Title This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Author Ann Pachett

Year Published 2013

Kind of Book Memoir/Writing

How strongly I recommend it 6/10 

My Impressions I really enjoyed some of Patchett's insights from "The Getaway Car" (which is included in this collection), but her others essays didn't do much for me.

Date Read January 2022

Practical Takeaways

  • Tell the truth (when writing)

  • Learn to write by writing

  • Write a story, learn for it, put it away, write another story etc.

  • Forgive yourself over and over throughout the course of your life

  • Teach others to write

  • Lecture about what you're reading

  • Don't go into debt to study creative writing

  • If you get into an MFA program without an offer of financial aid, sit out a year and then reapply

  • (to generate ideas for a story) look through a book of photography and make up a story about the people

  • (to generate ideas for a story) Make up two characters and put them in a room together and see what happens

  • (to generate ideas for a story) think of something that happened to you or someone you know and then make it turn out an entirely different way

  • Separate the part of your brain that makes the art from the part of your brain that judges the art

  • Don't start a sexy new piece until you've finished the piece you're currently writing

  • Learn how to construct a plot before rejecting the plot

  • To speed the pace of the book, make chapters short

  • To slow the pace of the book, make chapters long

  • Write your story in the order in which it will be read. Ie. Don’t jump around

  • First commit to writing 20 mintues a day, work your way up to 2 hours

  • Commit to Sit and write for 2hours a day for a week. You don't have to write, but you must sit there with no phone/internet/or distraction

  • Finish the book you're writing before looking for an agent

  • Read the magazine you're submitting to before submitting

  • Conduct your research on the piece you're writing AFTER you've started writing (if you do it before you may procrastinate endlessly)

  • There are times to write, times to think, and times to just live your life

  • Write down the time you start writing and stop writing each day

  • Don't have a kid if all you really need is a dog

  • Drink a lot of water when you travel or fly

  • Always put the children's section in the back of a store (so if parents are distracted kids don't wander out of the store)

  • (for choosing a partner/spouse) ask yourself 'Does she make you better and do you make her better?"

Big Ideas

The Getaway Car

  • Brilliant ideas are not too hard to come by

  • The reality of what you write rarely matches the beauty of what you imagined

  • People think playing a musical instrument will require practice and hard work to master

But

  • People think that writing shouldn't require practice and hard work and should come effortlessly

Most people are full of bad/bord/self-indulgent stories and have a few good stories hidden beneath them

  • Writing forces the writer to stare down his/her inadequacies

  • Most people avoid writing because they don't want to look at their inadequacies

  • We are not influenced by the things we love, so much as by the things we saw/read/experienced when we were in a particularly open state of mind

  • We are disproportionately more shaped by the content we consume and experiences we have as children than the content we consume and experiences we have as an adult

  • Our memory is better for formative experiences than experiences we have as an adult

  • Talking about/Lecturing about a book forces you to read at a higher level

  • Teaching others how to write helps the teacher understand how to write better

  • When we don't give something 100% of our effort we then have a convenient excuse for what we didn't succeed (or why things didn't turn out the way we would have liked)

  • Writing a novel is like swimming across a channel ie. It is low and steady, long distance, stroke after stroke in a cold dark sea

  • When you're writing there is an illusion to think that the thing you're writing is tired and boring and your idea for the new piece is great and that if you stop the old piece and start on the new idea it will be easier

But

  • Eventually your sexy new idea always becomes the tired boring idea once you start working on it

  • Sometimes you don't realize what's lacking in life until you find it

  • Being a novelist is the closest thing to being God a person can get

Because

  • Novelists create entire worlds and are in complete control of the fates of the characters in the worlds they create

  • Writing is often the last thing writers want to do (even after doing annoying chores)

  • Doing Research can be a way of procrastinating doing the harder thing (or scarier thing)

  • Writing is both awful and the best thing in the world

 

Other Essays

  • Before divorce became socially acceptable more people suffered in marriages they didn't want to be it

  • Before divorce became socially acceptable people didn't "try harder" in marriage

  • Now that divorce is so common place it informs the way we think about marriage (even if we never get divorced

  • Some people get a dog when what they really want is a baby

  • Some people have a baby when all they really needed was a dog

  • Knowing that the thing you're creating is going to be throw away leads to more risk-taking

  • More risk-taking usually leads to better art/writing/creating

Surprising Facts

  • Its cheaper for the police force for a cop to get killed than for a cop to kill somebody

 

Unknown Terms

Modus Operandi: someone's habits of working, particularly in the context of business or criminal investigations; but also more generally, it is a Latin phrase, approximately translated as mode of operating. 2)a distinct pattern or method of operation that indicates or suggests the work of a single criminal in more than one crime