How To Be A Writer

From the Archive | 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?

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 pr…