How To Be A Writer

From the Archives | 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?

Words are my lifeblood.

I’ve been fashioning a life out of this word and that one, placed one after the next, for more than 30 years. And some days, it seems like the longer I write, the less I know about writing.

Or at least, the more I know, the less I know for sure. That is to say, the more there is to discover, including how some of what I once believed about language—what it is, how it works, and how to make it do things like tell the truth—no longer feels relevant, or true.

Some ragged scraps, though, seem to stick. These scraps feel like a kind of wisdom that exists all by itself, separate from any skill, talent, or expertise I may ever have or lack.

Below are a few of those sticky scraps, which, taken together, form a ragged cloak of comfort I put on when I feel overwhelmed with the task of language, the stakes of truth, and the effort and luck involved in making something real out of words.

Start With Reading

We all know good writing starts with reading greedily and discerningly, and well beyond our own tastes—for example, in recent years I pushed myself toward dystopian fiction and have since not only discovered many works I love—Station Eleven, High High We Go in the Dark, Parable of the Sower, The School for Good Mothers—but have also learned things that strengthened my own writing and improved my life (that last part is not an exaggeration!). I also try to read older books alongside the new and contemporary work of my peers. I’m presently reading several novels, two of them being Snow Falling on Cedars, which, in addition to being an older book, falls also outside my range which does not typically encompass much historical fiction, and also Rene Denfeld’s beautiful new novel, Sleeping Giants.

Obviously I read nonfiction copiously, as well, given it’s my primary writing genre, and am as we speak devouring two ARCs—Docile by Hyeseung Song, and The Well-Trained Wife, by Tia Levings.

But I read poetry, too. Lots and lots of poetry.

As Ada Limon has said, “That’s how this machine works.”

I invite you to join me in reading poetry, even if you think it’s not for you!

People think poetry is hard or inaccessible or obtuse, but it doesn’t have to be. At all. If you clicked on the Ada Limon poem I just referred to, you will see what I mean.

Poetry is just a way of being very close up to the world with our words. Poetry is a way of becoming the world with our words.

Prose writers, especially, have so much to learn from the poets. We need to read the work of young writers and old writers. We need to read, in addition to the classics, the work of living writers and debut writers. Above all we need to read writers who don’t look like ourselves, whose lives haven’t looked like ours, who come from places far from where we live, and most of all, whose voices haven’t risen easily above the white male din that drowns everyone else out.

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. Never 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. Never reveal something so true it can burn through the last layer of our self-delusion and awaken us at a whole new level.

So we must also write the hard way. Because while writing for pleasure and catharsis and the satisfaction of a growing word count is well and good at times, we must, if we are to really “do language” as Toni Morrison claims we are here to do, mostly write for the strain and difficulty and torment of it. We must allow ourselves to write hard, write toward and through the demanding task of carving meaning from a flabby, overused language that has become, in the digital age, mostly used for “content.”

Writing should feel like a wrestling match—a grueling effort that leaves us spent and bruised.

Maybe that sounds unpleasant. But it’s not. It’s invigorating to wrestle with language in this way. This effort is how we reclaim the language, and also how we transform and progress as writers, artists, human beings.

This effort is where we meet ourselves anew (and isn’t that the reason for it all?) through grasping at first desperately, and then exactingly, after the perfect verb, through the slashing of pages and pages of “process writing” that are important to wade through as part of the hunt for the actual story, but that do not belong to the actual story, and therefore also do not belong in the actual story.

This sweaty effort is our chance for a wide-open and unflinching observation of our limitations on the page, and our chance to get back up, go back in there, and try again, but harder. This process can repeat itself for as long as we live. There is no destination. Art and the truth within it always remain just this far beyond our grasp. It’s in the act reaching that we encounter, however briefly, the possibility of self, other, and world.

This effort is where art happens—and it’s the art that matters.

Speaking of art, as writers we need to notice our surroundings with a sense of interest, wonder, and awe. We need to cultivate a searing curiosity about everything and everyone, because curiosity is the genesis of empathy. Our job as writers is to ask why, why, why, why, and be doggedly interested in the multiplicity of possibilities rather than relying too surely on what we think we know.

We must build a great tolerance for uncertainty. This requires a willingness to fail, make messes, write badly in a new way over writing the same thing we already know how to write. We need to learn to love uncertainty, and to consistently choose it over the temptation of knowing.

We need to sit quietly in the dark, even if it hurts.

And by all means we can’t obsess constantly on publication or the workings of the industry. If we want to publish, we should worry about that when the time comes. And the time comes when we’re pretty damn sure (which is as sure as we ever will be) that we’ve written something that’s ready—that’s good enough—for publication. In the meantime, it’s probably better to spend our time writing and improving the writing rather than scheming on the best strategy for breaking in.

Perfecting the writing is an alchemical process that requires an openness to perpetual discovery and refinement. Good writing has a raw, disobedient quality, a feral disposition. That’s what allows it to leap off the page. But achieving prose with that kind of unruly abandon almost always requires an untold amount of grunt work. Good writing that breathes and even gasps on the page almost never comes from focusing on market trends, though many commercially successful books do result from doing exactly that. But a commercially successful book and a transcendent piece of writing are not one and the same. The latter may certainly become the former and it sometimes does, but more often, it does not.

The frequent disconnect between powerful art and commercial remuneration must be understood and accepted from the outset.

Ultimately, we gain the most from focusing on our writing as a practice no different from meditation—we show up, we struggle, we break through or we don’t, and then we do it again.

Only over the course of months, years, decades, a lifetime, if ever, do we begin to see clearly the pattern of our own intricate unfolding within the context of not just our own life, but of everything.

The whole world.

Which is, of course, the point.

Love,
Jeannine

The Visceral Self: Writing Through The Body

Starting next week, on April 3, Writing in the Dark’s next 12-week seasonal intensive will explore embodied writing for all genres. We truly hope you’ll join us. We would love to write with you.

And if you are curious about embodied writing, here are some posts I’ve shared recently to give a sense of how I approach writing through the body, which begins with the senses:

1. “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final ... Nearby is the country they call life.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

2. I Was A Child in A Child’s Body

3. Some Might Have Called the Roses Garish

4. This is My Body, Filling My Body

5. Sleeping Birds Are Vulnerable

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If you or someone you know is walking the long path back to yourself after a painful childhood, then my memoir, The Part That Burns, might help light your way.