HOW TO WRITE? GOOD QUESTION

 

Every now and then, the literary section of some magazine or newspaper will try to come up with a winning formula for how to go about creative writing. In most cases, they will interview living writers and/or research quotes by authors from the past to see if they can come up with a set of rules that they all share within the general diversity of their craft. Personally, if I were the assignment editor for any such publication, I would tell whoever suggested such an article that it was a fool’s errand. Why? Because the only rule that all real writers share is that “true writers write…always.”

For writers—whether you’re born with it or develop it—storytelling is an obsession. You write because you can’t help it, even if nobody reads it. If you’re lucky enough to make a living at it, all the better, because you’re going to do it in any case. But to ask how writers write, is to walk into a veritable minefield of contradictions.

For instance, suggestions by published writers that I’ve read over the years include these: Get up early. Stay up late. Work out strenuously. Save your strength. Get out, meet people and see the world. Try to isolate yourself as much as possible to avoid distractions. Write long hand. Use a typewriter. Use a word processor. Avoid word processors. Make sure you have a comfortable chair. Stand up to write. You can never drink enough. You should never drink at all. Write in the morning. Write at night. Write all day. Have a schedule. Don’t regiment yourself. Create a detailed outline. Let the story take you where it will. Write what you know. Write outside your comfort zone…and so on and on the contradictions go.

Gellhorn and Hemingway

It was Martha Gellhorn who, when asked if drinking helped a writer write, said you could never drink enough. It worked for her. She smoked and drank heavily most of her very long life, and, despite that fact, she is recognized as one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century. Born in 1908—a native of St Louis—she covered every major conflict from the Spanish Civil War in the thirties, through Vietnam in the sixties, and beyond, to Central America’s widespread civil strife in the seventies and eighties. It wasn’t until the 1990s that she finally declared herself too old to cover the brewing conflict in the Balkans, but then went on a working tour of Brazil to cover chronic poverty there.

Over the course of her life, she wrote more than a score of books, both non-fiction and fiction, as well as being a prolific reporter, whose articles graced the pages of world-renowned journals. Despite her prodigious life as a writer, she found time for numerous love affairs and a couple of marriages, the most resounding of all of which was her affair with and then tumultuous four-year marriage to novelist Ernest Hemingway, who was jealous of her talent, but whose fame would overshadow the rest of her career as a writer. So much so, that she used to grant interviews only to those who promised Hemingway’s name would not be brought up. The competition between her and the legendary American novelist was such that in her travel memoir, Travels with Myself and Another, she refers throughout to Hemingway (who was the “Another” in the title) as U.C.—Unwilling Companion.

It was only in the last four years of her life that Gellhorn’s health failed her, which for her was like being a grounded flying ace. Perpetual motion and working on the fly was her method of writing, “being there” in order to write authentically about people and places. She committed suicide at eighty-nine in London, where she was living at the time.

As for her erstwhile spouse and later nemesis, Hemingway’s philosophy was, “Done by noon, drunk by three.” But despite his flamboyant lifestyle and legendary drinking prowess, he was, perhaps, one of the most disciplined writers in history. No matter what sort of adventure and debauchery he had put himself through the day and night before, at six each morning, he was present and accounted for at the service of his muse. And like a literary soldier standing guard over his stories, from six to twelve noon, he devoted his entire attention to writing.

Sometimes writing longhand, other times on a typewriter, he often worked standing up, nursing an old war wound. Tossing page after page to the floor like so much scrap, he would go back later and edit until he had a series of sentences in which not a single word was extraneous—a stark, triple-distilled and highly effective kind of prose that many American writers have sought since to emulate in one way or another. He, more than any other American author, by his example taught other writers that when it came to word counts, less was more. 

But Hemingway proved, in the end, less resistant to such a demanding if often gratifying lifestyle than his third wife (Gellhorn). Both mentally and physically burned out, and no longer able to write, he too chose suicide over living any but an uncompromising life, shooting himself in July of 1961, shortly before his sixty-second birthday.

Largely because of the alcoholic fame of such authors as Hemingway, Gellhorn, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Bukowski, Dylan Thomas, Hunter S. Thomson, Raymond Carver and many more, a lot of aspiring writers figure one of the keys to writing is heavy drinking. Stephen King, who tried it—tried the hell out of it, in fact—has a message for them. It doesn’t work and you end up writing in spite of your drinking rather than because of it.

Says King: “The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers—common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.”

Stephen King

As an aside, let me just say that, coming from a time when hard-boiled newsmen were expected to “know how to drink” as well as how to write, I’ve tried both—drinking beyond all reasonable limits and not drinking at all. Neither works for me, and I recommend (to anyone capable of it, because some people just aren’t) moderation.

More to the point of method, in his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft—to my mind the best book in the author’s massive bibliography—King writes, “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”

The best-selling author adds, “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”

And my favorite King writing quote of all: “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

A younger-generation admirer of Hemingway’s, Raymond Carver (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love), in my view, surpassed his literary hero, both as an inveterate drunk and as an absolute master of short fiction. His alcoholism dominated pretty much everything in his brief but brilliant life up until the final decade, before his death from lung cancer at age fifty. It even dictated his mastery of short fiction and precluded any thought of being a novelist. By his own admission, his need for serious drinking time was greater than his often-latent desire for creative time.

Between that fact and the parade of crappy jobs he took in his early years to keep body and soul together—delivery man, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill laborer, among others—while studying creative writing and attempting, with only fleeting success, to be a husband and father, he was left precious little time in which he was free enough and lucid enough to put word to page. But when he did, he quite successfully created some of the most powerful American short stories and free-verse poetry of the twentieth century.

Raymond Carver

At the height of his drinking, however, Carver reached a point when, according to him, he “gave up writing and became a full-time alcoholic.” Locked in a vicious cycle of binges, detox, withdrawal and relapse, he repeatedly ignored the warnings of doctors that he was at risk of serious brain damage and death if he continued on this course.

To his credit, Carver was, better late than never, able to place, first, living and, then, writing before his insatiable thirst, and quit cold turkey. Until then, drinking (not writing) had wrecked his career, his marriage and his life. But after he went to AA and got sober—though still nursing a dependency on cannabis and occasional cocaine—his life as a published writer and respected member of academia flourished. And by the time of his death, despite never having written a novel—something traditional publishers claim is a must—he had reached worldwide renown and his short works and poetry had been translated into twenty-two languages.

Carson McCullers

But in a very real sense, while their demons may often be the poisonous inkwell into which they dip their quill, the business of writing itself is divorced from them. No matter how self-indulgent the very best writers might be in their personal lives, they come to the task of writing with almost religious respect and purpose. They do so, as King points out, in spite of their weaknesses, their infidelities and their petty complaints. With the page before them, they put everything else aside, skim the cream from their hearts and souls, and pour it onto the page. Famed Southern writer Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) once said, “Writing for me is a search for God.” Her fellow Southerner, Flannery O’Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find), said, “You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s suffering and not your own.”   

Flannery O'Connor

But for that, you need method, and as I said at the outset, this is where the rubber meets the road. There is simply no method that can be considered the definitive one for all aspiring writers to follow. This, again, is a great quote about method from Flannery O’Connor: “Every morning between nine and twelve I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit there for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea comes between nine and twelve I am there ready for it.”

William Faulkner

William Faulkner had some simple but sage advice: “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” He added that it was important “to train oneself in ruthless intolerance” and, no matter how much one might fall in love with a page or paragraph, “to throw away anything that is false.”

Virginia Woolf, who wrote that, in order to write, a woman needed “money and a room of her own”, felt that, for the writer, “incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.”  

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon) once suggested that, in writing, “It is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.” She also felt that, “Writing is really a way of thinking—not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.”

Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) explains the writing process perhaps as succinctly as anyone has ever managed to: “The right way of doing things is whatever happens to be working for you. Some people have to start at the beginning and go through in order until they get to the end. Other people are making pieces and then arranging them. Some people like to work on (stories) at the page level, at the sentence level, and get that perfect before they move on. There is no set of surefire rules that are going to work for everyone. So you can try these suggestions. If they don't work for you, the wastepaper basket is your friend.”

Margaret Atwood

Truman Capote suggested that “writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them.” He also suggested that rigorous editing was key, adding, “I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” Capote graphically summed up the “post-partum” depression of completing a writing project when he wrote, “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”

On that same topic, John Steinbeck is quoted as saying, “To finish is sadness to a writer—a little death. He puts down the last word and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.” He also admitted, “I have written a great many stories and still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.”

John Steinbeck

As to how aspiring writers know whether they have any business writing at all, Gloria Steinem (Revolution From Within) once said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” And most writers agree that sitting down thinking you’re going to write a bestseller is sheer stupidity. Says Native American (and German-American) writer Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine): “It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That’s how one has to write anyway—in secret.”

Gloria Steinem

As to the question most often asked of writers by “civilians”—Where do you get your ideas?—American poet Sylvia Plath said, “Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” (I can vouch for that from firsthand experience). And Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende says simply, “Write what should not be forgotten.” (Actually, I guess that could be a perfect motto for this blog, because it’s precisely why I started writing it). My own experience as a writer is, of course, humble by comparison to any of these celebrities. I am, I suppose, what is commonly referred to in literary circles as “a hack”. But writing, in one form or another, has been my sole source of income for the past four and a half decades, which at least makes me a professional hack. There really aren’t a lot of writers who can say that. So there’s that, even if, although having written or adapted numerous books published under other people’s names, and having written and published literally thousands of articles, essays, op-eds and blog entries, I have yet to have published a book under my own name. But then again, I’m not done yet!

Louise Erdrich

Still, after forty-five years of professional writing, you’re bound to learn a few things and, for what they’re worth, these are my suggestions to anyone who has ever entertained any sort of literary aspiration:

Read! Broadly, intensively, obsessively, eclectically. Figure out what makes you like the authors you love best and not like the ones you have trouble reading. Try copying different styles, just as an exercise, not to publish. If a painter is good enough to successfully forge a great work, he or she is good enough to paint one. Then write...write...write! Have a schedule, sit in front of your computer, typewriter, yellow legal pad, parchment and quill, whatever, at a certain hour each day, every day. It doesn’t have to be the same hour every day, but you need to consciously or subconsciously pencil writing in at some point in your day, even if it’s only time you take to write a few pages in a journal, if you keep one. If you don’t, you might want to think about it since it helps you keep your brightest thoughts and observations from fluttering off into the night. Writers don't take weekends or days off unless they’re too sick to write. If you have to remind yourself to write, it’s a pretty safe bet you’re not a writer.

Stories don’t necessarily start at the beginning. They usually start wherever you can lay hands on them. I often write the end of things before the beginning, or the start and finish and worry about the middle later.

Fall in love with your ideas, not with your words. Be ruthless with your writing—cut, slash, burn. Usually the writing that comes off looking like it was written effortlessly is the product of a process of obsessive-compulsive tinkering that makes it look that way—and often drives writers to drink.

My own method—perhaps born of twenty years of journalism in which what you put on the page stays on the page because there’s seldom time to go back and rewrite a dozen times—differs from that of many who have always been creative writers and never journalists. Those people tend to pour their thoughts onto the page in an often chaotic first draft and then go back and revise over and over again. I try to write the very best I can in each line and paragraph as I go, seeking to leave out anything extraneous. Then every few pages or paragraphs, whenever I’ve completed a thought, I go back and re-write it, and re-write it, and re-write until it sounds the way I want it to.

But no matter how I get there, I agree with the creative thoroughbreds that, as Argentina’s best-known writer, Jorge Luis Borges, once suggested, the only solution to edition is publication. The key to good writing is, then, working until you think it’s the best that it can be—and then going back to see what else you can do to improve it.

I used to think my intrinsic under-confidence was the worst enemy of my writing aspirations. And in terms of self-promotion, that has certainly been the case. But when it comes to writing itself, I think anybody who considers him or herself a genius is handicapped from the outset. Genius may be great in mathematics or quantum physics. But writing is a craft that's all about hard work. And now and then if you’re very diligent and very lucky, it might actually approach some level of art.

If you've done all that, it should look to the reader as if you just wrote it off the top of your head (and from the bottom of your heart). If it proves to be something brilliant, provocative, shocking, compelling, disturbing, or just plain beautiful, you've probably done the best you could.

But try to do better the next time.