Tennessee Williams Liked To Revise ... And Revise ... And Revise

I've been reading the Collected Stories of Tennessee Williams, and I loved this anecdote. I'll just share the quotation from Gore Vidal's introduction.

"Over the decades I watched Tennessee at work in Rome, Paris, Key West, New Haven . . . He worked every morning on whatever was at hand. If there was no play to be finished or new dialogue to be sent round to the theater, he would open a drawer and take out the draft of a story already written and begin to rewrite it. I once caught him in the act of revising a short story that had just been published. "Why," I asked, "rewrite what's already in print?" He looked at me, vaguely, then said, "Well, obviously it's not finished." And went back to his typing.

As an inveterate reviser, I love this. Before I consider something even approximately finished, I have probably worked on revising it for weeks. Every time I send something out, I revise it again.

I totally understand one of the Impressionist painters, Bonnard (?) maybe, who was caught sneaking with his paints into the exhibition where his pictures were hanging, just touching it up a little.

Easy And Good Way To Make PDF Files

This is going to be just a little posting but I have been so happy with this free program I want to share. Several times lately a publisher has asked me to submit a PDF. Not wanting to spend money, I searched for free programs and found one called Cute PDF Writer. It was a quick, easy download and seems to work perfectly, at least for my simple needs. I've put a link to the site if you want to give it a try.

Creative Writing Tip: Thunder Writing

Last week I introduced you to Lightning Writing—white font, white background. Today I want to show you how to do Thunder Writing—black font, black background.

First, I’d like to think about the connotations of these two kinds of writing. Lightning Writing, as I said, is white on white. But what does white writing make you think of? Sudden illumination, jagged writing, purity and clarity? Definitely. But whiteness also makes me think of the eeriness of a deserted, weed-filled field on a hot summer day, with the buzz of unseen, unknown beings filling the air; Remember how Meursault felt in Camus’ L’Etranger in the blinding heat of the beach, leading him to an unpremeditated murder? You never dare to stare into the sun for fear of blindness. The point? When you write in white, you must open your mind to ambiguity—clarity and confusion.

You’ll experience the same abiguity when you do Thunder Writing—black on black. We often think of blackness and night as scary. Night is when the vampires and zombies come, when we feel terror trying to change an exploded tire on the expressway with all those serial killers cruising past. Sure. But night is also velvety soft, comforting and warm. It’s when you can think about things without guarding your expression. It’s time to be soft and warm in your nest of crisp sheets and blankets, for those wonderful moments of thinking before you sleep. It’s the gleam of crows’ wings and kohl to line your eyes. So when you write in black on black, consciously direct your writing toward affirmation and fear.

As with Lightning Writing, try to save your Thunder Writing without looking at it for a few days. Then you will open the document, select the text with Control + A, change it to black on white, and be amazed by what you wrote. Use it to write something consciously controlled and save it again, let it ripen.

Next week, we’ll talk about Sky Writing, Solar Writing, and Grass Writing.

Okay. Here’s how to do black on black.

Go to “Format” on the toolbar. Click on “Background.” You will see the background change to nice solid black. Then go to the “Text Color Selection” tool in the upper right (as you did for Lightning Writing) and choose “Black.” WARNING! Don’t choose “Automatic” or your text will be white, an interesting effect but not what we’re aiming for.

Start to write thunderously, with your fingers coming down firmly on the keyboard. Or begin to write stealthily, with your fingers coming down like delicate cats’ paws!

Friday's Creative Tip: Writing Soup

Today's tip is about a delicious soup that writers can easily make and only take about fifteen minutes off from their work.

The pan: I think cooking instruments should be lovely and satisfying to the cook's soul. I make this soup in a huge saute pan with a long, curving silver handle. It's so pretty you can just leave the soup in it for everybody to serve themselves.

The ingredients: Carrots cut up in round slices or those little carrot-shaped pieces you can buy in a packet. A package of fresh Swiss chard. Three or four cans of vegetable broth (stock up when it's on sale).

The recipe: Empty four cans of fragrant broth into your elegant pan. Add the carrots. Cut the stems off the Chard, wash it, and chop it into rather small pieces. Dump the veggies into the broth and heat it until the carrots are cooked the way you like them. Add some mushrooms if you like but they aren't really necessary.

Eat your delicious writers' soup. It isn't heavy, which would stifle your creativity. It is BEAUTIFUL--golden carrots, dark green Chard, light green broth. If the day is hot, cook it early and put it in the fridge because it is possibly even better cold. You will get a lot more writing done because you won't have to cook again. Just add a nice piece of vegetarian cheese and some lovely crusty whole-grain bread!

Lightning, Thunder and Fire Writing! Part I.

We’re going to start with Lightning Writing today.

Remember the joy of writing with invisible ink when you were a kid? You’d buy this ink at a novelty store and write in it. Nothing would appear on the page but when you held it up to a light bulb, the words would appear.

You can use a technological equivalent for those days when the censor is sitting on your shoulder and you’re lingering too much on what you’re writing instead of trusting yourself and moving ahead.

I’ve done this for years and was interested to hear another writer, Karen Blomain, talk about using it at a conference I recently attended. She uses the white version but I have several variations.

The idea is to write in a text you cannot see or cannot understand but which you can easily change back to your normal black Times New Roman (or whatever) on a white background.

Okay, ready to go?

First, change your font color to white with the selection tool in the upper right corner of the toolbar area. Begin to type. You will see . . . NOTHING!

This is a wonderfully freeing way to write. You will feel a closer connection between your brain and your fingers when you write without the in-between appearance of the printed text. Your thoughts will fly freer. You can come back and censor, tweak, re-arrange later. That’s the part of writing that should come later, divorced from the act of creationg. Give it a try.

Now that you know how to do this, be really brave and start a folder in which to save your unseen writing. Don't peek. It’s okay to give it a retrieval name you can see. You’ll want to call it up later, select the text, and change it to black.

After writing something, I always put it “in the drawer” for a few days, at least, or better, a few weeks before I come back to it. My mind will have been working on it in another way and my thoughts and eye are sharper to revise.

I’m going to give you a few days to try this and then I’ll post again, with some exciting variations.

Facebook Writing Community Rocks!

I've been fortunate enough to achieve some writing successes the last several days: A first for the literary short-short at the Philadelphia Writers Conference, a second in the category of Science Fiction, Imaginative Fiction and the Supernatural at the same conference and being a finalist in the Black Lawrence Press for my short story collection, Kissing Jesus. It felt a little egocentric to post these accolades on Facebook (although other writers do the same). The resulting congratulations from others, especially writers who know the loneliness and difficulty of the writing life, brought me a lot of joy. Now one of my Facebook friends, Joolz Denby, has even started a Facebook cafe and treats us to a new kind of coffe or tea along with delicious cakes every day. If I can't have a writers' cafe down the street, where we all stop in for our coffee and absinthe at the end of a hard day of writing, I'll be happy with my Facebook friends. Thanks, all!

Iranians To Follow On Twitter

StopAhmad and Emoltzan are good people to follow on Twitter for Iranian news as it happens. You can probably find more. I would think to be cautious even on Twitter. Who knows who is posting. The government could be posting under an assumed posture. Read and evaluate!

Twitter To Iran

I am getting tweets from Iranian citizens, DIRECTLY from Iranian citizens. For example, a woman just posted that the police knocked on her door at 2:00 a.m. and took her daughter away. Her husband is now having heart pains because of this. We should all make an effort to get our news this way, direct from the citizens, because it's hard to know what's what when the news is filtered by the media.

Nabokov On Writing-Colum McCann, NYT

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

Writing Aloud is Dead

Tonight I attended the final performance of the 10-year-run of one of the finest theatrical endeavors in the country. For the past ten years, eight under the direction of David Sanders and the last two under the direction of Rebecca Wright, a season of dramatized short fiction by local and national writers has been blessed with sold-out performances at InterAct Theatre on Sansom Street in downtown Philadelphia.

Over the years, I was lucky to have three of my short stories in the series. I met many other writers and actors who brought the stories to vivid life on the stage of Interact Theatre and who have become friends.

We ended the final performance with reminiscences and drank a final toast to a great series, a great theatre, great directors, great actors, and, from my point of view, best of all, great writers. We drank a toast there and I came home and drank another. When a theatrical series gives its final performance, it's like a death and so we had a wake for Writing Aloud.