Posts by Yuvi Zalkow
All my life, I’ve been obsessed with failure. Not so much other people’s failures — my own failures. This obviously has a destructive quality that doesn’t really serve me (or those who have to deal with me), but there are other aspects that I think are useful to the writing life. It’s the attitude of feeling like you’ve never got it all figured out, that you’ve got so much more to learn. More than that, you’ve got to genuinely want to make a dent in this giant list of things that you don’t quite get. Otherwise, you’ll just drown in your unknowingness.
Anyway, in this little video, I talk about the beauty of this failure attitude. It’s my brand of optimistic pessimism, for your consideration.
Nothing brilliant or shocking here, but it’s a way to look at the world that I think has some benefits. I guess there’s a gimmick to my talk of failure. I call it “failure” partly because I find it funny to tell people about all my failings, but more importantly, it’s my codeword for the need to keep my ass in the chair writing, studying, learning.
What about you? How do you keep yourself writing, studying, learning?
Read MoreIn my post last month, I talked about a really hard-to-find essay that was written in 1985 (thanks for the fabulous feedback, by the way). This time, I’d like to talk about a very easy-to-find conversation that took place in 2009 between two extremely popular writers/speakers in the tech community (John Gruber & Merlin Mann). The thing about this talk is that pretty much all my geek blogging friends know and love this discussion, and not one of my non-geek literary friends knows what I’m talking about when I mention this discussion. But I think this talk is oozing with insight for anyone that creates anything. It shouldn’t be limited to geeks. It shouldn’t be limited to bloggers. They talk about two essential qualities for success when creating something: Obsession & Voice. We writer types are always talking about voice — so that’s no surprise — but I hadn’t thought as much about obsession, both for my writing process and for the characters I write about.
In my five-minute video tribute, I illustrate what this talk means to me as a novelist and as a goofy presentation maker. I’ve swiped some excerpts from their talk (accompanied with my third-rate animations) to give you a feel for the parts that hit me the hardest. I even try to draw a stick figure dropping his pants to tease out some of the charm of these two people.
After you check out the video, you might want to read John Gruber’s preface to this talk here.
And if you didn’t already click through to the audio link via Gruber’s site, you can get to the (one-hour) audio file directly from Merlin’s blog here.
Have I linked you to death by now?
If not, then what do y’all think? Do you think obsession and voice are essential elements in your own writing? And do you find it refreshing to look outside the literary community for insight into your writing process?
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Read MoreSo how is this for an opener: Here is my blog post called Writing in the Cold about my video called Writing in the Cold, which is about an essay by Ted Solotaroff called “Writing in the Cold”, which was published in Granta in 1985. The essay was something one of my MFA mentors (Leonard Chang, www.leonardchang.com) wisely gave to us as we prepared to go out into the scary world outside of the MFA bubble.
This essay is more than a quarter century old and not one word of it feels dated (not a single reference to Journey or Boy George or Rubik’s cubes, for example). It’s tricky, being a writer. There are many aspects to this trickiness, but the aspect that I find most interesting (and that Solotaroff focuses on) is the need to possess a durability throughout all the rejection, uncertainty, and disappointment you will undoubtedly encounter. It’s more than just an ability to tolerate these things, it’s also an ability to take advantage of them, use them to learn something new. This essay is a great reminder not to give up on the whole writing process. I’ve known so many writers better and smarter than me that have quit. I keep wondering why I’m still around. I mean, I’m still an unknown writer, but I’m also still standing. It’s not brilliance, it’s not an innate talent, it’s not speed, it’s not confidence. I consider myself a slow learner, a slow reader, and I’m about as insecure as they come. But maybe there’s a durability in there too.
I’ll be honest with you, my piddly little video doesn’t even scrape the surface of this great essay. (Plus, I apologize for comparing the writing life to a game of Frogger.)
Unfortunately, the essay is hard to find. At least I can’t find any legal ways to point you to it online. You can buy the issue from Granta’s website. And how about this: I’ll send my extra copy of this issue of Granta (for free!) to a random commenter a week from when this post goes live. (Don’t post your address– I’ll get in touch with you…) Why? Just because I think it’s a kick-ass essay.
Regardless of whether or not you read the essay or watch my second-rate homage to this essay, the basic message can be summed up in his last sentence: “The life of published… writers is most often the exchange of one level of rejection, uncertainty and disappointment for another, and throughout, they need the same durable, patient conviction that got them published in the first place.”
What about you? Why are you still standing?
Read MoreTherese here. First off–if you haven’t figured this out already–this is today’s second post. Today’s first post is a great piece by honorary contributor Suzannah Windsor Freeman on short story credits; check it out just below.
Recently we were honored to announce four new contributors. Today, I’m here to announce one more–Yuvi Zalkow. You’ve seen Yuvi here once before; he allowed us to re-post the first video in his Failed Writer series last month. I loved it, you loved it, he loved the experience, so we decided to make it official. I’m thrilled he’s agreed to become a regular monthly contributor at Writer Unboxed, sharing not only his new videos with us but also his thoughts on the weird and wild world of publishing. Welcome, Yuvi!
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I’m a collector of rejections. I love rejections. I bathe in rejections. I mean, I don’t love them the moment I receive them, but I do believe that rejection is an important and valuable part of the process of being a writer. Almost something to celebrate as a writer.
I’m also obsessed with creating online presentations about writing. I’ve been particularly focused on making my “I’m a Failed Writer” series. After watching a few of my friends release book trailers along with their book releases, I started thinking about the book trailer format. Of course, you’d normally think that you need to PUBLISH A BOOK to make a book trailer, and I wasn’t there yet.
So I made a book trailer for my novel that I was struggling to sell. Instead of talking about the novel’s high points, it actually emphasizes the rejections I’ve received from literary agents. (WARNING: This one minute video has two occurrences of a neurotic Jew in his underwear.)
NOT IN MY LIFETIME Book Trailer from Yuvi Zalkow on Vimeo.
After doing this video, I read a post by Nina Badzin about being addicted to finding a literary agent and I realized that my trailer was more than just a fakey book trailer showing off my rejections. It was also the first step in my shift away from trying to find an agent for this book, which was something that I was obsessing about in an unhelpful way. So I created another “I’m a Failed Writer” episode, this time about the balance between the writing and the marketing of the writing. I tell my own story about re-balancing things to de-emphasize the marketing and focus again on the writing.
But there’s an odd twist to this story.
Read MoreTherese here. I met Yuvi Zalkow on Twitter after falling in love with the video you see below. Thanks to him for allowing me to re-post this here, and to Christi Craig for alerting me–and the entire Writer Unboxed Facebook group–to the video in the first place. Enjoy!
Episode 1: Revisions (I’m A Failed Writer Series) from Yuvi Zalkow on Vimeo.
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