Eleven Urgent And Possibly Helpful Things I Have Learned About Writing From Reading Thousands of Manuscripts

Because I find it so generous when other writers and editors do this, I am wrapping up 2022 by sharing some thoughts on how we (yes, this applies to me, as well) can make our writing more appealing to editors and agents—and, just as importantly, how we can make our writing simply better, stronger, and more effective in general. Make it more artful and true, more startling, and precise—more fully articulated, you could say.

I offer these insights after having spent the last three months immersed in thirteen manuscripts for a week-long revision intensive that I led in Mexico. That experience and the preparation it required brought focus and clarity to some of the patterns I see and have seen in manuscripts over the long run (both manuscripts in progress and “finished,” and as applied to both short works and long-form works, as well as to book-length projects). These realizations stem not just from the revision intensive I just taught, but also from more than twenty years of editorial experience, including a decade of magazine editing, developmental editing, and book coaching, and another decade in various literary roles including writing teacher, juror for Millay Colony, nonfiction editor and contest reader for Orison books, and more.

Importantly, I find that I often teach what I myself most need to learn—meaning I do not claim to have somehow transcended all of these tendencies or pitfalls myself. The bullet points on this list are aims we aspire to over a lifetime of writing. But it’s never too soon or too often to bring our attention to these aspects of craft. Also, every rule has exceptions, truly, with the only real rule of art being: you can do it if you can do it. So, everything I am about to offer is generalized by necessity. Which is okay, because we must sometimes generalize in order to say anything useful about the mechanics of craft. In the end, all we can do with lists like this one is take what is useful and leave the rest.

With that, some observations.

Attention: The number one most helpful practice you can take up to improve your writing is to pay close attention to the world. If you do this consistently and record your observations meticulously, your writing will explode with a realness and a vividness you cannot achieve any other way. Mary Oliver wasn’t kidding when she implored us, in her “instructions for living a life” from her poem “Sometimes,” to pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it. Too much of the writing submitted to me relies on abstractions and internal reflection without earning its proclamations with clear-eyed, truthful observations of the world we all share. I need precise, concrete renderings—of the world, this world, the one you and I both live in, the one I recognize—for work to come fully alive.

Internal vs. External: Speaking of internal reflection—and by this, I mean the author’s thoughts, feelings, memories, ideas, explanations, predictions, and so forth—be careful of this reflective writing. Working out these ideas in our journals may have value for us as humans, yes, but sharing those same ideas in the same way in our creative writing can be ineffective at best and grating at worst. And almost always, doing so is less effective than using powerful external details to evoke a feeling from the reader. When strung together on purpose, precise exterior observations will often point to a deeper meaning that the reader can discover for herself without having it explained. Precise, exterior observations also create true metaphors, rather than constructed, overstretched ones. This, in the end, is what we really mean by the old adage, “show don’t tell.”

More on External Observation: One more thing about exteriority—it’s clear in the workshops I teach that a lot of writers aren’t fully certain of what I mean when I say this. I find that out when a number of writers in the circle weave in a lot of interiority and reflection even when given a prompt that explicitly directs them to write only external observations of something that is right in front of them. This tendency comes from, in part, the urge we all feel to “rush to meaning,” or “throw ourselves into story” or make the writing about ourselves instead of about the world outside of ourselves. But here is the thing to remember: the external world is actually, for each of us, always, something of a reflection of our internal worlds. Therefore, the more closely you can observe and record the world outside of yourself—without making it into a story and/or making it into something about you—the more successful you will likely be, ultimately, in writing a compelling story and/or revealing something profound about yourself.

Showing vs Telling: Of course, we can and should sometimes tell. After all, summary and exposition are necessary and effective tools in creative writing, as long as we use them wisely and skillfully. For example, if you need to move us through time, compress time, or abbreviate a moment, then by all means sum it up in as few words as possible in order to clip along briskly. You can also use “telling” to interrupt the fictive dream of scene work. This can create tremendous and powerful effects. Poets know this power and use it in amazing ways. Back to Mary Oliver, we can see her harness this power intentionally whenever she interrupts her meticulous external description to grab us by the collar with an expository sentence (e.g., in “The Summer Day” she writes, after her granular depiction of a grasshopper: I don’t know what a prayer is, but I know how to pay attention). Another incredible example: the last two stanza’s of Marie Howe’s gripping poem, The Boy. So, what I am saying is this: if you want to tell me something, tell me! But tell me at the right time and in the right way (and, generally speaking, tell it as succinctly as possible). Show me the rest.

On Purpose: To do any or all of what I am suggesting above, we have to be very keenly aware of what we are doing. Our writing benefits greatly when we do things on purpose. But only when we can truly distinguish between internal/external and showing/telling can we make conscious, intentional choices about exactly what we are doing on the page, when we are doing it, and, most importantly, why are doing it. Cultivating and sharpening this intentionality will, I believe, improve our writing as much or more than any other one thing ever will, other than the paying attention practice with which I began this missive. What I crave from a piece of writing is to feel that the writer is strongly at the helm, charting a clear and determined direction, and doing it fully on purpose.

Time Control: This is related to the whole idea of doing our work on purpose. Whether your story is linear or fragmented, chronological or experimental, I need to know where I am in time, and, ideally, why I am at that place in time at this point in the story. I need to feel that you as the writer are fully in command of time and the way I am moving through it in your narrative. To clarify, I do not wish for journalistic devices in my creative nonfiction and fiction (let alone, gasp, in my poetry). Nonetheless, the who-what-where-why-when of journalism are not irrelevant in creative work. They just need to be embedded in the details in ways that are unmistakable while still being obscured enough to be artful. All of this requires that the writer be fully aware of how they are moving their reader through time. Remember, a reader can rarely be fully clear on anything not already fully clarified within the writer.

Narrative Time Awareness: This is a little different from time control, and there may be other, smarter, more technical term for this (and perhaps terms that are more recognized in the academy), but what I am talking about here is 1. The point in time from which you (or your narrator) narrate; 2. The proximity of narrative time point and the action, and 3. How on purpose that feels. What I often see is the narrative time point zooming out from the action to some distant, future moment, wherein the narrator observes/reveals something unknown to the protagonist in the scene. Can this be done to wonderful effect? Absolutely! Do I often see it done accidentally, and in ways that undermine the effectiveness of the work? Yes. So, to make sure I’m being clear about narrative time point, here’s an example of narrating from a far distant point in time—it comes at the end of the opening scene of Wilson Rawls’s famous Where the Red Fern Grows, during which the narrator observes a dog fight in the street, then returns home and looks at two trophies on his mantle and says, “I got up and took them down. There was a story in those cups—a story that went back more than a half century. As I caressed the smooth surfaces, my mind drifted back through the years, back to my boyhood days. How wonderful the memories were. Piece by piece the story unfolded.” See how the narration is from a far distance? In the next chapter, Rawls closes that distance and brings us firmly into scenes of the past, narrated right up close to and even from within the moment. It’s clear that he is doing this on purpose. Ocean Vuong does the same thing with narrating from the future in the opening of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Again, it feels entirely intentional and firmly in the writer’s control. But when writers interrupt the “in the moment” narration with a voice from a half century later in ways that feel accidental or random, it’s disorienting and can undermine the impact of the story. It can reveal things we as readers would be better off discovering more organically, in the way the discoveries were experienced by the protagonist. Fuzziness in the way a writer manages narrative time points can even create confusion in terms of overall time control.  Memoirists, of course, are prone to zooming out to the future to offer prediction or reflection—and while this is sometimes necessary and effective, it can, when done without care, be distracting and confusing. The key is to be aware and intentional.

Defamiliarization: Our most important job as writers is—I believe—to make language capable of telling the truth. The essayist, activist, and poet Wendell Berry has written about this idea many times. In 2010, he addressed it in a letter to an English teacher and her class, writing: “By taking up the study of writing … you are assuming consciously … a responsibility for our language. What is that responsibility? I think it is to make words mean what they say. It is to keep our language capable of telling the truth. We live in a time when we are surrounded by language that is glib, thoughtless, pointless, or deliberately false. If you learn to pay critical attention to what you hear on radio or television or read in the newspapers, you will see what I mean.” Just think, Berry wrote this letter in 2010! His sentiments are not so much prescient as keenly observant of a trend away from truth that has been in process since long, long before Donald Trump took office, and Berry’s words, for me at least, underscore the artist’s deep moral obligation to truth in the face of this massive pendulum swing toward double speak and confusion. In these times, the pursuit of truth in any and all of its forms may be the most radical act of all. In order to succeed with making language capable of telling the truth, we must get very close up to words themselves. We must love the words for their own sake—for their shapes and sounds, their strangeness and quirks. And we must test those same words over and over again to see if they are the absolute best fit for the job. We must reject overly easy, overly familiar images and phrases and push ourselves instead for the slight adjustment that can make a world of difference.

Take Larry Levis’s poem, Winter Stars, in which the speaker stares not through dark or bare or wide branches of an oak, but wet branches. And in which he gives us not bright or twinkling or sparkling stars, but a “thin haze of them, persisting.” This is what it means to defamiliarize language enough to let it hold truth. If the language is so familiar it washes over us, any truth it contains will be lost.

Plain language: On the other hand, de-familiarization does not mean fancified, writerly cartwheels that feel untrue and take away from the power of the story and its emotional impact. George Orwell tells us never to use a long word where a short one will do. E.B. White on the other hand said, “Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.” I do experience this, and caution writers to avoid words and images that literally fight with one another for the reader’s attention. My feeling about this practice is that it can cause a state of “image indigestion.” Back to Larry Levis’s poem, think of the simple language that creates images such as “wet branches of an oak” or “thin haze of [stars], persisting,” or, to give you a couple of full-line examples:

I wound up believing in words the way a scientist

Believes in carbon, after death

and

It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind,

The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again—

Which may be all that’s left of you & me.

Just revel in what a writer can do with simple, plain language that tells the truth!

Aboutness: I say this with all the love in the world: writers, you must dig deeply enough into your own work, and revise it enough times (usually that’s a lot of times), to know what it is really about. How explicit you make this aboutness is up to you, and should be dictated by the genre in which you are writing and by the nature of the piece itself. But if you cannot say in plain simple language what your piece is, at its core, about (and this is usually going to be related to, but distinct from, what happens in the piece), then the piece is probably not finished. You cannot do as Emily Dickenson says—tell the truth, but tell it slant—if you have not yet identified the truth you are seeking to set askew. And to note: general themes such as “grief” or “forgiveness” or “a search for becoming” are not “aboutness.” Aboutness is the middle ground between those broader, deeper themes and the “what happens” or “plot” of your piece. Aboutness is what we need to pin down when writing jacket copy for a book. Aboutness is related to the point-of-view character and what she wants and the misbeliefs that get in the way of her getting it. Aboutness is grounded in whatever is at stake in your piece. Aboutness should be something you can sum up in just a few clear, compelling sentences that would make someone want to read the rest of the piece. Don’t short shrift aboutness. It’s worth the time to discover for yourself what it is your essay or story is trying to say, at the center of its own heart of heart. And, as cautious as I feel about saying this—because I LOVE fragmented work that makes me work for its aboutness—even fragmented work should have an idea of what it is about. As T Kira Madden said on Twitter in her own thread recently (which inspired me to write this essay): ‘[A]re you avoiding finding the connective thread, lingering in scene, or exploring consequences for your characters past the point of comfort?” These are questions worth asking ourselves.

Beginnings: You’ve heard this one before, but please pay special and urgent attention to your beginnings. Remember that it’s not unusual that we should rewrite our beginnings entirely once we know (really know) what our piece is about, because we have finally finished writing and revising it. So be open throwing out your beginning and starting again. Look carefully to make sure you have not included an unnecessary on-ramp to the work. I want you to pull me straight into the thing itself, no small talk leading me up to it. And whether you rewrite your beginning or improve the one you already have, give your whole heart to defamiliarization. Wake that language up! Waste no words. But do not hold back. As Annie Dillard says, “Give it all, give it now.”

Endings: Perhaps the hardest thing of all is to write a truly satisfying ending—one that is both surprising and inevitable, as the best endings are. Yes, revise your ending. Yes, defamiliarize the language with which it tells its truths. But most of all, be sure you have done the full work of discovering the aboutness of your story or essay before you try to write a good ending. Often, the trouble with endings is the result of not just the ending itself, but also the prose that precedes it. Has the ending been fully earned? Have you planted enough breadcrumbs on the path through the forest to establish that “inevitability,” while holding enough back to create enough surprise or at least, revelation? You cannot answer these questions until you have wrestled long and hard with the aboutness of your piece and settled the score with enough confidence to deliver not only a beautiful ending, but one that is fully deserved by all that comes before it.

There you have it. And if you have read this far, then I sincerely hope this list has offered you some ideas to wrangle with in your work in the new year—and in a good way. Because, after all, wrangling is what we do as literary artists. Our writing is a process of discovery, not a matter of recitation. And it starts with language, our one and only tool. It starts with a celebration of and devotion to words, and a willingness to let go of what we think we know in order to take a chance on discovering something far truer. As Margaret Atwood says, “Poetry isn’t written from the idea down. It’s written from the phrase, line, and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.” Try this not only for poetry, but for prose as well, and see where it takes you. You may very well be surprised—in the best possible way.

With Love,

Jeannine

PS If you want a powerful introduction to paying attention through the lens of embodied writing, registration is now open for the first Elephant Rock writing workshop of 2023, taught by Jill Swenson, Writing with Brain & Body, January 7. You can also check out the other upcoming Elephant Rock classes here (more to be announced soon). Meanwhile, happiness to you and yours this holiday season and into the new year! Xo

PPS If you find this Substack valuable, a paid subscription might be a wonderful gift for a writer in your life! Or for yourself!