To learn a piece on the piano - even a simple one - has proved every bit as agonizing as writing a chapter in a book, every bit as tedious and hopeless and halting. But this is not to say that the piano hasn't helped my writing. It has, just not in the ways I expected.
We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in lots of sugar, and we'll get fat and sick. Confine our movement, and we'll get weak and antsy. Give us some manageable problems with which to grapple, and we'll cheer up.
A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?
For me, novel-writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, fatally misguided. The challenge has always been in assuring myself that by setting one foot in front of the other, I will eventually make my way out of the desert.
Literary interviews are inevitably packed with the nuts and bolts of how writers do their work, and there's very little that aspiring writers do more readily than fling other people's nuts and bolts into their toolboxes.
'At Freddie's' takes place in 1960s London at the Temple Stage School for child actors. It has a plot that makes you feel sorry for the people who have to write summaries on the backs of books.
When I started researching the eco effects of eating meat, I'd assumed, for no good reason, that environmental irresponsibility would correspond to both animal size and deliciousness: Eating cows would be worst, eating pigs would be a bit less bad, and eating chickens would be basically harmless.
Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business of committee meetings and PR releases; you might as well storm a butterfly den with a klieg light.
Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.
Enrichment happened to be my favorite time of day in the Children's Zoo, since it offered relief from the security-guard-esque standing around that makes up most of a zookeeper's day.
In the Children's Zoo, Enrichment meant presenting the goats with a trash can smeared with peanut butter or dangling keys at the end of a broomstick in front of the cow. The goats would knock their heads around the inside of the can and emerge giddy, peanut butter drunk.
I will never, most likely, be good at the piano, but thanks to it, I will never forget the humbling, infuriating, necessary slowness of progress in any artistic endeavor.
True atonement isn't the periodic shaving of karmic stubble via confessional; it requires deep, truthful change. It means doing the hardest thing of all: not making the same stupid mistake again.
Beginning in middle school, the era of wide-margined, Bible-paged anthologies, short stories develop unpromising associations - and these associations often linger through college, when stories become the things distributed in Xeroxes missing entire pages of line-endings.
The patron saint of outlining - the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock - is P. G. Wodehouse.
If you were placing bets on which author would write the tenderest, most moving book about fatherhood, Philip Roth would probably come in at the bottom of the list.
Philip Roth has made a cottage industry of unlikable characters, but compared with Mickey Sabbath, the furious and profane protagonist of 'Sabbath's Theater,' Roth's earlier creations seem like Winnie the Pooh.
I would love to love Saul Bellow, but by page fifty of 'Herzog', something within me has wandered into another room.
I've sold all but one of my microphones, put away my mini-notebooks, stopped scouring the Internet for scraps of wisdom.
Sometimes I think there ought to be a coat of arms for all of us who listen to Oberst's band Bright Eyes past the age of twenty-six. 'With Love and Shame,' the motto would read. The handwriting would be the cramped and tortured scribble of a high school freshman.
