Go take a walk.

Today’s Unbridled answer to “What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever given or received?” comes from author Erica Abeel.

“A nice piece of writing advice I once received is that whenever you’re stuck on a scene and where it’s heading, go take a walk.  Or just go brush your teeth or make tea — anything, so long as it takes you away, keeps you from bearing down on the page.  Move away from the work and a scene can open up to you.  Actually, actors say the same thing about how they get into a character they’re portraying. 

I also give myself advice about writing through analytic reading.  Currently I’m enamored of Richard Ford.  I revere his avoidance of cliches.  And humor.   In my current novel-in-progress, when I find myself veering into the solemn and sad, I try to find the humor in the situation, even if — especially if — it’s dark or grotesque or outrageous.”

ERICA ABEEL is the author of five books, including the novels Conscience Point and Women Like Us,  and a collection of pieces including some written for the “Hers” column in The New York Times: I’ll Call You Tomorrow and Other Lies between Men and Women. She has published articles in several major journals, including The New York Times. She’s currently working on a new novel and covering film for Filmmaker Magazine and indieWIRE.com. Abeel, a mother, lives and works in Manhattan.

let's burn literary witch Colin Dickey for his brilliant essay on witch trials & sympathetic magic in Lapham's Quarterly! →

gururugu:

Use them wisely.

Emily St. John Mandel

bookstalker:

I hope everyone had an enjoyable long weekend! Mine was spent on/in various balconies, backyards and rooftops drinking various beverages. Definitely a promising summer preview.

I’m heading off to Minneapolis this week, so I won’t be doing an events post, but I did want to share a delightful book launch I went to late last week. Brooklyn-based author Emily St. John Mandel presented her newest novel, The Lola Quartet, at WORD Bookstore last Thursday. True to the book’s jazz theme, it was a classy affair.

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In his lost career at the New York Star Gavin had begun all his stories with a new page in his notebook, names and ideas and associations scrawled out into the margins. At the beginning of his second week in Sebastian he drove to an office-supply store and bought notebooks—he couldn’t find the kind he liked best, but close enough—and wrote Anna across the top of a page. But where to begin? He had already spent some time trying to find Sasha, but had gotten nowhere. She wasn’t in the telephone directory and seemed to be among the disconcerting population of people who don’t exist on the Internet. He wrote Sasha buying baby clothes at mall? beneath Anna’s name and The Lola Quartet below that. It was evening, the lights of the freeway streaming across the top of his window behind the reflection of the room.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

Django Reinhardt was a prodigy at thirteen playing the cafés of Paris. A burn victim at eighteen when he came home from a gig and knocked over a candle in the caravan where he lived with his young wife. The materials for the celluloid-and-paper flowers she made to supplement their income were highly flammable, and the caravan flashed quickly into flame. A small miracle at twenty, when he emerged from a long convalescence after the fire that ruined half his left hand and revealed an improbable new technique: he worked the frets with two fingers and made his own substitutions for the standard major and minor chords. The miracle was that he played better after the fire than before. He carried the fire with him through all the days of his life, in his two curled fingers and in the way he used a match to hold the bridge of his battered guitar up to the proper height.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

He’d recently come out of rehab for the second time and he felt skinless, his bones exposed to the open air. His hands shook. Every light was too bright. He knew he could repair this awful fragility with a pill or two but that was the point, he’d promised his parents, he was wracked with guilt for how expensive he imagined rehab must be although they kept the numbers from him. “You don’t want to drift through life all addled, Jack,” his mother’s voice as she served him dinner his first night home, breadcrumb-covered casserole in a blue dish from childhood, these impossibly moving small details that kept him perpetually tripped-up and on the edge of tears. In rehab he’d spent a lot of time watching videos and now his thoughts were a fog of old movies.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

He had two jobs after that. There was the job he did for Eilo, the eight or nine hours he spent at her service. Driving to visit and photograph houses, negotiating with the residents of foreclosed homes, writing up property descriptions at his desk. Eilo liked his work. He neither enjoyed nor particularly disliked the occupation. He wanted only to reach the evening, when the real work began. His secret investigation, the story he was tracking, the focused hours spent waiting for Daniel to appear in the doorway of the police station.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

Step inside and it was just another bar, all chatter and shadows and the faint smell of stale beer, but at the back of the room was a window, a red paper umbrella attached to a wall, a doorway covered by a velvet curtain. The window was almost soundproof. From the dark of the bar he would stand and look through into a brighter world, a small dim room with a lit-up sign that read Hotel d’Orsay and a few rows of people sitting on uncomfortable chairs. Under the Hotel d’Orsay sign musicians set up their instruments, plugged in their amplifiers, milled about drinking beer while the audience stared at them, tested the mikes at their leisure, eventually got around to settling down behind their instruments, and then played some of the best music Gavin had ever heard.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

The tattoo story: before she transferred to Gavin’s high school Anna had run away three times in search of peace and quiet or maybe in search of adventure and change, the story shifted a bit with each telling. She’d fallen in with a dangerous crowd at her old school and a police officer had brought her home at two a.m. She’d been gone for three days but her parents hadn’t reported her missing. She was high out of her mind, laughing in the foyer while her parents talked to the cop, a black new tattoo bleeding softly on her shoulder, and the story Sasha told Gavin was that the cop had seen the squalor of the house and called Family Services, and it was the social worker’s idea to get Anna transferred to the magnet school. Something about getting her away from her sinking friends, a new environment, the positive influence of her less-screwed-up older half-sister, but Anna never talked about any of that, Anna only smiled and touched the tattoo on her shoulder and said “Even when I’m stoned I have good taste in tattoos.” 

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet