If it doesn’t fit, it’s probably a blog post.
When Norma and I decided to do it, we had just had a really great meal. We were in that heightened state. We saw endless possibilities. I think that’s why it happened. As to the meal, it could have been at Muzzicone, or at Regiro, or Gallo Nero, or la Sfizieria, or Ristorante Rogi, or Il Passaggio, or Antica Pieve or La Piana or Pietro or Buon Gustaio or Il Ristoro di Via Dante or Le Bindi...
I wrote this in 2013 and didn’t do much with it because at the time it felt a tad unpatriotic, insufficiently optimistic, kind of alarmist. Now it just feels like, duh.
I wrote this in 2013 and didn’t do much with it because at the time it felt a tad unpatriotic, insufficiently optimistic, kind of alarmist. Now it just feels like, duh.
Standing in the living room of the house we’d just renovated at considerable expense, the magnitude of what I’d done, debt-wise, was crashing in and I just thought, This is a beautiful space! People ought to come in here and create in this space! Then began this life-changing endeavor, the workshops. The thing is, it was a dream, it was a gesture of solidarity with other writers, and...
This morning at Caffe la Posta in Castiglion Fiorentino, as I was trying to read the Italian newspaper, I ran into professor Giuseppe Alpini. He asked me how the book is coming. Oh, you didn’t know I’m writing a book? The idea for the book came in the early morning darkness in June 2015, when I awoke at the Residence Le Santucce in Castiglion Fiorentino after a very vivid dream. I...
In our little town in Italy there is a cool little theater like something out of a Wes Anderson movie called Teatro Mario Spina and since I was a boy I always wanted to have a box seat in a theater and whereas you’d have to be a Getty or a Blum to have one in San Francisco here in Castiglion Fiorentino we just had to go chat up Paolo at the edicola, wading through the Italian jazz magazines...
No kidding, people are different here. Everything’s got a story and often it’s a long story. We’re glad we got out of San Francisco when we did but the real Tuscany is both much more amazing and much more about regular daily life than the brand “Tuscany” co-opted by sellers of “Tuscan-brown sofas surrounded by Tuscan-yellow walls,” etcetera. That’s...
NOTE: First posted June 4, 2018 (Upon reading “Fear of Freedom” by Carlo Levi) It was necessary to get out of America because America had become a monster, an unrecognizable foe, a fascist seedling sprouting on the fringe of consciousness. It was necessary to go someplace far away from America to sit and contemplate, to try to regain the self. I’m going to read this piece at the...
“I’m still alive!” is something you shout from the crevasse to the rescuers whose pick axes remind you because you are still a poet although stuck in the ice of cartoon implements from TV in Florida and this is how you hope to go one day but not yet because the medicine was good and you are still here a bit of a miracle but as they with their chisels chip and hammer at the ice that preserves you...
It is a job to get all the social media accounts up to date so I can tell everyone to buy the Finishing School book as a gift this gift-giving season and hopefully some will do as I command, I being master of the universe in my own head. But wow. So I go to Linked-In, which I hate, or at least have hated up to now, and I think, I have to get the info on this awful thing up to date just in case a...
Having left America two years ago for Italy, having used the money from selling our house in San Francisco to buy a smaller less expensive house in Italy and live here for a while, maybe for a long while, having fled, as it were, as if the place were on fire, having felt tremors like an earthquake in the social strata, having seen our city, once a refuge, turn against us, having felt suddenly and...
#NetNeutrality is an issue that will affect every single person here. It is not a partisan issue. We will never go back to a free internet.
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) November 21, 2017
Here is the thing. Our book Finishing School: The Happy Ending to That Writing Project You Can’t Seem to Get Done makes a great gift. I propose it as the solution to all gift-giving problems. And I have somewhat reliable proof, based on real people saying real things without prompting or cash prizes. When we talked about this idea, Danelle and I, when we wrote the proposal and showed it to...
I just read this Alif Batuman piece in n+1 from a few years back in which I found a kinship reading of “craft.” So let me get something off my chest, counterproductive and humiliating as it may be: Craft is awful. I hate craft! Instead of standing out there in the hot sun polishing and polishing your doomed anachronistic prose beauty why not instead, today! unleash the wild craftless being...
Here is how to make a magic book appear in someone’s hands. I write in a sometimes unstructured and intuitive way. I tend to hear the words I write. I don’t think it all out ahead of time. So I end up with events that happen in the novel but without explaining how and why they happened. For instance, I imagined a book, a fake book, a book not actually written by Mesopotamians five...
I have rewritten a certain scene several times. As a result, I now have several overlapping texts, texts that repeat other texts or portray the same events in different colors. Luckily, using Scrivener, I can go through this 3,000-word morass of visionary … OK, that’s the other problem: This scene combined the visible world, i.e. a woman who is sleepwalking, with the interior world...
One of the counter-intuitive aspects of finishing a novel turns out to be the desperate struggle not to have any new ideas. Or only new ideas in the service of problem-solving. Finishing is a closing-down, a limiting effort, bent on discarding, not on expanding. Yet sometimes, to finish a scene or section, one can be helped by a new idea. So here is an example of how the problem-solving aspect of...
Hi. So here it is Day 3 of my 49-day project to finish this novel using the Finishing School method and talk about it as I do so. Today, what I am editing is a long solo performance by the main character in which she gives a rambling monologue that makes her sound faintly deranged, and then dumps the contents of two bags on stage, one an expensive Gucci bag and the other a cheap Safeway bag, and...
I’m not going to go into why. I’m just going to share the day-by-day problem-solving of a guy who’s been working on the same novel since 1995 and is going to finish it, absolutely, using the techniques in the book Finishing School: The Happy Ending to That Writing Project You Can’t Seem to Get Done. Danelle Morton and I wrote the book on finishing. Now we have to prove...
As I sit here (“As I sit here”? “As I sit here”! “As I sit here” is one of the worst, most clichéd and overused beginnings in the history of first-person narrative … and yet … it is germane, as I am indeed sitting here! So …) as I was saying, as I sit here on the floor in my little room in this little medieval hill town of Castiglion...
Finally after the rains of May and June the sky went a brutal blue day after day and the ancient stones warmed and the air grew hot and everyone slowed down, even the animals. The dogs that barked all winter and spring now lie on the concrete and let me pass. Even the motorcycles sound lazy. Now the weather is barefoot, short-haired, slow and workless, without ambition, a weather of waiting, of...
They started out “not doing anything” but when her husband found out he threw her out of the house and filed for divorce. What’s wrong with this picture?
They started out “not doing anything” but when her husband found out he threw her out of the house and filed for divorce. What’s wrong with this picture?
This is a Repeat Offenders song written, I believe, by Vicki Wong with Susan Wood, and the band itself. Sorry if I’m getting that wrong. I was in the band and ought to know. All I know for sure is that I didn’t write it, but that’s me on guitar. It’s about revolution. We thought one was going to happen. It was a long time ago. I still feel this is our best song. Thought...
This is a Repeat Offenders song written, I believe, by Vicki Wong with Susan Wood, and the band itself. Sorry if I’m getting that wrong. I was in the band and ought to know. All I know for sure is that I didn’t write it, but that’s me on guitar. It’s about revolution. We thought one was going to happen. It was a long time ago. I still feel this is our best song. Thought...
A spare, angry, poetic song about America’s slow, wrenching decline.
A spare, angry, poetic song about America’s slow, wrenching decline.
A small-business woman in a wealthy city finds she can barely contain her rage at her own customers–the richest, most privileged people on the planet and their children …
A small-business woman in a wealthy city finds she can barely contain her rage at her own customers–the richest, most privileged people on the planet and their children …
Dear Folks, Well, I’m the last person you would expect to be writing a travel guide but the truth is I want to help you avoid making some of the mistakes I made when I first came to Italy. Learn to say buongiorno and buonasera: You can say buongiorno and buonasera and make people happy. Say it first when you walk in somewhere. People like to be greeted. Wear great shoes or, better yet, buy...
I have this image in my mind of saying goodbye to someone on a river, maybe on the Arno in Florence, on a bridge, maybe the Santa Trinita Bridge, that would do, that would be a good bridge, and I can see the sky, a bluish color, you’ve seen a sky at dusk when it’s bluish, you know how good it looks. I’m not sure why the image of saying goodbye to someone comes up. Maybe because I feel I have...
The way this whole thing started was my wife and I were sitting at the dining room table and I had my head in my hands and at this point I can’t remember but I think it was she who first said, Well, we could sell the house and move to Italy and yes, now that I think about it I’m sure it was she who said that first, not me, because if it had been me saying it then it would have been just another...
It’s strange, isn’t it, the ideas we get as children that we carry into adulthood, ideas we keep secret, ideas that keep us from doing certain things like dancing or singing or speaking in public, that keep us from even admitting that we cannot do something or do not know something? Isn’t it strange how we will make up a story to cover up, like, Oh, I don’t dance, or Oh...
10) Rudely talk over her. 9) Ignore her and when she doesn’t go away keep ignoring her until nightfall. 8) Listen to her and look for possible kernels of truth in what she says. 7) Regard her with mute compassion as a split-off part of the self. 6) Get used to what she’s saying and tune her out like a bad radio. 5) Pause in your writing until she has had her full say and then continue...
Dear … I thought of you just now. I am sitting in this renovated 13th-century Italian convent between Rome and Florence, a short walk up from the train station, and your face drifted into view. There were a lot of people here for ten days but they all left on the train today. I suppose suddenly being alone was one reason I thought of you. There had been little time to really think. Now I am...