Dave Press

“I had to be forced into a place where I simply did not give a fuck in order to find out what I was really capable of… What elevates someone’s work from “technically excellent” to “truly great” is the extent to which you feel like you’re seeing them live their truth, be fully themselves… Jason Scott, the historian and digital archivist, told me at Webstock that a fitting epitaph for his headstone would be: “He gave a crap. He didn’t give a fuck.”

—

Karen McKane, quoted in Austin Kleon’s post “Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck.”

This has been my mantra for the last couple months. I’ve finally settled into a professional atmosphere that engages my creative passions while also being totally okay with the reality that perhaps nothing I write for myself, like The Worst Writer Ever or any of my other writing projects, might see the end goal I would like. That’s not the reason I do them, because for me this kind of writing has been something I’ve engaged in on a daily basis since I was thirteen.

Recently, I was going through my old notebooks from NYC, college, high school, and some of the old typewriter manuscripts from before we had a computer. (I KNOW! I didn’t have one until half way through eighth grade). I’m trying to organize all of my papers in a similar manner to Gay Talese’s system and what I realized was how comics helped shaped me as a writer, and how long I’ve been engaging in writing. Since I was twelve! Twenty years I’ve been handwriting and journaling like this. Perhaps I was a creative life blogger from before the Internet. Maybe this is as far as I’ll get as a writer.

Then I came upon this quote written in one of my high school journals, I cringe at its teenage cliched pensiveness, but: “The second you stop caring about something is when it works out.” And it’s true. I think when you stop giving a fuck about the end game of something and just keep working on the details, and working on it eventually that thing will work out. It may be twenty years from now or next year. I do not give a fuck. It’s not why I do it.

2 months ago 247 notes

“I spend seven or eight hours… each time I try to write. Most of that time is spent stalling, which means that for every seven or eight hours I spend pretending to write - sitting in the writing position, looking at a screen - I get, on average, one hour of actual work done. It’s a terrible, unconscionable ratio. This kind of life is at odds with the romantic notions I once had, and most people have, of the writing life. We imagine more movement, somehow. We imagine it on horseback. Camelback? We imagine convertibles, windswept cliffs, lighthouses. We don’t imagine - or I didn’t imagine - quite so much sitting. I know it makes me sound pretty naive, that I would expect to be writing while, say, skiing. But still. The utterly sedentary nature of this task gets to me every day.”

—

Dave Eggers, via austinkleon.

I’ve been basically spending my first week of break just working around the idea of establishing a work flow for the four fucking projects I said I would finish/start over this break. More than anything else I feel that same level of inspiration that Eggers is talking about here in this article about Writing Life.

It can be workmanlike, it can be a grind, and it can take years to make anything of any value. But if, at the end of it all, there’s a Gabby who holds the words to her heart and rides the subway through the night, back to Oakland, thinking of what those words on a page did to her, then the work is worth doing.

In the meantime, I’ve spent the week fucking around with organizing my day and I’m not really getting anything done. Though I feel like Merlin Mann’s stuff is helping me with my procrastination issue and forcing me to figure it out. I think I’ve finally got it sorted out today.

(via austinkleon)

5 months ago 461 notes

“An idea is not a series, and jokes are not characters […] A story is only a story if (a) it’s about someone (singular or plural) who wants something and (b) something’s in hi (or their) way. And it’s a story worth telling only if (c) the reader has reasons to care about (a) and (b).”

—	Mark Waid, on the creation of INSUFFERABLE (and also giving some print-this-out-and-hang-it-on-the-wall-where-you-work advice for writers.) (Source: wilwheaton)

5 months ago 429 notes

“For me, it’s not that you can’t do it completely alone. If you were alone on an island and you had to write a Batman story, it’s not like it wouldn’t be something you’re proud of. For me the real extra layers, the extra richness that come in anything I do, if there is an extra layer, comes from those conversations with friends, or having another set of eyes looking at it. So I’m a really big advocate of if you have friends, not just going to school for writing or anything like that, but having gone to school for writing clinging to people you trust to read your work. If you have a friend that you think gives you good advice, there’s nothing more valuable than keeping that free flow of ideas going back and forth. For me, it’s a real lifeline.”

—	Scott Snyder in these really great interviews at the Comics Reporter.

5 months ago 2 notes

Writer as an ass escaping this reality through his black hole bum.

5 months ago 1 note

One of my favorites, Richard Price:

I was the reader in the family,’ he says. ‘From the age of four or five, I read more than anyone else I knew.’ He was also verbally precocious, but except for English, his school grades were average and he wasn’t an athlete, wasn’t tough, wasn’t popular. ‘I was a mope,’ he says. ‘A watcher, an outsider. Those are the kids who become writers.’

5 months ago 0 notes

From Stephen Marchie’s article in Esquire titled “The Golden Age For Writers is Right Now”.

I love this article. Far too often, I feel like writers are grumpy less than optimistic people and I’m sick and tired of it. The woe is me, “I’m not going to sell or promote myself and go the small press route and hopefully hand sell some of my work.” Fuck off, seriously, we’re so lucky to be passionate about writing and wanting to write and live interestingly so, in turn, we have interesting things to write about. I’m not saying live the Tucker Max-lifestyle or anything but live and write about the kinds of things you care about, enthusiasm and drive for excellence is a good place to start. As is affecting the active voice. Be enthusiastic about your work, sell yourself in a way that shows that what you’re trying to do is interesting because you care so much about it. What I’m saying is: writers need to be more confident.

In the mean time: I won’t make you click on the article because Esquire’s website is terrible but instead just excerpt some of my favorite bits:

At least we’ll have good stuff to read while we wait. This fall alone, the number of big books published by major writers is astounding: Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and about a half dozen others. Not that the list has stopped anyone from complaining. Literary circles have been so full of pity for so long that they can’t accept the optimistic truth: We’re living in a golden age for writers and writing.

…

The publishers are making money, too. Revenue for adult hardcover books is up 8.3 percent from 2011, and paperback sales are up 5.2 percent. Book sales for young adults and children grew by 12 percent last year. E-books accounted for 30 percent of net publisher sales in the adult fiction category in 2011 — compared with 13 percent in 2010 — but there’s little evidence that those numbers represent anything other than a shift in format. The e-reader is creating a new market, not destroying an old one. People with e-readers read more books than those without, and on average adult Americans read seventeen books in 2011 — a number that hasn’t been higher since Gallup and Pew began tracking the figure in 1990. And it’s not just crap books. The percentage of Americans who told the National Endowment for the Arts that they read literature rose in 2008 (their most recent survey) by 3.5 percentage points to more than half the population — the first gain in twenty-six years.
…

The book that “comes out of nowhere” is almost commonplace. Matterhorn. The Tiger’s Wife. Or these, both from tiny presses, which won the biggest literary prizes.

Last night, while uncorking myself from stressing over grading research papers I finally came to believe something I’ve been preaching forever: I’m not in competition with anyone. So what if some movie, book, or comic is like something I’ve been working on forever and it’s taken me a long time to get it off the ground—it’s a learning process—and if that piece of writing or art came out before my thing did that just means that I need to up my game. I should stop trying to affect a particular kind of voice to make it more like some author I look up to and really just fuck off and be myself.

What I liked about last night and this article is in its simple premise: have confidence in yourself, you’re not like others, and if you work hard enough at something—it’ll work out.

5 months ago 19 notes

From The Oatmeal’s recent post on making things on the Internet. This is pretty much all the fear that I’ve ever grappled with regarding anything I’ve ever done creatively and bothered to post here. This is also why I stopped caring and now just kind of do whatever. The internet is really just a great big bag of whatever.

6 months ago 1 note

“And if reading is similar to driving, then learning that you, yourself, can make stories, that you, yourself, can write a tale, is like lifting up the hood of your car for the first time. That moment when you realize that your car is a machine, something that was built, and if someone can build this machine, then you could build one of your own. You too can construct, can know the ins and outs of an engine headed elsewhere. But this, this construction, just like everything else, has to be taught: the importance of trusting yourself.”

—	Isaac Fitzgerald’s inspiring foreword to Quarterly 16 posted at 826 Valencia. This is something I try to do every day, and I love Isaac for saying it far more eloquently than me.

6 months ago 27 notes

Google Hangout video with Junot Diaz. I wish I was able to participate in this, because I’m pretty sure I would have one question that did not get asked. Anyway, if you have a half hour to kill—this is pretty interesting.

6 months ago 3 notes

#On writing

“An idea is not a series, and jokes are not characters […] A story is only a story if (a) it’s about someone (singular or plural) who wants something and (b) something’s in hi (or their) way. And it’s a story worth telling only if (c) the reader has reasons to care about (a) and (b).”

Dave Press