The late David Carr was one of the great hires at the New York Times when they were still doing fantastic, deep-dive media journalism. Recovered addict and veteran writer, Carr was a great one for delivering hard-bitten yet inspiring advice.
Keep typing until it turns into writing.
No notes.
When Paul Auster started publishing his New York City trilogy in the 1980s, he occupied a then-unusual space in American literature. An austere artist of deeply European instincts and a suspicion of the big gesture, he didn’t have the blustering hurly-burly of the 1970s crowd (your Mailers, Bellows, and Roths) and seemed to chart a new way forward that was cool in temperament like the New Wavers (Ellis, McInerney) but more finely chiseled.
When he passed away this week, Auster was beautifully eulogized by many, including Lucy Sante, who came up with one of the more moving renderings of
His paragraphs were a moving sidewalk — it was more comfortable to ride than to hop off — so you could read him for hours, as his plots twisted and turned…
There was a kind of fatalism to Auster’s work that called to mind the French writers whose spirit he inhabited (perhaps even more so, those adopted by France like Samuel Beckett). You can see it here, in a piece of advice for writers with ambitions:
You can never achieve what you hope to achieve. You can come close sometimes and others may appreciate your work, but you, the author, will always feel you’ve failed. You know you’ve done your best, but your best isn’t good enough. Maybe that’s why you keep writing. So you can fail a little better the next time…
So now that Taylor Swift is name-checking Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith, creating library-themed pop-ups, and igniting fierce debate over apostrophes, it seems time to welcome her to the literary community, yes?
In a sense, Taylor was already here, as is any songwriter who tries to write lyrics with story, character, and meaning rather than just sounds to accompany the music (looking your way, Dave Grohl).
What can Taylor teach us about writing? In her speech at the 2022 Nashville Songwriters Awards (there’s that pesky lack of an apostrophe again), she broke her lyrics down into three categories, defined by the imaginary writing instrument best suited in spirit to generating them:
Think of it like pseudonyms. Joyce Carol Oates likes to write mystery novels under the name Rosamond Smith, even after people found out it was her. Same with J.K. Rowling and her Robert Galbraith books. Why? One reason could be that a different writing identity helps you shape the words and imagine the story differently. Setting could be the same. You might scribble something down fast with a Bic on a napkin at a bar which will be very different from something you come up with sitting with your laptop in a quiet sun-lit room overlooking a lake.
Not everything you write will be the same. It shouldn’t be. Vary your material whenever possible.
Every now and again, reach for the glitter gel pen.
You may have noticed those ‘Writer’s Desk‘ posts which have been appearing on this site for a few years now. Or not (lot of content out there).
In any case, a little while back I thought it made sense to try and put some of these ideas to paper. Since I’ve been doing some writing for Workman Publishing, innovators of and home to Page-A-Day calendars, I pitched them a concept for a writing inspiration calendar. They liked it and now here we are, with The Writer’s Year: 365 Days of Inspiration, Prompts, and Quotes for 2025 available for pre-order. It comes with:
The Writer’s Year publishes in August. If you place your pre-order now through May 3 and use the discount code (NEWCAL25) you can get 20% off.
You would think that writers like David Baldacci have it easy. Forty-something novels, a ridiculous percentage of which are bestsellers; clearly writing another one is just like rolling out of bed. Right?
You have to ask yourself why you want to be a writer and you have to have passion in the belly for it. It can’t be just because you hate your day job and you want to sell the film rights, because it’s going to take a long time. It’s a craft, which means you’re going to be an apprentice for life. Nobody ever masters the art of writing…
You never stop learning to write. Which is exhilarating for some of us. If that doesn’t sound like a good way to spend your life, look elsewhere.
Sherwood Anderson, the roustabout journeyman who scrabbled around in manual labor and lived in a Chicago tenement before achieving fame with Winesburg, Ohio and then never managed to top himself no matter how much he wrote, had ideas about what made for subpar writing:
What did Anderson approve of? Keeping it “loose.”
Nice and specific, that. Only Anderson is actually right. Once it seems like a chore, feels labored, or gives you the sensation of rolling a boulder up a never-ending slope, time to regroup. If you are feeling that way, the reader will, too.
Regroup. Circle back. Shake it off. Start over. Move fast, bring no outline, live off the land.
Keep it loose.
Lois Lowry does not write poetry. But she finds it useful.
Here is what she said about poetry and writer’s block:
Blocked or not (and in truth I seldom am), I begin each day by reading poetry. I’m not a poet myself. But somehow to enter that world where language is distilled and precise, and where cadence and word selection are essential…it propels me into my own work with a heightened sense of excitement and possibility…
Back in 2017, when John Grisham had only sold a few quadrillion books, he very helpfully agreed to jot down some ideas for writing success in the New York Times.
A few of these are somewhat self-evident but nevertheless sterling pieces of advice to keep in mind:
Do: Write a page every day.
Don’t: Keep a thesaurus within reaching distance.
There’s another, however, which some people might quibble with:
Don’t: Write your first scene until you know your last.
This is fantastic when it happens. And many times you go searching for that final moment and it never comes to you. But other times, writing towards the conclusion delivers it to you. Which makes this seem overly limiting.
Still, he did write The Firm.
My review of the new adaptation of A Gentleman in Moscow, which premieres this Friday, ran today in Slant Magazine:
Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow was published in 2016, five years before Russia’s top opposition leader (and Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe) Alexei Navalny returned to his homeland and was immediately imprisoned. Showtime’s eight-part adaptation of Towles’s novel, about a Navalny-like political prisoner in Russia, serendipitously makes its premiere not long after Navalny died in a Russian prison camp. But the comparisons between reality and fiction largely end there. A Gentleman in Moscow is a glossy, romanticized series that mostly suggests rather than shows the horrors of a totalitarian regime…
Here’s the trailer:
What poets do may not seem to have much to do with other kinds of writing. It can seem arcane and abstruse, all those rules or lack of rules and blank space and gnomic pronouncements.
Of course, that’s all nonsense. Like anything else, poetry is just the act of putting one word after another until you have something.
Which is why Robert Frost knew what he was talking about. In the preface to a 1939 Collected Poems edition, he gave the following advice:
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader…
Be engaged in whatever you are writing. If you are just skipping along the surface, the reader can tell.
Against what so many people believe, there are writers who just knock out their book as they go. Outlining? Whiteboarding? Nah.
E. L. Doctorow was one of those. He told The Paris Review that Ragtime didn’t start because of deep research or a carefully plotted idea. It was really just an accident:
I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. That’s the kind of day we sometimes have, as writers. Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Broadview Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in the summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was President. One thing led to another and that’s the way that book began: through desperation to those few images…
One thing leads to another, as Doctorow also enunciated with a much-clipped statement which has given heart to many a disorganized and desperate writer over the years:
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way…
Some people write when they can snatch a little time during the day. Some take to it in the midnight hour when the house has gone quiet.
Others, like August Strindberg, are the morning kind. Get up, make the coffee, a brisk walk, and then to work. Per Sue Prideaux’s biography of the playwright:
And so it begins: on yellow, uncut Lessebo Bikupa paper, with Sir Joshua Mason’s 1001 nib and Antoine Fils’s violette noir ink it breaks out, accompanied by continual cigarette smoking until 12 o’clock. Then it is over. I am extinguished…
We may not all have access to “violette noir ink” but the principle remains sound. Do your work early, take the day to renew, then back to it the next morning.
(h/t: Daniel David Wallace)
My article on the new Christopher Hitchens anthology A Hitch in Time ran in PopMatters today:
A culture’s vitality can be measured by its major figures’ willingness to start fights and spread gossip. Minor or major, substantive or petty, it doesn’t matter. Writers, editors, and artists can best show they care about the life of the mind by getting into a scrape about it; the bitchier, the better…
In Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point, a critic named Walter spends a good part of his day whacking away at the flood of literary jetsam he is assigned to cover. Huxley, through Walter, has fun mocking the mediocrity which makes up much of publishing (“bad novels and worthless verses … insignificant biographies and boring books of travel”). But there is also a sadness in the description, a sense of wasted effort:
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul. But the bad author’s soul being, artistically at any rate, of inferior quality … the labour expended on the expression will be wasted…
There are a lot of Walters out there, pens drawn. Bring your best.
In 1940, Sinclair Lewis was in a dry spell, professionally. He was several years past his last notable work (1935’s prescient anti-fascist warning It Can’t Happen Here) and unsure about where to take his career. Visiting an old friend at the University of Wisconsin Madison, he decided to take up a teaching gig there.
In one of his more famous lectures, Lewis declared:
When you write don’t worry about whether or not it’ll sell …. Don’t want success at twenty-two. If you want fame, be a prize fighter or a movie star. If you write, write because you must write. Because you can’t help it. Write what you believe, what you know, what moves you. And always write the best you can. Be self-proud. You can fool the critics but never yourself. Remember you’re competing with the best that’s ever been written. Try to be better than the best. There’s no limit for you and there can be no writing but great writing. Possess a divine egotism. . . . And never forget that you’re competing with Shakespeare…
After teaching six classes, Lewis suddenly declared he had taught everything he knew and moved back to New York.
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