POST TO THE HOST

TOPIC: WRITING (Questions from The Back Room)

GK,

I’ve been listening, watching, and reading you since I landed in Minneapolis as a newly minted bureau chief in 1984. I remain astonished at your prodigious output. I’m retired and write a Substack now. While journalism has been my life’s craft, I’ve always been a wannabe writer of at least creative nonfiction.

Boy, what I wouldn’t do to pluck your brain about your processes. When do you sit down to write? For how long? On a laptop? What does your wife do when you’re gone — even if by being in your own head? Do you draft and redraft?

What’s a day like now in the life of Garrison Keillor?

Patrick Houston

I’m 84, Patrick, so a day in my life is a gift and I treat it well and try not to waste it. All writing is rewriting; there’s no end to it. It’s beautiful to wake up around 3 or 4 a.m. in the still of the night and tiptoe to the kitchen, turn the coffee on, and sit down directly at the keyboard and see what’s in my mind. My neurologist says the same thing about his scientific papers: early morning is the best time. I’m a Minnesotan in New York and though I do the usual ranting in my columns, I think New York is my beat. I live here because my wife loves the city and my job is to appreciate it for the benefit of Middle America. During the day, while I write, she’s often out walking, and I steal her impressions if I need to — plagiarism between spouses is simply absorption. Firsthand experience, not media-based. A walk in the park. The birds nesting on the terrace. The preschoolers hitched together like sled dogs. A night at the opera. Sidewalk-café sitting and gazing, the stream of humanity. I wish I were more ambitious to take on the tyranny of the elderly well-to-do over the young and eager, but other people can do that better than I. GK

______________________________________

Is cursive writing still an important skill to teach in grade schools?

Roy Gregory

Yes, there’s a physical feel for language in cursive creation that you don’t get from keys. I wouldn’t want to fight a pitched battle over it, but yes. GK

______________________________________

Dear GK:

Forty years ago, my spiritual mentor Henri Nouwen spoke of “writers’ block”: “I’m not yet ready to write; I gotta think it out first.” He suggested that this presumption is bass-ackward. We instead must write shitty first drafts and fifth drafts, etc., as a necessary precursor to clearer thinking. Has this been your experience?

Thanks mucho.

Best,

Rev. Dave Johnson, retired minister/oceanographer Overland Park, Kansas

Yes. You need to put words down on paper, preferably by hand. Thoughts evaporate, but you look at words and they suggest better words, and a stiff wordy paragraph leads to something more elegant. And b.s. can go around and around in your head, but you see it on paper (or on a screen) and it’s obvious and you ditch it and progress is made and what’s important in writing is to maintain progress and keep hope alive. You can see hope, but it’s hard to imagine. GK

______________________________________

I write rhymed metered verse based on the Sunday readings in church. So I mangle scripture (as do my professional clergy colleagues in homilies). I set these to old public domain church music tunes. Of course, nobody uses them.

My question is about using semicolons in rhymed metered verse. Should I just ignore that?

David Alexander

Ignore it and if someone tells you you’re wrong, then you’ve got a reader GK

______________________________________

1. If you feel you have to write on a regular basis, how do you avoid repeating yourself?

2. Is it worth writing on a regular basis, if the columns are not original or creative? Would it not be better to write less frequently so that each column is fresh and new, with new thoughts and ideas and inspirations?

Peter Drymalski, Silver Spring, MD

Mine is a twice-weekly column, sir, a fairly common arrangement in the column racket, and I don’t think repetition is a deadly sin since life repeats itself, the world keeps rotating, and Solomon said there is nothing new under the sun and who am I to argue with Solomon. But I will try to come up with new thoughts. And meanwhile, you should have a look at Roy Blount, Dave Barry, and George F. Will, all of them good. Try reading more widely and see if that doesn’t help. GK ______________________________________

Hello, Mr. Keillor.

I am coming to you with a question as either an emerging or mid-career playwright, depending on who you ask (I’m 40, so I myself wonder when I’m good and emerged already). Say you’ve got 30-some-odd plays, some awards under your belt, productions in a few different states, but haven’t landed with the folks you would love to land with. Is there anything to making one’s writing more punchy, more commercial, less controversial, more palatable? What are your thoughts on literature (namely theatre) becoming more homogenous and less challenging? Should a writer, say, acquiesce to writing one’s deepest and darkest moments in order to grab an ear? Must we all become Richard Gadd, setting aside our avant garde comedy in favor of spilling our guts?

If you have any thoughts on this subject, I would so love to hear them. Thank you again, sir.

Elise C. Hanson

I’ll be blunt, Elise. I don’t believe theater has the power to change the world. The one exception I can think of is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and other plays dealing with mental illness that helped launch a revolutionary change in the treatment of the ill, especially autistic children, in my lifetime. They were once locked in mental wards that drove them insane and now we accept they have a right to a good life. But peace and war? The environment? Racism? I doubt it. I think “spilling our guts” is arrogant. I think The Diary of Anne Frank changed people because it was real: a hopeful child holding her world close in the midst of unspeakable evil. But my bias is toward comedy, which I feel is a sacred calling and I am ambitious to do it better. GK

______________________________________

Hi,

Do you make yourself sit down every day and write for certain amount of time even if you don’t feel like it? Or do you wait for inspiration? Not being a creative type myself, I don’t understand how anybody ever gets this kind of thing accomplished.

Joan Friedman

Inspiration comes from living life, it’s as natural as curiosity. You can make yourself sit down and fulfill obligations but past a certain age, you’d rather do this for pleasure. GK

______________________________________

Dear Mr. Keillor,

I like to think of you as the poster boy for “write what you know.” Have you ever been tempted to write about things you don’t know about? If not, how might you approach that?

Patty Nolan

I told stories for years about a small town and people who live in small towns often wrote in to tell me when I was wrong, which happened often. I was too kind, in their opinion, and unwilling to dig deep. Well, it was humor and not satire, and it gave pleasure to people, and I’m not the one to judge it. I’ve moved on. I’m writing a book now about what the age 84 looks like and I think it’s pretty good. It’ll come out in the fall. GK

______________________________________

Mr. Keillor,

You write funny. And I mean that both literally and grammatically. How do you keep a meddling, officious or well-meaning editor or copyeditor or proofreader from “fixing” your loose sentence structure, your parataxis, your appositives piled on appositives, your anacoluthon and your right-branching syntax (ChatGPT told me that’s what you’re doing that drives English teachers crazy) and ruining your brilliant stuff?

With admiration,

Chris

A note from Mr. Keillor’s well-meaning copyeditor:

Thanks for your comment, Chris. Most appreciated. Garrison’s loose sentence structure, parataxis, anacoluthon, right-branching syntax, and so on, are distinctive parts of his style. This is not academic writing; it should be granted some leeway. As I’ve often said, we wouldn’t want to limit James Joyce to simple declarative sentences. We wouldn’t want to mention to Picasso that, strictly speaking, Dora Maar’s nose isn’t where her left ear ought to be. I, too, enjoy GK’s “funny” writing. And I like giving creativity a little breathing room.

_____________________________

Hello,

I’d like to know how to deal with acquaintances who use the wrong word or mispronounce a word. They know I used to be a newspaper reporter and editor, so they might not be surprised if I correct them, but am I damaging these relationships if I do? Should I just let the errors go, as long as I understand what they’re saying? Both choices feel wrong. Thanks.

Jon J.

I’d prefer to be corrected, which to me implies equality, a colleague helping another. My wife corrects me, why not you? Correct a passing stranger? Naw. A dodo or dumbbell? Why bother? A non-English speaker? Yes. A teenager not your own child? I don’t think so. A person in a clerical robe or with abbreviations after his/her name? Absolutely and with pleasure. GK