Thelma Adams: Novelist, Critic, Oscar Expert

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What are some best practices that can help a writer succeed both artistically and professionally?

March 19, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment


Writers fight a battle on at least three fronts: their personal artistic struggle, the challenge of creating good work, and the need to find a place in the market.

On a personal level, self-doubt can be the cancer of a writing practice. Look your doubt head on: you choose to be a writer. Make peace with the doubt monster as best you can. Find support: family, fellow writers, an editor who gets you, agents that support you. Create a supportive community. Block toxic naysayers.

Face your fears and write through them.

Writing is among the most accessible of arts — all you need is a pencil, paper and words. You don’t need a cast and crew. Writing, in the creation phase, is a very intimate art form, some would say lonely. I find it less lonely — because the words are the company I keep.

Whether writing fiction or criticism, practice is everything. Don’t stop. Find the rhythm that suits you — up all night, early morning brain. Coffee. Music. Cigarettes. You must write through those early days. You may be brilliant at school and, yet, when you write that first short story, or the fifth, it’s so much less than the books that you read, whether V. S. Naipaul or P. G. Wodehouse or Elena Ferrante. Continue, find your voice, find your format: short stories, poetry, novels, blog posts. For most writers, this requires great patience. To survive you must find joy in the process.

So: Write as if you were practicing for a marathon.

Finding a place in the market is the challenge most beyond your control. In some ways, it’s easier now with platforms like Quora, where you can write and connect without a gatekeeper. However, if you want to earn a living, as Dickens had to, then you must pursue a form for which there is a market.

While working a day job, I wrote hundreds of film reviews for a free Manhattan weekly before I kicked open the door at the New York Post. As a novelist, I wrote beyond rejection. I toasted the purchase of my first novel, Girl Empire, when it appeared to have publisher interest. It fell through. The book exists, I kid you not, on a floppy drive. My second novel, Playdate, got a prestigious publisher. I waited for the book’s publication to change my life. It didn’t. It wasn’t until The Last Woman Standing that I found a union of voice, subject, audience, agent and publisher.

By that time, I had learned my lesson. Keep writing. Keep finding subjects that fascinate. Change the world — as a creative individual, as a writer in the world, and as a professional — one sentence at a time.

So: Persistence.

To be a successful writer in the current environment, build confidence in your self, embark on the marathon that is a writing career, and be persistent. And, if you can, find joy in the creating.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Best Practices, historical fiction, Novel, novelist, Quora, Writing

Don’t Laugh: Comic Actor Jason Segel Deserves an Oscar Nomination

June 26, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Jason SegelSacrilege! Could Jason Segel of TV’s How I Met Your Mother and Forgetting Sarah Marshall merit a Best Actor nomination? Yes!

Segel’s performance as brilliant but troubled Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour, opening July 31, could be forgotten under the thundering hooves of autumn Telluride and Toronto Oscar vehicles. Think of Chadwick Boseman’s James Brown in Get on Up, an Oscar worthy performance that opened last year on August 1 and was all-but-forgotten in last year’s competitive Best Actor race.

Appreciating the bromantic duet between Segel’s Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg’s (compelling) Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky for a second time at the Nantucket Film Festival increased my passion for Segel’s performance. He restores Wallace not as that author you should have read (and probably didn’t) but as a brilliant writer who might not have been the most brilliant conversationalist or company.

With very little action, and articulating lines that are often intentionally inarticulate (Donald Margulies wrote the emotionally satisfying script), Segel creates a multi-layered portrait of a petty, generous, dog loving, soul searching, depression coping, American TV addict. His bandana-wearing Wallace struggles to carve out an authentic life in Bloomington, Indiana far away from the Manhattan literary buzz, which his character describes as the sound of egos rising and falling. What’s strong about the performance is that very lack of ego. It doesn’t take long before Segel loses himself in Wallace, alternately charming and antagonizing both Eisenberg’s Lipsky and the audience.

It will be an uphill battle for Segel. And one fought previously by actors who have made their reputations first as comedians: Steve Carell (Foxcatcher), Will Forte (Nebraska), Robin Williams (One Hour Photo), Bill Murray (Lost in Translation), Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls), Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig (The Skelton Twins), Whoopi Goldberg (The Color Purple) and even Jerry Lewis (The King of Comedy). The buzz that started at Sundance continues here.

Filed Under: Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: A24, best actor, bromance, depression, Donald Margulies, James Ponsoldt, Jann Wenner, Jason Segel, Jesse Eisenberg, Nantucket Film Fesstival, Novelists, Oscar, Rolling Stone, Writing

My Writing Process Blog Tour: You Are What You Write

June 16, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Vuillard painting of a woman writing

Vuillard painting of a woman writing

My good friend Susan Kouguell invited me to join the writing blog tour. Susan and I have been collaborating for a long time. I remember sitting in her flat on 247 Mulberry Street, the one that shared a bathroom wall with John Gotti’s notorious Ravenite Social Club. We were discussing my first novel, Girl Empire, and coming up with a way for her to build a real business out of her talents as a screenplay doctor, well before that cottage industry existed. That novel was never published, although Playdate was. And her company, Su-City Pictures, was born. You can learn about her company, and writing process, at http://su-city-pictures.com/wpblog/) .

Susan invited me to answer the following four questions:

  1. What am I working on? I am writing personal essays, specifically one with a currently crappy title about my son’s final vocal concert at the Kent School, and how surprisingly emotional that was for me, particularly since I had expected to be financially settled and established by this point — and I am not. So, his graduation and fresh start in the world comes at a particularly fraught time in my professional journey.
  2. How does my work differ from others of its genre? In this case, I’m not sure it does. I have never been a writer that adapted readily to preexisting formats, and so what I am trying to do is to learn how to take my prose and my emotions and experience and find a genre delivery system that will make these pieces more readily marketable. I have succeeded in the past, with a  “Lives” column in the NYT Magazine and an essay in O: The Oprah Magazine, but I have not been able to get sufficient traction.
  3. Why do I write what I do? Because I am a writer. Period. Since I am a professional online film critic and journalist, which I also love, I tend to work on shorter pieces that put me in touch with my poetry and personal emotions. Sometimes the two intersect,  as in my recent Yahoo! Movies piece “How Watching The Fault in Our Stars with My Teenage Daughter Brought us Closer” I am also working on a novel and revising a memoir but those projects require a stamina and focus that is often challenging when earning a living and raising children.
  4. How does your writing process work? In the ideal, I get up in the morning without putting a child on the school bus, make a cup of coffee and then write my very best, most focused, easiest prose. With essays, I have started taking a class with Susan Shapiro, to crack the personal essay code. And, so, that morning process can now be pulling an essay apart at the seams, so carefully stitched, and cutting toward the poetry. This is a new stage. In fact, I recently told my husband that I feel like an artist who has achieved a certain level of ability with her god-given talents and hard work, and now I am reaching for new colors outside of my usual palette: vermillion, sunflower yellow.

Here is the first of three writers whom I’ve invited to join this tour…they will be posting on June 23rd:

Carla Stockton is a lifelong on-and-off New Yorker, who, after living for 13 years in exile in the southwest desert, brings a returnee’s perspective to the city. She is a student, a parent, a grandparent, a blogger and an avid traveler. www.Carlastockton.me and also http://catchandrelease.columbiajournal.org/2014/06/12/get-real-robert-schenkkan-helps-unpack-the-paradox-of-all-the-way/

 

Filed Under: Essay Tagged With: Personal Essays, Susan Kouguell, Writing, Writing Lessons

“Playdate”: Father-daughter moment page 14

April 2, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Lance,Belle,Playdate,novel,Parade Magazine,Oprah pick,NY Times rave,Home Depot,difficult discussions,birds and bees

Stay-at-home-dads do it in the mini-van


Tomorrow, I’m going on WRITERS ON WRITING. KUCI Irvine, NPR, Orange County and I’m considering reading a short, short piece from my novel that I haven’t read aloud before, an intimate moment between father Lance and daughter Belle while they are making breakfast before school:

As Lance and Belle stood side by side in the kitchen, with Belle’s wild head of black curls at Lance’s hip, he experienced such a feeling of oneness that it scared him. How would he pull himself back together if something happened to her? He relished these moments of gooey eggs on their hands; the brush of his arm hair against Belle’s; and the simple knowledge that Cinnamon Toast Crunch was his daughter’s favorite cereal, having vanquished Lucky Charms and an austere period of plain organic yogurt.

This quiet harmony Lance and Belle shared was what he had imagined he would experience with Darlene as their marriage ripened. Instead, as the newness of their passion waned, a gulf had appeared between them, competitiveness entered the void, and, it seemed to him, a desire on Darlene’s part to assign blame. He still wanted to bridge that gulf, but wasn’t sure how.

Filed Under: Books, Playdate Tagged With: Novel, Playdate, Radio, Writers, Writing

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