The entire world will be against this (my college, which I love, has a tendency to hold committee meetings in the morning, which train-wrecks my writing); sometimes we have to tell the world to go away. And the world gets ticked off. And we write.

So. Find a place to write, and find a time -- the same time, every day. Alone. No internet. No television. Maybe some Bach (I've been listening to Gould's Goldberg Variations as of late). This is the only way to get there.

..
..

"We have two or three hundred acres, including two large islands," she reported. ///

"Never," she insists. "We go on long rides with our horses. We kayak on the river. I cross-country ski in the winter. 

"I have my photography. I paint and sculpt and write poetry. And there are always the animals to watch."

Things haven't always been so idyllic at the ranch. In 2000, a fire destroyed the manuscript of Novak's nearly completed autobiography. 

She also lost all of her memorabilia, including letters from Frank Sinatra and James Stewart, jewelry, and posters of her films and photos. At first she despaired of resuming her memoir, but now she is back at work and has completed several chapters.

..

Franzen weighs the pressures upon the self in a culture that manages the neat trick of discouraging real solitude and genuine community, substituting for both the paradox of media-overloaded isolation. 

"The first lesson reading teaches," he writes, "is how to be alone." Alone yes, but as he also shows, always with another consciousness. What good fiction fosters is not self-absorbed isolation but isolation as the first step toward engaging the mind of the writer or his characters. 

from review by Richard Lacayo [Time.com Nov. 25, 2002] of
How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

~ ~

Franzen's just as hard on intellectual conformity - on academe's canonization of third-rate but politically correct novels, for example. As a serious artist, he knows that the deck is stacked against him; after all, a great novel is a kind of antiproduct, one that is "inexpensive, infinitely reusable, and, worst of all, unimprovable." 

The problem, he says, is that instead of being allowed to enjoy our solitary uniqueness we are all being turned into one gigantic corporate-created entity, a point Franzen makes tellingly when he says that while a black lesbian New Yorker and a Southern Baptist Georgian might appear totally different, the truth is that both "watch Letterman every night, both are struggling to find health insurance... both play Lotto, both dream of fifteen minutes of fame, both are taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and both have a guilty crush on Uma Thurman."

These canny, well-researched essays (which have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and elsewhere) range over a variety of subjects... but they are united by a single passionate insistence that, in a cookie-cutter world, people who want simply to be themselves should have the right to do so. [from Publishers Weekly review]

..
..

DiFranco, who recently split with her longtime partner and sound engineer Andrew Gilchrist, also decided to forego a band on her current tour. 

She also chalked up another first by producing her latest album, "Educated Guess," entirely on her own -- as well as playing all the instruments herself.

Q : Your approach, your energy on the current tour and on the new album seem different. Why is that? 

Ani DiFranco: The difference is solitude. I have it in my life now, and I didn't for years, at all. 

But there's been a lot of changes so now I'm alone on stage, it's been like a year and a half, and I'm alone in my dressing room and I'm alone in my home. And there's just a lot less people around. So it allows for more contemplation. ///

..
..

I thought now that I got my engineering chops up at home and I'm kind of in the groove with my 8-track, I've sort of started working on that. 

And then I also, of course, still continue to write songs and I was thinking I might try collaborating in the studio with a producer and maybe make a different situation than I've recorded thus far. 

I think I'm at a point in my career now where I could maybe even call somebody up and say, "Are you interested in working on a record?" And they might even be.

....Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto by Anneli S. Rufus

In this compendium of everyone who was anyone who ever spent a moment alone, readers bump fleetingly into Kurt Cobain, French Resistance fighters, the Lone Ranger ("Tonto notwithstanding"), Michelangelo, Alexander Pope, John Lennon, cowboys, Saint Anthony and other solo acts. 

Rufus, the books editor of East Bay Express, views Degas's plain-faced dancers as "pretty ballerinas" whom the artist leaves every time he exits his studio, and Warhol's biography as "tellingly titled Loner at the Ball." 

She chases her motif, not so much a manifesto as a cri de coeur, through an assortment of perspectives: religion, advertising, clothes, crime, art, eccentricity, environment, literature, religion and popular culture. [Publishers Weekly review]

Erica Jong - from newsletter of National Association of Women Writers - naww.org

books by Erica Jong:  What Do Women Want?
Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected  /  photo from ericajong.com

Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two. 

Hence, positive silence implies a disciplined choice, and what Paul Tillich called the "courage to be." 

"Silence and solitude are important to me. They weren't important before because I was trained as a journalist and could write anywhere. But as I get older, I need more concentration." 

I enjoy discussions in class, I like to analyze poetry. I have yet to find anyone to sit with me at lunch and debate euthanasia. So a lot of my life is in my head, in my thoughts. I've learned to handle solitude creatively.