Recently, I started taking improv classes at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York (founded by the high priestess of funny, Amy Poehler). During each class exercise, I’d think, “This would help my writing.” I compiled a list of

1. Be in a scene (a place, a time, an action). I used to start scenes with a joke and go from there; one day my teacher, the venerable Chelsea Clarke, stopped me and said, “Be rowing a boat.” I began rowing a fake boat, and suddenly, I was a character in a boat; the audience knew where I was and what I was doing.

It’s similarly knee-jerk to start a chapter discussing the metaphysics of unrequited love or whatever, but that’s disorientating to your reader because it’s like soliloquizing in space. Put your reader in a scene. Make one character be unrequitedly in love with another character rowing her boat.

1a. Relatedly, I wrote a chapter that is 80% me talking about my emotions and blowjobs. After an hour-long conversation with an editor about how to organize/overhaul this chapter, she finally said, “Elissa! Get out of the talky headspace, and present [verb] moments, rather than talk on and on about them. Basically, I need to see the blowjob. Take me into the blowjob room.” Take your readers into the blowjob room.

2. Play to the top of your intelligence. I wish I could explain this one better, but I think I just like the phrase, “Play to the top of your intelligence.” (Here is what Google says: ”If your character is stupid, be smart about how you’re stupid,” which I take to mean, be stupid in a specific way).

2a. I am trying to write a book. The book begins with me as a college student, a nineteen-year-old girl. I did a lot of dumb shit at that age. As the writer/present-day narrator (no longer a college student, no longer a teenager), I have to be smart about showing that young girl doing dumb shit.

3. “Yes, and.” Tina Fey’s Bossypants gets this right: “The Rule of Agreement reminds you to ‘respect what your partner has created’ and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where it takes you. As an improvisor, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no . . . ‘No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.’ What kind of way is that to live? . . . You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own . . . To me, YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.” Do I agree with Tina Fey? YES, AND I want to be her sister.

3a. Once applied to writing, you’ll be saying to yourself, “Yes, I want to write this emotionally traumatic scene, and I want to write the healing scene that comes a few years later.” “Yes, I want to hear your constructive criticism, and I’m going to make this chapter stronger because of it.” “Yes, this character goes down on that character, and then they switch it up.” “Yes, this horrible thing happened to me, and I’m going to write about it and turn it into the most beautiful piece of literature.” “Yes, I’m going to write a book, and I’m going to write another.”

4. Support your scene partners’ success. This is all about not being a jerk. Applaud your team every single time they/he/she get(s) the courage to do something creative/crazy in front of you and your judging eyes.

4a. Here is a rant:

I used to believe that if someone else is really funny, then I’m obviously less funny. If someone else is the best in the scene, then I’m—if not the worst—not the best, because the best is taken. If another woman in the class is getting better, then I’m getting worse. If she’s succeeding, I’m not. Not true in improv (and life)! A few things to consider: A) The better your scene partner is, the better you are, because you’re trapped on a sinking and/or floating ship together. B) If your ship is sinking, it’s fine because you are not alone. C) Sometimes, to make the scene work, it’s in your benefit to be “the straight man” (this isn’t a homophobic term; it means: the one who isn’t the funny scene-stealing star. “Straight men” are important because they make the scene work, and therefore make the show good; it’s not about them—it’s about their team. “Straight men” are also important for sex.)

4b. How this pertains to writing: it may very well be true that another person is succeeding and you are not experiencing success, but one has nothing to do with the other. There’s not a limited amount of success going around. In what world does it make sense that if I am funny, you are not funny? NO WORLD. We need to believe in, encourage, support, and massage each other’s egos. I believe in you. I believe in what you’re doing. Please keep doing it, and maybe do a little of it near me.

(Sidebar rant to The Rant: There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and I think it’s harder for women than for men, because in men, arrogance is sexy. In women, it’s bitchy. I’m making generalizations based on my own generalizations and those of my friends—this may be hard to accept or you want to argue or say I’m not being objective or I’m being reverse sexist. This female community doesn’t exclude men; what I’m emphasizing is that we need to fortify the female community. There is work to be done. How do I know this? Because I know there’s work to be done inside me. [Insert dirty joke here.])

5. Make strong choices. The more specific you are (“I’m in a graveyard, and I’m a vampire slayer who is also a vampire [real scene that happened to me]“), the stronger you are communicating. If you’re a vampire, try biting your scene partner right away (the strong and obvious choice), instead of what I did, which was to stand still and say, “Hey, I’m a vampire slayer who is also a vampire, so I guess I’m suicidal.” And then I staked myself and died. The scene was over before it began.

5a. I can visualize a strong female lead who likes grilled cheese with American cheese and white bread; I do not have a clear picture of a character who eats food.

6. Don’t be precious. This is another way of saying, “kill your darlings.” Move on. Let go of your expectations. Let’s say you’re planning a great joke, but the scene changes/takes a different direction and the joke no longer works—let it go. Be comfortable letting it be gone forever. Know you’re in the next scene with a new joke, a new opportunity. As Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” I also like what Will Eno wrote: “Let’s not be precious. The history of plays and the history of the world is a set of the same conversations being had by different people. We’ve all been through them. ‘You are the only one, forever,’ we swear, having sworn it before.” You are the only one, forever, fantastic first sentence; goodbye.

6a. If you can’t kill your darlings, anesthetize/copy & paste them in a separate Word document.

7. Be present. Yoga also says this. If yoga and improv say this, it must be the truest of truths. Not being present in a scene is the real-life nightmare of showing up to a test for which you haven’t studied (and you are naked and your crush is noticing you for the first time and there is shrinkage). Not being present in a yoga pose means you have probably fallen on your sacrum or your shockra or your perineum.

7a. Writing takeaway: When talking about Elizabeth Bishop one day, my poetry teacher, Jennifer Michael Hecht, said she believed only in work created with a high level of concentration. Install the hilariously-named Freedom program that turns off the Internet; place your phone in a drawer; put up a sign that says Mining Coal; do whatever you have to do to be present with your writing. Go into the blowjob room if you have to.

There are a lot of other rules, and I’ll update this as I learn them. Namaste, Funny Women (and that includes men and everyone else).

**

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We ♥ Mike Doughty

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Misery loves writerly company, and we created the “Write Like a Motherf*ucker” Facebook page to offer extra support and/or a place to make a plan like, “let’s work for one hour and then check in.” Facebook can be something other than a wedding album sometimes, you know?

Check in with other writers who need to write like motherfuckers at any given time. Even if no one else is available at a particular time to write with you, state your intentions on this page, et voila, you are now accountable to the Write Like a Motherf*cker community at large. You don’t want to break a commitment like that–to so many people–do you? We didn’t think so.

Click here to go from f*cking off to writing like a motherf*cker.

***

“Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.” –Dear Sugar, TheRumpus.net. Let’s dig the shit out of [whatever project you're working on].

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• DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #48: Write Like a Motherfucker
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• Sugar’s Coming Out Party!
• Sugar Says

Even though I’m Jewish, I never went to summer camp. A popular girl in the sixth grade called me “Pizza Legs,” because of my purple spider veins and red splotches and moles—bright, textured flaws that looked like pizza toppings on pale skin. During a pool party, I refused to get in a swimsuit, and a different popular girl called me a lesbian.

Shwayder Camp, Idaho Springs, 1997. This summer has been—without rival—the best summer of my life. Life, I am sure, will continue on this trajectory.

For one thing, I am really tan. For another, I’m super heterosexual.

I’m the most popular Jewish girl at Jewish sleep-away camp. The reasons I am popular can be broken down into simple math, which is good for me because I am a lady:

Number of cigarettes I’ve smoked this summer: 7!!!

Number of times I was told I looked hot in my two-piece swimsuit: about a million.

Number of boys who’ve loved me at camp: all.

Number of times I’ve Frenched: 0.

I’ve had a few boyfriends so far, but I haven’t gone to first base with any of them because my body is a temple like Temple Emmanuel.

It’s the last day of camp, and I’ve been waiting all summer for tonight. I’ve been waiting all summer to do the thing, to let the most special boy at camp French my face for the first time.

After I won the championship tennis-racket baseball game today, the girls from Bunk 7 and the boys from Bunk 5 built a celebratory fire, and we sat around eating the best s’mores, strumming guitars, smoking cigarettes, and nursing top-shelf Scotch. Yeah, we’re thirteen, but we’re all interested in becoming addicted to things.

As the fire roared and the night grew darker, the kids began leaving in pairs to go express their emotions physically to each other. Around the fire disappeared Katie the Counselor, Peroxide Chick, Musical Theater Boy, “Musical Theater is Not Real Theater” Theater Gal, The Christian, Jazz Hands, Guitar Dude, Athletic Girl, Jenny the Slut, Just Regular Jenny, and Tripp—Tripp, who wore shorts so short you could tell he was a bona fide Jew.

Unlike Tripp, most of the boys at camp–excuse the Yiddish–were douchbags, but never to me. Certain idiots and schmucks would hurt other girls’ feelings by calling the pale ones “Pizza Legs” or accusing the pre-pubescent feminists of man-hating, but those guys were lining up to love me. I almost can’t believe it, because it seemed so real during the academic school year that I was unliked, that my heart was splintered, that I could have ever been alone considering how many people surround me now.

“Relationships are a noose,” I overheard Guitar Dude say to Tripp. Tripp was the counselor of Bunk 7. He was like a god, cut from Greek-brand marble and infused with poetry. Tripp high-fived Guitar Dude, who continued to talk about his math frat and all the sex he’d done.

My bestie Just Regular Jenny and I shared an appletini, and after a few sips, I felt warm and bold and—most important—wasted. I turned toward Tripp, slowly pulling my hair out of a ponytail and shaking my luscious locks at him (I thought I saw him produce an erection).

Tripp looked at me, and I knew the dream-catcher I made in arts and crafts worked. Within moments, Tripp and I were having serious eye sex.

Guitar Dude started playing “Your Body Is a Wonderland” while Tripp sauntered up to me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I retorted.

“Nice tan,” he smirked.

“Thanks, I’m just naturally like this,” I guffawed.

He smiled, and I knew what he was going to say next.

He pushed up the sunglasses he was wearing even though it was nighttime. “You’ve grown up a lot since before yesterday when we last talked about what a lesbian you’re not,” he said.

He’d noticed. He’d noticed I said I wasn’t a lesbian when I said I’m into cock.

He stepped closer to me until I inhaled his exhale. This had never happened before, so understandably, I froze.

“You got an Altoid?” he asked. This was code; this had great significance.

“I thought you’d never ask,” I said and took out my tin of mints.

We sucked them down and thought deep and separate thoughts. And then I very gradually recalibrated my body into a casual attitude ready to receive his mouth. We pressed our faces together and moved.

We were young. We were before sexual revolutions. We were new and ready and unencumbered.

“You French great,” he said.

“You same,” I said.

“My soul is finger-banging your soul right now,” he said.

I knew just what he meant.

He smiled at me and tucked my hair behind my ear and told me he was familiar with the work of Anaïs Nin. I had no idea what that meant.

“This might be a phase,” he said. “Or,” his eyes pouring into mine, “this might be falling in love.” We continued a kiss that had been waiting to happen all summer, both of us tasting of appletini and wantonness.

“Wait.” I put my fingers to his lips and told him to shut up and stop tonguing me for a second.

“Tripp,” I whispered. “I have to be honest with you, when we started hanging out seriously a few minutes ago, I thought we’d just be friends with benefits. But things change. People change. I’ve changed. I’m coming to you for the first time as a woman, a woman who loves a man, and who wants to hold him and make him a sandwich when he asks and do his laundry one day and yes, be the little spoon post-coital tristesse. Tripp, the literal translation of that is ‘after sex the spirit is sad.’ But anyway, Tripp, I love that you like me. And I don’t care that you’re the classic bad boy who fell through the cracks and never learned to read. The fact is I’ve always wanted you. Because you’re so hot. And that’s all that matters to me, is you, and how hot you are.”

At the end of my speech Tripp looked at me like I was crazy.

“Elissa,” he said. “You’re crazy.” And I felt scared.

“But,” he said. “I love you. I didn’t know it until this very moment for sure, but now I know, and it feels like nothing I’ve ever known before, and it feels so right. I love you.”

“Say it again,” I said.

“I love you.”

“LOUDER,” I screamed from my finger-banged soul.

“My voice doesn’t get any louder than this,” he confided sincerely.

We Frenched for like a minute, you guys, seriously.

Then, inexplicably, Tripp got really sad.

“Tripp,” I said, “You can tell me what you’re feeling.”

He started to cry, which I found unattractive.

“I knew this would happen,” he said, “that I would talk to you and fall in love with you, and you would leave me for the eighth grade. This is over, isn’t it?”

I shushed him and told him a secret about love and loss, and he relaxed.

“What’s going to happen tomorrow?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll see the world, maybe have to start seeing other people. We’ve got a couple weeks until school starts, and I have to start focusing on my career. These past few minutes have been the best of my life, and I promise I’ll never forget you and how you made me feel like I was close to G-d. But we both have to be adults now and that means being depressed and alone and also having priorities, and my first priority is to test out this lesbian theory, because you never know. So, goodbye, Tripp. I’m really gonna miss you.”

**

Please submit your own funny writing to funnywomen AT therumpus dot net. See first: Funny Women Submission Guidelines.

To read other Funny Women pieces and interviews, see the archives.

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Susie Bright

Her book’s epigraph is courtesy of Norman Mailer: “At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the whiffs I get from the ink of [women writers] are fey, old-hat, Quaintsy, Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.”

Susie and I talked over matzo ball soup about being fey, old-hat, Quaintsy, Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, and bright and stillborn, although we didn’t know what half of those terms meant. But we talked about this stuff anyway while we knitted tampon cozies and discussed what our g-spots mean to us.

[Everything in brackets is my editorial adjustments post-interview.]

[Like this: I interviewed Susie in March, and since then, I've been trying to put sex, power, and feminism into a sense-making machine. I came up with all sorts of stuff, including a second part to this interview called "I Need You to Want Me," a fictional interview tentatively titled "Brief Conversations with Hideous Feminists," and non-celibacy vows. I want to thank Susie for taking the time to help me, and by extension you, understand the messy intermingling of writing/life/sex. There is a lot of wisdom here, and I hope it reaches you in the same way it reached me. Look forward to Part II, if I ever get the ovaries to publish it.]

Part I: In Defense of Memoirs

Elissa Bassist: In the first sentence of your preface, you ask a rhetorical question; I want to ask it now, non-rhetorically: “How does a woman, an American woman born in mid-century, write a memoir? The chutzpah and the femmechismo needed to undertake the project go against the apron. I was raised with ‘Don’t think you’re so big.’ Yet to be a writer at all, you have to inflict your ego on a page and stake your reputation. To be a poet, the effect should be transcendent, and disarming.” How does a cocky woman write such a ballsy memoir?

Susie Bright: I always wrote autobiographically. But when you get to be a certain age and you’ve had some adventures or had some influence or have been a part of social change and saw the earth move—when you see consciousness open and you experience a tectonic shift in social awareness—you want to write about it. If you’re mindful of the legacy and revolutions you witness, if you think that legacy or those revolutions are important—and why wouldn’t I unless I had amnesia?—you want to write to them down. I wanted to write them down. The passing of a generation, the death of my parents, the maturity of my child, the loss of many loved ones before their time—those things add up to a kind of perspective that I didn’t have as a younger person. I had the practical luck of being a published author not too long after my parents died, and I thought how funny—great timing. Some have asked me if I felt like only now [after my parents’ death] that I can let the real dirt out of the bag. Of course there is a freeing aspect, although I meet people all the time who feel like it doesn’t matter how many people die, they can never write.

I’ve also had a lot of influences—there have always people I’ve looked to who made me say, I wanna do that some day. I read the biography of Emma Goldman and thought Yes! I’m going to do that some day.

Bassist: [This is how I feel about Susie Bright, especially right now.]

Bright: And I remember Judy Grahn, a famous feminist writer in the 70s, who edited a collection of women’s adventure stories called True to Life Adventure Stories. I remember reading that book several times—those women made things happen. They had massive Jack London-esque—or rather—Jackie London-esque lives.

Bassist:  Sorry to interrupt, but “Jackie London” reminds me of Shakespeare’s sister in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own; I love it, go on.

Bright: [Grahn’s collection of women’s adventure stories] weren’t suggested diets or whiney complaints about how you didn’t get the right shoes for high school prom or VH1-behind-the-scenes redemption stories—all of which I wanted to avoid [in writing my memoir]. And I certainly wanted to avoid those snore-a-thons that truly famous women have published that make us put down the book and say, “Well, I’d love to know what Hilary Clinton and Madeline Albright and Dick Chaney’s daughter really have to say, but I’ll never find out reading this book.”

Bassist: —best-selling books that say nothing, that reveal no great truth—books that are made for money or promotion rather than to unburden the writer or enlighten the readers.

Bright: [Right.] I’ve always been influenced by great memoirs or by women who drew on their lives to write fiction or other media. As I explain in the introduction to Big Sex Little Death, I did some marketing research to see what the bestsellers in women’s memoir are today. I wasn’t ready for it. I just thought I was dumb and didn’t know some really great books on the market that I’d been overlooking because I’d had my hands filled with erotic fiction. I’m just out of touch, I thought. Then I researched, and I found out, no, I’m not out of touch.

Bassist: They’re not there.

Bright: They’re not there. It’s weird [that great memoirs by women are] not around because transgressive frank sexual fiction from women is some of the best writing I’ve found [Susie has edited the Best American Erotica anthology every year since 1993]. I wanted to address the sexuality of my life as an integral part of my life, as a narrative, a moving part of the story that was not “kiss-and-tell” and that was not [at this point in the interview Susie mimics a sexy, smoldering, orgasm-faking voice] And now [breathless] on page 200, the thing you’ve been waiting for…my GIANT PUDENDA, as Erica Jong would say. I saw [Erica] this morning and because she was famously criticized by austere London publications who referred to her protagonist in Fear of Flying as a “mammoth pudenda,” I’m always saying to her, It’s The Giant Pudenda Show with Erica and Susie! [game-show music imitation].

Bassist: I picked up O, The Oprah Magazine when I was in an airport last summer, and I flipped to a section called something like “The Reader’s Bill of Rights: Things You Don’t Have to Read” [exact title not remembered and/or banished from memory]. One of the “Rights” said, “You don’t have to read a memoir written by someone under 35,” regarding the trend of young women writing memoirs. Are memoirs written by anyone under 35 less valid? If so, shit.

Bright: You could be 10 or you could be 20—a memoir can be about one day, and if you do it well, who is to mess with you? I have been writing creative nonfiction all along about small moments in passing, and I think it’s perfectly legitimate.

Bassist: Have you read Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters? Johnson was Jack Kerouac’s lover, but more important, she was/is a writer. In the introduction to the 1999 edition of Minor Characters, Ann Douglas writes, “In 1951, the poet Sylvia Plath, then eighteen, recorded in her journal her ‘consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors, and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording…to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night’—precisely the experiences On the Road would celebrate six years later. Plath knows, however, that she can do none of this, because ‘I am a girl, a female, always in danger of assault.’” Plath couldn’t go on the road, and she could not have the same adventures men had. This isn’t a question; I just want you to say something reassuring.

Bright: You have the crazy adventures that come with bleeding every month from puberty to menopause. Also, when everything fell apart with On Our Backs [the first women-run erotica magazine and the first magazine to feature lesbian erotica for a lesbian audience in the United States], I met a guy at the laundromat and we decided to move to the south of France on a fucking whim with no more than French 2 in my high school background—that was wild.

Bassist: That’s wild! But you’re wild. [I am editing this from my bathrobe on a Friday night; I am not wild. Also, my male friend says this about menstruation: “If I had to bleed out my insides because the POTENTIAL FOR HUMAN LIFE was being SCRAPED OFF the walls of one of my internal organs. . . . My god. We get kicked in the balls (which are hardly internal), and we have to make a joke in every single movie EVER MADE to raise awareness about HOW MUCH THAT HURTS. No, no, fuck that. You win.”]

Bright: I’ve been able to live another life. It’s always been an issue I’ve had with my daughter—who is a bit more intuitively a homebody than me. I lived like a vagabond, and I imagined that there’s something amazing if you just turn the corner.

Bassist: I took a yoga class the other day, and the teacher spoke about why we do the work we do in our day jobs, hobbies, relationships, etc. She said it’s important to give everything away, lose it all, relinquish what you have and who you are, because only then do you have the space to be filled again. The notion of why write clicked into place: we tell our secrets and write about our most intimate experiences because we feel we must give away what we want to receive from the world. For example, I don’t have a lot of sex/love, but I write about a lot of sex/love, and I realized that’s because I’d like to have a lot of sex/love. Now you’re going to tell me sex and love aren’t the same, and I will tell you, “No, I guess they are not. But they’re both something I wish I had a lot more of.”

Bright: [Laughs at me.]

Bassist: I love how you explain the relationship between loss and sex in your book: “Every loss uncovers an edge about why we persevere in spite of the empty space. Sex—its quixotic vitality, not its banal marketability—is one of those things that make you feel like I’m not done yet.” Everything about sex makes me feel like I’m not done yet. Sex makes me worry. Writing about sex makes me worry. Write your obsessions, some say. I’m obsessed with worrying I’m a woman who writes too much about men. Why am I not writing about the economy or science or climbing this mountain—and, more important, is that okay? I’m struggling between being okay that I’m not climbing a mountain and being I’m okay with writing about my “interior landscape” and feeling like that’s just as valid—writing about relationships is just as valid as writing about going up a mountain, which feels almost exactly the same, metaphorically.

Bright: What did you think John Updike was writing about all those years?

Bassist: His lack of a menstrual cycle?

Bright: Relationships. Anyone working as a writing teacher sees an eager, young writer and sees the way they’re going to impart the intensity of their first draft; it is almost always like this: I was really, really, really scared. And then I was very, very, very upset. And then it was like so so so intense you wouldn’t believe it…!! Young men and young women do this. As a teacher, your role is to say, “I believe you, but I need you to do this without using a single adjective or adverb and certainly not ‘very’ or ‘really’ and never ‘intense.’”

Bassist: [So very and really and totally true.]

Bright: [I tell my students] You need to turn on your little camera and tell me everything that happened; you be a little tape recorder and tell me what people said, just the way they said it, and how they tucked their hair behind their ear, how their coat fell on the sidewalk. And then let’s see if I can feel the things that you remember so vividly. When you talk about women being criticized for writing a relationship or utilizing an emotional point of view, you’re right, it’s absurd [the criticism]. Every man who’s covering anything where an intimate relationship enters the scene does it too though, and so it’s about who does it well and do you transcend the cliché?

I think in some of the service writing we do for popular periodicals, we see women’s writing with predictable conclusions designed to sell you a product. For example, a magazine has an advertiser who’s selling hot tubs and they need a kinky story about sex in a hot tub, but you can’t tell them anything bad that happened in the hot tub because the advertiser will pull the ad. This actually happened to me—I had a hilarious hot tub story where there was a little tiny thing that went wrong—but it was not an indictment of hot tubs, I swear. [Laughing] I’ve had stories killed because Hanes Pantyhose didn’t like it. Instead of blaming it on women’s writing, why not just say it’s advertising and commercial motivations that readers don’t even know about that go behind some of the stupidest things you read?

Bassist: I am comfortable blaming advertising.

Bright: Think of all the times you have read a book—let’s leave the magazines aside for a minute—and you feel like you can hear the fight going on between the editor and the writer. The editor says No one’s going to read that! You need to add this part or it will never sell. The writer cries, Oh! Oh, why, why, no, please and then gives in. It’s often ugly. The author may or may not be correct or her experience may not have been as riveting as she had hoped, but who would know with the kind of debate she was facing, a debate that wasn’t over the credibility, integrity, and the vitality of her writing, but rather some deep counter notion of what’s going to sell on Tuesday for 99 cents. No one really knows what’s going to be a hit because the last thing that was a hit was a surprise. It’s always the surprises where everyone is says Oh my god, that’s so incredible–why didn’t I think of that first?

Bassist: I have a teacher who said anyone who gets in the canon did something that wasn’t in the canon.

Bright: There you go. See? I wish I had said that.

Bassist: It takes courage to find out what you’ve found out. Writing is often a political act. I recently saw Susan Rosenberg speak in New York. Her memoir, An American Radical, is about being a political prisoner in her own country. I thanked her at the end of her reading—I thanked her for reminding me to fight. She spent 16 years in prison because she believed guerilla movements were just, that the U.S. government was responsible for a lot of violence, that 400 years of racism needed a revolution, and that achieving power demands putting people in motion. She said things like: “The more they fear you, the more they respect you,” and wondered aloud, “How do you change yourself without losing yourself?” Big Sex Little Death is also a book about fighting; at one point you wonder, “Why had people formulated revolution so long ago, yet nothing, nothing had changed?” Why do women still make 75 cents to the man’s dollar? Why are so few women writing for late-night television? How do we save Planned Parenthood? What do we have to do to get everyone to believe that broken bones and bruises do not define rape? What can you tell people who want change? What can you tell me? How do we do what we can with what we have?

Bright: Well—

Bassist: Believe in ourselves?

Bright: No. No. You look at your material conditions and get Marxist about it. It’s not some ephemeral what if theory—it’s asking Where are you right now? Where do you live? Who do you see everyday? Who is in your neighborhood and in your workplace and in your family. Who do you interact with and what do you deal with? What’s a vulnerable soft spot in that whole mix that also appeals to you that you’re ready to tangle with or subvert or form a response to as a writer? What is your fight?

You never walk into some random restaurant and walk up to the cook and say, So, we have a good idea what’s going on around here, and we need to organize and we’ve got a whole plan for you. Instead, take a fearless inventory [of your own life] and listen to the other people around you and be inspired by other women who are doing what you want to see more of out there—it’ll be inevitable to think to yourself, Do we have the talent and a few hot ideas and just a little bit of extra time where we can publish something online or make a few copies at the Xerox shop? How many of these revolutions have happened because of the Xerox store? Let it out. Try something. What might happen?

Bassist: Let’s say I’ve Xeroxed my revolution; how do I get people to read it?

Bright: [Follow these instructions] Open your address book that includes everybody you’ve ever known in your whole life. Send them a letter that’s going to bring tears to their eyes and make them howl with laughter—they absolutely have to see it; they have to read it; they have to send you a dime; they have to be part of it.

Look at what’s happening in the subways everyday here [in New York]—those amazing musicians who are busking—I’m a [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] next to them. Why don’t I go down there and read chapters out of my book and see if I have the nerve to deal with the public? Take the Hyde Park Speakers’ approach and get your freaking crate and speak truth and power.

Bassist: In your early career as a journalist in school, you had renegade ideas about writing news, making news, and then writing about the news you made: “The merry headlines of The Forty-Niner celebrated sports team wins and a new candy machine at the campus bookshop. Everyone on the editorial staff was serious about being a journalist, but their idea of big-time news was covering a fire. My take was that you started your own fire and people covered you. Then you wrote a blistering editorial!” You remind me of that which is easy to forget. When I publish something online, it’s off the main page by the end the next business day. So I think: is it over? Is my revolution over for the week?

Bright: It’s not over. You show it to all your friends. A ripple effect begins. If what you write has something that catches people’s eye and is something they want to talk about or it’s something they have been thinking about but couldn’t articulate, you’re off and running. You have to remember I was doing these kind of things when my name meant nothing to anybody. There will be people at the reading tonight who knew me as “Sue B. Last Name Unknown; byline: none,” because you weren’t allowed to take credit for anything you wrote when I started writing. I’ve found that you can get people to pay attention to you when you don’t have your name on things and when you’re not the least bit legendary just by paying attention to what’s going on around you and stealing moments.

Bassist: Speaking of moments, do you remember our first kiss? [We had just met at Literary Death Match, a reading series in San Francisco where I was the co-host and she was the literary merit judge. At the beginning of each Literary Death Match, I ask the judges a question onstage to get to know them better. My question to Susie Bright: “I am a feminist. You are a sex-positive feminist. How do I become one of those?” She answered by tongue-kissing me onstage in front of 500 people, including her partner and daughter.] That was the highlight of my career.

Our glasses are touching.

Bright: It was very impulsive on my part.

Bassist: You started a ripple effect, like what we’re talking about now, because then I made out with Brian Boitano and Lemony Snicket. You were the best out of all of them.

Please note: my hand clenching Brian Boitano's butt; his hand passionately grabbing my hair; the tangible heat between us.

Three photos compliments of the supremely talented LDM photographer, Timothy Faust. Click photos to see his website (and maybe more inappropriate literary photos).

Bright: You said that to Brian Boitano backstage! I heard you! You’ve said that to both of us now, you better know…

Bassist: You were the only one who kissed me with tongue! The boys were prudes.

Bright: I remember thinking, Her lips are so soft—and we’re onstage, so I have to show off.

Bassist: So, was I your best kiss ever?

Bright: You were definitely my best new kiss. I’m not going to diss my familiar kisses, because they’re special, and I don’t want you getting me in trouble.

***

Buy Big Sex Little Death and explore your own sex-positive feminism.

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Read Amy French’s article about her experience in the AFI DWW program, a forum that brings diligent creative women together.

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Upon finishing Infinite Jest (doing so is like a sacrament, which I say even though I’m Jewish), Chris Ayers created a shining visual memorial/appendage to Infinite Jest. The website Poor Yorick Entertainment is “a visual exploration of the filmography of James O. Incandenza and the world of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.”

About the site: “‘Poor Yorick Entertainment’ is the name of the fictional independent film company started by James O. Incandenza in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest. . . . This project is an attempt to bring some kind of visual life to the fictional filmmaker’s body of work.”

You know how Universal Orlando created “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter” theme park? This website is like that for the brain. And it’s free.

Site highlights:

Check out the movie posters for Kinds of Light, Various Small Flames, The Joke, Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, and Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators,

Ever wondered what an Enfield Tennis Academy “ETA” t-shirt looks like?

Everyone’s invited to the Whataburger Southwest Junior Invitational November 23,25, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment!

Subsidized Time goes visual.

Chris Ayers, I think I speak for everyone when I say: Marry me.

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Some advice for writers from our own Elissa Bassist:

[Some of this is stolen. But I won’t tell you what because I want to impress you.]

- First piece of writing advice: “Never take credit”–Stephen Elliott (pictured above)

- Your writing should amuse you; if it doesn’t, there’s hardly any point to suffering this much or being this vulnerable or getting that addicted to [fill in the thing to which you got really addicted or hope to get addicted because it’ll give you “material”].

- Writing is the opportunity to take the worst things that have happened to you and turn them into the most beautiful.

- Do you want someone to tell you that your short story sucks and that you should be intellectually and environmentally safe by recycling it? TOO BAD. No one can tell you this. No one gets to tell you what’s trash/recyclable; you decide.

- An MFA program will really help you if you have a high self-esteem problem.

- If someone judges you through your writing, that someone is doing a bad job reading.

- Write every day. If you can’t do that, do this: set an egg timer for 20 minutes; get a pencil and paper and have them touch; don’t lift your pen or pencil off the paper; write “I cannot write every day” on the piece of paper until you have something else to say; do this every day.

- “The moment I stop being a reader is the moment I stop being a writer”–a famous writer said this to me once.

- A conversation between two writers: Writer 1 says, “Blah blah blah,” and Writer 2 says, “Shut up and write.”

- You can’t dismiss an experience because there have been worse experiences.

- “No one who writes good fiction has an Internet connection”–poorly paraphrased advice from Jonathan Franzen.

- If anyone has told you you shouldn’t write or that no one would read your writing if he/she had a choice or that you’re unloveable, please email me at elissa.bassist@gmail.com, and I will tell you that any person who craps on your dream is a tampon popsicle.

***

For more from Elissa, such as her “Writer’s Guide to Using Twitter“ check out ElissaBassist.com.

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Hot news item: Egan Wins National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction Prize. ”Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad bests Jonathan Franzen’s work. The nonfiction award goes to ‘The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.‘”

Instead of mentioning how the Los Angeles Times reported this news with a picture of Franzen rather than of one of the stunning Egan, I’ll share some notes I took from Egan’s reading and our post-reading conversation.

On Writing A Visit from the Goon Squad:
-She was trying to write a different book and wrote this one instead.
-She started writing from “that moment” (for the first chapter, she imagined a woman stealing someone’s wallet in the bathroom; Egan began writing from “this moment,” and from it came clothing, humor, dialogue, and an ending [the thief will "get well"]).

Notes on characters:
-Establish “meaningful connection of shared experience” to “knowing each other too much.”
-The “yes/no smile”
-I’m changing, I’m changing, I’m changing, I’ve changed.
-Changes happen offstage (there’s always an inner logic).
-Care about minor characters.
-We never really know each other.
-Deliver up the past.

She set three rules for writing this book:
1. Every chapter must have a different protagonist.
2. Every chapter must have a different theme and feel.
3. Each chapter must stand alone.

She hoped to:
-Find little things and explore them deeply.
-Leap into lives of minor characters later in life.
-Insert dramatic possibilities so as make each chapter jump when read in succession.

Her process:
-Start with a time and a place.
-Be excited/surprised by the process (notetaker intrusion: I’m learning this; rather than be depressed and blocked by the process, why not be thrilled by it? Replacing “depressed” with “excited” has changed my experience of writing/living.)
-Avoid going backward instead of forward (so simple, and yet, so unyieldingly difficult).
-Start with as little as possible (this is the scariest advice I’ve ever heard–what about all my Word documents/false starts from seven years ago? What about all my scraps of paper with dashed-off brilliance? What about all the quotations I’ve retyped from every book I’ve ever read???)
-She numbers her drafts (sometimes 50 drafts)
-”Process” is what you learn (she said nonfiction forces you to learn faster–she writes both)

Re: outlining, she charts:
-What she has
-What she needs
-How to get it

On writing groups:
-She has one.
-Instead of emailing or printing drafts, each writer reads aloud and receives verbal responses on the spot. This way there is no homework or outside preparation. Also, when she reads aloud, she can see what matters and what doesn’t. (I have since tried this, and she is right. When you read your writing aloud, you find out faster when and where you should like an idiot.)

A brief reenactment of our brief conversation:
Elissa: “Hello, Jennifer Egan, my name is Elissa.”
Jennifer Egan: “Nice to meet you, Elissa.”
Elissa: [!!!]
Elissa (again): “I recently co-edited this famous and important book, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, Rumpus Women, Volume I. It’s a collection of personal essays by women. I think women writing and being published and having their unique voices heard is the most important thing. I want to thank you for A Visit from the Goon Squad–it is like a guiding light in bookstore windows [kiss-ass, but earnest]–it’s one of the few hardcover books by a woman that is always there. Every time I spot your turquoise cover next to Franzen’s book, I think Anything you can do, we can also do.”
Egan: It’s good to know young women are thinking hard about the situation of women in publishing.
Elissa: But I have a question. How did you maintain the courage to create something out of nothing? What I mean to say is, if I pitched a book outlining the rules you made for your book (1. Every chapter must have a different protagonist; 2. Every chapter must have a different theme and feel; 3. Each chapter must stand alone), I think people would look at me like I’m crazy and say it cannot be done this way (unless there is a vampire, etc.).
Egan: That’s why you don’t tell anyone about it. Just write it. (Worked out for her.)

[And then we got married! Not really.]

Closing notes:
After her reading, when I was alone in my apartment, I opened my newly signed copy of A Visit from the Goon Squad. She wrote, “Keep the faith.”

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