Laila Lalami

The Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah (whose debut story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, came out a few months ago) has some excellent advice for young writers on her blog. She writes:

A lot more people just want to know how they can be “real” , and that word keeps coming up, how they can be “real” writers. It is to these aspiring writers that I now reveal the secret to writing success.

Write.

That’s it.

Just write.

A writer is a person who writes.

Talent is overrated. Luck is overrated. The right agent is overrated. It helps to have all three, but they are all worthless without that thing in your hand, the manuscript, the thing in your hand that may become a book for which trees will die and that will be published and primped and pampered and put on bookshelves and paid for by people.

And this is what is underrated: the sitting down and grinding it out part. Because that is what writing is. You, at your computer or with your notebook, writing, and writing, revising and writing, and revising again.

This resonated with me because earlier this week, a student asked me for some career advice. I wasn’t sure what exactly she meant, and when I inquired it turned out she was very anxious because she felt that she should “put herself out there” and “try to get published.” She said that I was the only professor she had who never discussed publication or career in class. So she was curious. I told her that I didn’t discuss publication because I felt that the class should be spent on writing. I asked her how many stories she had written. The answer was: not very many. And so my advice to her was to write. I think I will also tell her to read what Gappah wrote.

When I went to see Chris Rock’s documentary, Good Hair, the other day, it got me thinking about how curly hair is written about in novels. The first example that came to me was Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. In the novel, Coleman Silk describes Iris Gittelman, the woman he’s going to marry, mostly in terms of her hair:

Her head of hair was something, a labyrinthine, billowing wreath of spirals and ringlets, fuzzy as twine and large enough for use as a Christmas ornamentation. All the disquiet of her childhood seemed to have passed into the convolutions of her sinuous thicket of hair. Her irreversible hair. You could polish pots with it and no more alter its construction than if it were harvested from the inky depths of the sea, some kind of wiry, reef-building organism, a dense living onyx hybrid of coral and shrubs, perhaps possessing medicinal properties.

Iris’s hair is significant, of course. Its curative property, so to speak, is that it allows Coleman, who has been passing for white, to have a convenient explanation for any kinkiness in his children’s hair.

I’m thrilled to let you all know that I have a short story in Dinarzad’s Children, an anthology of Arab American writing edited by Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa. The story is called “How I Became My Mother’s Daughter,” and almost everyone who has read it has mistaken it for an essay. It isn’t; it’s fiction. But this is what I get for writing in the first-person point of view.

At any rate, I hope you’ll look for this anthology in your neighborhood bookstore or library because it’s got some great writing by Rabih Alameddine, Rawi Hage, Laila Halaby, Alia Yunis, Diana Abu Jaber, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Yussef El Guindi, and the lovely and amazing Randa Jarrar, among many others.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, a writer, and we found ourselves doing that thing that writers often do: sharing horror stories about the book world. Here is one (among many) I told her. Several years ago, at a summer writers’ conference, I met a magazine editor who happened to be from the same city I lived in at the time. The editor said she was looking for slush pile readers, and I naively expressed some interest in helping out, on a volunteer basis. She sized me up, then asked, “How old are you?”

I didn’t quite understand why she asked me my age, but I answered, almost mechanically, “Thirty five.”

“Oh,” said the magazine editor. “Well, if you would like to volunteer your time, we really need help with office work.”

In a swift second, I had been reclassified from a potential reader of undiscovered gems to the person who stuffs rejection notices in envelopes. Needless to say, I never submitted any work to her. Eventually, I published a bunch of stories, then a book, and then another book. The kicker? A few years later, the editor, too, published a book. Then her publicist emailed me to ask me whether I could review it.

This month marks the eighth anniversary of my blog. The site has gone from an anonymous, sporadically updated, somewhat personal diary to an eponymous record of my literary, cultural, and political interests. But lately you may have noticed, dear reader, that I remain silent for several days on end and that my posts have become shorter. I think the reason for this is that I’ve changed my writing routine quite drastically. I used to write in the afternoon, after I’d read the day’s news, answered my emails, attended to any deadlines, and updated my blog. I figured I had to get all of the distractions out of the way so I could focus on my writing. Sometime last year, however, I realized that I could never ever catch up with email and that, in fact, the more prompt I was at answering email, the more of it I received. So I’ve been writing first thing in the morning, which means that everything else is pushed back to later in the day. Especially now that I’ve started work on my new novel. Still, I love having a place in which I can post commentary on things that interest me so this blog is not going anywhere anytime soon.