Today,
writing well is more important than ever. Far from being the province of a
select few as it was in Hemingway’s day, writing is a daily occupation for all
of us — in email, on blogs, and through social media. It is also a primary
means for documenting, communicating, and refining our ideas. As essayist,
programmer, and investor Paul Graham has written, “Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas;
it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll
miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”
So what
can we do to improve our writing short of hanging ourselves? Below, find 25
snippets of insight from some exceptional authors. While they are all focused
on the craft of writing, most of these tips pertain to pushing forward creative
projects of any kind.
Don’t
just plan to write—write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we
develop our own style.
[The]
Resistance knows that the longer we noodle around “getting ready,” the more
time and opportunity we’ll have to sabotage ourselves. Resistance loves it when
we hesitate, when we over-prepare. The answer: plunge in.
Find your
best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere.
Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.
Work on a
computer that is disconnected from the internet.
Find a
subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care
about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will
be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. I am not urging you
to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one,
provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a
pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.
Find an
organizational scheme for your notes and materials; keep up with it (if you are
transcribing sound files or notebooks, don’t let yourself fall behind); and be
faithful to it: Don’t obsess over an apparently better scheme that someone else
has. At some point during your work, someone will release what looks
like a brilliant piece of software that will solve all your problems. Resist
the urge to try it out, whatever it is, unless 1) it is endorsed by people
whose working methods you already know to be like your own and 2) you know you
can implement it quickly and easily without a lot of backfilling. Reworking
organizational schemes is incredibly seductive and a massive timesuck.
Hone your
outline and then cling to it as a lifeline. You can adjust it in
mid-stream, but don’t try to just write your way into a better structure:
think about the right structure and then write to it. Your outline will
get you through those periods when you can’t possibly imagine ever
finishing the damn thing — at those times, your outline will let you see it
as a sequence of manageable 1,000 word sections.
Get
through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing
until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft
of “Lincoln’s Melancholy” I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But
I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to
first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.
Treat
writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this.
Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before
lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a
day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like
shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I’ve got there,
because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000
words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to
return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.
[Be] willing
to write really badly. It won’t hurt you to do that. I think there is this fear
of writing badly, something primal about it, like: “This bad stuff is coming
out of me…” Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows. For me,
the bad beginning is just something to build on. It’s no big deal. You have to
give yourself permission to do that because you can’t expect to write regularly
and always write well. That’s when people get into the habit of waiting for the
good moments, and that is where I think writer’s block comes from. Like: It’s
not happening. Well, maybe good writing isn’t happening, but let some bad
writing happen… When I was writing “The Keep,” my writing was so terrible. It
was God-awful. My working title for that first draft was, A Short Bad Novel. I
thought: “How can I disappoint?”
Be
without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting
and set aside the large ones until they behave – then use them, maybe even
write them. Too much fear and all you’ll get is silence.
Don’t
look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the
last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing
feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get
down to the real work which is all in… The edit.
In
private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed
that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk
every single day and concentrated. I understand the purpose behind his doing
this. This is the way Chandler gave himself the physical stamina a professional
writer needs, quietly strengthening his willpower. This sort of daily training
was indispensable to him.
Have more
than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a
book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an
idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to
feel that I’m bunking off from something.
Don’t
hang around with people who are negative and who are not supportive of your
writing. Make friends with writers so that you have a community. Hopefully,
your community of writer friends will be good and they’ll give you good
feedback and good criticism on your writing but really the best way to be a
writer is to be a writer.
When
people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost
always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and
how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
You can
never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that
first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been
backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore
ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the
publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a
romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
Try to
think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.
Finish
the day’s writing when you still want to continue.
If you
get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make
a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just
stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a
party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words
should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.
A work in
progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight… it is a
lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery
over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to
its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and
shouting, ‘Simba!’
Write
even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence,
music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten
minutes and a writing implement.
I believe
myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to
keep at it. Just think of the work you’ve set yourself to do, and do it as well
as you can. Once you have really done all you can, then you can show it to
people. But I find this is increasingly not the case with the younger people.
They do a first draft and want somebody to finish it off for them with good
advice. So I just maneuver myself out of this. I say, Keep at it. I grew up
recognizing that there was nobody to give me any advice and that you do your
best and if it’s not good enough, someday you will come to terms with that.
I have
forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt
my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for
another five minutes… and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
Or appears to do so.
The way
to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing
is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
