Making New Year’s Resolutions? Resolve to Follow This Advice!
The end of the year is upon us, and I know I speak for everyone when I say, what a relief! 2021 has to be better.
How do you plan to make it better for your own writing practice? The Guardian newspaper just released some pieces of advice from some writers you probably know and respect, so let’s start with a few of those.
Jeanette Winterson
Winterson became famous with her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against conventional values. Some of her other novels have explored gender polarities and sexual identity, with later novels also exploring the relationship between humans and technology. She is also a broadcaster and a professor of creative writing.
Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.
Love what you do.
Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are doing is no good, accept it.
Don't hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.
Take no notice of anyone you don't respect.
Take no notice of anyone with a gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.
Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.
Trust your creativity.
Enjoy this work!
Annie Proulx
Proulx is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards. Her second novel, The Shipping News, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted as a 2001 film of the same name. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA, and Golden Globe Award-winning motion picture released in 2005.
Proceed slowly and take care.
To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.
Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.
Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous phrase/sentence/paragraph/page/story/chapter.
Ian Rankin
Rankin is a Scottish crime writer, best known for his Inspector Rebus novels. His first novel, Summer Rites, remains in his bottom drawer, but his second novel, The Flood, was published in 1986, while his first Rebus novel, Knots & Crosses, was published in 1987. The Rebus series is now translated into twenty-two languages and the books are bestsellers on several continents.
Read lots.
Write lots.
Learn to be self-critical.
Learn what criticism to accept.
Be persistent.
Have a story worth telling.
Don't give up.
Know the market.
Get lucky.
Stay lucky.
Zadie Smith
Smith is an English novelist, essayist, playwright, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010.
When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Don't romanticize your "vocation.” You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle.” All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.
Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.
Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Don't confuse honors with achievement.
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
Sarah Waters
Waters is the author of six novels, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith, The Night Watch and The Little Stranger, which have all been adapted for stage, television and feature film in the UK and US.
Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualize the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. Which leads me on to . . .
Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts – including my own – where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. In fact . . .
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.
Writing fiction is not "self-expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.
Respect your characters, even the minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's. At the same time . . .
Don't overcrowd the narrative. Characters should be individualized, but functional – like figures in a painting. Think of Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked, in which a patiently suffering Jesus is closely surrounded by four threatening men. Each of the characters is unique, and yet each represents a type; and collectively they form a narrative that is all the more powerful for being so tightly and so economically constructed. On a similar theme . . .
Don't overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced, and can be dispelled by obeying Rule 1. To read some of the work of Colm Tóibín or Cormac McCarthy, for example, is to discover how a deliberately limited vocabulary can produce an astonishing emotional punch.
Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.
Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.
Talent trumps all. If you're a really great writer, none of these rules need apply. If James Baldwin had felt the need to whip up the pace a bit, he could never have achieved the extended lyrical intensity of Giovanni's Room. Without "overwritten" prose, we would have none of the linguistic exuberance of a Dickens or an Angela Carter. If everyone was economical with their characters, there would be no Wolf Hall . . . For the rest of us, however, rules remain important. And, crucially, only by understanding what they're for and how they work can you begin to experiment with breaking them.
Want more? You can find them at The Guardian.
And of course the advice that set this all off is still the most relevant. Elmore Leonard was an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. His earliest novels, published in the 1950s, were Westerns, but he went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Among his best-known works are Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Swag, Hombre, Mr. Majestyk, and Rum Punch.
“I always refer to style as sound,” Leonard said. “The sound of the writing.”
Some of his suggestions appeared in a 2001 New York Times article that became the basis of his 2007 book, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing:
1. Never open a book with the weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
5. Keep your exclamation points under control!
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Same for places and things.
10. Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.
So… will you be writing new year’s resolutions that will support your writing practice and help it to flourish? I’d love to hear what they are! Share in the comments section if you feel so inclined, and happy 2021!