My first writing job was on a TV show called Get a Life. The show was mostly in the voice of its creators, Chris Elliott and Adam Resnick, who’d worked on the David Letterman Show. Adam’s scripts were the best thing about Get a Life – and we all tried to write in Adam’s voice. That was the job.

I was frustrated with the results, but it occurred to me that there was no solution as long as my job was trying to imitate someone else’s voice. The obvious solution was to find a situation where I was doing me, not someone else. The major obstacle to this is your deeply seated belief that “you” is not interesting.

When I first got the job, I couldn’t talk in the writing room. I was working on a sitcom and I could not talk. It wasn’t as if I chose not to talk, or I didn’t talk – I couldn’t open my mouth. No words would come out. And that went on for six weeks. I thought I was going to get fired, and probably should have been.

[…]

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It’s not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it’s a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

– Beginning of an article by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, “Why I Wrote Being John Malkovich,” in the Guardian. Via ArtsJournal.

with the Andrew Motion biography of Philip Larkin. Larkin was so miserable and tortured he makes Samuel Beckett look like the most well-adjusted writer in writerdom. (Beckett’s biography was the last one I read.) Although I am getting tired of Larkin’s many socially repugnant opinions, you can’t help feeling sorry for the man nonetheless. He wasn’t a particularly progressive person, or even, in many situations, a kind one, but he wasn’t a happy one, either.

For the record, I still love his poems–there have been, as of yet, no revelations that can change that.

I have just realized shall be able to refer, obliquely, to last semester as “the semester of the sonnet competition.”

There was, indeed, a sonnet competition, judged this year by A.E. Stallings, and for weeks, our out-of-workshop workshops revolved around sonnets, as many of us attempted to write them. I didn’t try. It is only now, looking back, that I am surprised at myself for not having made the effort.

What better time to write a sonnet, than when all your friends are doing it? Perhaps (I know this is at least partially true) I thought their sonnets were so good I did not need to bother. Perhaps (also partially true) most of the things I have to say tend to be pleasantly unwieldy and exposition-heavy, and unsuitable, I thought, to the form. But why didn’t I try?

I don’t know. I think I half-have in mind a snarky comment made by one poet on another poet’s online post where the snidest thing he could think of to say was “Hey X. Still writing sonnets?”

Why have I still not–I think ever, really–written a sonnet as more than an exercise?

The line length is something I have never liked very much, either. I write lots of poems of these lengths:
12 lines (3×4)
16 lines (4×4 or 2×8)
15 lines (3×5)
18 lines (3×6)
but 14?

we remarked, a number of times, on Wallace Stevens’s habit of composing poems in his head as he walked to work and then dictating them to his secretary. I have been thinking of this lately because of the amount of time I’ve spent on buses and subway cars lately. Every time I have a prolonged stretch of time on public transit, I get more writing done–and more rhythmical, regular writing. It’s not quite composing the whole poem in my head, but frequently large portions of it get done that way. The rhythm of the train car, like the rhythm of the walk, is part of the process.

All of which is to say that this has been a poetically productive vacation.

You taught in the John Hopkins writing program for 26 years before your retirement. What sort of impact did this role have on your own fiction? What were some of the most vital lessons that you endeavored to impart on, what turned out to be, a generation of writers?

I taught for 27 years. Sept., ’80 to June, ’07. Maybe that is 26 years. Teaching had no impact on my writing.

My main characters were often teachers in college, but you rarely saw them teaching. One story, “Eating the Placenta,” in my 1984 collection Time to Go, has a teacher trying to avoid an unavoidable student who wants feedback on a story he’s written. The teacher wants to hurry home to attend to his wife, who called him in his office to say she needs to be taken to the hospital to have their first baby. The student is unrelenting, follows him most of the way home. That’s an example of how I included my teaching experiences into my writing.

Or in Frog, a writing teacher goes crazy in the classroom, turns over a table, needs quick psychiatric help. Otherwise, I found the academic setting void of material. I kept the experience of teaching on the outskirts.

Lessons? I taught line by line, story by story, word by word. I told them there were no rules in fiction writing. I was always encouraging, pointed out where they were writing well, was very easy on them when they weren’t writing well. My young writers were very sensitive about their work, and I didn’t want to hurt any of them. My impression of their work meant a lot to them. Somehow, they all became better writers. Benevolence works. I told them never to fool themselves that something is better than it is. Don’t call a work finished till it’s the best you can do. Never change anything if you don’t agree with the change. Develop self-editing skills, because one day you’ll be out there writing alone. And so on. Practical advice. Don’t let rejections stop you if writing is what you love most to do. And don’t change a word just to get it published. If you do, even once — I don’t care for how much money or recognition — you might soil your writing from then on.

– Stephen Dixon, interviewed by Sean Carroll in the December Bookslut.