are in the writing dialog and not the porn dialog. I am sorry to make you wait for your comments to post, but it is necessary.

Moderation is a funny word, meaning choosing the golden mean on the one side, and acting like the FBI, snooping around to make sure all is legitimate, on the other. In person, moderating a panel let's say, it's not so bad. You can point out places of major disagreements and highlight places of minor but important agreement between panelists. You can try to keep them on debatable items rather than canned speeches. I feel pretty comfortable with it in that sense. But having to vet every comment on the blog really runs against my tide. I will do it, though. I hope you legitimate discussants won't hate it too much.

Favorite Inspiring Quotations on Writing

I've been writing a novel in which one of the characters posts a quotation every week, and since she wants to be a writer, a lot are about writing. I have collected some inspiring quotations about writing, partly by following a thread on She Writes site. Here are a few of my favorites:

"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else." by Gloria Steinem

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect." by Anaïs Nin

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." Joan Didion

"In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway." Junot Diaz

"When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid." Audre Lorde

Do you have a favorite writer you'd like to quote on writing? Please post in the comments!

Welcome to 2010, Blog Writers Beware

It's a new year, promising a new perspective, a writing renewal. But the FTC has a surprise for us this year--actually it went into effect in December. We bloggers must now disclose (hate that word) to the readers whether or not we have a "material connection" to the product we discuss. Did we receive a free review copy of book x? Have we perhaps written that book? Then we cannot mention that book without "disclosing" our free copy or authorship.

Might it have affected our opinion? I hope no blogger would write about a book without reading it, so it had to affect the opinion. But did getting it free incline the blogger to plug it? Maybe. Is this a danger worth our government's surveillance? Don't make me laugh. Can they catch bankers swiping hoards of cash from customers, betting against their own advice in the stock market? Can they catch nascent terrorists wanting to set their pants on fire? Well, maybe it would be easier to catch a book reviewer on Blogspot. Okay, so expect disclaimers if I mention any books. Sigh.