Somewhere Over the Sunadvice

Letter to a Month-Old Nephew

Dear Sylas,

Enjoy doing the dishes.

I’ve been thinking for a while about the person you’ll become, and my influence on how happy that person will be. I’ve been wondering about life lessons, and what kind I’ll be passing on to you. Your father might be tempted to joke about not listening to the life lessons of a 24-year-old writer/bum and that’s a fair point, but it doesn’t keep me from thinking about it. And that’s the first one:

Enjoy doing the dishes.

Try to find pleasure in the little, trifling things that people allow themselves to be upset by. Banish others from the kitchen, listen to your favorite music and rinse at your own pace. Throw a towel over your shoulder to intermittently dry your hands on. Spritz lemon into the dish-soap holder and watch your fingers wrinkle. Say you’re welcome to your mom when she thanks you. Know that the soreness in your back is small and temporary.

It’s a strange thing to ask you: to enjoy something you may not enjoy in the least bit. How can this ‘life lesson’ be imparted if your tastes, that enigmatic, whyless arrangement of what we love and hate, decides for you whether or not you like doing the dishes?

All I can say is that if you enjoy the clean up, making a mess is all the more satisfying.

∞06:35 pm, by somewhereoverthesunnovel ∩12

[sylas] [letters] [life lessons] [advice] [dishes] [dear sylas]

Listen: a swimmer loves the water. So she submerges herself in it, kicks it aside and learns to be in it until the wrinkles it spreads throughout her skin feel not like effects of a cause but like the natural state of things. Writers have to submerge themselves in words. And either out of a fear of drowning, or just the inevitable passing of time, of learning better ways to stay afloat, you’ll get better at it. Spend time with words, reading or writing them, and you’ll develop strokes you never thought yourself capable of, eventually excel at things you were average at.

(via passionatesoul)

Some advice I gave a reader and am now sharing with you.

∞10:57 pm, reblogged by somewhereoverthesunnovel ∩32

[writing] [advice] [swimming]

Enjoy!

I suppose it’s common practice in many school: senior-class t-shirts. Hold a design contest, pick a winner, unify hundreds of kids with one inside joke of a message. My classmates picked a vodka bottle with the clever line: Absolut Seniors (the future marketing major in me appreciated the product placement). The school rejected the concept for various reasons.

Then came a kid named Doh Young. He introduced a back-up idea. “This Korean symbol means, ‘Enjoy!’” he explained. A black shirt, the Korean symbol in white, the English translation in brackets below. The design was approved.

What the symbol actually meant in Korean: Fuck you. What the symbol actually meant to us: Enjoy!

The simplest message I could ever hope to convey, Doh Young faked and somehow managed to actually express at the same time. I thought of it on the bus this week. Ten hours in motion. The first one and a half spent talking to a fellow traveler. The rest a combination of music, literature, podcasts, the view, solitude, textual companionship. It all seemed enjoyable.

I don’t know if it was the motion (“Make no mistake about it, moving is living,” a movie told me), or the acknowledgment that time would pass in this exact way, or that a destination was yet to be reached, or that the simple entertainment of these distractions kept me…well…entertained. But I thought of Doh Young and our black and white, lying t-shirts, and I could not feel anything but joy.

“Enjoy!” his hidden-in-plain-sight philosophy so wisely insists. Enjoy your bus rides. Your marriages. Enjoy sending surreptitious middle finger messages to the authority. Enjoy the sun and smearing yourselves with mud. Enjoy unenjoyable smells. Local pub musicians and the drunk people that invariably love them. Walks home. Being on the path to success in your dream career. Enjoy time and its passing. Its fullness or emptiness, the life that is there regardless.

∞06:00 pm, by somewhereoverthesunnovel ∩7

[enjoy] [happiness] [writing] [life] [advice] [t-shirts]

Adi, It was such a great idea to post quotes from your book, they are sooo good! My interest has skyrocketed, I'm still trying to see how I can get your book from amazon and over here to Mexico. Here's a question: What have you done over the years to get better at your writing, and have you noticed improvement over the years with your techniques? My writing is not yet to your beautiful, original, and exquisite level, which is why I'm wondering what I could do to practice and continue growing :)

Yay! I’m glad my slightly self-absorbed marketing tactic worked on piquing at least one person’s interest. :)

And this paragraph really should be first (but it’d be dishonest to move it up before the yay! paragraph): thank you. On some level, I always understand that I’m a good writer, but I’m always slightly taken aback when someone expresses their enjoyment of my words the way you did. Beautiful, original, exquisite? Well, gee blushing shucks, thanks! I may still be a young writer, but a young writer’s flattery probably feels best. It’s like my past self coming back and saying, you’re doing good.

I’ve mentioned in a few posts (You Are What You Read and Letter to a Young Novelist) what I believe is most helpful to improve your skill. Simply, to continue to read and write.

Listen: a swimmer loves the water. So she submerges herself in it, kicks it aside and learns to be in it until the wrinkles it spreads throughout her skin feel not like effects of a cause but like the natural state of things. Writers have to submerge themselves in words. And either out of a fear of drowning, or just the inevitable passing of time, of learning better ways to stay afloat, you’ll get better at it. Spend time with words, reading or writing them, and you’ll develop strokes you never thought yourself capable of, eventually excel at things you were average at.

Life will help, somehow. I really don’t understand it. It’s just one of those things time does: makes you better at the things you love, as long as you keep doing them. You will always, always, always look back at something you wrote in the past and feel proud and ashamed. “I was so young in my thoughts,” you’ll think, “and yet this is way better than I thought it was at the time,” and then you’ll write something better and feel it’s not that great. And then years later you’ll do the same thing.

Just keep words around you, that’s my advice. They’ll take care of you.

∞06:22 pm, question from passionatesoul, answered by somewhereoverthesunnovel ∩4

[writing] [advice] [books] [writing advice]

Adi vs. the Volcano

You have some time left, Mr. Banks. You have some life left. My advice to you is go live it well.

In re-watching one of my favorite movies, Joe vs. the Volcano, (and the above quotation from that movie) I realized that this is advice to give in any situation. Nothing new, or particularly groundbreaking. Far from it. Trite, actually, if you just count how many times the message has been sent out. Knowledge of your mortality should make you see things as precious, because they are. Live life while you have it. Yeah, it’s a tired message, hard to accomplish advice. But…it’s all we should be saying to each other, over and over again, and can we blame movies and books and music for trying to tell us to do just that?

You have some life left. Go live it well.

∞08:00 pm, by somewhereoverthesunnovel ∩2

[life] [quote] [joe vs the volcano] [movies] [advice]

Letter to a Young Novelist

You don’t learn love from listening to people who have loved telling you what to do and not do. You lay in bed with a person and do or not do things. You spend time in the nooks and crannies of who they are. One person at a time you decide what you love in people.

You don’t learn to write from the didactic (if well meaning) advice of teachers. If you want words to grab a hold of you and shape themselves through the tips of your fingers, take a book and treat it like a person.

If what’s on the surface intrigues you, dive into the rest. It is, after all, what you do with people.Take it to coffee shops and restaurants and the beach, talk to it during commercials, be seen in public with it and then take it to bed. And there, notice what you love and what you don’t about its story.

Be a whore. Take them all to bed. Even if you never learn to write, at least you’ll have spent your time in the company of some lovely books.

∞05:34 pm, by somewhereoverthesunnovel ∩142

[writing] [books] [advice] [love] [novelist]

I'm an obsessive writer and I dream to books published as soon as I'm out of college. If you don't live near Cali, New york etc., then how would you get your book noticed ?

Hi there, dear reader (by the way, as much as I love names, their consonants, vowels, nuances and how different they are from each other even when they’re exactly alike, I love addressing you as my dear reader).

I apologize for how long it took me to respond to your question. I like being accessible to my readers, especially fellow obsessive writers, so please don’t let my lack of timeliness keep you from asking other questions.

Now to actually answer your question. There’s absolutely no need to live near the Publishing Mecca that is New York, or even near any independent publishing house or literary agency anywhere in the country or the world. Everything is achievable electronically. As long as you have easy access to a computer and the internet, you can do all you need to do to get noticed.

You can query agents, promote yourself with a website, Twitter and Facebook profiles, even communicate with self-publishers to get your first project done and build a name for yourself, all from as remote a location as Mexico City.

Having the means to travel is probably helpful. If you’re lucky enough to draw the interest of an agent, you might want to meet face to face to make sure the match is right. And signing contracts, although it can be done electronically, is something that might call for a trip to New York or wherever the literary agency or publishing house is.

Aside from that, our profession is a rootless one. We can live anywhere we like. So continue to dream about publishing books, dear reader. Distance is nothing these days.

∞12:51 am, question from Anonymous, answered by somewhereoverthesunnovel ∩9

[writing] [publishing] [novels] [advice] [writers]

hi there. i'm working on a book. and...my characters decided they wanted to change much of the plot. what do you do when that happens?

Enjoy the ride.

Characters do that. Plot does that. It kind of just…ignores you. Vague outlines are best for books for the same reason that vague outlines are best for making plans: life gets in the way.

You can try to guide the plot, but if something unexpected pops up, do what you would if your night’s plans get derailed: either pout and try to force the issue or adjust.

If they’ve gotten completely out of hand in a Bolshevik Revolution kind of way, then it’s best to just meet their demands and tweak your outline. They’re stubborn and usually get their way in the end.

Good luck.

∞12:58 pm, question from iclownfish-deactivated20110117, answered by somewhereoverthesunnovel

[writing] [advice] [characters] [plots]