A Quote by Lorine Niedecker
Grandfather / advised me: / Learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery.
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There was a sergeant at a desk. I knew he was a sergeant because I recognized the marks on his uniform, and I knew it was a desk because it's always a desk. There's always someone at a desk, except when it's a table that functions as a desk. You sit behind a desk, and everyone knows you're supposed to be there, and that you're doing something that involves your brain. It's an odd, special kind of importance. I think everyone should get a desk; you can sit behind it when you feel like you don't matter.
Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
My grandfather learned to swim in the Navy by getting thrown off a boat into the ocean. He had to learn fast. And I think I learn pretty well under pressure.
It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.
In my home office, I built a custom sit-stand desk to which I connected a big, kidney shaped glass top which I got for cheap at Ikea. Kidney-shaped desk tops are, I think, the most efficient of all possible desk shapes.
Strange, (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, blood, even assassination should so condense - perhaps only really lastingly condense - a Nationality.
James Agate, a great critic of the day, advised me that the way to learn your job properly was to learn Shakespeare, so I went to Stratford. It really sorts out the men from the boys.
When I was 15, I begged my grandfather to give me this guitar he'd always had in the back of his closet. I promised him I'd learn to play it, but I never did. Then my grandfather died, and I felt so guilty. So I started playing.
It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.
Writing helped to have jobs that involved running around, pushing things like dish carts and wheelbarrows. It would be hard to sit at a desk all day, and then come to sit at another desk. Also, it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won't get beyond the first sentence. It's better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I'll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you're writing humor.
My desk is right next to my bed. So I sit on my bed. I write in a big notebook which is on the desk. And if I feel drowsy, I just have to slide into bed.
I spent six years as a child growing not far from Las Vegas.I use to sit on the porch of our home and listen to my grandfather tell stories as he smoked one of three daily cigars.One of the things my grandfather instilled in me, was that I was really blessed because I was a citizen of the greatest country in the history of our mankind.
In the '50s and '60s, journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for - it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job.
It seemed to me that I should have a desk, even though I had no real need for a desk. I was afraid that if I had no desk in my room my life would seem too haphazard.
Persist - don't take no for an answer. If you're happy to sit at your desk and not take any risk, you'll be sitting at your desk for the next 20 years.
I, for one, find writing excruciating. Some mornings, as I'm on my way to my desk, my hands actually tremble with fear. The fear, of course, is that I'll sit down at the desk and discover that what I've written is claptrap. Fear inevitably leads to procrastination.
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