You’ll quickly notice that the advice is straightforward when you walk into any serious writing workshop. Every day, write. Remove anything that isn’t necessary. Talk about what you’re scared to say. Read aloud what you’ve written. These concepts are not novel, obscure, or particularly challenging to comprehend. They are nearly always challenging to accomplish. The majority of writing careers quietly stagnate in the space between understanding the advice and acting upon it.
Over the course of five years, Joe Fassler interviewed over 150 writers for The Atlantic, including novelists, essayists, poets, and authors of some of the most well-known books of the past few decades. He discovered that the concepts that kept coming up were not particularly complex. Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell gave him the straightforward advice, “Neglect everything else.” As an operational instruction, not as a hyperbole. No other advice can reach you if you’re not taking the time to write. Victor Lavalle protects a two-hour window in the morning from the conflicting demands of teaching and parenting. Because his writing originates from his private self, Jonathan Franzen has discussed the need to protect it. Before you try to live by the advice for a month, it seems almost insultingly straightforward.
The issue with the most helpful writing advice is that it necessitates a level of ego management that most people find genuinely uncomfortable. One of the most often cited pieces of craft wisdom in the industry is Stephen King’s observation about editing: “Good editing means cutting something you love because it isn’t working.” The same concept was expressed differently by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: perfection is reached when there is nothing left to take away, not when there is nothing left to add. They’re both saying the same thing. In reality, both describe a situation that is similar to losing something. Even so, seasoned writers learn how to do it. The writing suffers as a result of younger authors’ tendency to compromise, maintain, and rationalize.
A mechanical solution to the cutting problem is provided by Richard Lanham’s Paramedic Method, which was first described in his book Revising Prose. It involves highlighting prepositions, highlighting passive verb forms, identifying who is doing what to whom, converting to active, starting quickly, and reading aloud. Every passage Lanham revised saw a significant reduction in word count, frequently by more than half, without any loss of meaning. The remaining sentences flowed more quickly and were cleaner. The exercise highlights a problem with most first-draft prose: the words that seemed authoritative and thoughtful frequently said nothing at all. Instead of attaining depth, they were acting it out.
Another piece of advice that writers are aware of, agree with, and often disregard is reading aloud. In his article about creating four New York Times bestsellers, Tucker Max recounts the moment he recorded his audiobook and discovered, after several rounds of editorial review, a hundred minor word choice mistakes that no one had noticed on the page. They were audible to the ear but invisible to the eye. There was an error in rhythm. Some constructions that made sense when read silently fell apart as soon as they were spoken. In addition to being accurate, the rule of thumb—if you wouldn’t say it aloud to someone else, it probably won’t read clearly on the page—is almost perfectly positioned to be disregarded by writers who are sick of looking at their own work and want to finish it.
However, the advice that is most often repeated is also the hardest. Write down the things you’re scared to say. In the words of Bill Stout, “Whether or not you write well, write bravely.” It is based on a fairly specific observation: readers are, at some level, constantly looking for truth in a recognizable form, and a writer who consistently avoids saying what they really want to say creates work that evokes no emotion at all. This is not an abstract source of anxiety. It has to do with the particular discomfort of writing something authentic and then having to deal with it being read. The majority of writers deal with this by qualifying, softening, or steering toward safer ground, but the effort they put into avoiding it is exactly equal to the energy they expend on the work.
Observing all of this from the outside gives one the impression that writing is not as mysterious as it is sometimes made out to be. The fundamentals are not concealed. They are essentially common knowledge in any serious writing community because enough authors have stated them clearly and frequently enough. The daily act of following them, such as sitting down without inspiration, cutting the sentence you worked on the longest, saying the thing that makes you uncomfortable, or reading the entire thing aloud when you’d prefer to just turn it in and be done, is what’s really difficult. When asked if there were any rules, Neil Gaiman replied that there were just one: can you do this with joy, style, and confidence? It sounds liberating. It’s also a covert way of saying that you have to do the work and that no amount of guidance will help.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.