Writing Advice
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Writing Advice 1) Enter every contest you can, and understand that every time you have something published, that’s a contest right there: you’re trying to be better than everybody else, aren’t you? Assume writing fiction conforms to the Highlander model: ‘There can be only one.’ Insist on being that one. Nothing else will do. A lot of writing teachers will tell you that what matters in writing, it’s expressing yourself honestly, authentically, as well as you can. And that’s not wrong. That’s at the very core of fiction. But there’s more to an apple than just a core. Writing, it’s also about expressing yourself honestly better than the next person in line. Every slushpile, it’s shark-eat-shark. Never stop swimming. Never forget that you’re one bite away from entering the food chain headfirst. Your pen’s the only thing that can save you, too. Your pen’s always the only thing that can save you. 2) Have a good pen, then. 3) Or, have a lot of pens. Trick is, if you end up with a lucky pen, or you have to have your desk arranged a certain way in order to write, or if you can only work when wearing a certain hat, or if you discover there’s a ‘magic’ time of the day when you’re most productive, then what you’re doing is allowing yourself to make excuses for not writing: “I couldn’t find my pen, the dog chewed my hat up, I was watching Price is Right at ten this morning, so I missed my window, will have to wait until tomorrow.” Instead, say that all the hours are magic. Say that any pen will do. Your desk isn’t at the airport, no, but it is, too: your desk is wherever you happen to sit down. Condition yourself to write anywhere, in the smallest amounts of time, and with whatever gimme pen you’ve stolen from whatever counter. On the backs of envelopes, in check registers. Pull over to the side of the road and write the first paragraph of a story on a receipt you dig up from the floorboard, on a gum wrapper you iron flat from the crumpled lostness at the bottom of your purse. It’s not the paper that matters, and it’s not the pen. It’s the words. 4) Don’t be broken-hearted when you lose some of those receipts, when some of those gum wrappers never actually make it back out of your purse. Your world doesn’t end because you left your notebook in a cab. Really, leaving your notebook in a cab be the most liberating thing. Now you can start over. Sure, some of the things you’d jotted down and stolen from the world, they were perfect, they were bulletproof, they were magic and timeless. But, to a writer, the world’s always magic and timeless. Every bank line you stand in, somebody’s saying something that’s never been said before. And you’re going to mishear it in a way that’s going to open up a completely new world. That’s your job as a writer: to step into new world after new world, and then to look back to the Page 1 of 6 reader, hold your hand across, help them in, show them around, and then slip out the side door while they’re not looking. If the world you’ve made up is real enough, they won’t even notice you’ve left. 5) Talking magic and timeless texts: never try to write those. Because you never can. Every piece of magic that’s ever happened on the page, it’s by accident. It’s when the writer wasn’t looking. The magic happens between the places where you think you’re doing great art. What the great artists do, then, is they go back, erase all the parts where they think they’re being timeless. What’s left, it’s the magic they didn’t intend, the magic that always seeps through, the magic that wants to be there, if we would only please get out of the way. What people call “writer’s block,” it’s never a lack of ideas or invention. A solid fifty percent of the time, it’s simply that you, the writer, have decided this story, it goes up on the shelf with Cheever, with Chekhov, with Octavia Butler. Meaning it’s got to be perfect, times two. But that never happens. You’ll be writing that same story for six years, trying to get it perfect. And that’s six years where you could have written so many other ‘imperfect,’ accidentally-magic things. Don’t deny yourself that chance, and understand that your chances improve so, so much, the more you put pen to paper. The less you pin all your hopes on a single ‘perfect’ story. Your estimation of ‘perfect,’ it’s imperfect itself. Spending months or years on a single piece, it’s shooting yourself in the foot over and over. Move on. Keep swimming. 6) The other half of what people usually call “writer’s block”—and this is important, and some of you’ve already figured this out—it never actually happens where it feels like it’s happening. Say you’re writing a novel, and a hundred and fifty pages in, you hit what feels like a wall. You can’t find a way under it, you can’t go around it, you can’t bust it down, it’s unclimbable. And what you think is that the problem you have to solve is at that wall. It’s not. It never is. What that wall is, it’s the result of some mis-step you’ve made twenty or forty or sixty pages back. And, you’re an instinctual enough writer that you know without quite knowing that, if left uncorrected, that problem is going to undermine the whole novel. No, Neo should have taken the red pill. Of course, of course. What the wall is is the story falling apart because he took the blue pill. So, your job, here, it’s to feel back through what you’ve written and ferret out what will soon look like like a glaring, obvious mis-step, one that’ll be funny, once you find it. 7) But don’t feel bad about these dead-end plotlines, either. These characters you have to completely remove. These story elements that are mucking things up. Don’t feel bad that you don’t know the best way through the story while you’re writing it. Exploring those dead ends is how you figure out what is the best way. Page 2 of 6 Writers and readers in science fiction and fantasy, they talk a lot about world- building, about mapping out this made-up place, giving it a history, a climate, an era. World-building isn’t just for science fiction and fantasy, though. Every story is made-up. Every story, you have to build a world for that story to happen in. Just, sometimes, instead of drawing a map for your world, you instead map that terrain by walking across every last bit of it. With dead-end plotlines. With characters who are going to be erased. But they’re never really erased. They’re just not on the page anymore. They’re still there, though, exerting a sort of narrative gravitational force on your story. You know they’re there, one street over, and knowing that, it makes your world more whole, more organic, more real. It makes the world a world you can live in. And that’s the kind of world a reader can live in. 8) And that’s what it’s finally about, whatever the genre: convincing your readers that this world is solid enough for them to invest themselves in. Solid enough for them to step into. Solid enough to hold them, should they give it their weight. Don’t make the writer leap into your novel. Give them steps. And take them where they would never go alone. 9) Always write yourself into a corner. If your character is a private eye, then make this case impossible to solve. And then, along with that private eye, find that solution. When your back’s in a corner in a story, and all you’ve got is your pen, which is any pen, you’ll sometimes find you can draw a door in the wall beside you and slither through into the next room, the next corner. Not only do readers prefer to read these kind of situations, but you’ll find you can really draw some pretty great doors. 10) But still, this doesn’t mean you should ever write a story you know you can write. If you sit down sure you can do this again, just like last time, if there’s no trepidation, if you’re not pretty sure it’s all going to fall apart this time, that everybody’s going to see what a fake you are, then, is this even a mountain worth climbing anymore? Pretty soon you’ll be writing from a position of authority, and no author should ever have authority. No writer should ever feel like something is true and real just because it’s their voice saying it. Neil Gaiman was interviewing the fantasy write Gene Wolfe once, at a point in his career where Gene Wolfe had already written a stack of books as tall as himself, probably (I’m not sure how tall Gene Wolfe is).