150 Writers: Best Advice

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I found a wonderful article by Joe Fassler in which he summarises the advice of 150 writers he interviewed. It appeared on the Literary Hub website, dated October 26, 2017.

Joe Fassler is the editor of Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process. He regularly interviews writers for The Atlantic‘s “By Heart” series. He also covers the politics and economics of the American food system as a senior editor for The New Food Economy.

Joe Fassler

“I once heard John Irving give a lecture on his process at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an in-depth account of the way his novels come to be. He kicked it off by writing a single sentence on the chalkboard—the last line of Last Night in Twisted River. All his books begin with the ending, Irving explained, a capstone he works and reworks until it’s ready. From there, he’ll generate a detailed summary that ultimately builds towards the finale, like SparkNotes for a book that does not yet exist. Only when he has the synopsis and last sentence in hand will he actually start writing.

I remember being fascinated by this. The approach had clearly been successful, and made sense in theory, and yet was so unlike any creative strategy that had ever worked for me. Which is an important thing to keep in mind when trafficking in the familiar genre of writing advice: Just because John Irving does it that way doesn’t mean you should. Not only is every writer different, but each poem, each story and essay, each novel, has its own formal requirements. Advice might be a comfort in the moment, but the hard truth is that literary wisdom can be hard to systematize. There’s just no doing it the same way twice.

And yet. In the five years I’ve spent interviewing authors for The Atlantic’s “By Heart” series—the basis for a new collection, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process—it’s been impossible to ignore the way certain ideas tend to come up again and again. Between the column and the book I’ve engaged a diverse group of more than 150 writers, a large sample size, that nonetheless has some defining traits. Here are the recurring ideas, distilled from dozens of conversations, that I think will most help you—no matter how unorthodox your process, how singular your vision.

1.
Neglect everything else.

It starts with a simple fact: If you’re not making the time to write, no other advice can help you. Which is probably why so many of the writers I talk to seem preoccupied with time-management. “You probably have time to be a halfway decent parent and one other thing,” David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, told me. That can mean mustering the grit to let other responsibilities languish. As he put it in short: “Neglect everything else.”

Many authors need to put blinders on, finding ways to simplify their experience and reduce the number of potential distractions. That might mean consistently keeping a single two-hour window sacred, as Victor Lavalle does, morning time he safeguards against the demands of parenting and full-time teaching. For others, it means finding ways to ward off digital derailment. Mitchell does this by setting his homepage as the most boring thing he can think of: the Apple website.

Ultimately, the literary exercise is about finding ways to defend something fragile—the quiet mood in which the imagination flourishes. As Jonathan Franzen put it: “I need to make sure I still have a private self. Because the private self is where my writing comes from.”

2.
Beginnings matter.

Everyone knows that the opening line is a crucial invitation, something that can make or break a reader’s interest in a book. But far less attention has been paid to the role first lines play for writers, leading them through the work’s dark, uncertain stages like a beacon.

“The first line must convince me that it somehow embodies the entire unwritten text,” William Gibson told me, a radical, koan-like conviction that nonetheless seems to be commonplace. Stephen King described spending “weeks and months and even years” working on first sentences, each one an incantation with the power to unlock the finished book. And Michael Chabon said that, once he stumbled on the first sentence of Wonder Boys, the rest of the novel was almost like taking dictation. “The seed of the novel—who would tell the story and what it would be about—was in that first sentence, and it just arrived,” he said.

3.
Follow the headlights.

It doesn’t matter if you’re the kind of writer who plans meticulously: Give yourself some leeway in the early drafts. Throw out all your plans and assumptions, and make room to surprise yourself.

Andre Dubus calls this following the headlights: it’s like driving a car down a dark, unfamiliar road, simply describing as things become visible under the beam. “What’s on the side of the road?” he asked. “What’s the weather? What are the sounds? If I capture the experience all along the way, the structure starts to reveal itself. My guiding force and principle for shaping the story is just to follow the headlights—that’s how the architecture is revealed.”

Dozens of writers have told me some version of the same story. “The writing I tend to think of as ‘good’ is good because it’s mysterious,” Aimee Bender said. “It tends to happen when I get out of the way—when I let go a little bit, I surprise myself.”

4.
Sound it out.

Of course, all this is easier said than done. In the absence of a concrete plan, how to know when you’re headed in the right direction? For many writers I’ve spoken with, the answer seems to lie in the sound of the words.

“Plot can be overrated. What I strive for more is rhythm,” the late Jim Harrison said. “It’s like taking dictation, when you’re really attuned to the rhythm of that voice.” George Saunders described a similar process, explaining that sound shows him where the energy is, revealing which aspects of the story are important, which lines to follow. It can help with revision, too. Many drafts in, when he can no longer see the work with fresh eyes, Jesse Ball told me that he turns to his ears. “Sound gives us clues about what is necessary and real,” he said. “When you read [your work] aloud, there are parts you might skip over—you find yourself not wanting to speak them. Those are the weak parts. It’s hard to find them otherwise, just reading along.”

5.
It’s supposed to be difficult.

One of the things that’s surprised me most is how much the process—even for best-selling and critically acclaimed writers—never seems to get any easier. Khaled Hosseini’s piece in Light the Dark is one especially poignant testament to this: material success doesn’t blunt the pain an author feels when the words just come up short.

But writers seem to be masters of deflecting existential despair, the malaise that takes hold in the middle of a taxing enterprise. I’ve covered this in more detail in an essay for The Atlantic, so one example in particular will suffice here: Elizabeth Gilbert’s concept of “stubborn gladness,” a term she borrows from the poet Jack Gilbert. It’s a promise to take things in stride, to remain cheerfully engaged no matter how difficult things get. “My path as a writer became much more smooth,” she said, “when I learned, when things aren’t going well, to regard my struggles as curious, not tragic.”

6.
Keep a totem.

Charles Dickens famously wrote with a series of porcelain figurines arranged across his desk, characters that kept him company as he toiled under punishing deadlines. It’s not as strange as it sounds: Many of the writers I talk to keep a totem—an object of special significance, whether it’s a small trinket or printed slogan—nearby as they work, something that serves as a source of inspiration or a barrier against despair.

Jane Smiley described pasting the phrase “Nobody asked you to write that novel” above her desk, an empowering reminder that creative hardships are voluntarily chosen. Mohsin Hamid keeps a Murakami passage taped to his printer—lines that link creativity and physical exercise, ones that encouraged him to build six-mile walks into his daily writing regimen. And Russell Banks keeps part of an old gravestone in his office, inscribed with the epitaph “Remember Death.” There’s nothing more inspiring than the awareness that time is short, and that the ultimate deadline is soon approaching.

7.
Find the joy.

Ultimately, the writers I speak to seem committed to finding the joy within their work, even if that means looking in the most unexpected places. “One of the things that aids me, and which he helped teach me, is this: fundamentally, I do not believe in despair as a real aspect of the human condition,” says Ayana Mathis. “There is great confusion, there is great pain, there is suffering, all of those things, yes. But despair? I don’t believe in despair, and I don’t write from despair. I write from difficulty, absolutely. I write about people who are in great pain, who are desperate and sometimes even miserable. But despair, to me, means an absolute absence of hope. It is a nothing. There is always hope for betterment.”

But it’s not just leaving room for hope and levity on the page. It’s about retaining one’s own capacity to find joy within the process, making sure the work’s difficulty never fully squeezes out delight.

“The joy of being an author is the joy of feeling I can do anything,” says Neil Gaiman in Light the Dark. “There are no rules. Only: can you do this with confidence? Can you do it with aplomb? Can you do it with style? Can you do it with joy?”.

Find the joy, and when you do, there are no rules.”

Is AI a Writer’s Friend?

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Giancarlo Ghedini has an article about the pros and cons of AI from a writer’s perspective on Writers Digest website yesterday. I think it is both useful and interesting, and I quote the key points below.

Giancarlo Ghedini is an author and copywriter and host of The Story King Podcast.

Giancarlo Ghedini

“I’m not sure how AI works just yet. I want to say it has something to do with sorcery. For those who haven’t been tuned in or have been too scared to, let’s discuss what exactly ChatGPT is. I don’t want to put words in its mouth (don’t worry, it does not have an actual mouth…yet), so here is how it defined itself when I asked:

ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI. It is designed to engage in natural language conversations, providing responses and information based on its training on a wide range of texts. It can answer questions, provide explanations, offer suggestions, and generate text in a conversational manner.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s precisely what many writers and content creators are scared of—a machine able to perform better than themselves. The rest of this article will cover my experiments with this technology, its obvious uses, its shortcomings, and why I see it as a Gutenberg Press-level game changer every writer should have in their toolbox. Let’s begin!

Spoiler Alert! AI was used to generate large swaths of this article. That was intentional and sort of the point. All ChatGPT words are in block quotes. With enough practice though, you’ll be able to tell the difference yourself. Here’s an article with some pointers.

On principle alone, I’m against any technology that dehumanizes civilization and trivializes art. Not to mention the idea that AI is already wreaking havoc on academics.

Copywriting

Based on my experience at work, I was curious how good a copywriter ChatGPT was. I gave it specific parameters: “Write me three headlines for a company named AI MoneyMaker no more than 30 characters each. Write three text descriptions for each headline no more than 90 characters each. There should also be three calls to action no more than 20 characters each.” Here’s what ChatGPT gave me:

Headlines:

1. “AI MoneyMaker: Boost Profits!”
2. “Unlock Wealth with AI!”
3. “Maximize ROI with AI!”

Text descriptions:

1. “Turn your investments into gold with AI-powered solutions.”
2. “Experience the power of AI in growing your financial portfolio.”
3. “Supercharge your returns with cutting-edge AI technologies.”

Calls to action:

1. “Invest now!”
2. “Get started!”
3. “Grow your wealth!”

I was particularly impressed with the third headline’s wordplay: “ROI with AI.” I could’ve written these myself, but not in 20 seconds.

Short Stories

So how about fiction? My sons and I had fun with this. I don’t imagine it would do great with a longer piece of literature like a novel. But I wanted to test it out with a short story.

My 12-year-old told it to write a story about Peppa Pig going crazy and becoming a killer. ChatGPT refused. It’s programmed to not be inappropriate. We tried another prompt. I asked it to write a 100-word story that sounds like Hemingway wrote it. Here it is:

The old man sat by the river, his lined face weathered by time and memory. The autumn breeze whispered through the tall grass, carrying the echoes of forgotten battles. He cast his line into the current, its silver glimmer a fleeting reflection of his lost youth. The fish, elusive as time itself, danced beneath the surface, taunting him with their evasive grace. His hands trembled, weathered by years of struggle, as he held the rod with desperate resolve. And in that moment, as the sun dipped below the horizon, he felt a whisper of hope, for tomorrow, the fish would be his.

Character Backgrounds

I told ChatGPT to give me a backstory in the form of a numbered list of 10 reasons my fictional character is struggling with alcohol addiction. Seconds later I had this:

1. Jack’s failed marriage: The breakdown of his once-loving relationship with his wife left him feeling isolated and emotionally shattered.
2. Loss of his daughter: The tragic and untimely death of his daughter due to a terminal illness inflicted immense grief and a sense of powerlessness.
3. Struggles with career: Jack’s aspirations as a writer were met with rejection and disappointment, leading to frustration and a sense of inadequacy.
4. Escaping reality: Overwhelmed by the weight of his personal struggles, Jack turned to alcohol as a means of escape, seeking temporary relief from his emotional pain.
5. Alienation from loved ones: As Jack’s addiction worsened, his behavior pushed away friends and family who were unable to cope with his self-destructive tendencies.
6. Financial difficulties: Jack’s addiction consumed his financial resources, leading to mounting debts and further exacerbating his stress and desperation.
7. Health deterioration: The toll of excessive drinking began to manifest in Jack’s physical and mental well-being, affecting his overall health and cognitive abilities.
8. Social consequences: Jack’s alcoholism caused him to make poor decisions and engage in disruptive behavior, leading to strained relationships and legal issues.
9. Loss of professional opportunities: Jack’s addiction impaired his ability to maintain steady employment, resulting in missed opportunities and a downward spiral in his career.
10. Rock bottom moment: Jack reached a pivotal low point in his life, perhaps a wake-up call or a life-altering event, that forced him to confront the devastating consequences of his alcoholism and seek help in order to reclaim his life.

Not bad, right? I didn’t even name the character Jack, nor would I, but still. It’s easy to see how this technology can help with writer’s block. You’re stuck, you’re not sure where to take your story, ChatGPT really thrives with ideation.

Book Summaries

This was a nice surprise. I stuck to a nonfiction classic. I asked ChatGPT to give me a quick summary in the form of a numbered list for each chapter of How To Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie:

Chapter 1: “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People” – This chapter focuses on the importance of avoiding criticism and condemnation, appreciating others genuinely, and showing respect for their opinions to effectively handle people.

Chapter 2: “Six Ways to Make People Like You” – Carnegie presents six principles for building rapport, including becoming genuinely interested in others, smiling, remembering and using people’s names, actively listening, talking in terms of the other person’s interests, and making the other person feel important.

Chapter 3: “How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking” – The author provides strategies to influence others positively, such as avoiding arguments and showing respect for others’ opinions. He emphasizes the power of listening to understand and using questions to guide conversations.

etc.

Ideation

In my opinion, this is where ChatGPT shines. No need for another example here. If nothing else, a writer has an idea-generating machine with AI. That is its true value, the ability to assist human imagination, rather than take it over.

It helped me brainstorm different ideas for one of my characters to escape being trapped in a walled city during a riot. I then asked it to help me think of ways for another fictional character to rob a bank in the modern world. That last one was just a test to see if people could override its algorithmic ethics to brainstorm criminal plans. ChatGPT was not falling for it. It passed my tricky test, and I still don’t know how to rob a bank! Impressive. 

Going forward, this exercise showed how vitally important it is to create ethical AI. This is a public service every AI developer needs to take to heart.

Research

Here’s where it gets tricky. On the one hand, research can now be lightning-fast. Ask any question you want. As of this writing, ChatGPT was equipped with a knowledge base ending around September 2021. I now have so much research for my historical fiction book. The only problem? Sometimes AI is completely wrong about stuff.

I have two examples. I asked it to give me some information about ancient Jerusalem at the time of Jesus and it mentioned there was a Muslim quarter. But that isn’t possible as Islam was still over 500 years from being founded. I informed ChatGPT about its error. It kindly apologized for the mistake and said I was correct. It’s good to know history sometimes.

My second example is similar. Still doing research about events at the time of Jesus, ChatGPT mentioned that Barabbas was the one who plotted to kill Jesus. I said that was wrong. Again, it apologized and said it was Pontius Pilate. That too was wrong. Pilate was the one who sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion, but he didn’t plot to kill him. It eventually got it right and was very sorry about all the mistakes.

Maybe ChatGPT just doesn’t know the Bible very well. At any rate, I’d be careful giving it your wholesale trust to deliver reliable facts regardless of the topic. It seems to get most things right, but not all.

Editing Tasks

It failed miserably on this front. Grammarly beats it by a long shot. Maybe my request was not clear enough. I asked it to edit two paragraphs from a chapter in a book I’m writing. It kept wanting to rewrite it–and in the clunkiest manner. It’s not even worth showing.

Conclusion

I asked ChatGPT to give me five reasons writers should use it. Here’s what it said:

1. Saves time: ChatGPT provides quick and comprehensive answers to any writing queries or doubts that a writer may have, effectively cutting down on the time required for research and brainstorming.
2. Eliminates writer’s block: ChatGPT can be a great resource for writers who are stuck in their writing process and unsure of how to move forward. It can provide fresh perspectives and prompt ideas that may not have previously occurred to them.
3. Access to expertise: ChatGPT has a team of experienced writers and subject matter experts who can offer insight and guidance to writers in various genres, styles, and topics.
4. Helps writers improve their skills: Writers can ask ChatGPT for feedback on their work, evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and improve their craft with suggestions given by the AI.
5. Provides customized solutions: ChatGPT’s AI technology provides customized solutions based on the specific needs of writers, making it an ideal tool for writers across all genres, languages and styles.

I also asked it to give me five reasons why writers should not use it:

1. Limited Understanding: While I have been programmed to understand a wide range of topics, I cannot claim to have complete knowledge of all subjects. My responses depend on the quality of the input data, and sometimes I may not fully understand the context.
2. Lack of Creativity: I can provide helpful ideas and suggestions, but I cannot replace human creativity. Writing requires original thought processes and critical thinking that AI is not yet capable of replicating.
3. Plagiarism Risks: Over reliance on AI writing assistance may lead to plagiarism or academic dishonesty. Academic institutions frown upon students who submit assignments that have been wholly created by AI models.
4. Language Barriers: While I have the ability to interact with users in multiple languages, my responses may sometimes be limited in terms of tone, nuance, and cultural context.
5. Dependency: Relying too much on AI writing tools for writing can lead to a loss of self-confidence in writing ability and critical thinking skills. It is essential to develop your own writing skills by practicing and reading widely.”

So there you have it. As for me, I have used ChatGPT in the work I do for a charity, but not yet in my writing. What about you?

Review: The Marriage Portrait

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I recently bought a copy of The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, having been attracted by the brief description of a historical novel involving a marriage in XVI century Italy, and by the author’s biography.

Maggie O’Farrell is the author of Hamnet, winner the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I am, I am, I am, both Sunday Times  no. 1 bestsellers. She was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and raised in Wales and Scotland. Her novel The Hand that First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, and The Distance between Us won a Somerset Maugham Award. She currently lives in Edinburgh.

Maggie O’Farrell

The Marriage Portrait is set in XVI century Florence and Ferrara, Italy. The protagonist is Lucrezia, the fifth child of the Duke of Tuscany, a somewhat rebellious child, who stroked a captured tiger in the basement of her father’s castle and was thought to have charmed the beast. At the age of thirteen she was betrothed to Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara who was more than ten years her senior. He had previously been betrothed to an older sister who died. Her marriage took place when she was sixteen in Florence and she moved to Ferrara as a young duchess with a maid, Emilia, who is two years older and the daughter of her childhood nanny. There is political intrigue in Ferrara, where Alfonso’s mother has taken up a hostile alliance. One of Alfonso’s two sisters, Elizabetta, is having an affair with the captain of the palace guards, Ercole Contrari, and the other sister, Nunciata, seems hostile to Lucrezia. When Alfonso discovers the love affair between Elizabetta and Ercole, he orders that Ercole be strangled by the brutal Baldassare, the dukes cousin, while Elizabetta is required to watch. It becomes clear to Lucrezia that she is required to produce a male heir for Alfonso. She must perform her marital duty frequently. Her husband sometimes strikes her as cruel and distant and warm and loving at other times. When the couple move to a remote hunting lodge, Lucrezia is convinced that her husband intends to murder her. He refers to a marriage portrait of Lucrezia as “my first duchess”. I won’t give away the ending which is quite satisfactory, but I will say that the real first duchess, on whom Lucrezia is based, was reported to have died of a “putrid fever”, but there were rumors that she was murdered by her husband. The real Alfonso II married twice more; neither duchess produced an heir.

I have only one major criticism of this novel, and that is that it is too long. It is 432 pages long, but it could be trimmed without any significant loss and it would gain urgency. Ms O’Farrell likes to describe her settings in poetic detail which makes them beautifully clear but a bit laborious. The plot of the novel is excellent. One is convinced of being immersed in XVI century Italy with characters who are living like royalty and servants can at best survive. The values and traditions of the times are captured as well. There is a frequent transition between a short chapter which is set in the final hunting lodge and an earlier, longer chapter containing events leading up to the end. This sequencing can be confusing, and I’m not convinced it is necessary to maintain the ‘is he really going to kill me?’ tension.

Hear Your Own Voice

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Jason Chatfield has an article on the Writers Digest website dated June 13, 2023 with the title ‘Five Ways to Turn Down the Volume to Hear Your Own Voice’. His basic point is we can’t hear our own genuine voice as writers with all the ambient noise.

Jason Chatfield is an Australian cartoonist and comedian based in New York. He is Australia’s most widely-syndicated cartoonist, producing the iconic comic strip Ginger Meggs which is syndicated daily in over 30 countries through Andrews McMeel Syndication. Ginger Meggs has been running since 1921, making it one of the longest-running comic strips in history, celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2021.

Jason says,”There’s something to be said for immersing yourself in the marketplace of ideas and being exposed to what your contemporaries are doing. There is, however, a very real danger that in doing so, you become the kind of creative individual that does more on-looking than creating.

The ability to yank yourself out of the endless slip-stream of “content” and quietly explore your own ideas is one that should be cultivated above all else. That is, unless, you like the idea of mimicking everyone around you by osmosis and wondering why nobody is noticing your work.

Artists only languish when their primary drive is to merely strive to keep up with what their peers are doing. If they are only exposed to the contemporary trends of their art form, their ideas will reflect that limitation. But, this isn’t a new problem. As long as art has been created, it has been mimicked and iterated on to the detriment of true originality.

For example, in 1801, Ludwig van Beethoven was lamenting the fact that he was slowly going deaf. By 1800, his hearing was in full decline. He was 30 years old. Over the following years, he had to accept that there was no hope of remission and would have to live the rest of his life without the ability to properly hear a musical note. He told people that without sound, his life would be meaningless. But what happened as a result changed the world and holds a lesson for us more than two centuries later.

By Age 46, Beethoven’s deafness was complete, so music only existed in his imagination. During that period, Beethoven was unable to hear the popular compositions of the day. Across the decades, while others were busy replicating each other with slight variations on the same themes, Beethoven was in his own mind, writing the music that he alone wanted to write. This ability to work in a creative silo culminated in his greatest work: his famous Ninth Symphony, which would define his unique style, change music permanently, and make him one of the greatest composers of all time.

With that in mind, here are five of my best pieces of advice for turning down the volume to hear your own unique voice:

1. Become Comfortable With Silence.

Becoming comfortable with silence is one of the hardest skills to cultivate in the modern world, but it is the most important. It’s made even harder with a seemingly infinite amount of ways to disturb the silence. We’ve become so used to cramming “content” into our audio and visual senses at all waking moments that we’ve lost the capacity to just be.

Be honest with yourself; can you remember the last time you left your house without your earbuds? Or got in your car without turning on the radio or a podcast, an audiobook, music, or something else to fill the dead air?

It can be tempting during quiet moments to simply play some soft background music, or some white noise, or even a loop of a crackling fireplace or some rain, but it is essential that your mind benefits from the absence of any sound whatsoever.

2. Deactivate Your Social Media.

We’ve lost much of our ability to examine our own thoughts, ideas, and opinions—to cultivate our own unique voice in the world. Most of the time, our opinions are just a simulacrum of those we’ve heard online, on every topic from immigration law to Taylor Swift. Here’s the truth: You don’t need to have an opinion on everything, even if the social media slipstream insists you do. Doing this is diverting your creative energy away from the things that would actually bear original artistic fruit.

If you have the ability to do so, I would highly recommend the practice of taking yourself as far from the aforementioned slipstream as you can: Deactivate all social media, remove the apps from your phone, and disable all notifications. Remove your default browser if it means you won’t be tempted to check social media in your browser app. If need be, you can reactivate them and showcase your work when you finally have something unique and original to share.

Think people will panic and wonder where you went if you stop posting to Instagram? I’m going to tell you a very upsetting truth that I and many others have discovered: Most of them won’t even notice. Try it for one month and tell me I’m wrong.

3. Clear Your Calendar.

Learning to say “No” to every invitation is a skill that needs to be learned like anything else. A “No” after saying “Yes” is even harder to master, but I guarantee you it will be of great value if you want to dig down and do the work needed to cultivate your most authentic work. As James Clear writes in his book, Atomic Habits, “No is a decision: Yes is a responsibility.”

In the same way that rest days are important for physical training, deliberately building in time to turn down the volume on the rest of the world is essential if you want to be able to cultivate your own distinct voice. By maintaining routine blocks of protected solitude, the world’s greatest artists have produced their most innovative creative work, pushing their medium forward into previously unexplored terrain. There’s absolutely no good reason for you not to do the same.

4. Get Away From It All.

Some of the most satisfying, deep and original creative work I’ve managed to accomplish as an artist has been during times of great isolation—picking up from the city and driving off to a tiny cabin in the woods with an empty sketchbook, a french press, and a bottle of scotch. (OK, and my dog.)

5. Bring Only What Is Necessary.

You’re going to be tempted to listen to something or read something if you bring novelties to fill the silence. Instead, bring only what is necessary to do your work. Nothing else. Limitation breeds extraordinary clarity and creativity. Turning down the volume includes not reading and looking at other artists’ work in print.

Try these tips today, and tell me they don’t make a massive difference to your creative output over the coming months.”

Use of Crying

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Benjamin Perry has an article on Writer’s Digest dated May 25, 2023 on how crying can shape a story and a character. His analysis strikes me as particularly useful to writers.

Benjamin Perry is a minister at Middle Church and an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in outlets like The Washington Post, Slate, Sojourners, and Bustle. He has a degree in psychology from SUNY Geneseo and an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary.

Mr Perry says, “Why do characters cry? At face value, it’s an easy question: They cry because people cry. Authors want their creations to feel life-like, so just as characters share our laughter and struggle, our hopes and wild dreaming, they must share our weeping, too. But tears, like any action, can feel authentic or forced. When crying is handled poorly it can feel incidental at best and, at worst, a disingenuous attempt to make the reader feel something that the writer has not earned. However, when tears are artfully woven into the narrative, they can provide unparalleled emotional complexity and catharsis for the reader.

“In the two years I spent writing Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter—a nonfiction book about the science and social ethics of crying—I was particularly attuned to how authors portrayed weeping in the fictional books I read. The book devotes an entire chapter to the way tears function in novels, myths, and sacred texts, but here I’ll condense a few of the bigger lessons I learned about how to effectively portray sobbing in a story.

1. Crying Isn’t Just About Sadness

“A common pitfall I see is writers only linking tears to sorrow. Obviously, sadness is a significant reason why people cry, but—even when it’s a principal cause—real emotions are usually more layered and multivalent. Often, it’s not just the sadness that makes our eyes well up, it’s frustration with our situation, anger at unjust circumstances, our longing for something different.

“There’s a scene in Torrey Peters’ wonderful novel Detransition, Baby where one of the main characters sits weeping on the floor of her ex-partner’s closet. Certainly, loss from the breakup is part of why she’s crying. But what truly gives the scene its power is how that loss mingles with her fragile hope about the possibility of becoming a mother—and the anger she feels about receiving what she longs for from someone she feels betrayed her. If crying is used as lazy shorthand for “sad,” we lose that emotional richness.

2. Weeping Helps to Cross a Threshold

“Crying is startlingly effective as an action to bring a character into a new place—either physically or in their heart. One of the most famous examples of this are the tears that Alice weeps when entering wonderland. Growing giant, she weeps a sea into which she later becomes literally awash. She must travel through that soggy morass to enter the door to a different world, a striking metaphor for the character’s emotional journey.

3. Link Tears to Transformation

“While tears are often connected to a particular emotion (anger, pride, joy, etc.), they’re also extremely effective to show how a character is changing or has changed. The archetypal example of this, for me, is Ebenezer Scrooge. Throughout A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens punctuates Scrooge’s ghostly visions with frequent tears, to show how the experience is changing him. This all culminates on Christmas morning when Scrooge leaps from his bed, “laughing and crying in the same breath,” upon learning that there is still time for him to choose a different future.

4. Crying Shouldn’t Only Happen Where You Expect

“Because of social forces that shape who is more comfortable crying openly, there are many cultural misconceptions about crying. Men, for example, are far less frequently depicted crying in our stories. (And the absence of those portrayals is likely part of why so many men only feel comfortable crying in private.) There is so much power in subverting these expectations!

“It’s not a book, but one of my favorite recent depictions of masculinity is the titular character in Ted Lasso. The show follows an ebullient soccer coach who motivates his characters through praise and kindness. Part of what makes the character so vibrant, however, is the way he’s shown weeping in private moments—often literally in the dark. It’s the tension between the public joy and quiet sorrow that gives Ted so much pathos.

5. There Are Many Types of Tears

“We cry for so many reasons: Awe at the majesty of a forest; pride at accomplishing something long-awaited; confusion when something happens that we don’t expect; even cunning tears wielded to deceive. Part of the beauty and mystery of tears comes from the way that they refract the fullness of our humanity. So, embrace that complexity!

“The more you’re able to use tears in multifaceted ways, the nearer they will strike reality—and the more your reader will resonate with what’s on the page. Similarly, there are lots of ways we cry: a single glimmering tear, a silent stream, or the howling sorrow of full, body wracking sobs. Matching physical embodiment to the narrative event will cultivate realism, helping your characters come alive.”

Endings Matter

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In Harry Bingham’s latest email, he discusses the importance of the ending of a novel.

“I just realised that I write quite often about beginning a novel, and not all that often about ending it.

And yes: beginnings are important. If you don’t get your reader onto the story-train in that opening chapter, you’ve basically lost the game before it’s really started.

Endings matter at least as much as beginnings and the reason I don’t talk about them much is simply that endings mostly write themselves.

I don’t know about your experience, but my endings generally pass in a rush. It’s as though the entirety of the preceding novel is there to allow me to write the final chunk in a blaze of understanding and joy.

The understanding is: I know my characters. I know how all my little plot intricacies need to play out. I know what the grand finale needs to deliver. The prior 90,000 words involved me figuring those things out. The last 20,000 are my reward.

The joy is partly the ease of writing. But it’s also the joy of completing the arc. It’s like writing one long punchline, where you already know that the joke is going to land. I’ve certainly had some spectacularly happy writing sessions that haven’t involved endings. (Giving Fiona hypothermia in the snows of Love Story, with Murders was joyous. And I did enjoy burying her underground in The Dead House.) But mostly – the writing sessions I remember with most pleasure involve endings. Words flowing and the text satisfying.

So maybe you don’t need help with the endings. I think there’s an argument that if the preceding story has worked properly, the ending should just fall into place. But here, for what it’s worth, is a checklist to keep at hand …

Exterior drama

Have you properly completed your exterior drama? In the kind of books I write, that’ll typically involve some good splash of violence – a sinking boat, a fight, a burning building. But that’s not necessary. In Pride and Prejudice, the exterior ‘drama’ involves a naïve girl eloping with Mr Wrong and the Romantic Hero doing (off-screen) what Romantic Heroes are there to do. The off-screen quality of that drama is probably a little underweight for a modern audience, but so long as you have some dramatic action that’s well suited to your genre and readership, you’re fine.

Interior drama

The flipside of the exterior action needs to be some serious internal pressure. In a standalone novel, that pressure needs to have the sense of being pivotal – life-altering, life-defining. In a series novel, you can’t quite get away with a new life-defining moment with every instalment, but the stakes still need to be high. Series characters take a bit of a battering as a result. (I once did an ‘interview’ with Fiona, in which she grumped at me for giving her a rough time. Reading it back, I have to say that she’s in the right. I’ll never tell her that though.)

Romantic relationship

Most books, not all, will involve a romantic relationship. And – of course – the pressures of your grand finale are also pressures that test and define that relationship. You definitely don’t have to kiss and get married at the end of every book. I’ve ended a book with my protagonist ending what had seemed like a strong and constructive relationship. But when your character enters the furnaces of your ending, everything is tested, everything will either prove itself durable or fallible. The relationship can’t simply be as it was before. (Again, series characters need to play those things differently, but ‘differently’ doesn’t mean you can just ignore the issue.)

Other key friendships / relationships

Of course, there are a ton of other relationships that build up over the course of a book. Those might be best-friend type relationships, or children, or parents. They can (importantly) be office colleagues, which sounds dull but they can matter too. My detective’s relationship with her boss and other colleagues is just quite central to the architecture of her life and the books. These relationships too don’t need profound alteration necessarily, but they need some token of ending. A boss hugging your character (when he/she never normally would), or talking about a promotion, or offering a holiday – those things sound trivial, but they can define something important about everyone’s relationship to what has just happened. You don’t necessarily need much here. Half a page? A page? That might be ample. But if you book misses that page, it’ll never quite satisfy as it ought to.

Mystery resolution

Most books – not just crime novels – will often have some kind of mystery at the heart. That mystery will probably be unfolded in your grand action-climax, but that won’t always be true. Modern fiction has (rightly) moved away from that moustache-twirling final chapter where the Great Detective reveals the mystery to a completely static audience. But it’ll often be the case that little questions and niggles remain. Those things need to be addressed. It’s even OK if they’re addressed by saying, “We’ll never know exactly how / why / who X.” But you need to resolve your mysteries or acknowledge that you haven’t.

Movement

And, since we’ve just dissed static and moustache-twirling final chapters, I’d add that maintaining some kind of motion still matters at the end. Just as you’ll want to move settings fairly frequently in your middle chapters, I think you’ll want to do the same at the end. Physical motion is still a good way to convey story motion.

The closing shot

And –

There’s a theory in film-structure that the opening shot should show the ‘Before’ state of a character and the closing shot should show the ‘After’ – where the before/after vignettes somehow encapsulate the alteration brought about by the story. So to take the (vastly excellent) Miss Congeniality movie, the opening shot shows Sandra Bullock as goofy, unkempt, and without close female friends. The closing shot shows her kempt, still her, but now with close female friends. That’s the key transition in the movie.

I don’t quite like the mechanical nature of these movie plotting guides, but I do think it’s worth reflecting on the closing shot. What are you wanting to show? What’s the image of your character that you want to leave with your reader? In one of my books, a girl had been long separated from her father. Fiona’s last act in the book is to rejoin the two. She’s not physically present when the two meet – she’s set up the meeting, but remains in a car outside, watching. And that maybe is just the right tone for the book. Fiona plays this almost Christ-like role – suffering for others, undoing wrongs – but nevertheless remains on the outside of ordinary human society. That point isn’t made in any direct way, but it doesn’t have to be. An indirect point lingers longer than one made more crudely.

Review: Tropic of Cancer

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As you may know, this novel by Henry Miller was banned in the US as obscene for twenty-seven years after it was first published in Paris in 1934. Having never read any of Henry Miller’s work, I decided to start with this one. Now, having read it, I would say that it is not obscene (although it is occasionally explicit and does not shy away from bad language), it is, in my opinion, misogynistic. Henry Miller has little respect for women as equals.

Henry Miller was born in New York in 1891. Surprisingly, he attended City University for only one semester. (He writes with considerable skill and with an astonishing vocabulary.) He worked in personnel at Western Union for ten years before devoting himself entirely to writing. He developed a semi-autobiographical, stream of consciousness style. He lived in Paris during the 1930’s, in Greece briefly and in California until his death in 1980. He was married five times. His major works, aside from Tropic of Cancer, include The Rosy Crucifixion, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn and The Colossus of Maroussi.

Henry Miller

Tropic of Cancer is set in Bohemian Paris during the 1930’s when Miller was a destitute, struggling writer there, having separated from his second wife, whom he recollects warmly. The book is written in the first person, as Henry Miller, and is a commentary on the human condition from a low-down, devil-may-care perspective. Many of the characters are thinly disguised friends and associates of Miller’s. The narrative is disorderly, sometimes in the present and sometimes a recollection of past events. The subjects are the peculiarities of the characters, their influences on one another, the scarcity of money, various venues and scenes in the city, sexual encounters, writing, philosophy, and employment, all revealed unvarnished and with clarity. Millers’s writing is characterised by an eagerness to reveal all, and he views his desperate financial circumstances and challenging relationships with startling optimism.

Tropic of Cancer is clearly a literary milestone in its construction, style, subject and narrative. Strangely, perhaps, it makes an engaging read. One wants to discover what Henry will discover next. For me, there is no overarching theme or message, and if one tried to construct a philosophy from the events, it would probably be self defeating. For example, Miller seems to view the church disdainfully, but his observations are congruent with Christian theology. The writing is extraordinary its clarity and erudition. While I take strong exception to Miller’s view of the role of women, I have to admire the way he has described his experiences in Bohemian Paris in the 30’s. Is it a great literary treasure? I think not. Is it a book one should read. Yes!

Review: The Maid

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The second novel – a crime novel – that my wife and I listed to during the drive down to Sicily was The Maid by Nita Prose and narrated by Lauren Ambrose. It is certainly an entertaining book, though when we started to listen I wasn’t expecting a crime novel; I was expecting a romance or an adventure. It has sold over a million copies and won a couple of awards.

Ms Prose says, “As for my professional life, I work in the publishing industry. I began years ago as an intern, photocopying edited manuscripts and secretly snooping the fascinating margin conversations between editors and writers. Currently, I’m vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster in Toronto, Canada, where I have the privilege of working with an incredible array of authors and publishing colleagues whom I credit with teaching me, manuscript by manuscript, book by book, the wondrous craft of writing.”

Nita Prose

The central character is Molly, who is a maid in the Regency Grand Hotel, a job to which she feels she was born and is obsessively dedicated. She likes nothing more than restoring a filthy, messy room to perfection. She has such an orderly, Polly-Anna-ish mind that I thought she has learning disabilities until I learned that she had completed some university level courses. Molly lived alone with her grandmother, who has a similar character, is full of simple-minded advice, and who dies halfway through the book. The other characters are a supervising maid, who is lazy and apt to purloin tips that have been left for Molly. There was a boyfriend who stole a large nest egg which Molly’s grandma had been saving for them. Molly’s current crush is the hotel bartender, who has suspicious friends and treats her with indifference. The hotel manager is a harried soul who treats Molly with respect, and there is the hotel dishwasher, a conscientious Mexican worker whose immigration papers are not in order. Mr Black, an older, very rich, disagreeable man in doubtful businesses, and his younger, trophy wife are frequent guests at the hotel. Molly strikes up a friendship with the wife, and Molly finds Mr Black dead in his room. It was murder and Molly is the prime suspect according to a zealous police detective. Fortunately, the doorman has a daughter who is a very clever criminal lawyer and who devises a scheme to prove Molly not guilty and to reveal the actual perpetrator. A drugs operation involving the bartender, Mr Black and assorted outside thugs is discovered. Molly knows who actually killed Mr Black, but for personal, sympathetic reasons, she does not reveal the person at the trial.

Certainly it is a clever device to create a character who goes against our reflex notions of a hotel maid: invisible, unmotivated and slap-dash. This strange character wins our sympathy, though perhaps a little reluctantly in my case. For me, Molly is a little too dedicated to her simple-minded perfectionism to be fully credible. Perhaps if Molly had some learning disabilities she would have worked better for me. The writing is lively, though not of literary quality, nor should it be. The scenes and characters are clear. The plot is well conceived, and tension is maintained throughout. For me, Molly’s motivation not to reveal the true killer was not strong enough, and in the real world the killer would have been identified.

Review: The Ghost

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I listened to this novel by Robert Harris on our drive down to Sicily from London.

Harris is a British novelist and journalist born in 1957. He was educate at Cambridge, and began his career at the BBC where he worked in news and current affairs programs. He became the political editor of The Observer at the age of 30. From 1982 to 1990 he wrote five non-fiction books. His first novel, a commercial success, was Fatherland, based on the Nazis having won the Second World War and published in 1992. He has written fourteen further novels. The Ghost was published in 2007 and was made into a film starring Pierce Brosnan.

Robert Harris

The Ghost is told in the first person by an unnamed professional ghostwriter, who is hired by a prominent publisher to complete the memoirs of Adam Lang, an ex-prime minister of the UK, thinly based on Tony Blair. Lang’s original ghostwriter, Mike McAra, a former aid to Lang, had died in strange circumstances, having fallen overboard from the Woods Hole Ferry. Most of the action takes place on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, where the publisher owns a lavish summer home. Lang’s wife is depicted as a scheming manipulator, while Lang is having an affair with his attractive female assistant. Frustrated with having an opaque picture of the real Adam Lang, the ghostwriter gets into McAra’s rented car an allows it to follow a previously set destination. This takes him to a Professor Paul Emmett, who went to Cambridge with Lang, was an associate of Lang’s wife and was a CIA agent. Lang’s former Foreign Secretary, Richard Rycart, loosely based on Robin Cook, is now working at the UN and has produced documentation that Lang had four terror suspects arrested in Pakistan by the SAS, and turned over to the CIA for interrogation. Potentially, Lang would be charged with was crimes. The ghostwriter finds Rycart’s phone number in McAra’s files, and arranges to meet Rycart in New York, where Rycart confirms that he and McAra had concluded that Emmett had recruited Lang into the CIA. Lang is assassinated by a protester. The ghostwriter finishes the book, but does not reveal Lang’s secret, because he does not confirm it before he is killed.

The book is brilliantly read by Michael Jayston who uses a distinctive voice for each major character. The plot unfolds beautifully and with constant tension until it seems likely that Lang was a CIA agent. This seems far fetched and renders a satisfactory conclusion to the book nearly impossible. The writing is captivating, though it occasionally wanders into unnecessary detail. The characters are well draw and credible. Two events struck me as lacking substantiation: the fling between the ghostwriter and Lang’s wife and the beach scene at night where McAra’s body washed up.

Perhaps Mr Harris permitted his disenchantment with Tony Blair to overrule his literary craft.

Novels Left Unpublished

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Bryan VanDyke has an essay on The Millions website with the catchy title “To All the Novels I Never Published”. In my case, I’ve abandoned a novel after writing seventy pages, then come back a year and a half later, rewrote much of what I had written, and finally published it. But I’ve never put a completed manuscript in a drawer and left it there indefinitely. I was interested in what Mr VanDyke had to say.

Bryan VanDyke’s essays and fiction have appeared in The Millions, The Rumpus, Carve, and Pacific Standard. He is the author of Only the Trying, a book-length essay on the nature of illness and recovery. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

“I’ve had a manuscript locked in a drawer for three and a half years now. It’s a coming-of-age novel about a boy who believes a supernatural force has seized the minds of the adults in his life. He and his best friend confront and defeat the supernatural force, but victory comes at the cost of their innocence—the classic trade-off. I don’t know if it’s my best work, but it’s my favorite. Perhaps inevitably, I’m terrified of ever trying to sell it to someone.

I’m not new to this writing jig. A few weeks ago, I went deep into my hard drive archives and tallied the numbers. Here’s what I learned: over the last 25 years, I’ve finished seven novels, three dozen short stories, and 55 essays. The number of published pieces is, well, much smaller. This is all to say that I’m well acquainted with the creative process, its thralls and its jiltings. There is work that I’ve rushed to share with the world and work that I’ve held back. The hard part is getting wise to which is which.

In college, I pursued a double concentration in both poetry and fiction. That’s how much I wanted to be a writer. At the end of senior year, I won an award from the English Department for one of my short stories. A handful of students were honored at a small reception, and we received $300 checks from Alfred Appel, a professor and author of four books on Vladimir Nabokov (my first literary god). This check, Professor Appel told us, might be the most money you ever earn for a single piece of creative work. He grinned like he was joking. He wasn’t joking.

After college I was lucky enough—or damn fool enough, depending on your perspective—to jet straight off to an MFA program. To afford tuition, I juggled four jobs: I spent a part of each week as a web developer, a departmental admin, a researcher for a magazine, an LSAT teacher, and a tutor. I did most of my writing after midnight. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world.

At one point for a workshop I was paired with Mary Gordon, a thoughtful teacher and tenacious stylist whom I’d heard great things about. You’ll love her, one of my mentors said. Professor Gordon told me in our first private conference: I’m going to be hard on you because I think you’re a good writer. Oh, wow, I said, flattered. I suspect this was a line she delivered to many if not most students. If it was a ploy, it worked: I never thought she was harsh, even when she derided the archaic diction in my stories.

During class one afternoon Professor Gordon said: After I finish a novel, I always put it in a drawer for a year. All of the apprentices in the room sat up a little at this. A year? The disbelief was perceptible, like a shift in the wind. Yes, she insisted, gathering forcefulness as she repeated herself. You must do this with a book. It’s the only way to really figure out if something’s any good. You need space.

Her advice bothered me because it was both wise and inconvenient. Our entire MFA program was oriented around the idea that your thesis would be either a story collections or a novel—either way, you needed a finished manuscript in order to graduate.  With what I was paying in tuition, my pockets weren’t deep enough to wait a whole year to figure out if what I wrote was any good. I barreled onward, advice be damned, and when I finished my thesis, I turned it in. I had no time for locked drawers. 

I spent five years sharing and revising my first novel. I gathered feedback from agents and editors and friends. I incorporated their suggestions. I signed a contract with an agent. But I never managed to sell the book. The material never quite struck the mark. I only understood why after a critique from my mother, the woman who taught me to read, the relentless reader whose reading habits I first emulated. I had hoped to impress her with what I’d made, the product of all that effort, all that education, all that patience. “I don’t know what I just read,” she wrote on the first page of a print-out of the first chapter. 

She did not mean the words in unkindness; she was honestly confused by the novel’s cold open, a poetic description of a cleaning woman as she watches another woman ride a horse down a street. I had long believed that good writing could—would!—connect with anyone. Suddenly, I saw how the problem with my novel was bigger than my novel. I had to accept one of two unacceptable conclusions: either a) my core belief in the universality of good writing was not true; or, b) what I’d labored over for years wasn’t actually good writing. Now that I have the distance of years, I can reread those pages and see, ah, yes. The problem was a little bit of a), and a whole lot of b).

William Faulkner wrote two failed novels (his words) before he famously gave up writing for other people and began to write just for himself. The books he wrote after that volta are the ones that students still read for classes around the world. “Write for yourself” is easy to say, and even easier to understand, but in practice it’s dangerous. If you’re not careful, it leaves you with a hefty tally of novels, stories, and essays, proof that you’re a writer, but confusion about what being a writer has actually done for you. 

A few years later I wrote another novel, one that my wife told me had “perfect bones.” I posted to Facebook about how good I felt about her feedback. Other friends, some I knew well, some I hadn’t seen in years, asked to read the manuscript. Eager to share, I had copies of the text printed and bound and mailed to everyone who had inquired. Then I leaned back and waited to hear what people thought. I got at least one or two wonderful emails. A few short notes. But from half of the people, well, I’m still waiting for word.

Did they not like it? Did they not have time to read it? Did they shut the pages at some point and say quietly to an empty room, I don’t know what I just read? I don’t know. Perhaps there is only one thing I can be sure of: anything you put into the world is something that you must accept uncertainty about. Is it enjoyable? Was it understood? It’s impossible to know. It can no longer be your perfect idea. It isn’t even fully yours anymore.

All this has led me to conclude that any given piece of writing must be categorized: the ones you keep, and the ones you share. In order to truly finish a piece you must be ready to know what you want from it. Is it a book that you need many people to read? Or is it something you can lock in a drawer and smile after fondly, knowing you have done what you’ve done, even if no one else sees it? Some of the things that I write are for others, essays like this one. Some of them are just for me, like that novel in the drawer that I love. 

I have in truth shared the novel I love with a very select group. My teenage daughter read it in a day and said she wanted more—quite a compliment. My dad said the book’s setting made him think fondly of the town where he (and I) grew up. I sent the novel to a fellow writer, and she said it lifted her heart. I haven’t edited or revised the manuscript in ages but if I close my eyes I can still see the scenes. I feel the words. I don’t have a synopsis and I don’t have a plan and I don’t have an expectation that anyone other than a handful people will ever read it—but what if I told you that this feeling, the feeling of a tale that I felt and then captured in words, is the best feeling I’ve ever had as a writer? The one that I love most? The one that I would never trade, even if it meant somebody paid me a bunch of money for this book in the drawer and all the other ones that I wrote and failed to sell, too? 

Nothing feels as good. Not even when someone tells me they’ve read my book and it was great. Not even when an editor writes back to tell me, yes, they’d like to run my essay. Don’t get me wrong or mark me as ungrateful. Those latter moments are great, even necessary at times. But they’re post facto. They’re director’s notes for a part that I’m no longer performing. Like life, art moves on.”

I don’t quite know what to make of this essay. It’s not clear to me why it didn’t get published. It’s his favourite, so why is he afraid of selling it? It’s not as if he would lose possession of it. If Bryan is reading this, yes, I’d like to read it.