{"id":1165,"date":"2010-02-19T11:45:02","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T16:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/?p=1165"},"modified":"2010-02-19T12:01:52","modified_gmt":"2010-02-19T17:01:52","slug":"shut-up-and-listen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/2010\/02\/19\/shut-up-and-listen\/","title":{"rendered":"Shut Up and Listen"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" title=\"Photo of an ear\" src=\"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/images\/ear-photo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"357\" \/>Listen.<br \/>\nWith faint dry sound,<br \/>\nLike steps of passing ghosts,<br \/>\nThe leaves, frost-crisp&#8217;d, break from the trees<br \/>\nAnd fall.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; &#8220;November Night,&#8221; by Adelaide Crapsey<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve met a lot of people who want to write but have a hard time listening.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They don&#8217;t listen to advice<\/li>\n<li>They don&#8217;t listen to the way people talk<\/li>\n<li>They don&#8217;t listen to the world around them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One of the most important things a writer can do is listen.<\/p>\n<p>If you have a hard time keeping quiet and listening, here are a few tips that may help you.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Listen to Advice<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve known of many would-be writers who ask writers for advice&#8230;and then ignore it.<\/p>\n<p>They ask how to write, how to submit, how to get an agent &#8212; and after a busy writer takes time out from their schedule to help them, the person asking for help does nothing with the advice.<\/p>\n<p>If you ask somebody for advice or help, you owe it to that person to sit and listen&#8230;and then do something with the information they give you. They don&#8217;t have to help you &#8212; they&#8217;re doing <em>you <\/em>a favor.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/2009\/10\/15\/criticism-its-not-an-editors-job\/\">It&#8217;s not an editor&#8217;s job to tell you what you are doing wrong<\/a>; an agent doesn&#8217;t need to offer advice; writers are busy writing.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re not going to listen to the advice you&#8217;re asking for and follow up with action, stay silent and let another writer who <em>will <\/em>listen and act have the chance.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Listen to the Way People Talk<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At day jobs, I&#8217;ve always been the person who can get along with the people others loathe. The person who babbles on and on, wasting everybody&#8217;s time&#8230;? I can stomach that. The ranting conspiracy theorist always gets my time. People with opposing political views, religious views, or any view get my time as well.<\/p>\n<p>I listen to people others think are &#8220;below&#8221; them. I talk to the people emptying my trash in part because one of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/2009\/11\/02\/odd-jobs-help-writing\/\">many jobs I&#8217;ve had<\/a> was a janitor, but also because that person has different stories. I&#8217;ve listened to homeless people, people running large companies, and people from backwater towns.<\/p>\n<p>I listen because I like people, but in listening to the people others ignore, it&#8217;s helped me write better dialogue.<\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t listen to that person from the sticks, when it comes time to write a character who lives in the middle of nowhere, everything you write will sound like\u00a0 a stereotype.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not fair to your writing, your readers, and definitely not fair to the people you never got to know.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Listen to the World Around You<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We recently had the heaviest snowfall that Dallas\/Ft. Worth, Texas has ever seen. My wife grew up, here, and it was the heaviest snow my wife&#8217;s ever seen. (I was raised in Chicago and north of the city, and last week&#8217;s snow made me homesick.)<\/p>\n<p>My wife and I ran around in the snow for a couple hours. She loved the way the snow sounded as it crunched under our feet. We stopped in a park and listened to big snowflakes fall.<\/p>\n<p>On our evening walks, we&#8217;re usually both fairly quiet, spending the time as we trudge along thinking about things.<\/p>\n<p>I spend a lot of time listening.<\/p>\n<p>I catch the sounds of animals, distant trains and cars, planes, the wind, people chatting in backyards. I listen to my breathing and my feet hitting the ground. I hear things far off; not because I have particularly good hearing, but because I open myself up to the world around me.<\/p>\n<p>While I&#8217;ve always been a writer who believes less is more when it comes to descriptive prose, a couple well-placed lines appealing to the senses &#8212; in this case, hearing &#8212; put your stories in a bigger world that seems alive, not a constrained world that seems fabricated.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>So shut up<\/p>\n<p>And<\/p>\n<p>Listen&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen. With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp&#8217;d, break from the trees And fall. &#8211; &#8220;November Night,&#8221; by Adelaide Crapsey *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 * I&#8217;ve met a lot of people who want to write but have a hard time listening. They don&#8217;t listen to advice They don&#8217;t listen to the way [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"categories":[3,59],"tags":[14],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}