The Daily News
A Bit About Baseball
And a Bit About
Amy Tan.

1   In so many ways I'm glad that I can relax a bit from the baseball season.

2   I can take only one championship run every other year. 

3  I recall last year staying up late watching games, trying to plan lessons, getting up early, writing this boushit, and THEN going in and teaching. 

4   AND we had union/district issues, so there was a lot of tension going on as well. 

5   All that vanished, and I am suddenly sitting at Caitlin and Josh's house enjoying two gorgeous babies, bringing food in, and trying to take care of business.

6  The toughest thing has been continuing with the writing lessons, but they're fun to write and hopefully they are helping people understand how the craft works.

7   What is fun to me is not so much giving grammar lessons. What is fun to me is reading famous writers' advice to writers, and then sharing.

8   I focused a lot on Stephen King's On Writing, in which he credits Amy Tan for asking why writers are seldom asked about the language. 

9   It occurred to me this morning that I have been throwing writing tips out there every single day dating back to September 7. I hope to continue until it disrupts my life a bit too much, which it has done of late. 

10  What's fun is discoveries. For example, I discovered that writers hang out with each other way more than I imagined, and that they are WAY interested in learning how to do other things. Common sense stuff, of course, but for some reason we don't see writers as much more than authors of books.

11  With all that in mind I decided yesterday to see what sorts of things Amy Tan does as a writer. 

12  I found this, an interview with Tan by one Noah Charney, and I'm happy to share it with you:

Amy Tan: How I Write

13   Here is a wonderful excerpt:

Now, when you sit down to write, could you describe your workspace?

Ah, well this is a new office. I have another one from which I haven’t moved all my belongings yet. This particular office is fairly bare. I do have my photos of my family here on my desk. Only family members who have died. My grandmother, my mother, my father, and my oldest brother. I have also a doll of the Little Prince from the 1960s, that belonged to my friend, who died. So I surround myself with things that belong to people, or photos of people, who I’ve really loved in my love. My reminder to think deeply and honestly, to feel deeply. That’s what I want to do with my fiction. I also have all my journals in front of me on two shelves. I have old photo albums and a recording my father made of his voice, speaking, with my mother. On one of these old time records. But I lack a record player to play it! But there it is, their voices captured.

Tell me about your journals.

It’s notes to myself. Ideas for a novel, the notes I took when working with a composer on the libretto for an opera I did in 2008. Some say “miscellaneous China 2003” and others “miscellaneous conferences.” Or “Easter Island” or “Bhutan.” What’s in there doesn’t necessarily relate to the place. It’s just a marker of when I started the journal. I don’t keep the journals in chronological order. I might pick up a journal from 2004 because it happens to be handy, and start writing in it. It’s complete disorganization, but it doesn’t matter. They’re all, in one sense, ideas that go somewhere. Sometimes I go through them and jot down things that would be useful for whatever book I happen to working on at the time.

Do you go through them often, or is it more about preserving the memories just to know that you could go through them if you wanted to?

Yeah, it’s mostly the latter. It’s the habit of writing down a thought, memory, an idea … I feel that moments forgotten are moments of my existence that are no longer there. They’re pieces of me that have died. Very strange idea, I know, but if I can preserve them, the thoughts come back when I look at what I’ve written. The memory of the feelings, as well. And I have a sense of a continuous being from the past—it’s not the past anymore, but I’m a continuous being, rather than a delineation between past, present, and future. These are not diary entries. I don’t say anything like “today I had dinner with Stephen King, Dave Barry, and we rehearsed this particular song” [they are all members of a writer garage band band called the Rock Bottom Remainders]. It may be something I’ve overheard. When it’s something that’s my own, I have an asterisk next to it. If it’s from another source, I cite it. It’s so easy to put daily thoughts down and not know who they should be attributed to. I always put down the date and the place where I wrote each entry. I then go back and recall where I was at the time I was writing it. A mnemonic to bring the memory back.

I’ve interviewed several members of the Rock Bottom Remainders. Tell me a good story about performing together.

Ha! Well, I am the person who gives credence to their bragging that we are a band that is “hard listening.” There are a number of members of the band who are quite good musicians, or who have voices that are quite good. I have a terrible voice, and I cannot remember lyrics. I like to say that I have a brain disorder that makes it impossible. I can’t even remember passages from my own books—I can’t memorize anything. So it’s guaranteed I’ll forget my lyrics. We’ve chosen comedic songs for me, so it’s part of the act, that I don’t remember my lyrics. The songs are “These Boots are Made for Walking” and “Leader of the Pack.” I wear costumes for both. For “Boots” I’m especially gifted. I wield a whip and at the end of the song, I tell the boys to bend over. The audience somehow forgets that I’m not a good singer, and they go wild! When our musical director, Al Cooper, first suggested I do the song, I was mildly outraged. I said, “That’s a sexist song!”  He’d also suggested I wear thigh-high boots and fishnet stockings. I rejected that at first, but my friend said that it would be cute, and when she said that, I realized, This is not me trying to be able to sing a song that is easy. It’s about entertaining the audience. So that’s been my signature song for a good twenty years.

Speaking of entertaining the audience, of all your many accomplishments, the one I think I’m most in awe of is that you appear in an episode of The Simpsons. What was that experience like for you?

Well, you have to understand I didn’t have to audition for the role. Matt Groening asked if I would do it, and he also volunteered to direct me. He’s so sweet. So there I was in a studio, connected to Matt, who was directing me. I was saying to Lisa Simpson, after she had complimented me on my tender mother-daughter stories…I’m berating her for describing erroneously what my book is about. “That’s not what I said! That’s not what the book is about! Sit down, I’m ashamed for the both of us.” Matt went through twenty iterations of that. “Sound meaner, really let her have it.” By the twentieth take, I was saying “Fuck you, little girl!”  It was hilarious. I was trying to get to the point of fomenting, full of madness, berating some poor little girl who would have psychiatric problems the rest of her life! What we ended up with was probably the first take, which was fairly mild. I sound nasty, but not nearly as much as in the takes Matt cajoled out of me. We were cracking up!

Describe your routine when conceiving of a book and its plot, before the writing begins. Do you like to map out your books ahead of time, or just let it flow?

I map out some of it, through the journals. I like doing it with journals, because I can jot down ideas quickly, and then write in the margins arrows that will connect one thing to the other. There are notes I often write at night in bed, or on an airplane—wherever I have time. I think about the novel every single night, before I go to bed, and try to work some aspect out. Usually the beginning and the voice. I sketch out a very very basic outline, a couple of paragraphs. Then I add little funny details—well, not funny, but some specifics that I know I want to include as part of the character. It could be a small attribute or an event. When I finally sit down and write, it is done entirely on computer.

What has to happen on page one, and in chapter one, to make for a successful book that urges you to read on?

Well, in my book, the opening invariably gets changed—it’s the last thing that gets written. Only when I finish the book can I go back to the beginning and write in the voice of all that happened. For books I want to keep reading, it’s definitely the voice. It must be a voice I’ve never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By “voice,” I don’t mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits. I mean an understanding of how events happen in the world, whether it was the result of simply growing up, or accidents, or bad choices, good choices. That becomes evident in the beginning. If the book starts with the name of some popular icon, I immediately put it down! I don’t know why, there are probably many good books that begin like that, but it’s a sign to me that it’s going to feature stock characters.

14   And on and on. When I saw this article, I thought to myself, "What a treat!" And it was.

15   I think I'll exit now.

16  My laptop has gone wonky and is double-spacing.

17  That gives me the rest of the day off, the way I see it.

18  Hope you enjoyed Amy Tan. I saw Tan once at San Jose State. Absolutely charming. I've a small anecdote to share, but as I said, my laptop doesn't want to cooperate today. 

19  I'll try to get that to you tomorrow. Meanwhile, I gottago.

20  See you again. 

21  Have a GREAT day.

22  Peace.

~H~

fin.