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226 Talking about Writing Isn’t Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . If you’re spending more time talking about writing than actually writing, you may want to reassess your priorities. I’ve seen this happen in writers’ groups, in coffeehouses, in MFA programs, in bars, on Facebook: writers who haven’t yet published anything, or who haven’t published much, talking or twittering about their “writing.” Sometimes, these people are talking or twittering about their writer’s block. Maybe it’s therapeutic to spend so much time talking about it, but I suspect it’s the opposite. I suspect it drives the supposed muse away.Take the time that you’d normally be talking about writing and write. Even if what you’re writing is crap, it’ll be more worth your while than talking about writing, because I believe you can write your way out of crappy writing, but it’s unlikely you’re going to talk your way into good writing. I get paid to talk about writing. I teach for a living, and I’m occasionally invited to give lectures. If I find myself giving too many lectures , and if these lectures cut into my writing time, I start feeling like a fraud. I should be writing, I think. There are semesters when I feel as though I should be sending my students away for four months to write every day instead of having them sit in a classroom and listen to me.What bettereducation about thewriting life than to spend it writing everyday, seven days a week? Instead, my students—many of them, anyway—wait until close to their deadline and then hammer out a draft of a story in a day. No matter how sincere their looks are as I prattle on about the importance of writing day in and dayout, most of them ignore this advice. The semester that I took a workshop from Allan Gurganus, he was in the galley stages of his behemoth novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Everyone will warn you that you’re not supposed to revise at the galley stage. The text has already been typeset , and changes to that text become costly. And yet Allan was still revising. He had invited our class over to a party at the house he was renting that semester, and that’s when what it meant to be a writer finally sunk in for me. Page proofs were taped everywhere, including around the bathtub so that Allan could revise as he bathed. I have stated over and over in this book that a writer’s most valuable com- The Writer’s Life 227 modity is time, and Allan wasted none of it. He had thrown himself fully into this novel. He wasn’t merely skimming the surface of the writing life; he had submerged himself in it, like a baptism. He breathed it. And I was a lucky person to have seen it. ...

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