Selections from the Berkeley Writers at Work Series
at the University of California, Berkeley
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Anthropology
I tend to write. . . to individuals. In fact . . . I generally have photos in front of me when I write.. . . they’re like little relics. This [photograph] is my favorite informant, Bieu, who’s taken out her false teeth. . . . I try to amuse her sometimes. Or some of my favorite street kids will be out there. Or a picture of the local priest, and I’ll be then arguing with aspects of Catholicism.
I keep [a figurine of an impish devil] in front of me, sticking his tongue out because, you know, you have to have a sense of humor about writing, and also because you write with your angels, but you write with your devils too. And you’d be lost if you got rid of all those devils, because they really help you, they give you your passion, and so, it’s bringing the angels and the devils together in your writing
Spring, 1998
Frederick Crews
English
If you are serious about revision, and serious about listening to people who can give you a really hardnosed, rational critique of your work, your eventual prose is going to turn out to be better than yourself. It’s going to be more logical than you are. It’s going to be more eloquent than you are. It’s going to impress people in a way that you don’t impress people. And then you get the thrill of being known for something that is an artifact of a process, rather than for your own beautiful inner nature—and, at my age, I’ll take it.
Fall, 1998
Ronald Takaki
Asian American Studies
I can write sometimes for eight hours, ten hours with just a break for lunch. It’s that way with almost every book; I get absorbed in it. When I was in Hawaii, I was writing Iron Cages, and I would often go jogging or bicycling—some of you know that I’m a surfer, right? I’d go to the beach around 4:00. What’s kind of interesting here, I’m also still thinking about that chapter that I was working on. Maybe just being out there, away from my desk, enables me to see pieces of the puzzle come together in a different kind of configuration. . . .these breaks can be very important in terms of the writing process
Spring, 1997
Alan Dundes
Anthropology and Folklore
My philosophy . . . my rule has always been, whether it’s a book or an article, if it comes back (and, as I say, most of them do come back because people don’t like Freud or they don’t like me. . . who knows?) my rule is I send it off the same day. The same day - and I already know who I’ll send it to. I have number two. I send it to the best journal or the best publisher. Then, when it comes back, I don’t wait around. . . . I just say, “Oh, it’s going off to journal number two.” Of course, I don’t tell journal number two that it’s come back from journal number one. I just hope it isn’t the same reviewers. “Oh, we’ve already said this is a lousy piece of work. Why are you sending it to us again?” But that’s my rule. Send it off the same day.
Fall, 1999
Robin Lakoff
Linguistics
Proofreading is what I hate. I detest editing and one of the things I’ve had to learn with more difficulty than almost anything else in the course of learning how to write is that you have to proofread and you have to edit. I do not use a spell checker because it’s more annoying than helpful, I find. I certainly don’t use a grammar checker because I am the syntactician here. Nobody’s going to tell me—no stupid machine is going to tell me—how to write a sentence. But, yes, you do have to proofread and there is no way for it not to be obnoxious.
Fall, 1997
Bharati Mukherjee
English
[I usually write] three total drafts. As I write, I don’t look at the earlier draft. It’s a very weird and wasteful way of proceeding, I suppose, but for me a draft is simply to find out what is the story I really want to tell, whose story is it that I want to tell. Sometimes the character I thought was the main character will get thrown out and put in file boxes and basements of houses in Iowa or Saratoga, and a very minor character will take over. I’d say that rewriting is not cosmetic for me, but it’s thinking through each novel. I find it very claustrophobic to actually look at the last draft. [Each draft is] completely new.
Spring, 2000
Orville Schell
Gradute School of Journalism
The real problem, in my view, with people’s view of writing and their assessment of their abilities, is that on a scale of 1-10, they get to two or three and they think they’re done and it’s rotten. And they think they’re no good. This is never more true than in academia where I find many people have no concept of how to get from three up to ten.
….
… It’s very depressing when you’re writing something and maybe you send it in to a publisher, a magazine or even a professor and you think you’re done just because you got to the end and you put a period there. But, in actuality, you’re usually not anywhere near done. Intellectually you’re not even done—never mind whether the writing’s any good. You only get intellectually done by doing it again and again, thinking it through over and over, and writing your way to a conclusion —often with the help of somebody helping you look at it and edit it.
….
I believe I strongly believe that writers must allow their readers to come to their own conclusions. So I do resist attitude. My editor’s always slashing and burning—precisely to remind me that the best writing has a point of view, but it doesn’t beat you over the head with it.
What you want to do is to get the reader to end up where you are, through artfulness, not through ideology or through bludgeoning.
Fall, 2000
Arlie Hochschild
Sociology
What I do is waste a lot of time doing one terrible first draft that is my homage to the academic fathers—sort of a male thing. I feel okay, this is what you want here, I’ll do it. Then I burn it. It’s like the sacrificial offering. It has no use whatever except to absolve me of guilt so that I can then tell a story.
Spring, 2001
BERKELEY WRITERS @ WORK
is sponsored by The College Writing Programs. For more information contact Steve Tollefson.
February 2004