daniel prazer

You feel crazy when you write, fraught with doubt and remorse at not being able to do it well. More on that later.

So I felt pretty good when I found this Scientific American Podcast/article through Poet & Writers Daily News feed. It’s fascinating stuff.

Here is what scientists found:  The number of ideas expressed in those autobiographies had a inverse association with the severity of dementia later in life. For instance in the sentence, “I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on May 24, 1913 and was baptized in a church,” has seven ideas according to the researchers. Phrases like “I was born” and “I was baptized in church” all count toward what they call a measurement of “idea density.”

So I suppose that bodes well for fiction writers, particularly, who write entire works from the ether of their imagination. I’d like to think these researchers would place the “idea density” of solid novels (and even well-written narrative creative nonfiction) damn high.

As for the insanity of writing, the amazing Richard Bausch once told me—and I’m paraphrasing—that the self-doubt you feel is your talent; bad writers don’t have that voice telling you “it’s not quite right yet.”

Gizmodo had a post this afternoon about an art installation in Bologna called Scanner by a Slovakian artist. And it’s made of thousands of books.

Oh, this is awesome.

I just rewatched the film adaptation last night, which is absolutely one of the most successful translations from page to screen out there, and was reminded of the first time I read E. Annie Proulx’s novel. I was a sophomore at Miami University taking a contemporary literature class, though The Shipping News wasn’t on the reading list. (Jesus’s Son was, and that’s still one of my all-time favorites.) No, my professor mentioned Annie Proulx’s novel to us as something amazing, and I picked it up in one of uptown’s bookstores on the way home that afternoon.

It absolutely blew me away.

Leading each chapter with an entry from the Ashley Book of Knots. The way it starts with clipped phrases. Taking everything from Quoyle. The way the prose becomes more fluid and nuanced as Quoyle learns who he is and recovers his life. The stunningly human twists, and Newfoundland becoming a character of its own. The mysticism of the sensitive Newfies.

It started a young journalism student out slowly, with those clipped phrases. I remember thinking, “I can do this. I’ve read Hemingway,” but the more I read, the more I got sucked in, I said to myself, “I want to do this.”

It was the book that made me want to be a fiction writer and a journalist.

By Daniel Prazer

A year ago last weekend, I walked across the stage and got my master’s degree in writing from Columbia College. Cranking away at a book-length manuscript tends to burn you out, a condition I referred to as the post-post-graduate writing hangover.

Less than a month later, my father took his own life. For the next few months, I sank deeper into the couch cushions.

Momentum—or the lack of it—took over my writing life. When I finally emerged from my suicide-survivor’s exile, the only words I put down on the page were cover letters to go with a redesigned resume. Nothing creative.

Until this summer, when a former professor and friend, Sam Weller, threw down this gauntlet on his Facebook wall: “I am going to write 500 words a day, every day, until the end of August. This will give me a 53,000-word draft of a novel by the end of summer. Anyone care to join me in this challenge? It’s just two pages a day.”

Read the rest at New City’s Summer Guide.

I’m working on copy editing and laying out the Story Week Reader 2010 (the past five editions are available online at the Publishing Lab’s Web site) this week, something I’ve been doing for two years now with my wife, Ann, who designs the cover. This year’s, I think, is particularly strong. It’s got the tiny keyboard and the large keyboard, the process from writing small—the magazine’s maximum word count is 750—to writing long.

Those aren’t my hands. Nor my wife’s. The faculty advisor told me my hands looked too old and wizened. “We need something younger,” he said. “Maybe tattoos. Definitely female.”

And I take that as a complement. I’ve got scars on my hands from years of cats and hot oils popping from skillets and general clumsiness. I’ve got a wedding ring. Could I use some lotion? Probably, but man’s men don’t moisturize. That my hands wouldn’t work for this design is a sign of growing up, not old. Do my knees ache after I go to the gym? Sure. Can I pull all-nighters and still be alert the next day? Certainly not as well as I could when I was an undergrad, or hell, even a grad student.

It was a gentle validation that I’m an adult. And I like that. It means I’ve got perspective. It means I’ve survived things that made me stronger (especially this past summer). It means I can make wise choices, and if my choices turn out to be not-so-wise, that I’m adaptable enough to duck and weave and come out on the other side with my own momentum.

And I like that.