I’ve scheduled an event at Manny’s in the Mission District in the evening of Tuesday, October 14. The event is on EventBrite. HOW COME? Well, Norma and I had a publishing business in San Francisco. I wrote the books and we shipped them out of our garage. It worked really great. Then we moved to Italy. I put the remaining inventory in a storage locker in Daly City. That was nine years...
Wouldn’t you feel great if you finally got it done? Finishing School is a way to get things done when nothing else has worked. It doesn’t matter what the thing is. Finishing isn’t about the mechanics of the task. It’s about the process, or method, of finishing. It’s very simple. It is easy to learn. If you have tried scheduling, will power, time management, getting...
[UPDATE July 27, 2021: I briefly called it “The Split-Second Forever” but the title has gone back to being The Stones of le Santucce.” Just so you know.–ct] I’ve been working on The Stones of le Santucce nearly four years. People are starting to wonder. I saw Professor Alpini this morning, standing near the gate to our little walled garden, talking in the driveway with a...
“A must for every writer and artist of any kind, Finishing School belongs on the bookshelf right next to Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing. I can’t wait to tell every writer I know to buy it.”—Cole Kazdin, four-time Emmy-winning television news producer, writer, and performer “Cary Tennis and Danelle Morton accomplish something remarkable in Finishing School—an actually...
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...
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...
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...
Is it appropriate, in a work of autofiction, to ask, Which part is the fiction? I think it is. Because of how people read. The great thing about fiction is it frees the author of the ethical considerations of autobiography and memoir. When people read something that’s about something that actually happened they read one way. When they read about something that’s not supposed to have...
So here is another thing. Seth Myers is interviewing Joe Hill and I am watching from my perch high and far away on my mysterious island of emotional distance and contempt and it is as if the older I get the more godlike I am because there is nothing that surprises me and I cannot be seduced by the son of Stephen King and I am charmed by nothing; I have attained the weary omniscience of a god ...
I sent a piece to “Fence” and they said it wasn’t for them. “Thanks. OK. That’s cool. I can handle it. It’s not a big deal. It’s not like I’m going to go out and cut myself or anything.” A meditation on submission and rejection ——– Original Message ——– Subject: RE: [Fence] Wading in Shallow Water with Architects From:...
It was at one time understood that to be noble one must not draw unseemly attention to oneself or glorify oneself or make oneself seem, in a crowd, to be the most important person, or to seek glory only for oneself at the expense of others, nor to seek to draw the fame of others toward oneself for one’s own gain. But today, all good citizens must tweet and tweet widely. One must take...
I’m so awakened by Ifemelu in Americanah, her blogging, that after the doctor, whose first name was Tennessa, which I had never heard before, and which, when I mentioned it to the medical student who had amazingly white teeth, got me a blank and slightly fearful smile as if she did not know which way I was going with this simple acknowledgement that I had never heard the name Tennessa...
Into my awareness a few weeks ago came this strange, unbidden thought: My reading is private. I don’t really want to talk with you about the books I love. I just want to love them in my own way. I mean, I like you and you’re interesting to me, but the reading I do is mine, all mine, and I don’t even all that much want to share it. Is that bad of me? The truth is full of paradox...
Dear Cary, What a delight that you are continuing. Bravo! The quality of the world dipped there for a moment, but now it is leveled up again, thank, goodness. I’ll be sure to do my part to spread the word so that everyone I know can enjoy your column. On another note, I do want to ask you a few related questions about my writing. Some background: On a deep and sweet level, I am an...
Here are some of the links I mentioned in the 2013 Santa Barbara Novel Mentor workshop, about dialog, pitches, queries and beginnings of novels. dialog Writing Dialog by Tom Chiarella. I lent this book to somebody and have to get it back. It’s a good book. Useful. Interesting. 12 Exercises for improving dialog by John Hewitt. Some of these are pretty good. You can’t go wrong trying...
The June 2012 issue of The Sun features a generous excerpt of Citizens of the Dream, my book about creativity. It runs after a fascinating interview with painter Ran Ortner and a lovely poem by Alison Luterman, and right before a poem by Tony Hoagland! What humbling and awe-inspiring company! It says quite a lot that The Sun saw fit to showcase the book. After you read the excerpt, I suggest you...
I do not remember exactly how I developed this huge attitude about Michael Chabon. I think it was the book Cavalier and Clay that sort of sealed it. We did not like the “innovative” language. But I have felt guilty about this for many reasons. Not only is Michael Chabon sort of local, and we should be nice to locals, but he is a brilliant writer in his way and also a father and...