NERVOUSLY SIPPING WINE

Try sitting at your typewrite and without thinking begin to write Russell Edson-type pieces.

As a man sauteed his hat he was thinking of how his 
mother used to saute his father's hat, 
and how grandmother used to saute grandfather's hat.
Some garlic and wine and it doesn't taste like hat at all,
it tastes like underwear. . . .
And as he sauteed his hat he thought of his mother 
sauteing his father's hat, and grandmother sauteing 
grandfather's hat,  and wished he had somehow gotten married 
so he'd have someone to saute his hat; sauteing is such a 
lonely thing. . . .

This means letting go and allowing elm in your front yard to pick itself up and walk over to Iowa. try for good, strong first sentences. You might want to take the first half of your sentence from a newspaper article and finish the sentence with an ingredient listed in a cookbook. Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

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DON'T TELL BUT SHOW

What does this actually mean? It means don';t tell us about anger (or any of those big words like honesty, truth, hate, love, sorrow, life, justice, etc); show us what made you angry. We will read it and feel angry. Don't tell readers what to feel. Show them the situation, and that feeling will awaken in them.

BE SPECIFIC

Don't say "fruit." tell what kind of fruit---"It is a pomegranate." Give things the dignity of their names.

Learn the names of everything: birds, cheese, tractors, cars, buildings. A writer is all at once everything---an architect, French cook, farmer---and at the same time, a writer is none of these things.

BIG CONCENTRATION

Okay. take something specific to write about. let's say the experience of carving your first spoon out of cedar. tell us all the details. Penetrate that experience, but at the same time don't become myopic. As you become single-minded in your writing, at the same time something in you should remain aware of the color of the sky or the sound of a distant mower. Just throw in even one line about the street outside your window at the time you were carving that spoon. it is good practice.

THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY

The snake dance was made up of detail after detail with extreme concentration; it had to be that way---the snakes were in the Hopis' mouths. We who watched thought it was unfathomable and fantastic because it was new and foreign. It was also ordinary and had been done for hundreds of years. In order to write about it, we have to go to the heart of it and know it, so the ordinary and extraordinary flash before our eyes simultaneously. Go so deep into something that you understand its interpenetration with all things. then automatically the detail is imbued with the cosmic, they are interchangeable.

TALK IS THE EXERCISE GROUND

It is good to talk.  Do not be ashamed of it.  Talk is the exercise ground for writing.  
It is a way we learn about communication---what makes people interested, 
What makes them bored.  I laugh with friends and say, "We are not gossiping cruelly.  We
We are just trying to understand life."  And it is true.  We should learn to talk, not
with judgment, greed or envy but with compassion, wonder and amazement.
 

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