From the Archive | How To Be A Writer

Building piles and piles of words is not enough. Good writing has a raw, disobedient quality, a feral disposition. So how do we achieve that?

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Writing is wild. People have come up with many brilliant ways to do it—many different brilliant ways.

Maybe that’s why some people think writing can’t be taught. But I think it absolutely can—it’s just that not all teachers are good fits for all learners.

That said, writing can be hard to teach, because writing is an art, and it’s personal. Plus, it’s a little weird, the whole idea of making totally alive things out of nothing but words. How unlikely! Yet, language itself is unlikely, too.

So is life.

And everything changes all the time, including my ideas about writing, which are constantly shaped and reshaped just through me being alive, the same way the beach is shaped and reshaped by life of the ocean tides, their rise and fall, and by the ceaseless coastal winds and storms.

So, in that spirit, I share these ideas even in the sure knowledge they will continue shifting and evolving.

Good writing starts with reading. We grow by reading greedily and discerningly and well beyond our preferred genres and tastes. It’s wonderful to expose ourselves to so many different styles of writing and to stay open.

We need to read poetry, too.

Prose writers, especially, have so much to learn from poets.

Poetry gives us a heightened, precise experience of language through concrete specific images, through the pleasure of rhythm, and through the surprise of silence. Poetry teaches us how to point and how to listen, and shows us how to do more with less and how to say something profound without saying it at all. Poetry also brings us back to the question of who we are and why we are here but only by first bring our full attention to the delicacy of the skin over a girl’s wrist.

So yes, we must read truly, madly, deeply, but also, we must take great pains to decode the works we read so that we can figure out exactly what those writers did to make certain passages and whole books so arresting. This kind of reading, this close reading for the craft of it, is what will change us into the writers we hope to become.

Of course, we must write, too, as much as we can, day after day, showing up for the arduous work putting one word after the next, again and again and again.

But there is more to it than that, because building piles and piles of words is not enough. Building piles of words can even teach us bad habits, get us into the practice of writing lazy sentences, sentences that will never sing. So we must