Writing Advice
“Foul Shots: A Clinic”
Be perpendicular to the basket,
toes avid for the line.
Already this description is perilously abstract:
the ball and basket are round,
the nailhead centered in the center
plank of the foul-circle is round,
and though the rumpled body isn’t round,
it isn’t perpendicular.
You have to draw “an imaginary line,”
as the breezy coaches say,
“through your shoulders.”
Here’s how to cheat: remember your collarbone.
Now the instructions grow spiritual—
deep breathing, relax and concentrate both;
aim for the front of the rim but miss it
deliberately so the ball goes in.
Ignore this part of the clinic and shoot
200 foul shots every day.
Teach yourself not to be bored by
any boring one of them.
You have to love to do this,
and chances are you don’t;
you’d love to be good at it but
not by a love that drives you
to shoot 200 foul shots every day,
and the lovingly unlaunched foul shots
we’re talking about now—the clinic
having served to bring us together—
circle eccentrically in a sky of
stolid orbits as unlike as
you and I are from the arcs
those foul shots leave behind
when they go in.
William Matthews— “Foul Shots: A Clinic”
Toni Morrison wrote, “They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places … but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. … All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”
Jean Rhys, author of The Wide Sargasso Sea, said,
“Listen to me. I want to tell you something very important. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyeysky. And there are trickles like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters.”
Remember your obligation is to write, And in writing, to be serious without being solemn, fresh without being cold, to be inclusive without being asinine, particular without being picky, feminine without being effeminate, masculine without being brutish, human while keeping all the animal graces you had inside the womb, and beast-like without being inhuman. Let your language be delectable always, and fresh and true.