Adoption or employment?
If you want to acquire skill as a writer, but don't want to do it the old-fashioned way (hard work, practice, BIC method, etc.), it seems to me that there are two good options:
One. Get Ursula LeGuin to adopt you. That's not as unrealistic as it seems; she's only a few years older than the woman who claims to be my mother. Could look into that one. I figure just breathing the same air as she does might have some beneficial effects.
Two. Get Michael Chabon to hire you as his valet. Distinct possibilities there. I'm good at creative interpretations of simple instructions, reliable consistency and subtle repartee, and I'm a Yid, too. Think Jewish Jeeves. I'd shortly endear myself to Ayelet (Wesleyan '86) and the kids, and we'd be off. Then I could follow Michael around and listen to him think.
These are authors who can take the English language and turn it into their own personal toy. Here's first sentence of Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, which I'm reading now:For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravensary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve.
I read a sentence like that and my jaw just hangs open with envy. You know where you are, you have a sense of the place's history, you know what's about to happen and why (or you think so), you're quite possibly falling out of your chair with laughter already. And you desperately want to read the next sentence. It's also a beautiful "establishing shot" sort of sentence -- you can almost see the camera panning down from a wide angle of the entire room to the bird itself, over to the big man, back to the bird...
Wow.
One. Get Ursula LeGuin to adopt you. That's not as unrealistic as it seems; she's only a few years older than the woman who claims to be my mother. Could look into that one. I figure just breathing the same air as she does might have some beneficial effects.
Two. Get Michael Chabon to hire you as his valet. Distinct possibilities there. I'm good at creative interpretations of simple instructions, reliable consistency and subtle repartee, and I'm a Yid, too. Think Jewish Jeeves. I'd shortly endear myself to Ayelet (Wesleyan '86) and the kids, and we'd be off. Then I could follow Michael around and listen to him think.
These are authors who can take the English language and turn it into their own personal toy. Here's first sentence of Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, which I'm reading now:For numberless years a myna had astounded travelers to the caravensary with its ability to spew indecencies in ten languages, and before the fight broke out everyone assumed the old blue-tongued devil on its perch by the fireplace was the one who maligned the giant African with such foulness and verve.
I read a sentence like that and my jaw just hangs open with envy. You know where you are, you have a sense of the place's history, you know what's about to happen and why (or you think so), you're quite possibly falling out of your chair with laughter already. And you desperately want to read the next sentence. It's also a beautiful "establishing shot" sort of sentence -- you can almost see the camera panning down from a wide angle of the entire room to the bird itself, over to the big man, back to the bird...
Wow.