Perhaps the best aspect of crowd seeding is that it allows a writer to work among people. So much of this job is done in isolation, whether alone with a pen or keyboard, or alone on a stage, or alone in a hotel room. It’s always a joy to just introduce an idea and listen as other people perform. My degree is in journalism. I lack imagination, but I am a good listener, and my memory is decent. And for me writing fiction is about identifying patterns common to many, many lives.

  So if you were my student, I’d tell you to go to parties. Share the awkward, unflattering parts of your life. Allow other people to share theirs, and look for a pattern to emerge.

  Process: My Kitchen-Table Master’s in Fine Arts

  Tom always said that 99 percent of what any workshop does is give people permission to write. It legitimizes an activity that most of the world sees as pointless.

  Every Thursday at Tom’s ran the same course. We’d meet at his house at six in the evening. He’d ask each of us how we were, usually using the third person. Asking Monica Drake, “How is Monica feeling this week?” Asking me, “What’s going on in Chuck’s world?”

  We’d socialize and Tom would share about his own week. He was a living, breathing author, and we craved his stories about book contracts and movie options. Just having Tom present made our own dreams seem possible.

  The socializing allowed for stragglers to arrive. He’d give a lecture on some aspect of writing, like “horses” or “monkey mind versus elephant mind.” Other times a guest writer would stop in and give a talk. This could be Peter Christopher teaching us to “submerge the I” or Karen Karbo telling us that a gun is never just a gun. It has to be particularized. She gave this lecture after hearing me read the first chapter of Fight Club, so I went back to The Anarchist Cookbook and found the details about making a homemade silencer, and my resulting gun worked infinitely better to establish my authority.

  With all the students accounted for, Tom called for pages. It was the chorus we used for decades, “Who has pages tonight?”

  A student had to bring printed copies for everyone to read as the writer read the work aloud. Part of this practice came from Lish’s workshop at Columbia. It’s agony to read your work and hear where it plods along. Part of reading aloud came from Tom’s training with the Bowery Theatre in New York. There is no more honest feedback than laughter or groans or the motionless silence that genuine tension creates. That, and reading aloud prepares you for eventually reading in public on a book tour.

  Listening writers would jot notes in the margins of their copies. After the reading, people had the opportunity to respond. Opinions were only useful if they came with a suggestion for a fix or if they praised a specific aspect. Cross talk was discouraged because we might spend all evening trying to dominate each other. As we became trained in Tom’s distinctions—big voice, on the body, horses, sous-conversation, manumission—it became our language for evaluating a piece.

  For the record “sous-conversation” (or subtext) refers to the message that’s submerged in the actions and dialogue of the scene, the hidden extra meaning. Tom’s use of “manumission” meant the grace with which your sentences carried the reader forward without disturbing the fictional dream. To demonstrate this, he’d cup his hands and tilt them as if gently passing a small object back and forth between his palms. A good writer must gently pass the reader from sentence to sentence, like a fragile egg, without jarring the reader out of the story.

  The last to respond to student work would be Tom. He could always say something generous.

  Always present was a good-natured sense of competition. If Monica made everyone laugh, I’d be determined to make them laugh harder in the week to come. Cross-pollination always occurs in a group setting. It wasn’t unusual for one writer to introduce an endearing dog in a story, and within the weeks to come everyone’s work would include an endearing dog. As much as Tom taught us, we also taught one another with our mistakes and successes.

  We were young and hip enough to recognize when a writer’s new idea was already cresting in popular culture. And we pooled our best insider advice about tax law and literary agents. For years we all trusted our tax returns to the same preparer, a woman who specialized in finding loopholes for emerging painters, musicians, writers, and other marginally profitable artist types.

  The evening would repeat this pattern—students reading, everyone responding—until people were too tired to pay attention. Occasionally the phone would ring and wreck the mood of someone’s story. I was adamant about Tom unplugging the phone, but he’d forget, and it would ring and sabotage the payoff of someone’s perfect plot point. Usually mine. As students got better, no one wanted to read after them so the anchor person was usually Suzy Vitello, Monica Drake, Joanna Rose, or me.

  Finally, Tom would read from his work in progress. No one was allowed to critique Tom’s writing, no one dared. It was thrilling to hear something we knew would soon go into a real book. Or something we’d know, later, had been cut from the eventual final draft. Not unlike seeing the secret deleted scenes from a movie.

  We’d applaud Tom, and he’d begin lighting candles. Candles on the table. Candles on shelves. Someone would pass out glasses and people would open bottles of wine they’d brought.

  From that point it was a party. We’d talk about books, but mostly about movies because it was more likely several of us had seen the movie in question. We debated Thelma and Louise. Boogie Nights. Prêt-à-Porter ate up an evening. Tom lent us books or told us what to read. Story collections by Amy Hempel, Thom Jones, Mark Richard, or Barry Hannah.

  As wine was poured Tom would rub his palms together in a loud, showy way and ask, “Okay, who owes me money?” We’d pay two hundred dollars in cash for ten sessions. When cash got tight, Tom took household objects in trade. He’d moved from New York and still needed furniture. I remember Monica in particular bringing a lamp…a vase…

  The writer Steve Almond recently stated in the New York Times Magazine that writing workshops might be replacing psychoactive drugs as the new talk therapy for mental illness. By writing, people present their lives as fiction and tackle their issues as a craft exercise. By redeeming their protagonist, they find their own redemption.

  Tom would agree. In his approach, called Dangerous Writing, he encouraged students to explore their deepest, secret, unresolved anxiety. The writing process would provide the reward of resolving those issues, making publication and sales—if they happened—a less important bonus. For me, the workshops served an even larger purpose.

  Through our lives, our relationships are based on proximity. We attend the same school. We work at the same company or live in the same neighborhood. And when those circumstances change, our friendships dissolve. But at Tom’s and in workshops since Tom’s my friendships have been based on a shared passion. Instead of proximity, our mutual passion to write and share our work brings my friends together, largely the same group since 1990. Every week. That means seeing each other through marriages and new babies and someday grandchildren. Some among us have died. New friends have entered workshop. We’ve watched each other fail and succeed.

  Back in the 1990s it was our party every Thursday night. And whereas my partying to date had been about binge drinking—toking bong hits and shotgunning beers to forget my boring life and job—this was a party that celebrated a new future. We were young, toasting our heroes. Our dreams would actually come true. We would all become authors.

  Process: The Good Writer as Bad Artist

  If you’re going to be a good writer, don’t be afraid to also be a bad artist. Ray Bradbury painted. Truman Capote made collages. Norman Mailer drew. Kurt Vonnegut drew. James Thurber drew. William Burroughs blasted paint-filled balloons with a shotgun.

  Monica Drake, the author of Clown Girl and The Stud Book, paints the most perfect still lifes, in oil paints, on switch plate covers. She protects them with several layers of clear varnish, creating unlikely little masterpieces people come in contact with every day.

  Consider that some form of visual art will complement your writing. To recover from the colorless, limited world of abstract language, spend some time working with colors and tactile shapes.

  Process: The Writer as Showman

  If I were your teacher I’d tell you to overserve your audience.

  According to the linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, the books that become classics are the books that bring people together in community. The Tolkien books, for instance, are famous for uniting like-minded readers who love them.

  To create this community, give readers more than they can handle alone. Give them so much humor or pathos or idea or profundity that they’re compelled to push the book on others if only to have peers with whom they can discuss it. Give them a book so strong, or a performance so big, that it becomes a story they tell. It’s their story about experiencing the story.

  Again, my core theory is that we digest our experience by turning it into stories. Repeating the story—good or bad—allows us to exhaust the unresolved emotion of it.

  If you provide readers with something too strong to readily accept, they’re more likely to share it. Community forms as people assemble to explore their own reactions. Charles Dickens knew this. As did Mark Twain. A book needs a face, and even the best writers have to act as showmen. Promoting a book is part of your profession so there’s no point in hating the process.

  Find some way to love every aspect of the writing job.

  Somewhere around my bah-zillionth book tour I started to hate the tours. Between the sleepless nights in hotels, the early-morning flights, and the airport fast-food meals, I began resenting the people I was meeting. My solution? I believe that a physical gesture trumps a thought, so in Phoenix, Arizona, I asked the local publicist to stop by a Claire’s shop, where I bought bags of rhinestone-studded crowns and tiaras.

  The two most difficult parts of an author event are prompting questions from the audience, and, finally, when too many questions are coming too fast, stemming the tide. My solution was to offer a tiara for each question. The barrage started instantly. Clearly I had only so many prizes so with the last crown, the questions ended. Best of all, I had a great time. I could not hate and resent people at the same time that I gave them lovely tiaras and whatnot. The act of giving something rewired my thoughts.

  You see, the secret is to trick yourself into having a great time. Whether you’re on a twenty-city book tour or washing dishes, find some way to love the task. In fact there’s a Buddhist saying told to me by Nora Ephron, the one-and-only time I met her after reading her work since college. At a noisy Random House party in the restaurant Cognac, she said, “If you can’t be happy while washing dishes, you can’t be happy.”

  Nora Ephron

  People wrote to me about how they wore their tiaras to school. So I expanded to the autographed severed limbs. Then the glowing beach balls. In Pittsburgh on the tour for Damned, the writer Stewart O’Nan gave me ten full-size candy bars that I threw into the auditorium that evening. It was such a good contrast to just talking. It felt great to throw things as hard as I could so I began to buy huge sacks of candy bars and to heave them at people. Few things mirror the delivery of a good joke or story better than watching the arc of a thrown bag of Snickers bars as it flies over the heads of a thousand people and lands in the arms of just one.

  That did the trick. I loved doing events again. I’d spend all winter staging and shipping the props. The blow-up sex dolls. The penguins and giant inflatable brains. To be honest, it cost me a fortune. Each big event set me back roughly ten thousand dollars in props, prizes, and shipping. But I’d ask, by a show of hands, how many people had never been to an author’s book tour event. And always, it would be most of the auditorium, so it felt worth all the fuss to make these people’s first book event something special.

  I’m not sure if I’ll ever stage such big events again, but I’ll always be glad I did.

  Also, if you were my student, I’d tell you to make the reader/author photos a story. For Pygmy, Todd Doughty, beloved Todd, the best publicist alive, he and I carted around a towering trophy. It broke down into many sections, and before each event I’d be in my hotel room screwing it together like a sniper assembling an assault rifle. All so that I could ask readers to hold it in photos. Forever after, when anyone saw the pictures that resulted they’d ask, “What did you win?”

  Again, the photos would generate a story. The events would generate a story. If I did my main job well, the book would generate a story. And people will come together to tell their stories about the story. And that’s the reason why I’d tell you to find a way to have fun at work, and to give your audience something they can’t stop talking about.

  Process: Learning by Imitation

  A common joke in Tom’s workshop was that students followed his rules so well that eventually they all sounded like bad imitations of his best work. It’s a joke, but it’s true. And it must’ve been disheartening to hear this stream of unintended parody. His own narrative voice being used to tell stories to which he had no attachment, exaggerating his storytelling devices to the point of burlesque: it had to be soul crushing.

  It was only natural. Most of us had started writing by trying to mimic Fitzgerald or Hemingway. I read and reread The Portable Dorothy Parker until her snark became second nature to me. Now we were aping Tom, and the best of us would ultimately merge elements of his style with the best of what we’d cribbed from other writers. We’d add a few tricks we discovered on our own, and we’d create a unique voice. Unique enough. A hybrid.

  What’s important is that imitation is a natural way to learn. In the golden years of Gordon Lish, when he taught at Columbia, edited for Knopf, and ran the literary magazine The Quarterly, he was known as Captain Fiction. His best students were the most promising young writers in America. And those writers wrote according to his demands and dedicated their work, publically, “To Q,” meaning to Lish, and it was a juggernaut. Lish’s unstoppable army.

  Unstoppable until it was stopped. The critic Sven Birkerts, writing for The New Republic, called attention to how similar all the great, young Minimalists sounded. They wrote in the first person, in the constantly unspooling present moment, in “byte-sized” perceptions. And Birkerts was correct, and the shining edifice of Minimalism no longer looked like the future.

  Just as Chick Lit fell out of fashion…Once a style or genre becomes too copied, reader fatigue kills it.

  So no, the idea isn’t to follow every rule of Gordon’s and Tom’s and mine, not forever. But it’s better to start with some rules. Learn some compulsory skills. After that you can free-style, and if you’re lucky and if you’re successful a new generation of aspiring writers will copy your style and drive your hard-won, well-crafted voice right into the ground.

  Process: Build Your Infrastructure

  Even when you’re written out, you can still do the work of a writer.

  When you’re between ideas, build the infrastructure you’ll need. Among the best Christmas presents I’ve ever gotten is a robust three-hole paper punch that can handle twenty-five or thirty pages at a time. My career started in the days of paper manuscripts, and I still prefer to send my first complete draft to my agent and editor in hardcopy. That means stocking printer ink and binders. You’ll eventually need mailing envelopes for contracts. A filing system for incomplete work.

  No electronic storage system is foolproof. Chelsea Cain is the most tech-savvy writer I know, and she still lost a near-complete novel. It couldn’t be found in the cloud or in any of the emails she’d sent herself as backup. Eventually she sent her hard drive to a company that specializes in recovering lost data for the military and even they couldn’t save the lost book. My tech guy tells me that even flash drives often mysteriously scramble or lose information. So you’ll want a way to print and file your work.

  You’ll want a system for organizing tax receipts. Like an engaged couple planning to get married, make a list of the tools and supplies you need. A sort of gift registry. And send it to friends and family. Better you should get a good-quality stapler and boxes of staples than some cologne you’ll be rushing to re-gift. Let people know what you’re doing, and allow them to help in this way.

  Seriously, I cannot tell you how much I love my three-hole punch. And the four-drawer file cabinet I found used for five dollars. And the L-shaped 1960s “secretary’s desk” enameled avocado green I bought for fifty bucks. It’s so big that it filled half my apartment. A friend saw how it crowded my bed and remarked, “You have the only bedroom I’ve seen with a receptionist.”

  Yes, this is all very pedestrian. But get good task lighting. Develop a system for organizing your books and supplies. You won’t dread handling paper correspondence if you have a stock of boxes, envelopes, a tape gun, and a designated table to work on. You won’t dread tax time if you regularly total and bundle your receipts.

  Being a writer consists of more than writing. The next great inspiration will come along, but until it does…clean up your desk. Recycle the old paper stuff. Make room for the new arrival in your head.

  Process: Public Readings

  Tom would arrange public readings. At coffeehouses, usually, one time at Common Grounds on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland, a sold-out evening so well attended that the short-staffed barista gave Tom and me uniforms and we bused tables and washed dishes while the readings took place. Farther down Hawthorne Boulevard was Cafe Lena, which hosted an open-mike reading every Tuesday night.

  Beware those long-established, come-one-come-all evenings, and be aware that the opposite of reading isn’t listening. Instead, it’s the drunken impatience and polite applause of a hundred poets each waiting his turn. There, people found their regular attention fix. Each week set a trap that caught the same writers. They never brought work to a larger market.