2.1 Good advice might be bad for you
Whenever you come across a piece of writing advice, please don’t just swallow it whole, don’t take it as some kind of holy gospel, no matter how successful the person might be who’s giving the advice.
Instead…
Try it out, experiment, work it over, wrestle with it.
And…
Play with it.
Find out if it’s right for you, or not. Maybe you’ll use it as is, maybe you’ll adapt it, maybe you’ll toss it.
Let me show you what I mean by talking about my personal reactions to popular advice from top–dollar writers and writing teachers.
Stephen King
“I think a writer’s notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around.”
Well, he’d definitely disapprove of me, because I always carry a digital recorder with me wherever I go, or else a nifty notebook, so I can instantly record ideas as they come to me.
Know how it is in the morning when you waken out of a dream and there is that short transitional liminal time when you’re not fully conscious, and traces of the dream are still alive for you?
Some of my best ideas ever have come to me as liminal traces, a kind of silken thought floating away, and if I don’t write it down in the instant, it’ll be gone.
I know King has written a gazillion books and made a bazillion dollars, but I’m not going to give up my entrancement with liminal discoveries to follow his advice just because he is contemptuous of my process.
Anne Lamott
Her book, Bird by Bird, is a perennial best seller and is on pretty much every list of recommended writing books.
But her key strategy doesn’t work for me. Her brother was writing a report for school about birds and he was freaking out because it was the night before it was due and he was just starting it. Lamott’s father, a writer, told her brother, “Bird by bird, buddy, bird by bird.”
This became the key image for Lamott’s writing advice. I don’t think that’s why the book sells so well year after year. I think it sells because Lamott is such a character in the book. Which gives personality to her writing, as compared to dispassionate, distant writing advice you get in lots of books. Readers can identify with her personal struggles with writing. And I like that about the book.
But the bird–by–bird strategy is not right for lots of us. I think it works for Lamott because her best selling books are not her novels, but her collections of short, inspirational essays. So it seems to me that essay–by–essay is the perfect strategy for her.
But I need to get a feel for the whole picture of a book I’m writing. I write relationally. I want all the parts of the book to be in a deep relationship with each other. I want all the parts to be partners.
So my preferred way of writing is not piece work, but holistic immersion.
James Scott Bell
“The best writing advice I ever got, and I got this early on, and I’m glad I did, was to write a certain number of words on a regular basis, a quota of words, Because then you look up, three months, four months, maybe it takes a year, but you look up at some point and then you’ve got a completed novel.”
Bell is only one of very many authors who follow the word count strategy. But this has never made sense to me. There was a period of months in my 20s when I’d get on the computer and write like a maniac, turning out page after page of words.
Next morning, I’d read back through what I had written and see that all I had was a mess of words, which didn’t add up to anything, and which didn’t give me satisfaction.
Writing is not just a pile of words. I want it to mean something, something important.
What matters to me is…
Quality not quantity.
I’m remembering a day when I wrote a surprising breakthrough sentence that changed the direction of a the key chapter in my first book. .
That one sentence made the whole day worth it.
E. L. Doctorow
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Pantsers love this image, but it doesn’t work for me. The problem I have with it, is if you just follow your headlights, not looking more than a hundred feet ahead, you may end up turning down a dead-end street and have to start all over again, having wasted precious time.
And of course, if I know where I’m going and it’s a familiar route because I’ve gone there before, I can drive in a fog at night just looking at the illuminated patch of road ahead of me and get to my destination just fine.
But when it comes to my writing, I want to see the lay of the land. I want to open to possibilities. I want to look at the meadows and woods along the way.
I write with a strong sense of purpose. I don’t want to do tangential wanderings, unless I’m doing that for personal entertainment, or as part of my process of discovery.
Ian McEwan
“It’s useful to have expectations laid on you that you’re going to produce the work. Because many people find it extremely difficult to just drive themselves onward to write several stories or get a novel going.”
I understand this works just fine for some people, but I really don’t like feeling any pressure to perform. I don’t respond well to deadlines. So if I have one, I start working toward it immediately, well ahead of time.
And I really, really don’t want to meet anyone else’s expectations. I spent my childhood and my teen years dong that, and that was so bad for me, I’m not ever dong that again.
This is one reason the primal–play strategy works so well for me. I get to discover what’s deepest in my heart and make all my decisions from there.
Ernest Hemingway
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck.”
Roald Dahl echoed this:
“I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. Hemingway taught me the finest trick: ‘When you are going good, stop writing.’
“You don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? You make yourself stop and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next.”
This is a neat trick and it works really well for lots of writers, but not for me.
When I’m writing hot, when I’m in the flow, I want to get to the resolution. I want to finish what I’m working on.
By the next morning, I may feel distant from what I was writing the day before, and I won’t finish nearly as well as if I had written full–force to the end of the passage or chapter or story while it was alive for me.
I have other ways to warm myself up the next day. I don’t need to stop and hold myself in suspended animation till the morning.
Richard Ford
In a video of eleven successful authors giving advice to young aspiring writers, here’s what he said about pursuing a career in writing…
“Talk yourself out of it if you can, because you’re probably not going to be very good at it. Your wife’s probably not going to support you. You\’re probably going to have a drinking problem. You’re probably going to be frustrated if you have any children at all. And you’ll probably never make a penny…Find something better.”
Jeez, Louise, Mr. Eeyore.
Thomas Mann
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
What I think Mann is saying here is that if you care more about the art of writing, and the craft of it, than the average bear, of course you’re going to want your writing to be the best it can be, and so you’re going to put a lot more effort into it than someone who dashes off a careless blog post without a second thought.
But the truth is that writing is a developmental skill. With focused practice, you get better at it, and then it might well become less difficult for you than for a non-writer. You’ll be able to write higher quality passages much more quickly than they can. I like to focus on that happy part of writing, that you can get better. And what once was difficult is now so much easier and more pleasurable.
Ann Rice
I just watched a video of her saying how great it is that you don’t need anything in order to be a write. Just a pen and paper, or a computer and a keyboard. You don’t need professional training or formal apprenticeship. And maybe you’ll end up writing a best seller.
There are some successful writers who seem to be born talented and don’t have to work at their craft, and maybe Rice is one of them, but I’m definitely not.
I’ve needed to spend long hours reading books, watching videos, working out in writing workshops, running myself through my own de facto apprentice program.
For me it’s been a long, hard journey, which thankfully has gotten so much easier over time. I think of myself as being out of the struggle phase of my writing and into the reward phase. Which makes me very, very happy.
Lee Child
“The best advice about writing is to ignore all advice.”
Does he really mean this? Is he saying he’s never taken any advice about writing ever? Is he saying that he hasn’t learned from other writers or from writing teachers? Has he never read a book or watched a video about writing?
It seems to me if you ignore all advice, that just makes you ignorant.
Maybe what Child meant to say is: “Don’t swallow writing advice uncritically,”
If so, then I’m with him. Which is no surprise since that’s the point of this page.
A zillion authors and teachers.
“If you want to be a real writer, you have to write every day.”
I write every day. But I don’t tell myself I have to. I do it because I like doing it, not because it’s a should.
I give myself permission to skip a day whenever I want. And there have been times when my mood has been so down that I just sit and watch reruns, or go on a long walk around the lake.
Or maybe I get invited to an all–day birthday party, and have no time to write. Well, there’s more to life than writing.
And guess what? Many successful authors don’t write every day. Some take the weekends off so they come back to their work on Monday morning refreshed.
Some writers do binge writing. They get inspired and write for long hours for a dozen weeks. And then they don’t write at all for another dozen weeks.
What matters is that you experiment and find the schedule and pacing that works for you. And as you develop your craft, what works for you might change and you’ll create a new schedule.
Toni Morrison
I want to give her the last word because hers is advice I take to heart…
“I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?”
The key word in that paragraph is….
Need.
The key question to keep asking yourself is…
What do I need?
What do I need to make my writing practice work like I want it to work?
What do I need so much writing practice will nurture me instead of depressing me?
And of course, you get to wrestle with my advice about wrestling with advice.
You get to mess with it to find out if it’s right for you.
PS:
Here’s something fun you can try if you like. Whenever you come across an essay or a video where an author talks about their process, finish this sentence…
I’m the same as this author because…
And then this one…
I’m different from this author because…
You might have only one ending or you might have a dozen. But I’ll bet if you do this regularly, you’re going to get into a deeper, sweeter relationship with your writing.
