January 15, 2012
Advice From A Scribe: Part 2
I wrote a bunch of advice for young writers last week, and I thought I was done being insufferably preachy and schoolmarmish. But I kept thinking about all the stuff I had left off the list for brevity’s sake, all the pet peeves that continued to peeve me, and I my inbox continued to fill up with pitches from aspiring writers linking to their sub-literate blogs. Apparently, one post telling people how to write wasn’t enough to suddenly turn the world into a bunch of hard-edged, precise prosesmiths with copies of “The Elements of Style” tucked in their breast pockets. So here’s some additional advice. Hopefully, this will do the trick.
1. Know What You Write
I never liked that old chestnut about “Writing what you know.” If you are just starting out in the world of reading, writing, and learning about the world, chances are you don’t know much, and writing only what you know limits you to writing about things like high school, riding the bus, and failing at sports (those are three things knew something about early on, anyway). The way to solve this problem is to learn stuff, which shouldn’t be that hard—you like to read, right? Read a lot, and read about a lot of different topics. Stalk church and library book sales, used bookstores, search your parents’ bookshelves. Get out of your comfort zone and read history books about things you’ve never heard of. Spend some time wandering through Wikipedia entries. Read a book until you’re bored with it and then cast it aside (you don’t need to finish books, especially not nonfiction ones). Read books if they have weird covers or titles. Above all, please—read books not assigned to you by teachers or other adults. Learning stuff this way not only makes you a more interesting person to talk to, it makes you a more interesting writer to read. (The two things are rather closely related.)
2. Be a Critic
The last bit of advice I have is probably the most important, and it should be pretty self-evident, but it’s helpful to be reminded of every now and again: When you’re reading, ask yourself questions. Do you think this piece of prose is good? Bad? Does it inspire feeling, thought? Then go deeper: How is it good or bad? What do you like or dislike about it? Is there a pleasing repetition of words, or is the repetition annoying; are the verbs driving the sentences; do the sentences vary their rhythms and lengths? Taking apart the writing of others can be a useful way to start thinking about writing in a technical, exacting way; noticing annoying tics and habits in others will help you identify your own bad habits. The problem with this, I realize, that it is not a very fun thing to do. If you prefer to just sit down and write, to vomit your thoughts out onto paper without lifting the pencil up, if you think of your work as a precious poetic art that will wither up if you try to analyze it—I’ve run into more than one young writer who thinks this way—you won’t care much for the suggestion that you should pay attention to mundane things like the length of sentences or varying your verbs. But writing isn’t pure abstract inspiration; it’s a skill, like swinging a golf club, and like any skill you get better by practicing at it and breaking it down into its component parts. It’s not fun—at least not in the same way that just sitting down and scrawling your freeform thoughts out in your journal is fun—but at least there’s the off chance that if you take your writing, and the practice of writing, seriously, other people will take you seriously too.
