Two Steps to Writing Well
If you want to be a writer, and since you’re reading this, I suspect you do, there is a lot of advice out there. There are many great examples of craft and criticism that can help a writer structure, ponder, and explore in new ways. We’ll get to some of these in a later discussion. But a large part of what is out there, in the great internet age of coaches, webinars, and late-stage capitalism generally, should be considered with suspicion. A lot of it is intended to sell something unnecessary. Most of the broad writing advice you’ll encounter—avoid adverbs, show don’t tell, etc—are rules that are open to interpretation, and act as invitations to destruction. Other admonishments, to “cycle-sync” your creativity, to join yet another webinar on growing a six-figure writing career, should be glanced at with distrust and deleted from your inbox.
There are only two hard and fast rules to being a “better” writer. Luckily, they are both simple, but unfortunately, they require time and effort: to be a great writer you have to read a lot, and you have to write a lot.
That’s it. Both as much and as often as you can.
Being a writer requires you to read widely, promiscuously even, and to read deeply. There is the first layer of reading, which most writers have already spent their lives practicing, and that is reading for the experience, which is often pleasure, but sometimes something less definable. Sometimes, the experience of reading is the pursuit of a kind of pain, or at least melancholy, something that mirrors the uncertainty and vastness of the experience of life. The experience of reading and a reader’s attachment to it is what draws people to stories and poems. Writing is intended to create this experience, whatever it is.
The next kind of reading is the kind that must be developed with time and conscious effort. To be a writer one must learn to read like a writer. This is where the work of deep thought and careful consideration must be deployed. To read in this way is to think while reading, to slow down and pay attention to the craft of the writing. Reflecting on our reading is the next step in developing our reading capacity, in refining our ability to read like writers. Consider:
How is the experience created? What is the construction of the work? What are the choices that have been made that make the story or poem or essay feel as if it could not have been written any other way?
To read like a writer is to pay attention, to study writing as other artist’s study colors, forms, compositions. Reading a work once will not be enough to learn from it. In parts or in whole, the object of study will have to be read and re-read and likely read again. Learn to feel delight in this, to see new things with each reading, to bring full attention to the work. Besides, great writing, truly great writing, bares up under additional reading, finds new ways to entice, delight, destroy, because it is layered and buried enough that to read it multiple times bears multiple baskets of fruit.
Reading like a writer is a skill the must be cultivated over time. Each work will have its own instructions for reading, its own particular means of construction and mode of delivery. Denis Johnson and Alice Munro cannot be read in the same way. There are some basics to begin with, starting off points to begin to develop writerly awareness. These are the first questions to ask after (or during) a first reading—whose story is it? When and where does the story take place? In what tense and perspective is the story told? Each of these answers were choices made by the writer.
As to what to read, the answer is as much as you can, as often as you can. Read in the genre and form in which you desire to write and read beyond it. Whatever style or genre you write in, you should be reading poetry, because poetry will teach rhythm, it will show how to crack language open. It is that beautiful, new, exposed language that makes great writing, that makes readers react even when they don’t know why they are reacting. Read great writing (I have suggestions!) so that you know what the heights to which you’re aiming, but find writing you think is bad too, so you know what to avoid.
Which brings us to necessity number two—write and keep writing. This means to keep writing stories and poems and essays, but it also means to write just to write. It is important to sit down with the intention to write a thing, but it is equally important to have the material notes to pull from in the writing. Write snippets, write scenes, write down things that may never become anything. Write in the mornings and at night and the small still moments that slip away between our fingers. Carry a notebook and call it your artist’s daybook. Keep a diary. Record language that you love and language that you hate. Impress upon the page what it felt like to move inside of life today, how the body felt as it ambulated through its day. While studying great writing, write down the lines and paragraphs that express that cracking open of language, of story, of vision. You do not need to have an hour for a session of writing to be meaningful. It is just as important, just as meaningful, to find still moments where three or five minutes are stolen for writing, for taking notes on life and the experience of living it.
Learning to write well is the embracing of the re. Re-reading as we have discussed, but also re-writing. Write and write and write enough that later there is stuff to re-write which will be the hard work of making the story you have written to tell yourself into the story that other people will read. Re-writing, revision, is the real work of a writer, it is the line in the sand where one evolves from dreamer to craftsman. It is also the point at which most writers begin to give up. There is something disheartening about coming back to something you have written and having to take the eyes out of your head and read the thing that has poured out of you as if you have never seen it before.
In re-writing you stop loving the work as a child born of your heart and remember that it will be a labor created of your soul. Then you take your pen to it and slash it into ribbons and try to rebuild it again, into something that is closer to the vision that lived in your head.
There are few tools necessary in writing—there is the language and there is the page and everything that a reader is to see, feel, hear, touch, believe, intuit, and know about the work must be made with those things. Plots, worlds, characters, are all parts of a story, but they are constructed out of the language. Language is the first place we must study, the key to building all of the other things. A story starts in the sentences, a poem lives in its lines.
All of this reading and writing, all of this paying attention, is a way of falling in love with language.
Read a lot, write a lot. Two deceptively simple tasks for the writer. It is not easier, but more manageable, if there is a community around to do this work with. In community, we are given the opportunity to share the burdens, to read and write together and to help one another see and consider in new ways. It is a way of putting many eyes on the same things and giving voice to the same problems.
Community is not always easy to find though, especially now, which is why we have a proliferation of internet coaches and webinars and influencers, even in the scared space of making art. So, sometimes, that community is in works of craft or criticism—James’ Woods The Art of Fiction, Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, and the non-fiction work of Mary Oliver are some of my favorites, and sometimes that community is a newsletter.
If you are very lucky, sometimes you get to make community in the place where you live, even if you have to wrest it from the ground up. (It’s me, I’m lucky!)
So, if you are nearby or if you are not, I hope that I can be a part of your community.
Happy writing friends and see you soon.
