Come back when you decide to work harder — come back when you agree to commit yourself to the work you want to do and stop making excuses. I’m tired of all your whining.

Also: stop being so agreeable. You know what your problem is — you fully recognize your limitations and your shortcomings — but you’re spending all your time saying “I know, I know…I must do better…” When it gets so tiring to listen to such crap. Fix it already.

Sit at the desk and work. If your job or your kids are getting in the way, deal with it. If it’s going to be a crutch for you, quit writing. Just quit and save everyone the hassle of having to hear your mouth anymore.

In fact, just quit. I don’t even trust you at this point. You’ll nod your head when you read this and resolve to do better, because you know I’m on to you. It won’t last, though. You’ll do all right for a day or two, then you’ll start the excuses again. You’ll have to clean the office, or the holidays are here. You’ll start on New Year’s. It’s the perfect time for such things. You’ll start writing seriously, SERIOUSLY this time. You’re at a crossroads and THIS IS IT.

Save it. You’re not doing anything like that. Unless you’re willing to start right now and right where you’re sitting (no coffeeshops, no reserving a quiet room at the library) then just quit. You’re finished.

I don’t want to hear about this again.

What if writers did the same thing? What if a writer sat down during a session and wrote a story or piece of a novel from start to finish, without any deep consideration for pointed insight or introspection, letting the plot meander until it reaches a satisfactory ending; then take it out on the ‘road’ to open mikes, writing salons, atop soap boxes on street corners; and finally return to the writing desk to rewrite, fleshing out the skeleton of the piece to create something seemingly finished.

What if you arrived at the open mike, writing salon, street corner, etc. and riffed on keywords of your freewrite, your rough skeleton as you’re reading the piece aloud, and you recorded what you read – your riffs. You could try out your new material, improvising where you felt necessary, and return to your desk to complete the piece.

You could keep audio files of your riffs, but never write them down. You could riff on different aspects of the initial skeletal piece and create as many variations of your story as you wanted. It could become strictly an organic performance piece.

Or you could collect the variations of the same story into a collection of prose, and readers could see your mind at work. They could know the truth.

A brilliant analogy he made was a pretty simple one: the shot clock in basketball. College basketball has a 35-second clock, during which time the team on the offensive must shoot the ball. If the ball is not shot in 35 seconds, the other team takes possession. Incidentally, Women’s College Basketball uses a 30-second clock. Why? Is it a kind of “Hurry the hell up and let’s get this over with” thing?

Anyway, there wasn’t always a shot clock. A team could have, and did, run several minutes off the clock by playing keep-away from the other team. It was a boring brand of basketball for sure. Bachelder’s point, if you haven’t figured it out already, is that things became more exciting when the shot clock was introduced. The players on the floor had to make, sometimes, split second decisions. Also, the audience knew that something HAD to happen at least every 35 seconds. This made things more exciting, had the audience always anticipating things.

Bachelder talked about television programs, too — sitcoms in particular. You used to know that some kind of climax had to happen by the 27 or 28-minute mark. Television writers have gotten way smarter, today, though, because shows don’t always end that way anymore. Take CSI for instance. Sometimes it’s resolved and sometimes you see Jerry Bruckheimer’s name and you’re like: What the hell just happened? What the writers have done is make the viewer anticipate the anticipation. It’s absolutely brilliant.

So the 35-second clock, the 30-minute sitcom, the 60-minute drama all have back walls. What about stories?

Bachelder talked about Ulysses, which takes place in a day. I thought of the back wall of The Catcher in the Rye, which takes place over three days, and you know Holden has to go home to his parents some time, or you think Holden has to go home sometime.

The clock has to begin early in a story. The opening of the story opens up the back wall for the reader. Bachelder used Raymond Carver’s opening to his story, “Cathedral”

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-law’s. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing -eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

There’s a lot here to anticipate. The evening the blind man spends at the house is going to be interesting: the narrator is going to be uncomfortable, and uncomfortable things are interesting to watch from afar. This paragraph contains enough to want to know what happens the evening the blind man shows up. The second paragraph, though, goes even further:

That summer in Seattle she had needed a job. She didn’t have any money. The man she was going to marry at the end of the summer was in the officers’ training school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something in the paper: HELP WANTED — Reading to Blind Man, and a telephone number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She’s worked with the blind man all summer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county social-service department. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man. How do I know these things? She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, he nose — even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her.

Paragraph two certainly raises the stakes: the narrator’s wife loved another man before him; she had an emotional attachment to the blind man; the blind man had his hands all over her face (“even her neck!”); and thinking back, the blind man is traveling five hours just to see her and stay overnight.

You want to read the rest of this story, don’t you.

So I’m working on my Keys story with all of this in mind, or not in mind at first. It’s nine pages now, which is important to me for some reason.

I’m here and I feel out of place, which is not surprising: I feel out of place in most places. At this point, I’m like Crash Davis, without the minor league homerun record.

People are good. I don’t like people, but recognize that people are good and useful. When I decided to speak to people here, I found them genuinely good. Here’s the thing about conferences at this point: People here are either 90 or they’re 24. Or there’s a youth writing conference here, in which case the participants are teenagers.

Lydia Davis is one of these good people, and she visited campus to give a reading and an informal talk about writing, etc. Her ‘interviewer’ was Chris Bachelder. He wasn’t really an interviewer, though, and I appreciated that. He got the hell out of the way and let Lydia meander through her genius unfettered, as opposed to me, who is very much the hell in the way of this entry. I am fettering the progression of this entry.

Lydia knows me from her generosity. She and Amy Hempel came to Pittsfield, Massachusetts (50 miles from where I am now) and did a benefit reading for my educational nonprofit, Word Street. There was dinner afterward with Lydia and Amy, and I have chosen not to write about it because I loved the moment and want it to be mine for as long as possible.

I’m not ready to write about it yet.

Before what was to be an interview before a live audience, I watched Lydia talk some with Chris, most likely doing some last minute preparation for what was to come. Lydia saw me and waved quite vigorously. I know the reason for this was that she knows how oddly uncomfortable I am in most situations and especially in light of the debacle at the Brix Wine Bar.

My wife and I had our annual date night a few months ago, and we decided to pretend to be refined palates and sniff some wine corks at Brix. It was three or four days, maybe a week, before the big reading I organized, featuring Davis and Hempel, and the maitre d’ seated us just about on top of Lydia Davis and her husband, the artist Alan Cote. I knew Lydia from a master class in fiction I took with her at UAlbany, but that was a long time ago, at least a year, so when I sat down next to her, I didn’t think it was appropriate to say hello, thought I’d be imposing on a meal I shouldn’t have been a part of in the first place. Yes, I have issues. I’m in the process of getting help.

So I never said hello to her, and to make matters worse, since I thought she may have noticed me and wondered why I didn’t say hello, I emailed her to tell her what I did, that I was sorry. She emailed back and recounted the entire evening, from the things we ordered to the awkward conversation with the waiter. She thought the whole thing was humorous and put me at ease once and for all.

So when she waved vigorously to me two days ago, I think she knew what she was doing.

Like I said, she’s one of the good people.

Without further delay, here are my disjointed notes on Lydia Davis’ interview with Chris Bachelder:

Lydia read the dictionary in 1971, it was a collegiate dictionary, maybe a Merriam Webster. She still references a worn copy of the dictionary constantly – not for shedding light on a general meaning of a word, but to find the precise meaning of a word. She also regards etymology as essential.

The best writing instruction she ever absorbed was not from writing teachers, but from one or two writerly friends who would read her work microscopically close.

It takes a long time to become individual as a writer. I’m assuming she’s talking about voice and style.

Constraints in writing are often more useful than freedom.

Interesting exercises: using the thesaurus to change words — consequently rhythm; diction, obviously. There are no synonyms, after all, because words aren’t the same, each is more or less precise.

Ideology doesn’t drive her work. Davis is receptive to external elements and, usually, her ideology appears beneath or within (these are partly my paraphrasings, by the way) another intention.

If Davis is stuck on a particular day (which is a rarity), she assigns herself small writing tasks: each day this week, I will write a two-paragraph story. In forcing yourself to stay in the chair no matter what, the result is a brutal truth.

Look to models in published writing for solutions to writing problems.

Lydia Davis writes in order for the words to disappear. The precision of her diction and simplicity of the language directs the reader, ideally, away from the writing.

My own thought toward the end of the interview: If a woman is sitting in front of me and her cascading blonde hair falls all over my bare knees, isn’t she in my space? Should I allow this?

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