The best writing advice I ever got & other quick takes: 7QT III, seriatim.

quick expla­na­tion about the dearth of posts late­ly. (At least by my own stan­dards and wish­es; per­haps you haven’t noticed.) I have been between jobs since last month and have been using the time to take care of some per­son­al busi­ness and long-neglect­ed tasks at home. I start new employ­ment next week, which will be good for my head since I only func­tion well under rou­tine (and cof­fee mea­sured in the gal­lons) and have found myself say­ing: “What day is this? What week is this? What month is this? Is it real­ly almost Novem­ber? How old am I? How long have I been asleep? Who were you again?” I agree with Flan­nery O’Con­nor: “Rou­tine is a con­di­tion of sur­vival.” Thus next week I can get myself back on a reg­u­lar rou­tine, includ­ing read­ing and writ­ing, and that means I should be able to post about 3–4 times a week. The blog will start going in some vary­ing direc­tions, as well—not dif­fer­ent direc­tions, just addi­tion­al ones long promised. So stay tuned, reg­u­lar read­ers.

II.

When I was a grad­u­ate stu­dent, I made a con­scious effort to try not to write in an aca­d­e­m­ic style. My first year, I had used all the prop­er jar­gon, and all the expect­ed aca­d­e­m­ic log­jam of syn­tax (snooze yawn zzzzz), and only end­ed up hat­ing every­thing that I had writ­ten. When Sir Wal­ter Scott wrote about Dr. Dryas­dust, he knew where­of he spoke. I did­n’t want to be Dr. Dryas­dust. So I said to myself, “Why are you doing this? Why not write about lit­er­a­ture as though you actu­al­ly do love it and think it mat­ters and ought to be read?” (I remem­ber Joseph Heller’s won­der­ful line in Catch-22: “He knew every­thing there was to know about lit­er­a­ture except how to enjoy it.”) Only one professor—Dr. George Goodin—understood what I was up to. Every­one else told me I was being over­ly sub­jec­tive, but Dr. Good­in said to me, “You’re try­ing to do some­thing that’s very dif­fi­cult to do: write lit­er­ary crit­i­cism the way Vir­ginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence do.” (He might have added G.K. Chester­ton! Though actu­al­ly, I was try­ing to imi­tate John Irv­ing’s man­ner of writ­ing about Charles Dick­ens.) “It’s eas­i­er,” Dr. Good­in said, “to write like pro­fes­sors write. But I hope you keep try­ing.”

It’s eas­i­er to do it that way, but keep try­ing to do it this way, the hard way: What bet­ter advice could there be? Dr. Good­in also told me that he would read any­thing I gave him, which was won­der­ful encour­age­ment.

III.

Also at South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty, I got some relat­ed advice from Dr. Jack Brown—God rest his soul—who taught excel­lent cours­es in Shake­speare and Mil­ton. I think I learned more about how to read lit­er­a­ture from Dr. Brown and Dr. Good­in than from any­one else. In Mil­ton, Dr. Brown devot­ed one entire class ses­sion to review­ing some Eng­lish his­to­ry, as back­ground to the prop­er under­stand­ing of Par­adise Lost and Sam­son Ago­nistes and The Tenure of Kings and Mag­is­trates and much of the rest of Mil­ton we were going to read.

Many of stu­dents were bored with this; I sus­pect they want­ed to com­plain about how Mil­ton hat­ed women. That’s all any­one did in grad­u­ate school in those days. For all I know, that’s all any­one does now. At any rate, after class was over, dur­ing office hours, I assured Dr. Brown I knew what he was up to: You can’t under­stand Mil­ton with­out under­stand­ing Eng­lish his­to­ry. He not­ed that he had always tried, and failed, to have a course in Eng­lish his­to­ry be required for grad­u­ate stu­dents. It is not just Mil­ton; it is hard-going to under­stand half of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture with­out know­ing the his­to­ry. “Well, I’ll just learn it on my own,” I told him.

“And you can learn it on your own!” Dr. Brown told me. “Peo­ple have this mis­tak­en view that, in order to learn some­thing, you need to take a course in it or get a degree in it. But the sen­si­ble thing to do, when you want to learn a sub­ject, is just to read.”

If some­one tells you to “Write about what you know,” they’re full of it. My mot­to is C.S. Lewis’s: “I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.” You don’t have to go out and lay waste to Troy before you can write a war nov­el. Who are all these people—like Ken Follett—writing his­tor­i­cal nov­els set in the Mid­dle Ages? Do they all have time machines? Do they all have Ph.D.’s in medieval his­to­ry? No. It’s called research.

Dr. Brown’s soap­box was: Before you read any­thing else, read Vir­gil. I nev­er under­stood why. He also preached what he called “the four essen­tial Eng­lish writ­ers, plus one of your own choos­ing.” The four essen­tial writ­ers were Chaucer, Mil­ton, Spenser, and Shake­speare. My fifth was Dick­ens.

Of course, Dr. Brown was a dinosaur. Which is why he was such a great teacher.

IV.

My moth­er has always told me that she knew I was going to become a writer when I was in third grade and I wrote a sto­ry about being locked in Jim­my Carter’s trash can.

I sus­pect that this sto­ry was a polit­i­cal alle­go­ry.

V.

The only thing I know about writ­ing is this: that you have to work hard at writ­ing the kind of stuff you want to write. It does no good, if you want to write 700 page nov­els, to lis­ten to oth­ers tell you that peo­ple only read short sto­ries any­more. Don’t lis­ten to them; if you’re not com­ing up with short sto­ries, you’re not a short sto­ry writer, and the quick­est way to stop writ­ing is to spend years try­ing to learn how to write some­thing you don’t have it in you to write in the first place. Write the 700 page nov­el. Learn how to do that. Read 700 page nov­els; learn how they work, learn how they’re paced, learn what they sound like, learn how many char­ac­ters are need­ed for a 700 page nov­el, learn how many sub­plots you need to keep going. If you’re a good writer, read­ers will find you even if you’ve writ­ten 2000 pages. And frankly, any nov­el by Charles Dick­ens or Leo Tol­stoy reads faster than the three-page pon­tif­i­ca­tions of Dr. Dryas­dust. Les Mis­er­ables reads faster than a 250-page snooz­er by Mar­tin Amis. It’s also bet­ter.

Con­trari­wise, a friend once told me that the rea­son most of Hem­ing­way’s nov­els are so lousy is because he was a short sto­ry writer try­ing to write nov­els. And it’s true; no one can con­vince me that The Sun Also Ris­es and A Farewell to Arms are bet­ter than “Hills Like White Ele­phants” and “A Clean, Well-Light­ed Place.” I sus­pect the same is true of Flan­nery O’Con­nor, whose two nov­els don’t mea­sure up to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Coun­try Peo­ple.” But she did­n’t live long enough for any­one to know. Faulkn­er may have just been a freak who could write both great short sto­ries and great nov­els. But few of us are Faulkn­er.

Be the best at your kind of writ­ing, not some­one else’s. Fig­ure out how you nat­u­ral­ly write; then fig­ure out how to be the best at that kind of writ­ing, and not sec­ond- or third-best at some oth­er. Your audi­ence is the kind of peo­ple who read the kind of stuff you write. Write for that audi­ence, not some dif­fer­ent one. Find your audi­ence, not anoth­er writer’s.

Apart from that, I don’t know a damn thing.

VI.

When Prof. Lin­da Hoop­er of the Dick­ens Project at UC-San­ta Cruz was asked why Charles Dick­ens was such a great writer, she did­n’t try to com­pli­cate mat­ters: “One of the rea­sons why I believe he’s a great writer is because he was­n’t just a nov­el­ist. He was an edi­tor, he was a jour­nal­ist. He wrote let­ters all the time, he wrote plays, he wrote poems and songs. He’s some­one who wrote all the time.”

The nov­el­ist John Irv­ing has a dif­fer­ent view. “There was a stan­dard of lan­guage there,” he says. “Com­ic lan­guage; embell­ished, enhanced lan­guage; very com­pli­cat­ed sen­tences; lots of asides, as if the writer were talk­ing to sev­er­al sides of his own per­son­al­i­ty at once, as if every­thing were par­en­thet­i­cal, set apart by dash­es, semi­colons galore, colons every four or five lines. None of this one com­ma, one peri­od, and out Hem­ing­way bull­shit.”

The actor Ethan Hawke has a dif­fer­ent view. “What I most admire about Charles Dick­ens is the sheer tenac­i­ty of him—how he just writes these sto­ries after sto­ries, and the big­ness and the grand­ness of the sto­ries, and yet he takes his time and all the small details are there.”

They’re all right.

VII.

Someone—I think it was Joseph Heller, but I can’t find the quo­ta­tion; maybe it was Vonnegut—said that he nev­er wrote any­thing fun­ny where the com­e­dy was the point. The point was always dead­ly seri­ous, but he could­n’t approach seri­ous with­out being unin­ten­tion­al­ly com­ic along the way, as though by reflex. I think that’s absolute­ly right. Dick­ens would have approved. Dr. Dryas­dust would not.