Friday Write #151

Let's make lists!

Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. —#4 on Benjamin Franklin’s list of Thirteen Virtues

Hey, writers!

In 1977, David Wallechinsky (son of novelist and screenwriter Irving Wallace) published The Book of Lists, which offered readers information on “4 Places with More Pigs Than Humans,” “Ten Really Unusual Medical Conditions,” and “6 Incestuous Couples of the Bible,” among other fascinating subjects.

The book sold millions of copies (as his father’s potboilers had done), and four sequels, a TV show, and a board game followed. People, it turns out, really love lists.

One of my daughter’s college applications asks her to list five things that are important to her. This seems like a no-brainer unless you’re trying to stand out from a crowd: you can’t write “friends, family, my cats…” when someone else has “the scent of library paste in mid-century children’s books” and “the first motherboard I built (age six).”

Today, your prompt is to have fun with lists. (Not to-do lists; those aren’t fun enough.) One idea would be to think really hard about five things that are important to a character in your story/novel/memoir. You could also do the same thing for yourself—again, thinking really long and hard about it. In either case, insights may result.

Or you can take a page from one of the producers of This American Life (which is where I heard about The Book of Lists), and make your own weird list. Hers include “Things that are off-brand for me, or common things I’ve never done, or times strangers have involved me in their business for unclear reasons.” Also: “Harmless things my dad hates” and “Things I should have known.”

Filling out any of those lists sounds like pretty decent fun to me. I just wrote one called “Things I wish I liked more than I do,” but since it wasn’t that interesting I’m going to have to keep trying.

Johnny Cash’s to-do list is pretty good though

And now, a list of literary links:

1. “I work best from a place of zero ego and zero hope.” A nice interview with the writer Erin Somers over at Counter Craft.

2. Maybe someone can watch Richard Power’s interview/storytelling masterclass and tell me all about it. I have to finish The Understory first.

3. I haven’t listened to this podcast episode, either, but Rick Rubin’s take on life as an artist is pretty great: Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not. It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it. It’s like saying, “I’m not good at being a monk.” You are either living as a monk or you’re not. We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.

4. “I was hired as an assassin.” In honor of Patricia Lockwood’s appearance at the Portland Book Festival (get your tickets today!), here’s her unforgettable take on John Updike’s oeuvre in the London Review of Books.

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