New Blog: How to Write Stories About Writers

In 1995 a well meaning instructor at the Clarion Writer’s workshop informed me that there was one essential rule for writing that all would do well to follow. The rule was simply this:

Don’t write stories about writers.

I did not immediately take the rule to heart. After all this instruction seemed to contradict a rule I’d learned of even earlier. An English teacher at Palmer High School had told me that the important thing was to: write what you know. The two rules obviously contradict each other, but at the same time they share a common sensibility as both are prohibitions, and over time I’ve decided that these rules serve the same function. They are dispensed by those who think of themselves as established to those who are beginning. And the intent behind the dispensing of these tidbits, these rules, is highly suspect.

For the young the adage–Write what you know– is an instruction to give up on writing anything. After all the typical young person drawn to literature is wise enough to know that she doesn’t know a thing.

The maxim–Don’t write stories about writers–is likewise a way to silence the small and common people who shrink from the real world and take refuge in words on a page. These lonely old men don’t have experiences worth knowing, and thereby they have nothing worth sharing. They ought not to bother.

So the rules are suspect in their intent, and after editing a couple of issues of Diet Soap, after receiving a number of interesting stories in violation of the second rule, it struck me that there was nothing to gain by continuing to abide by these rules, and perhaps a lot to gain by flouting them. And so, nearly 15 years after being told what not to do I have decided to start a publication that is about nothing more than breaking the rule.

At How to Write Stories About Writers we will never restrict ourselves to writing only what we absolutely know, and we will never discount our own experiences.

“How to Write Stories About Writers” is a blog where I’ll publish what I think are worthwhile stories about writers as they come in. To begin I’ll be publishing fiction once a week for four weeks. In between I’ll post nonfiction blog entries: book reviews, interviews, cranky email exchanges, manifestoes, and so on. I’ll be posting submission guidelines for How to Write Stories About Writers on the Diet Soap submission webpage sometime in the next few days.

The first story up is “Life’s Simple Pleasures” by writer and editor John Klima.

 ISSUE #2 (Sex and Gender) | TABLE OF CONTENTS

“Dream Date” by Chelsea Martin

“Be the Bomb You Throw” by Katherine Sparrow

“Peach” by Ginnetta Correli

“Stitching Time” by Stephanie Burgis

“The Growns” by Maxwell James

“Shopping for a Husband” by Aurelio Rico Lopez III

“Pro-Life Patter” by Rachel Swirsky

“How to Walk in Heels” by Tina Connolly

Collages by Jen Light

ISSUE #1 (Surveillance) | TABLE OF CONTENTS

“Diary of a Nonsworn” by Holly K. Hein

“Observer Effects” by Tim Pratt

“The Basement, Borges” by Darin C. Bradley

“A Brief History of Cakes and Cake Making” by Eric Weiskott

“Evelyn Manesta and the Resistance to Modern Photographic Surveillance” by Bill Brown (of the Surveillance Camera Players)”

A Dead Man in Internet Images” by J. A. Tyler

“From Georges Bataille to Jesus Christ in Four Moves” by Ben Segal

“Xi?an (a Metophilia)” by Brendan Connell

“Three Naughty Palindromes” by Michael Constantine McConnell

Email us at info (at) dietsoap (dot) org for a free pdf copy of the ‘zine, and remember to indicate whether you’d like a bookletized or onscreen version, or click here to order a printed copy of Diet Soap.