Meeah Williams

When Philip Roth announced his retirement from writing in 2012 at the age of eighty, many people expressed surprise, even disbelief. How could a writer stop writing? Isn’t writing a calling, like the priesthood? Isn’t writing something more than a profession? Can a writer stop writing any more than the rain can stop raining?

Roth’s retirement got me thinking. Then, shortly after his announcement, Alice Munro announced her retirement from writing, too. As a writer myself, I considered that maybe they were both on to something.

I’m not eighty and I haven’t achieved the phenomenal success that either Roth or Munro achieved so my retirement might seem more than a little premature, not to mention un-noteworthy, except to myself. I fell short of winning the Pulitzer Prize. Way short, as it happens. The National Book Award somehow eluded me. The Nobel Prize…well, even Roth retired before winning that. The fact is, I never rose higher than publishing a handful of backlist genre novels and a dozen or so short stories in obscure literary journals. But then again, not everyone can be a CEO no matter how hard they labor or how high their aspirations; the majority of writers are salary men (and women), middle-management types and plain old office workers. And, typically, they retire earlier than the corporate superstars.

So why not take an early retirement? It’s pitiful how I keep laboring on, having reached my limit, pounding my head on the ceiling of whatever potential I might have had. I remind myself of those poor souls who keep at a job long after retirement age because they fear the sense of obsoleteness and existential pointlessness that awaits them if they were to ever stop. Because they fear they will have no reason to live; that they will die without an office to go to, a report to read, a conference table to sit at. Why can’t they find an interest in life that absorbs them other than work? Why can’t I?

Sure, writing is supposed to be that interest—and I suppose it can be, for others, for mere amateurs. But for me, it’s always been more. I thought it was a calling, but now I begin to wonder if it was really a profession, after all. A way to achieve success and fame, reward and standing. I’m beginning to suspect that I’m no different than the ambitious company man with his briefcase of Powerpoint presentations.

Isn’t it time–long past time, in fact,–for me to accept retirement gracefully? Isn’t it time for me to acknowledge that my career, even if it wasn’t all I’d hoped it would be, is over? I’d done my best now it’s time to move on. Shouldn’t I find a nice hobby, like cross-stitch or gardening? Maybe I can take up watercolors? Isn’t there an adult education class in something I can take to fill my time? Didn’t I always want to learn the fine art of French cooking? An eight-week course in short story writing…whoa, not for me! Leave that to the retired stockbroker who never had time to write. Perhaps, I should take that business administration course that I never had time to take? Didn’t I always want to be an accountant? No? Then what else did I want to be but a writer?

I’m afraid for my post-writer future. I’m afraid I’ll end wandering from coffee-shop to coffee-shop, a sad, disheveled, disoriented figure with my battered laptop and a knapsack stuffed with rough drafts and rejection slips. I worry that I’ll end up that eccentric lady at the table by the window at Starbucks drawing sympathetic stares. That I’ll be nursing silos of coffee, scribbling away incessantly with no story to tell, like those men who dress in a suit and tie every morning, grab their briefcase, go down to the train station…but have no office to go to anymore. I can see my husband shaking his head sadly as he watches me head off to my writing nook every morning after breakfast. Why can’t I just stop?

This is not a calling, it’s a sickness, a compulsion, an obsession. If I don’t write, I’m worthless. That’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it? That’s my deepest conviction. It can’t be true, can it? No more than it’s true for anyone else with a job. Writers aren’t really in a special class of their own, are they? They can retire, too. They should retire. No one is exclusively what they do. Writers don’t disappear, lose all value and purpose if they stop writing. A policeman can retire. A doctor can retire. Even a priest can retire—and they do. The jobs they have are a lot more important, a great deal more essential, than what the average writer does.

There’s a life after every job. Surely there’s a life after writing. I just can’t imagine what in the world it is. What tragic irony! My job depended on my imagination and here my imagination utterly fails me! In fact, I can’t imagine that Roth or Munro have stopped writing either. That they don’t take out their pens when no one is looking and start filling a page with words. That they don’t let their fingers play over a keyboard from time to time. Just for the joy of it. Just to see what happens. That, paradoxically, they may have rediscovered why they started writing in the first place. That it really was never a profession. That it was play, sheer joy, a participation in life that only begins when we stop trying to make it a living.

If I can only hold on to that thought, and hope for nothing more, one of these days I may be able to finally retire, too.

Meeah Williams is a writer and graphic artist. Her work has appeared most recently in The Milo Review, Per Contra, Vagabond City and Dark Matters, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Jeffrey R. Schrecongost

Greed. Guilt. God.

The big ones, yes? The ways in which the three interrelate are what I seek to explore in my fiction. People who need more than they need. The pain of remorse. The nature of a faith that comforts some and confuses and disappoints others.

To unite these themes, to create the vivid dream, I strive to employ the following: poetic prose to enhance atmosphere; tight, realistic, substantive dialogue to propel the plot and reveal characters and conflict; internal tensions and gradual, deliberate character revelation to maintain suspense and verisimilitude; and allusions to music, film, and other elements of popular culture to shape and/or reflect mood and setting.

It’s a good plan, for sure, but how does the writer keep all those syntactical fireworks from either 1) sputtering out or 2) burning down the house?

Careful (as in life or death careful) word choice.

Faulkner, in As I Lay Dying, and Fitzgerald, in “Winter Dreams,” do it this way:

Faulkner writes, “The lantern sits on a stump. Rusted, grease-fouled, its cracked chimney smeared on one side with a soaring smudge of soot, it sheds a feeble and sultry glare upon the trestles and the boards and the adjacent earth.” The lantern is first personified, making for a more-important-than-average lantern. Its role, its purpose, is to illuminate the creation of Addie’s coffin, so it deserves the attention it gets here. Next, we learn that the lantern is in bad shape – rusty, greasy, broken. But the lyrical fashion in which the author gives us this information is particularly effective. Faulkner’s use of alliteration – with ‘s’ sounds — reflects the lantern’s dirty, slippery surface. Smeared, side, soaring, smudge, soot, sheds, sultry. Additionally, these ‘s’ sounds mimic the flame’s hiss which, in turn, enhances the creepy mood. Faulkner then gives us more on the lantern’s condition. The light is feeble yet sultry. Sensual? Torrid? Passionate? Yes. It is a light languid and sexual in nature. Like the way a brothel room’s dim, solitary light dances with darkness to reveal a leg here, a breast there, closing eyes, slow-moving hands. This dense, poetic imagery works to liken Cash’s coffin construction to something resembling sexuality by calling attention to his mysterious physical movements and manipulation of the boards. Oh yes, it’s weird, gloriously weird, and it’s all accomplished in just two sentences.

Let’s see how Fitzgerald does it. He writes, “The dark street lightened, the dwellings of the rich loomed up around them, he stopped his coupe in front of the great white bulk of the Mortimer Joneses’ house, somnolent, gorgeous, drenched with the splendor of the damp moonlight.” Wow. Again, we have personification in the neighborhood’s introduction. But first, there is this surreal shattering of the darkness, an image suggesting the power of wealth. Then the homes loom. They threaten Dexter as old money always has. The Joneses’ home is a white giant, dazzling even in its slumber. But the key word here, the astonishing image, is drenched. The moon heaves a silver wave over the home. It drips with the shimmering of everything Dexter thinks Judy is not. So, Fitzgerald has, with one sentence of dreamy, lush, poetic imagery, given us an atmosphere that is a story in itself – a story about both the possession and lack of wealth, power, and privilege. When the prose is this great, most individual passages in a text can, on their own, stand tall as thematic microcosms of the larger piece.

Lombardi, in Writing Fiction, states that, “With fiction, more than anything else perhaps, it’s the description that envelops you because really everything in a work of fiction, except for the dialogue, is a description of some sort. […] [With great description, the] reader will be swept along by the words, believing every moment of the story, as if it’s a dream or a movie, or as if it were actually happening.”

A dream. A movie. Actually happening.

Faulkner and Fitzgerald are masters of poetic description, and their prose works to mingle multiple forms of sensory data to create that dream-like, filmic, and/or realistic experience. But, as Ringo Starr reminds us, “It don’t come easy.” Hard choices must be made. My relationship with a story’s first, final, and next word is always rocky. It might, for days, weeks, months, remain on the page — my perfect, lovely word – until a more appealing word saunters by and my loyalty fades. Or maybe that perfect, lovely word draws too much attention to itself and so must go. Maybe all the surrounding words hate its guts (I’ve seen this happen – Flagstaff, AZ, 1994), and who wants to get in the middle of that? As a fiction writer I suffer many falls, but getting that one, best word down on paper, followed by the next best word, and the next best word, until all the words are my best words, well, that’s what gets me up in the air.

Jeffrey R. Schrecongost received his M.F.A. from Converse College and teaches English at Ivy Tech Community College and Spartanburg Community College. His fiction has appeared in Blood Lotus, BlazeVOX, and Gadfly. He lives in Greenville, SC, with his loyal Golden Retriever, Molly.

Kathleen Nalley

At the conclusion of an alumni weekend during the Converse College MFA residency, I sat with three friends/colleagues/fellow alum who gathered for one final moment before parting (again) to return to our respective homes after a fun-filled, raucous, inspiring time.

As we reflected on various moments, all of us anticipating and dreading the impending depression that results from returning to the “real world,” the thought for this blog post struck me.

What’s more fitting, I thought, than to write about the friendships of writers? Most of us have heard stories of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Capote and Lee, Ginsberg and O’Hara, but what of the friendships forged between emerging writers today?

So, with a nod to novelist and educator extraordinaire, Leslie Pietrzyk, who often uses the Top 10 format to convey tips and advice to students, I present to you:

The Top 10 Reasons Why Writers Make the Best Friends

10. They know a lot about things you didn’t realize you were interested in. Writers expose you to a wide variety of brain fodder: from the Epic Rap Battle series to the nesting habits of sparrows to how fast a Cadillac can accelerate in 0.2 seconds. Whether it’s the life cycle of squirrels, chinchillas in space, the chemical reaction of rust, nanotechnology, theatre, history, engineering, social media, robots, revolutionary women of the 16th century, backpacks, synesthesia, the type of tree grown in the southernmost region of Sicily, or the mating habits of spiders, you learn, through osmosis, just by hanging out with them.

9. They are protective. Writers will steal events and characters from your life, but they will always, always, always change the names.

8. They do not judge or criticize you. Are you self-conscious? Have an ugly zit on the end of your nose? Feel compelled to wear the same black t-shirt every day? Have daddy issues? Talk to ducks? No matter! Writers praise your faults, embrace your idiosyncrasies, and adore you as you are. In fact, writers often understand your impulses and motivations better than your therapist (and usually offer several potential conflict resolutions for the small price of a paperback).

7. They are generous. Writers put aside their feelings of jealousy to shamelessly promote your latest project on Facebook, fund your Kickstarter campaign, or retweet your Tweets. They also tell you about contest/fellowship/job/grant opportunities that will place the two of you in direct competition. Ever see a stockbroker give another stockbroker an inside tip so he has the potential to make more money? Yeah…a writer will do that.

6. Despite popular opinion, they are low maintenance. You may only see a writer friend once a year, twice if you’re lucky. (But the time you spend together is exciting, engaging, and memory-making enough to fill the gaps in between.) Further, writers rarely say goodbye, preferring to disappear into the shadows and drift away while you aren’t looking — making those typical, awkward, teary farewells nonexistent.

5. They understand rejection. Multiple times a year/month/week/day, writers receive the dreaded email that begins, “We loved your piece, but it is just not right for our journal at this time.” Such frequent communication primes them to be the perfect sounding board when your marriage fails, your dog refuses to come when called, your credit application for a new refrigerator is denied, or your family disowns you for living in the basement and playing Call of Duty 24/7, although you’re 43 and have a Master’s degree. Writers know what it feels like, man.

4. They are uber-productive, respectable citizens. Most writers maintain several jobs to barely eek out a living — teaching, writing, submitting, freelancing, reviewing, copyediting, raising kids, maintaining a household, waiting tables, cleaning toilets, etc., etc. While many writers schedule sleeping, they still make time for you (see #6.).

3. You can bring them to Thanksgiving. Writers become temporary experts on the details du jour — Fibonacci sequences, KISS song lyrics, metallurgy, gemstone properties, Greek architecture, cancer metastasis, etc., because, inevitably, such details will bring a character to life or become a metaphor for cultural deterioration in a capitalist market. Writers can talk someone’s ear off on just about any topic, saving you from having to explain why you’re not married, why you’re not employed, and/or why you’re not providing the anticipated grandchildren any time soon.

2. They are like those people you rolled your eyes at but secretly envied in high school. 97.5% of writers actively seek out the nearest karaoke bar and aren’t shy about wailing “Hotel California,” “Toxic,” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” back-to-back, no matter the makeup of the audience, no matter how well s/he can sing. (Another curious note: writers often break into spontaneous song while walking up stairs, while in the bathroom, giving a reading, and/or in the middle of a workshop). A writer forces you out of your comfort zone, and you will be all the better for it.

And last, but certainly not least,

1. They know where to find the best and cheapest drinks. And if going out is not an option, writers will give you their last beer, just like the shirts off their backs.

Kathleen Nalley received her MFA from Converse College in 2012. Nesting Doll, winner of the S.C. Poetry Initiative Prize, was published in 2013. Her poetry has appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Country Dog Review, Emrys Journal, Real South magazine, and several other journals. She currently serves as Poetry Editor of South85 Journal and teaches English at Clemson University. This year, she hopes to win the lottery, gain equality for women, narrow the income/class gap, and/or publish a full collection of poems — not necessarily in that order.

Sara Kuhl

As writers, we often develop deep relationships with our characters. We talk to them while we’re in the shower. At night, we dream of them. Our characters live side-by-side with us for long stretches. So when it comes time to push their narrative to a place that forces us to make a choice that could hurt them, we may opt to give them a sprained leg when what’s really necessary is an amputation.

I’ve danced around causing my own beloved characters pain. In an early draft of a story about a boy who drowns, I refused to allow the parents to feel the anguish of that loss. I wanted to tie up their lives in neat little packages and allow them to go on their way.

I know. The impulse makes no sense. After ripping out their hearts, I wanted everything to be OK. How could I as a writer drown a child and then not allow the parents feel the deep and utter pain of that death? I wanted them to have a sprained leg instead of an amputation.

Back to the manuscript I went, taking the father and the mother to those dark places that can be challenging not only to explore but also to translate to the page. It is in those moments of harshness and despair that we writers often touch our readers deeply by allowing them to join in universal experience of our character. My story still isn’t right for many reasons, but in writing a scene about the father’s reaction to his son’s death, I wept. So maybe, just maybe, I am getting a little closer.

I like to think I’m not alone in this desire to protect my characters. I believe Willa Cather suffered from this same affliction. I have no concrete evidence to support my claim. She didn’t write of this issue in the recently released volume of her letters. (The Selected Letters of Willa Cather is worth the time for any writer. Her discussion of craft will have you thinking differently about your own process and characters.) As I thought about my own plight in terms of being an overprotective writer, I began to realized that one only need look at Cather’s prairie trilogy — O Pioneers!, Song of the Lark, My Ántonia — for an example of a highly accomplished and acclaimed author who also protected her characters, yet grew and changed as she matured as a writer.

These now classic stories of life on the Nebraska prairie were published between 1913 and 1918. The trilogy wasn’t her first foray into publishing. She already had a volume of poetry, a collection of short stories and first novel to her credit when the prairie novels were released. Cather struggled with those early publications and found little that she liked in the work and did not discover her voice until she wrote O Pioneers! Her voice only emerged after some serious pushing from her mentor, Sarah Orne Jewett. Orne Jewett told Cather, “Write it as it is, don’t try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way—you will have to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new, don’t let that frighten you. Don’t try to write the kind of short story that this or that magazine wants—write the truth, and let them take it or leave it.”

Willa Cather followed her mentor’s advice and a century’s worth of readers are grateful. (Note to self, listen to your mentors.)

Cather begins her examination of life on the frontier in O Pioneers! Alexandria, Cather’s strong and capable protagonist, is anointed as the head of the family by her father as he lay dying. In that episode, Alexandria’s brothers are stunned that a woman would be given charge over them. Remember, this book was published seven years prior to the ratification of the nineteenth amendment, which granted women the right to vote. The stalwart father fades into the early pages of novel and life simply forges on for his offspring. I believe this is a case of Cather providing a sprain when something more dramatic may have been more appropriate.

Some may argue that Cather is brutal in her treatment of Alexandria’s brother, Emil, and his lover, Marie, with a murder scene in the orchard. However, even that episode is told from a distance, away from the pain of the death of two young and vibrant souls. The reader only hears the details of their deaths from Alexandria’s friend and confidant, the mystical Norwegian Ivar.

It isn’t until her final book of the trilogy, My Ántonia, that Cather gives insight into the harsh realities of immigrant life on the unforgiving flats of Nebraska. Of the three novels, My Ántonia, is the most acclaimed. The writing is beautiful and sparse. Cather honed her use of episodic writing to such an art that most readers never realize they are not reading a traditional narrative. And she creates characters with depth and emotional anguish that surpass any of her previous writing. Compared to the quiet death of Alexandria’s father, Cather retells a story she first heard when she arrived in Nebraska at the age of nine. Ántonia’s beloved, soft and kind father commits suicide in the family’s barn one night after dinner. The story of the actual death is retold through the eyes of a hired man. Again, Cather places distance between the reader and the violence. But that suicide alerts the reader that Ántonia’s future will be different from the easier life of Alexandria and Cather carries through giving Ántonia a challenging, but rewarding path.

I’d like to think that Cather deeply pondered the fate of her characters. I know she spent time talking with them each day and living with them while she wrote. She loved Thea from The Song of the Lark so much that the novel is overwritten despite efforts to winnow it down. I picture Cather asking herself questions like, “What is the worst thing that can happen to my character and will the action be believable to the reader?” Then, I see her talking it out with her characters, debating the outcomes, and finally delving into her stories, and pulling out the sharp amputation saw when necessary.

Now, I look toward Cather’s example anytime I return to the page. I think of the joy and the suffering of my characters, for without the full emotional experiences aren’t our stories just one-dimensional pablum? In my story of the boy who drowns, I take the father to the place where his son is lost. I put the father in the water. I allow him the experience of trying to relive the those last moments, to feel the pull of the Wisconsin River’s violent current and I let him make the choice to let the current take him or pull himself back to the shore to face life with a child gone.

Sara Kuhl is a fiction writer who is working on her MFA at Converse College. Through the wise guidance of a writing mentor, she only recently found her soul sister in Willa Cather. Kuhl, a northerner by birth, feels fortunate to be privy to a cabal of strong Southern writers at Converse. When not attempting to push her characters to emotional extremes, she is the director of university marketing and media relations at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Karin Gillespie

I once ran into a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist in a ladies’ room at a writer’s conference. She slipped into a stall and I could hear her peeing. The whole time I was thinking, “Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists have to pee?”

Obviously they do. They also probably burp and sneeze and maybe even snore but their writing is so impressive sometimes it’s hard to imagine it comes from mere mortals.

In fact, when I was a beginning writer I used to assume that certain authors had a direct pipeline to the writing gods who sent them down a steady supply of flawless prose any time they sat at their computers. I also thought that these gods were exceedingly elitist, and only showered special writers with their gifts. When I put my fingers on the keyboard, I imagined the gods rolling their eyes and saying, “Her again? Toss down a few clichés and some stilted sentences.”

But then one night, many years ago, I was writing a freelance theater review on “Richard III” for my local newspaper; it was a rush job and had to be completed in two hours. I was in panic because I’ve never written anything decent in that period of time, and I was still pretty new to the writing game.

I threw myself into the review and the next day when I read it in the paper, I was afraid it was going to be terrible, but, to my surprise, it was fresh and invigorating. In fact, it was so good I couldn’t believe I’d actually written it.

Artists at all levels of mastery have had similar experiences. I once read that the actor Lawrence Olivier came off the stage after his most brilliant performance of his life. Supposedly he said, “I know it was my best work ever, but I have no idea how I can replicate it.”

I can relate to his bewilderment. How can we repeat those moments in writing when we are just not at our best, but better than our best? How can we more consistently unearth gems and gold doubloons instead of old shoes and rusty nails?

The obvious advice applies: learn your craft, keep butt in chair. But I would also add some additional advice: Get the hell out of your way.

I think the reason my theater review was so good was because I didn’t have time for my usual writing mind games, i.e., the need to impress, the near constant belittling, and the occasional delusions of grandeur. My mind was clear and focused on my purpose, making me an excellent conduit for the writing gods’ gifts.

Of course getting out of your way is easier said than done. For me, meditation helps enormously. Twenty minutes every day I sit and listen to the voices in my head. The more I observe those voices in action, the more I understand how frequently they undermine my creative work. Those voices are like kindergarteners in need of a nap. They always seize onto the first idea because they want to get the writing over with or they’re attracted to derivation because “it made that other kid famous and I want to be famous too.” Or they resist a needed revision because “It’s good enough. I’m so sick of this.”

It seems ludicrous that we would actually listen to these wrongheaded voices, but the truth is, many of us not only listen to them but are ruled by them. Meditation doesn’t completely quiet them, but we are then less likely to give into their wily demands.

Sometimes I’m tempted to yell at these voices, “Quit being such brats!” but I think it’s a better strategy to be kind and patient with them and say, “You kids play nice for a while. I have to work right now.”

Then I sit down and write my head off before the voices get restless. Does this make me write like a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist? Nope. I still write like Karin Gillespie but sometimes, with the help of the writings gods, I write even better than she does.

Karin Gillespie is the author of five novels and has MFA in creative writing from Converse. Visit her Karingillespie.net.

Leslie Pietrzyk

I know, I know. We’re all too busy to write. And yet…we’re writers. Write we must. But how? Here are some ideas for ways to try to keep your creative juices flowing when real life is getting in the way. Maybe you’ll feel like you’ve discovered that 25th hour of the day:

–You’re waiting, anywhere—let’s say in line at the grocery store. Instead of flipping through the magazines or glaring at the customer ahead of you who pushes past to run back through the aisle for a forgotten can of tomatoes, mentally describe what you see, what you hear, what you smell. Does anyone around look like your characters? Are there any gestures you can snag for one of your scenes? I was riding the DC metro recently and watched a girl twisting her hair into corkscrews, over and over, her arm lifted straight over her head. She wasn’t even aware of her actions! You can bet that will show up somewhere. Whenever you’re standing around or sitting around waiting for someone or something, use that time to observe.

–Don’t pull out your phone when you’re waiting to meet someone or you’re somewhere left to your own devices. The phone is the devil, keeping you away from writing! (Okay, I exaggerate, slightly, but you’re not going to be observing and thinking and daydreaming if you’re checking your email, and observing and thinking and daydreaming are part of the work of the writer.) Just…be. Be in the moment and see what you think and see. I know, totally subversive.

–Get out of the habit of assuming you need hours of time to make progress. I belong to a neighborhood prompt group that meets once a month. We write to two different prompts for fifteen minutes each. Fifteen minutes! People have written amazing things in that short time. I’ve written a number of pieces that I later stretched into stories or scenes.

–Don’t be snobby about writing prompts. There’s something about the prompt process that is especially helpful. If I say, “Write a short story in fifteen minutes,” either you’re rolling your eyes or you’re quaking in fear. If I say, “Write about snow for fifteen minutes,” you can get going. And who knows what will result?

–And use writing prompts (or exercises) to your advantage: Write about snow, sure…with your characters in mind. As part of a possible scene for your story. With dialogue you can slip into your novel-in-progress.

–No one manages time better than a busy person. START a prompt group yourself, either with friends or strangers. They don’t have to be professional writers, just people who are interested in writing. If you make a commitment and put a date on the calendar, there you’ll be…writing.

–Your calendar is your friend. Find some chunks of time you can steal for yourself and block off your writing date. Keep it. In an ideal world, this could a weekly event, but if it’s not, don’t beat yourself up. Also, your friend is your friend: find a buddy who wants to write or read or knit or whatever. Plan time to meet up and each do your own thing, together but separate. Save the chat for afterwards.

–Can’t sleep because you’re stressed out? Welcome to the club. But use that time…it would be great if you got up and started writing. I can’t do that, though…something about leaving a cozy bed is against my nature. But my mind can leave. Instead of reliving the endless to-do list, think about the story you’re working on. Think about the novel you want to write one day. Think about the stories of your past. The benefit is that often once you do fall back asleep, your subconscious mind does some work for you and will make interesting connections and find solutions to problems that will be apparent when you wake up.

–Think about writing when you exercise. Admittedly, I’m not a heavy-duty exerciser, so maybe this isn’t possible for you people who know what a kettlebell is. But don’t tell me you can’t think about your work while you’re on a treadmill instead of watching CNN headlines blare by. Take a walk—and instead of listening to music, think about your work.

–Always carry a pen/tiny notebook. Like the Boy Scouts say, Be prepared.

–Keep a character scrapbook. I guess this is what Pinterest could be for, but I like the tactile feel of magazines and paper. Rip out pictures that make you think of your characters or their houses. Keep ticket stubs to movies your characters would like, or hate. If you read a poem that makes you see something differently, throw it in there. Don’t get all worked up about arranging these items prettily or buying a bunch of Martha Stewart brand organizing supplies, because that sounds like a to-do list time killer; a folder or large envelope or a stack will be fine. Flip through it from time to time for inspiration before you sit down to write.

–Sit in your car and write. (This is best done in temperate weather…we don’t want any heat stroke victims!) There’s a park I like to drive to because I can park and stare at the river and no one knows where I am. But there’s no reason you couldn’t steal fifteen minutes before walking across the parking lot into the grocery store.

–Create a routine: this pen, this music, this coffee shop, this day, this much time. Whatever it is so that when you pick up THAT pen and hear THAT music, you automatically think, “Time to write.”

–Read. Remind yourself why you’re writing; remind yourself of the transformative power of words. Maybe you don’t have time for The Goldfinch, coming in at 771 pages. Okay—spend fifteen minutes with a poem. You will be nourished.

–Plan an escape. Apply to a writing residency where you will be given the gift of all the time in the world. There are residencies in a variety of locations, and most are looking for a mix of promising writers at various points in their careers, so don’t despair if you haven’t published a book. Many are free or offer reduced fees depending on financial need. Here’s a great place to start your search for a writing residency: http://www.beltwaypoetry.com/ (look for the “resources” link on the far right).

–Create an escape. Make your own writing residency. Can you housesit? Stay in someone’s vacation house? Buddy up with some writing friends to rent a cabin somewhere? Hide in the basement? Do it.

Do I do all of these things? No. But I don’t have to do all of them, only some of them. Same for you. Pick one or two ideas that fit into your life and that make sense for you. Come up with more ideas on your own.

In the end, we can whine all we want about being busy, and we can despair that we’ll never have enough time, because it’s true: we are busy, and there isn’t enough time. Or we can simply push and shove and wedge and find and create that time for ourselves. If I were to write one page a day, at the end of the year, I could have the draft of a novel—that, at 365 pages, many agents would tell me was too long! I know it’s not easy. But, honestly, NOT writing is the thing that isn’t easy.

Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of two novels, Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day. Her short fiction has appeared in many journals, including Gettysburg Review, The Sun, r.kv.r.y., and Shenandoah. She teaches fiction in the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins University and is a member of the core faculty at the Converse College low-residency MFA program. Her literary blog is Work in Progress.

Cheryl Russell

Yes, you. The concept behind literary citizenship is a simple one—become involved in the reading/writing community to support the work of others. It’s not that difficult to do, really. It requires time, but what worthy endeavor doesn’t? Does lit citizenship require money? If you have it to spend in a literary way, great, but even if you don’t, you can still be a solid lit citizen and grow the community.

How can you become a productive lit citizen?
1) Write a note of encouragement to an author whose work you admire. Email, snail mail, tweet, leave a comment on their blog—but let that author know you admire their work.
2) Have a blog? Lit journal? Then do an author interview.
3) Talk up books you like—in person, on Amazon, Goodreads, other social media.
4) Read and support journals—if you’re reading this, then good for you! You’ve taken a step as a lit citizen.
5) Buy books—preferably new, preferably hardback, so the publishers notice. But if you’re strapped for cash, then request them at your local library.
6) Support your local library. Volunteer, donate. Ask what you can do.
7) Give books as gifts.
8) Donate books to local charities—in the past, I’ve donated books to children’s hospitals, and Toys for Tots, among others. What about your local elementary library?
9) What about local elementary schools? Know a teacher that could use some books for the classroom?
10) Volunteer to combat illiteracy—turn someone else on to the joys of reading.
11) Support local readings—go and listen to an author.
12) Visit book festivals.
13) Start a little free library in your neighborhood—littlefreelibrary.org.
14) Join a book club or start one of your own.

For even more ideas, visit websites such as Cathy Day’s www.literarycitizenship.com site. She teaches at Ball State University and teaches a class on literary citizenship, and is the main reason I’ve become a lit citizen. Follow #litcitizen and @litcitizen on Twitter.

What ways can you think of to become a literary citizen?

Cheryl Russell received her MFA from Converse in 2013. Her work has appeared in Infuze, Title Trakk, Focus on Fiction, The Storyteller, Ruminate, and Rose and Thorn. She currently teaches at Malone University. She resides in Ohio with her family, but they would all rather live in one of their favorite vacation spots, Alaska. Read more of her blog posts at whythewritingworks.com.

Travis Burnham

The Paris Review is chockablock with interviews. What would happen if you pitted two interviews against each other—iron cage match style?  Take Stephen King vs. Haruki Murakami as an example.

King’s and Murakami’s interviews are reflective of their personality. Murakami tends to write about lonely, alienated men on the outskirts of society, whereas King usually writes about the everyman and everyday existence that is disrupted by supernatural events. King himself seemed to be more of an everyman, and I got the feeling that I’d like to hoist a drink with him—though not a beer, he’s a recovering alcoholic. Murakami comes across as more aloof in his interview. He states: “I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books.”  My feeling is that if you’re just like everybody else and you aren’t arrogant, you don’t have to go out of your way to say it. He also said: “I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book. That’s why I wrote that book. It was a best-seller in Japan and I expected that result.” This statement smacks of arrogance. The interviewer does preface the interview by saying that Murakami readily laughed throughout the interview, so it really may be the language barrier.

Murakami seems to reject his culture, whereas King embraces it. Murakami stated: “I didn’t read many Japanese writers when I was a child or even in my teens. I wanted to escape from this culture; I felt it was boring. Too sticky.”  There are many aspects of Japanese culture that are stifling, and challenging, such as long work hours and stratified social roles, whereas King, when asked about his use of brand names (the distillation of a culture) in his writing, said: “…nobody was ever going to convince me that I was wrong to do it. Because every time I did it, what I felt inside was this little bang! like I nailed it dead square—like Michael Jordan on a fade-away jump shot. Sometimes the brand name is the perfect word…”

Though King received some recognition when the National Book Foundation awarded him a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, I still feel he’s considered more of a populist, whereas Murakami was nominated for the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.

If you read these two interviews back-to-back, it brings to mind the nature of literature. It often seems there’s a division between the high ideal of “LITERATURE” ‘pon its lofty pedestal, the canonical works; and then there’s the bourgeoisie writers toiling in the trenches and shoveling junk food to the masses. It’s very polarizing. Matt Haig, in his blog post, “30 Things to Tell a Book Snob,” summarized at least a portion of my thoughts very well: “There is something innately snobby about the world of books. There is the snobbery of literary over genre, of adult books over children’s, of seriousness over comedy, of reality over fantasy, of Martin Amis over Stephen King. And it is unhealthy. If books ever die, snobbery would be standing over the corpse.”

We’re living in a media drenched time where competition with books is ever increasing. There will always be room for storytellers, but why provide fuel for the book competitors by means of division? I’m not arguing for bad writing, I’m arguing that all good writing is good writing, whether it’s for escapism or loftier ideals or deeper meanings. Even John Gardner, in his On Being a Writer,agrees: “Just as it is easy for the student of literature to believe he, his teacher, and his classmates are better people than those unfamiliar with Ezra Pound, it is easy for him to be persuaded by his coursework that “entertainment” is a low if not despicable value in literature.” I feel that there’s room at the table for both literature and genre, so why be judgmental?

With regards to John Gardner’s fictive dream, King was, at a very young age, already thinking about it on a gut level. When he went through a phase of reading Thomas Hardy, it ended when he read Jude the Obscure: “…so I read a whole bunch of Hardy. But when I read Jude the Obscure, that was the end of my Hardy phase. I thought, This is fucking ridiculous. Nobody’s life is this bad. Give me a break, you know?” Hardy, in the case of this one reader, didn’t maintain a believable world—was so cruel to his characters that King couldn’t suspend disbelief. Murakami, who is much more surrealistic in his writing, addresses this differently in that the characters are often pointing out how weird the things are that are happening around them. Something of the opposite of how surrealistic writing deals with this issue. In The Metamorphosis for example, Gregor Samsa never questions the veracity of the things happening to him; they simply are.

Both of these interviews were great, though I probably enjoyed King’s interview more because of King’s easy going manner and humor, but this isn’t 100% fair, as both interviews were conducted in English, and Murakami had to grapple with a second language. Read the interviews and see if they spark an internal debate for you.

As with most writers, Travis Burnham has had heaps of jobs, such as: nuclear power plant custodian, project manager, laborer, dishwasher, carpenter, painter, convenience store cashier, office rat, photocopy jockey, etc. He has a BS in Biology from the University of Maine, Orono, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. He likes to travel, and has lived in Japan, Colombia and the CNMI, and traveled to many other countries. He lives and teaches in the Upstate of South Carolina with his wife, Chika.