Yes, they used to be actual letters! To support myself, I turned temp jobs in offices into full-time writing jobs. I wrote that novel and another one and countless short stories, and I have the rejection letters to prove it. I petitioned my high school to let me take a creative writing class every semester even though the registrar said that was “unusual.” I only applied to colleges with creative writing majors, and after graduating with mine, I expected that it would only be a matter of time before I published the next great American novel.
I started writing down those stories first with crayon and then pen and then on my father’s electric typewriter and then on our Mac Classic. As a child, it was all I ever imagined doing, spending hours in my closet making up stories. I love Orlean’s (to my eyes) perfect books and essays, but I can begrudgingly agree that for the most part, she is correct when she writes, “Unless you’re arrogant or a fool, you know there’s always something more that could be done to make something you’ve written better.”įor years, I have danced around a career as a writer. Sheets and pillowcases and sleeves can be ironed to a kind of perfection that Orlean says she and no one else is ever able to achieve with the written word.
MINBOX DEAD HOW TO
In “ How to Avoid Going Insane as a Writer,” Susan Orlean says, “I’ve realized that it’s important for me to have something to do regularly that is concrete and satisfying, to contrast with the abstractness, the impossibility, of writing perfectly.”įor Orlean, this concrete thing is ironing.
0 kommentar(er)
