Tag: writing

Last Night’s Reading, Yesterday’s Writing

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Last night, I read:

“The Woman Who Rode Away” by DH Lawrence

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Chapters 1 – 3.

If anyone would like to talk about either of those selections, please do comment below. 

Yesterday, I revised (tried to re-see) a poem I’ve been working on and got to what I think is a good place with it.  The middle section still needs attention, but I did what I could with the energy I had.  

It was one of those days where I knew in my head (I don’t mean my mind…I mean I had one of those headaches where you just feel tired all day) I wasn’t going to get much new writing done, but I’m happy with what I was able to do in revision.  That’s not to say that revision isn’t new writing, but it’s not from scratch or the ether or wherever else these things in their mirror images form before you make them stick.

If you’re writing today, good writing!




Does Blogging Mess Up a Writing Life?

~ Chris Cocca ~ 5 Comments

I’ve gone back and forth on this. 

One thing I can say is that when I achieve flow in a short story or longer-form fiction, the last thing I want to do is open another tab and start blogging about it. I don’t want to do anything other than stay in the flow.

But no one is in always in the flow.  It’s not productive to try.  Stay in the flow as long as it’s flowing, but understand that your subconscious needs a break.  You’re not at peak creative performance all the time.  You need downtime and sleep and the daily demands of life.  That’s not glamorous, but it’s true. 

Don’t write drunk and edit sober.  Don’t forget about sleep.  REM-cycles are essential for the next day’s writing, and for bridging the brilliance of yesterday’s flow with today’s and tomorrow’s.

There are times when you can’t work on The Thing In Itself.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t write at all.  When the flow stops, shift gears.  Dig out an old post and revise.  Make it better.  Re-share.

Read.  Read short stories.  Read books.

I’d suggest reading more than you blog, but if you have a family or a partner or a dog or a cat or a goldfish or parents or siblings or nieces or nephews or bosses or bills, you have commitments outside of yourself.  Sometimes you can blog while doing other things (I do not mean driving).  It’s much harder to read while your spouse watches Chopped.  (You should also watch Chopped.  It’s great.)

Blogging (or tweeting) does not mess up a writing life, but it needs to kept in perspective.  Sometimes, it can help unlock the next round of creative flow.

That’s been my experience.  What’s been yours?



Fiction Responding to Fiction: D.H. Lawrence and Raymond Carver (and James Lasdun)

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Among the 14 pounds of books I got from Powell’s this week are three or four pounds of DH Lawrence. I also bought the 2014 O. Henry Prize collection and a new copy of James Lasdun’s It’s Beginning to Hurt.  I studied with James in 2011 at The New School.  I did not know that James was a jurist for the 2014 O. Henry Prize, nor did I know that he wrote the introduction to one of the Lawrence collections among the three or four of my new 14 pounds.

James is a great writer and a great teacher.  It was a pleasure to find more of his work than I knew was coming.

The link below is to a piece on the similarities between Raymond Carver’s “Cathedrals” and Lawrence’s “The Blind Man” at Ploughshares. I share it here because one of the things that has encouraged me over the years is some insight James gave me on a story I’d written for his seminar.  We’d discussed the Cathedrals/Blind Man connections in class, and James asked us each to write a story in some way inspired by something we’d read and studied in class.  I went back to “The Blind Man,” among other things.

Speaking of Carver:  I think most writers are looking for a less-ambitious Gordon Lish.

From Ploughshares:

“The Fiction Responding to Fiction series considers the influence that a short story has on another writer; previous entries can be found here. Raymond Carver insisted that his iconic masterpiece….”

Source: Fiction Responding to Fiction: D.H. Lawrence and Raymond Carver

When Clark Kent Quit the Daily Planet

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

“I was taught to believe you could use words to change the course of rivers — that even the darkest secrets would fall under the harsh light of the sun…But facts have been replaced by opinions. Information has been replaced by entertainment. Reporters have become stenographers. I can’t be the only one who’s sick of what passes for the news today.”

Clark Kent, 2012

Scott Lobdell wrote this characterization of America’s most famous reporter, published in the final weeks of the 2012 election.  Superman was speaking here as a progressive; this is not a right-wing screed about fake news.

The point holds though, perhaps now more than ever.  The White House would like to bar reporters who ask questions it doesn’t like, and refuses to condemn the killing of dissident journalists overseas. 

When nothing is true, not even our most basic social mores, I suppose all news can convincingly be cast as fake by people with a vested interest in doing so. 

Part of this is on us.  We have tolerated decades of spin, of being lied to repeatedly by people in power.  Long before Trump, we’d bemoan the truth that all leaders lie, even as we kept electing them.  We’ve been in co-dependent political relationships for the length of the media age.  

Remember when some people thought blogging would save us? Or social media? 

It turns out democracy only works if we participate beyond the bare minimum.  If you’re too busy, too tired, too overworked, too impoverished to be more involved, consider whether the systems that govern your life have made that less or more true.  Then vote accordingly.  That’s a start.




Revising after Rejection: Re-Seeing, Re-Listening, Re-Hearing

~ Chris Cocca ~ 3 Comments

Like most necessary things, writing is hard.  Communicating mental images or flashes of memory or triggering smells with tools that are, themselves, none of those things, takes work.  Doing so in ways that makes sense not just to you but also to readers takes even more work. 

I submitted some things to a great journal a few months ago.  Even though the work I shared wasn’t ultimately accepted, I’m quite pleased with the feedback.  Having given myself some time and space, I’ve come back to the piece they particularly liked with new eyes and ears.  (Revision is always, literally, re-seeing.  But it’s also re-listening and re-hearing.)

I greatly appreciate what the editor here is saying, and the time he took to say it, and the time he and the rest of the team take thinking deeply on these things:

We are writing with mixed news. While we are not accepting these poems, your submission made it through multiple editorial rounds. We particularly enjoyed “[title redacted]” with its exploration of anxiety and attempts at self-soothing. Our main concern, ultimately, was that there were moments when the piece felt too expository. We’d love to see the entire piece rooted in the wild imagery of the last third of the poem.

We recognize how much talent and skill went in to your submission, but we can only publish a small percentage of the work we receive. In the final round of selections, we start looking for the smallest of reasons–reasons in line with our own personal tastes–to reject a manuscript. This part of the process, we understand, is so very subjective. So we want you to know that while we are not accepting this manuscript, we were pleased with your submission, it was a joy to read, and we hope we’ll see more of your work in the future.

Fourteen Pounds of Books and Gift Receipts

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I order ordered books from Powell’s. 

When the box arrived on Monday, it weighed 14 pounds.

Saul Bellow, D.H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad top the list.  Some things I’ve read before but had not previously owned, and other things that will be new to me.

Reading as a writer, that is, reading to uncover craft, is a much more pleasurable thing to me than what we sometimes mean when we self-consciously say we’re reading for pleasure.

A side note: My used copy of Sons and Lovers has a gift receipt from a Barnes & Noble in Costa Mesa, California from December 19, 2004 inside the cover and a remnant bit of Christmas paper still Scotch-taped to the back.  It was processed into the Powell’s system last January.  Where else has it been?  How did the receipt and the wrapping paper stay connected to this edition for 14 years?  Did someone unwrap it, like it, keep it, and then get rid of it last year?  Or has it been in circulation longer?  The mind already reels, and we haven’t even made it to the Table of Contents or the Timeline of the World of D.H. Lawrence.

I don’t know if that’s of any help to you this Black Friday, but I do recommend buying books.