My Advice to Writers

 

I’m often asked for advice on how to become a writer. In my experience, the answer is to write.

 

Try Everything

No matter what corner of the writing world you think of as home, try your hand at every genre you can think of: fiction, poetry, history, plays and screenplays, songs, ad-copy, jokes, book blurbs, film trailers, nursery rhymes, news journalism, criticism, op-eds, essays, video games, websites, and technical or ‘how-to’ writing. There is something to be learned from all of them.
 

Write What You Want To Read

At 18, I knew precisely two truths: 1) I didn’t know anything, and 2) if Tolkien, Shakespeare, and my favorite writers of the Arthurian legend – Malory, Tennyson, T.H. White, and Mary Stewart – had only written “what they knew,” the world would be an immeasurably poorer place. Non-fiction requires guard-rails around fact, transparency, and an author’s humility in the face of truth. But fiction — glorious and infinite — is exactly the place to experiment with what you don’t know.

The lone upside of writing classes, in my experience, is to learn how to give and receive constructive criticism from fellow writers. For this to work, though, you have to be lucky enough to be surrounded by writers — above all, your teacher — who are kind and generous, as well as critically astute. And it helps to have at least a few voices in the room who know something about the genre that you’re trying to write.
 

Read

The best writing teachers are your favorite authors. Read them, but — hard as it may be — not for pleasure alone. Pick up your favorite books again, pencil in hand, and try to figure out what makes them work. How do the authors construct their plots? Their chapters? Their paragraphs? Their sentences? How do they use words and silences to create mood, convey emotion, transmit information?
 

Learn the Tools of your Trade

You are a carpenter, and these are your lumber, your hammer, your nails:

• • Devour words and make them your own. Learn their shades of meaning as well as their history. Learn the music of language: the rhythms of prose and poetry.

 

• • Learn the ins and outs of Word or Final Cut, or whatever the standard program may be in your chosen genre. Learn how to type quickly and cleanly. One of the most useful courses I have ever taken remains the typing class I took in high school.

 

• • Learn the world of story. Even if you want to write history, learn the world’s major mythologies and fairy tales. Keep abreast of pop culture and urban legend.

 

• • Likewise, even if you want to write the wildest science fiction or fantasy, learn history: what real people have done and why. (A London socialite eagerly looking on as a doctor infects her beloved children with smallpox? Ewww, but yes!) Go deep into whatever pleases you, but go broad, too. Know something about our world and the people in it, past and present (Shakespeare’s thunderous popularity in the Wild West? Why not!). Be aware of current events in your town, region, country, planet: the lived stories unfolding around you.

 

• • Notice the world around you: the buildings, landscapes, plants and animals, the quality of light, the rhythms of time. Practice translating all the senses into words: not just sight, but sound, scent, touch, and taste, too.

 

• • Finally, people-watching is your business. Listen to the people around you: absorb their intonations, accents, vocabulary, their patterns of thought and rhythms of feeling. Pay attention to body language, facial expressions, clothes, movement, what and how they eat, all kinds of quirks and habits.

 

Dream

As for what to do with all this: give yourself space to daydream. Squash the inner critic, set the outside world to mute and turn off the endlessly flickering screens. Let your mind have free-play over an idea or an intriguing set of observations. If the specter of boredom paws at you: outwait it. Sit with it until your imagination dusts itself off and gets up to play. To others, it may look like you’re not doing anything, but these hours can be some of the most productive in a writer’s career.
 

Above All: Write

Don’t wait till you’ve done all this to begin, or you never will. Like I said at the beginning, if you want to write, get on with it: pick up a pen or fire up the computer. Write.