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

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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.

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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). Neil Gaiman said to Gene Wolfe, “You’ve probably figured it out by now, haven’t you? This whole novel thing? It must be wonderful, not to be scared now, going in.” Gene Wolfe said back that you only ever learn to write the novel you’re writing. Me, I’ve got twenty books, that come up maybe to my knee if I’m not wearing boots, and I know that Gene Wolfe was dead-on, there: each novel I start, I can’t imagine how it’s going to

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work, or if it is. To me, a mountain worth climbing, it’s one you can’t really see the top of. Just walk up into the mist, see what happens.

11) Stories and novels aren’t just mountains, though. Really, they’re cake. Our job as writers, it’s to make that cake delicious, and to make it filling. As you know, these don’t always go together. Some cakes, they’re all icing, while other cakes, they’re just layers and layers of dry crumbliness. Take Moby Dick. It’s got all the icing we could want, doesn’t it? Is there any better icing than going out on a ship with a crazy person after a monster of a whale? That’s the best kind of adventure. If they win, they lose, so, the only way to come out alive, it’s to fail, but, hopefully for us, fail so beautifully that it feels like winning. I would eat that icing all day, until I was sick, and then ask for more. But then Moby Dick, it’s got the layers under that icing as well. It’s a critique of America, of slavery—that impossible white whale, that whale who’s taking this all pretty personally for a whale, it’s a big metaphoric space, big enough to hold nearly whatever read we might want to apply. And still, it’ll wrap us up in the harpoon rope, drag us down with it. Remember this in your own writing. You need the icing, the entertainment, but you need some substance as well. Not a message, not a moral, but a way of looking at the world that’s peculiarly yours enough that it can be used by everybody.

12) And then do that again, and again. You don’t just have one book in you. You’ve got as many books as you’ve got time to write them. And, if you cheat, you maybe even can get a couple in that you don’t have time for.

13) Because you’ve always got more stories, more words, never hesitate to throw something away if it’s not working. It’s not a sign of disloyalty to delete a piece that’s bogging you down, a piece that’s asking to be deleted. You’re under no compulsion to resuscitate every dying thing you write. What you are compelled to do, it’s to learn from each of those dead and dying and mercy-killed projects. Identify what it was about that time out that was built to fail, and then Don’t Make that Mistake Again. And, if you write a piece and mail it out to twenty places, and all twenty places reject it, then mail it out to twenty more, so long as, while it’s in the mail, you’re writing new stuff. Never wait for permission or license from the market or the critics to write. The market and the critics—the world—they’re all waiting for your perfect wonderful beautiful words, for your unlikely situations, for your hard-earned insights and realizations. Your words are the fuel that lets their world move. They always need those words. Keep writing, whether the acceptances and checks are rolling in or not. And, yes, if you get those forty or sixty rejections, do consider the chance that you need to do something different, maybe in this piece only, maybe in your whole approach to writing. Just, find a way to do that something different that doesn’t

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compromise your integrity. ‘Selling out,’ it doesn’t have anything to do with money. It has everything to do with executing work you know to be below your abilities.

14) Read work you don't expect to like. If you write westerns, then try on a spy novel. If you write romance, give horror a ride. If you’re strictly literary, then read what’s charting in the New York Times. If you don’t believe non-fiction’s possible, then read as many essays as you can. I guarantee, you’ll learn something, both about craft and about story. Those spy writers, man, they’ve got trick after trick up their sleeve, and you can steal them, plug them into your fantasy novel, your thriller. It’s the same with romance, with crime, with memoir, with all of it. But what you learn about story, it’s that it’s always at the core of anything good. Genre, that’s just the window-dressing, that’s just the costume. What the reader’s always looking for, it’s a voice they can identify with, a character in an unlikely situation, a situation extreme enough to that character that we don’t just root for them to find a way out, but we come to understand that them finding a way out, that’s us finding a way out. A good story engages our secret selves. A good writer reaches deep enough to expose those secret selves. And then you walk away.

15) Be sure to buy stupid stuff with the first money you get from writing. Sure, you need to find that magic alchemy of turning words into groceries, that’s what we all want, that’s the dream, but right at first, maybe it’s better to be hungry than it is to be reasonable. Being a writer, I mean, there’s nothing reasonable about that, is there? You’re sitting down to play the lottery every day, with the idea that your concentration and education can somehow spin the results. And maybe it can. But, that first check you get: Do you know someone who’s always wanted a certain rare lamp? Are lamps an item someone can pine for? Can a person look longingly at a lamp? If so, then you can make someone’s day, their week, every afternoon they sit in the room with that lamp from here on out. Or take everybody out to eat at the least likely place. Fly up to see the Northern Lights, then turn right back around—you don’t have hotel money—fly home again. What this kind of stuff does is it cements in your head and your heart that, yes, these ridiculous little words you’re always scratching down on the page, they can turn into dreams. It’s what it’s all about, dreaming, and sustaining the dream. Insisting on the dream.

16) And, last. This isn’t my advice, but one of my professor’s, twenty years ago: your study or your office, it isn’t a cell. You’re not a prisoner locked in there, away from your family, your friends, your life. Yes, it does take a lot of time to get all these words down, and then to erase them and write them all over. It’s a lifetime of work right there. But you’ve also got to LIVE. Your kids, they’re in there in the

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living room, they’re growing up. Life, it’s happening all around. Our instinct as writers, it comes from our instinct as readers: to hide, to escape, to engage another world so completely that, for three hundred pages, this world kind of slips away. That’s the particular magic of reading. And that’s the magic of writing, as well. But it’s not the only magic there is. You have to look over the top of the book, sometimes. Look over the top of the screen. You can reach other people through your stories, yes, people thousands of miles and hundreds of years away. But there’s people so much closer than that, too. People right now. At the end of your writing career, if all you’ve got is a lot of books behind you, then you haven’t won. If you’ve got a stack of books on your back trail and people all around you, though, then you’re winning. Then you’ve won.

17) So, go out, write, and write yourself into the lives of people, and leave room on the page for them as well.

Stephen Graham Jones May 2014

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