author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

OK, so, since the last time I ended a blog post with vague promises about "tomorrow," a lot of tomorrows happened, to nobody's surprise.

So what did the intervening undocumented tomorrows consist of? Well, some of them involved me driving down to New Orleans for my 30th high school reunion! It was great! Turns out, the people I grew up with are all stellar human beings and I like hanging out with them! I was in town a few days on either side of the big event, visiting friends and family, writing a little, skating a little, eating a lot of good food--all pretty much expected features of a visit home.

Then, on the Wednesday morning I was packing the car to drive away, Dad tested positive for COVID-19 and I realized I had a sore throat and a runny nose myself. Yup. I done got it again. Thankfully, the spread seems to have been limited to myself, my dad, and my brother when we had dinner together Monday night. No one else I visited that day or the day before reported symptoms. So it seems unlikely that I encountered the bug among, or introduced the bug to, the Alumni Weekend/Class of '94 Reunion crowds on Friday and Saturday.

This has been a mild case, as covid goes. And a good thing too, since I still needed to drive the 20-hour return trip to Boulder. Thank goodness for cough drops and hand sanitizer.

For my two previous bouts with covid back in 2021, I isolated in the office/second bedroom. But this time around required a more ironclad plan. John's about to host a small private gaming convention, and he needs to present zero risk to his guests. So we agreed that, after passing by the house for a brief non-contact exchange of goods, I'd check myself into a nearby hotel to isolate.

Annnnnnnnd I'm still here. Still testing positive a week later. I DON'T LIKE IT. But over the past couple days I've regained enough energy and physical well-being to sit up and play games on the computer and even write! Yes! Today's been especially good. Got a full "morning shift" in, took a guilt-free nap, and now here I am writing a blog post like I haven't done since February.

Now, at the end of that previous blog post, I suggested I might get back to talking about actually writing. AND SO I SHALL. Sort of. Here we go:

Barbara Baig's How to Be a Writer
(Being a Rather Grumpy Book Review)

So I recently had occasion to install Google Play Books, and it turns out that when you install Google Play Books, you get a bunch of freebies. Well, I did, anyway. Almost all of them were writing books:

• Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Write That Book Already!
• Les Edgerton, Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go
• Barbara Baig, How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play
• Victoria Lynn Schmidt, Story Structure Architect
• Theodore Cheney, Getting the Words Right
• Marilyn Ross and Sue Collier, The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing
• Writers Digest Books, The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing

And then there was The Oera Linda Book, which purports to be a Thirteenth-century manuscript but is in fact widely held to be a Nineteenth-century hoax or forgery. From 1922 on, it got really popular among the Nazis. Why Google included that, I dunno.

But anyway, here I am at Isolation Station with lots of time on my hands, trying to discipline myself into using that time for writing, and I figure, why not dive into this selection and see what we find? I started with the one by Baig, because it sounded like it might freshen up my Morning Pages and freewriting practice with a little extra playfulness.

I'm 23% of the way in, and I don't think I'll be finishing it.

How to Be a Writer is basically an introduction to writing-as-practice and the value of freewriting. These are concepts I'm already extremely familiar with. Which is fine. I knew going in that I was not going to be the primary audience. But I did hope that it might offer a few new-to-me insights. Or at least be enjoyable to read?

Turns out, not so much.

Put it this way: Imagine someone said, "Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron were very good for their time, but their hits were 40 and 30 years ago. It's time to repackage their tools for a new generation. And while we're at it, maybe remove all that inconvenient spirituality. We don't want to scare anyone off..." Well, then, you might get something like How to Be a Writer... if you also had a very poor opinion of the new generation's reading comprehension.

Look. It is fine to devote a few early paragraphs to how writing is a skill just like baseball is a skill, and, like baseball, it benefits from regular practice. That is a perfectly cromulent beginner-level truth. It is, in fact, the argument for this book's entire existence. But, having stated it in the introduction, and then having expanded on this thesis throughout Chapter 1, why continue trying to convince us through Chapter 2? We are now already convinced. We do not need the point belabored further. We certainly don't need to introduce Chapter 3 with a paragraph-long quote from Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans about how baseball players make it look easy because they have been practicing. But all right, fine, include that long quote if you must. But then for heaven's sake don't continue for two further paragraphs that do nothing but paraphrase that quote! We read the quote already! We don't need it explained to us!

At this point I'm beginning to wonder whether she thinks her readers are not just beginners at writing, but also at thinking, that a concept this simple should need to be developed painfully, slowly, and with great repetition and as many sportsball comparisons as possible, over nearly a quarter of the book's page-count. Or perhaps there was an assigned minimum word count that had to be reached?

These are, admittedly, not kind things for me think about an author. But I am not best disposed toward an author who seems to assume I can't keep a thought in my head for five minutes at a time.

(To be scrupulously fair, Goldberg compares writing to running at least as often as Baig compares writing to baseball. But then, Goldberg herself is a runner. There's no hypothetical "when we see a runner in a marathon, we are seeing the result of months of daily practice" here. It is her own running practice, and her own writing practice, too, that she puts on the page. She is writing in specific detail from her lived experience, and not from an abstract course syllabus in her head.)

All right. Fine. Shifting from Goldberg to Cameron here: Let's say this book is deliberately meant to be something like The Artist's Way but for the two-thousand-teens. Why, then, having reached the 23% mark, have I noticed no quotations--neither the chapter-heading epigraphs or the "like so-and-so said" anecdotes--that aren't old enough to have been included in The Artist's Way in the first place? In fact, I'm pretty sure a good chunk of them were included. I think that's why I recognize so many of them. (Well, the McCarver quote dates to 1999. It would have had to wait for the 30th Anniversary Edition of The Artist's Way.) Do you think no writers have said anything quotable more recently than that? And why are all the writers you're quoting--not to put too fine a point on it--men?

(And why, for the love of little green crickets, is one of those men Woody effin' Allen? I mean, it's a quote about the importance of having a daily routine. I'm pretty sure other writers with less objectionable histories had daily routines in 2012 and would have been happy to talk about them!)

Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe later on in the book there are really nice quotes from Ursula K Le Guin and Nnedi Okorafor. Maybe there will also be insights unique to this author and to the decade in which she's writing. I'll never know, because what I have read so far has not inclined me toward continuing.

So, yeah, I'm sitting here in a hotel room, eating tonight's DoorDash delivery, and getting very homesick for my physical library with its well-thumbed copies of much better books. (I am also homesick for my husband, and for my bunny, and for the ability to cook myself a meal from scratch...) But I'll be there Sunday morning at the very latest. Until then, there's always the public library's online catalog.