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P.S. My first novel, Seeking Sara Summers , is available on Kindle, as well as iBooks and Barnes and Noble (on the Nook). Please check it out!

According to The Writer’s Almanac, today is Toni Morrison’s birthday. Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio (1931). Lorain was a steel town. Her father worked at the steel mill and in construction, and her mother raised the kids. Morrison said about her mother:

When an eviction notice was put on our house, she tore it off. If there were maggots in our flour, she wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt. My mother believed something should be done about inhuman situations.

Morrison went to college, got interested in theater and traveled around in an acting troupe, then went on to get a master’s in English. She loved to read, but had never been a writer except for a few stories in high school. But after she got married and had two children, her marriage started to dissolve, and she needed an escape. She said,

It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination. I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly.

She joined a writing group, but after she had workshopped her stories from high school, she was out of things to share, so she wrote a story about a black girl who wanted blue eyes. And then she started to expand it into a novel called, The Bluest Eye (1969). She went on to write eight more novels, including Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), and most recently, A Mercy (2008). And she was the first African-American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature.

Do you write secretly, compulsively, slyly? If not, I recommend it. Sometimes secrets are good, especially if there are critics nearby or you can be easily influenced. Part of the task of being a writer is to protect your new creations. Some of you may do things totally differently, but I know that if I start sharing too soon, the piece loses energy. So I don’t talk about or share anything I’m writing until I have completed an entire first draft.

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According to the Writer’s Almanac, Alice Munro, known for her short stories, was born in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She grew up on a farm, and she said,

Reading was an indulgence that you didn’t go in for if there was physical work to be done.

Women were only supposed to read on Sundays, because on every other day of the week they had no excuse to be reading when they could be knitting instead. So as a kid, she was always telling herself stories, and when she didn’t like the endings — like in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” — she would make up new ones.

She went to college, hoping to become a writer, but she dropped out to get married and have three children. She got divorced and went back to her hometown to take care of her sick father, and she was amazed at how much material there was there. She said,

What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together — radiant, everlasting.

 

And so she took those things, and turned them into short stories. She has written 11 books of short stories, and a new collection, Too Much Happiness, which came out this year. In May, Alice Munro won the Man Booker International Prize.

 
Here’s her advise to aspiring writers:

It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‘Read,’ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‘Don’t read, don’t think, just write,’ and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you’re going to be a writer you’ll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think ‘There must be something else people do,’ you won’t quite be able to quit.

What do you think? Is this good advice?

Too Much Happiness: Stories by Alice Munro

Story in the New Yorker: Things You May Not Know About Alice Munro

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On a fall day in 1509 the public first saw Michelangelo’s frescoes painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. According to Writer’s Almanac, Michelangelo– a sculptor, not a painter– didn’t want to paint the Sistine ceiling. But Pope Julius II, insisted that the ceiling be painted. In fact, the Pope actually threatened to fling the artist from the scaffolding if he refused.

In the course of creating one of his most famous works, Michelangelo supposedly complained constantly. He was, after all, in his 70s when he began painting the Sistine Chapel. It was extremely uncomfortable to be up on scaffolding and bent backward, in order to paint over his head. More than once, he threatened to leave Rome without finishing the ceiling, but Julius threatened right back. So at a time when he was probably ready for a nice little retirement villa on the Italian coastline, he was creating one of his finest masterpieces. Genuis, it seems, does not take age into account.

Michelangelo even wrote a sonnet complaining about his work. It contains the lines: “A goiter it seems I got from this backward craning like the cats get there in Lombardy.” And, “From all this straining my guts and my hambones tangle.” And, “Feet are out of sight; they just scuffle around, erratic. Up front my hide’s tight elastic; in the rear it’s slack and droopy, except where crimps have callused. I’m bent like a bow.”

Modern viewers are often brought to tears when witnessing the Sistine ceiling. They seldom think of (or even know about!) the physical agonies Michelangelo endured to complete it. Instead, they remain focused on his genius, which is awesomely evident.

Being an artist/writer/sculptor can be agognizing work. We may not have popes threatening to throw us from a scaffold, but we have bills that have to be paid and precious little time to complete our creations. We all become whiners at one time or another. It’s only human. But somehow, some way, we must persevere and let our own internal Michelangelo create its masterpiece.

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This week’s post is pulled directly from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. If you don’t already, you may want to subscribe. The Writer’s Almanac is full of interesting stories about writers and poets and includes a poem of the day. One of today’s gems proves that it’s never too late to start your writing career–even by accident.

Advertising exec-turned-writer, Ilene Beckerman, was born in Manhattan (1935). She didn’t begin her writing career until the age of 60, and even then, she became a published author almost by accident. She had written and illustrated a book for her five children, something to remember her by. She said: “My purpose was to say things to my children one doesn’t have the time to say. I wanted them to know I wasn’t always their mother. I was a girl, I had best friends, we did stupid things together. I was on a bus with my friend once eating dog bones so people would look at us. I wanted them to know.”

She took the book she’d written down to the ad agency she owned, to use the machines there to make a dozen photocopies. She put them in big red binders, with the illustrations she’d sketched in plastic sheet protectors, and handed them out to her children and a few close friends. She was done. Then, the cousin of a friend got a hold of one of the binders and sent it over to Algonquin Books. Pretty soon, the publisher was calling her about publishing her book. Beckerman said that they offered her “an advance that had a comma in it. I think I fainted.”

The book was Love, Loss, and What I Wore, published in 1995. It’s the story of her life growing up in Manhattan in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, and it’s accompanied by drawings of the clothes that she was wearing during that time. She insists that clothing plays an integral part in many women’s memories, that they can recall important events or distinct spans of their lives by what they were wearing at the time. When the book came out, bookstores were not sure whether to market it as memoir or fashion. It has now sold more than 100,000 copies.
 

Beckerman insists that clothes are the least important part of her book, which she considers a memoir. The book contains advice and aphorisms from her grandmother, who raised her, such as, “If you have to stand on your head to make somebody happy, all you can expect is a big headache.” And, “It’s better to be alone than with someone who makes you feel lonely.” And, “You never know what goes on behind closed doors, even Miss America can have hemorrhoids.” And, “If beauty brought happiness, Elizabeth Taylor wouldn’t have needed so many husbands.”

Since then, she has written and illustrated What We Do for Love (1997), Makeovers at the Beauty Counter of Happiness (2005) — containing unsent letters to Marilyn Monroe, Mother Teresa, Audrey Hepburn, Sarah Jessica Parker, and her own 11-year-old granddaughter — and Mother of the Bride (2000), about planning her daughter’s wedding. She said, “Childbirth was a lot easier than being the mother of the bride.”

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