Tag: authors

Writer’s Desk: Two Pages a Day

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S.E. Hinton was just eighteen years old when her first novel, The Outsiders, was published. Though in some ways a dream come true, having that kind of success so young proved daunting.

While in college, Hinton was hit with writer’s block. She thought she needed to produce another masterpiece, she told Writer’s Digest. “And I knew I didn’t have no masterpiece.”

The solution, Hinton said, was relatively simple:

My boyfriend, who is now my husband, was saying ‘I don’t care if you never get published again, but you’ve got to start writing again. Enough of this gloom and doom stuff.’ He said, ‘Write two pages a day. Nobody’s every dropped dead of two pages.’ And he’d come over to take me out, and if I hadn’t done my two pages we wouldn’t go out. So that was a great motivation for writing…

Eventually those two pages turned into her second novel, That Was Then, This is Now:

When I had a stack about the size of a book, I sent it off…

Writer’s Desk: Ignore This Advice

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Richard Bausch (editor of multiple Norton anthologies) has spent his time in the trenches of literary academia and seen the number of how-to books on writing proliferate while the number of readers keeps falling.

His advice for those aspiring to life of the pen?

Put the manuals and the how-to books away. Read the writers themselves, whose work and example are all you really need if you want to write …

Which is a superb suggestion. If you cannot learn from the well-crafted sentences of the masters, then How to Write Your Novel in 30 Days (helpful though it may be for working out certain knots in your plot) will not substitute.

Bausch goes on to remind us why we get up each day to do this thing:

This work is not done as a job, ladies and gentlemen, it is done out of love for the art and the artists who brought it forth, and who still bring it forth to us, down the years and across ignorance and chaos and borderlines … Let me paraphrase William Carlos Williams, American poet: literature has no practical function, but every day people die for lack of what is found there…

Writer’s Desk: Procrastinate Well

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Finding ways not to write is a skill shared by all in the profession. But what if there was a way to delay your work productively? Miranda July has an idea:

It’s best to procrastinate with other things I don’t want to do. The amount of business emails and household chores I’ve gotten done while not writing! The best part of this is that when you finally do get down to writing, and then eventually stop for the day, you discover that the bills have been magically paid, the floors washed…

Like anything else in life, if you are going to procrastinate, do it well.

Writer’s Desk: Make It Make Sense

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Canadian author Miriam Toews (Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows) lost both her father and her sister Marjorie to suicide. She was not sure the loss was something she could ever write about.

“I had no words,” she told Kristen Martin. But then after a couple of years, Toews had a realization:

No, I’m a writer. This is what I do, take stuff and work it into something that makes sense to me…

Writer’s Desk: Only You Can Do It

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The author Geoff Dyer, who writes everything from fiction to criticism and essays on tennis, has a ritual he enacts before starting a new book. He pens a note to himself which reads, “Write a book that no one else could write“:

I think one of the features of nonfiction today is that, to a degree, a book could be written by anyone possessed of a certain level of knowledge. The area of expertise might change, but quite often, there’s nothing particularly distinct about the writing or the thought. With my books, for good or ill, they could only be written by me. And that’s what they have going for them. And I just need to remind myself of that, whenever I set off…

This does not mean never following form or genre. But if you do so, be idiosyncratic about it. Stand out.

Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘The Writer’s Year 2026’ on Sale Now

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According to my publisher, the 2026 edition of The Writer’s Year Page-A-Day calendar will:

BANISH WRITER’S BLOCK: This essential calendar provides a steady guide to help you achieve your goals—or at least be productive and have fun trying—with regular writing prompts and monthly check-ins to help you track your progress.

Who am I to argue? Get your copy here!

Writer’s Desk: Get the Details Right

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In the 1920s, before Dashiell Hammett went to Hollywood, he reviewed crime fiction for the Saturday Evening Post. This job caused him much consternation. Having spent some years working as a Pinkerton detective, he had some lived knowledge of the world of criminality (which brought some realism to his novels, especially Red Harvest and The Glass Key).

Hammett laid out several rules for crime writers to follow:

  • “Not nearly so much can be seen by moonlight as you imagine. This is especially true of colors.”
  • “Fingerprints of any value to the police are seldom found on anybody’s skin.”
  • “When you are knocked unconscious you do not feel the blow that does it.”
  • “When a bullet from a Colt’s .45, or any firearm of approximately the same size and power, hits you, even if not in a fatal spot, it usually knocks you over. It is quite upsetting at any reasonable range.”

Listen to Dashiell, especially regarding how it feels to be hit or shot (“quite upsetting”). Update as needed for technological advances.

Writer’s Desk: Talk Yourself to Sleep

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Even the most prolific authors hit roadblocks. Val McDermid (40-plus books) is no different.

She tackles those problems in an interesting fashion:

If in the morning I know I’m going to be writing a scene that’s not quite clear in my head yet, or a difficult confrontation, or a complicated transition, or I’m not quite sure why somebody’s doing something at all, then I’ll set myself a problem when I’m going to sleep and I’ll talk myself to sleep almost through it, and then nine times out of ten when I get in the shower in the morning, the answer’s there…

Writer’s Desk: Self-Doubt is Okay

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W. B. Yeats (1914)

In those moments when nothing seems to be working, some writers might imagine that for more successful (or at least productive) others who have spent years lashed to the desk, things came easily. They must have known they were great, yes?

One of W. B. Yeats’ last poems, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” shows what a fallacy this is. He starts the piece in a vein of specific misery any writer will recognize (“I sought a theme and sought for it in vain / I sought it daily for six weeks or so”) and then drops a line which is like a sigh of giving up (“What can I but enumerate old themes”).

The trick is not to gnash one’s teeth about having nothing to write about and being unable to write it well even if an idea did come. A little wallowing is okay. But see it as all part of the process. If you have zipped through a piece and feel inordinately proud of the results, something might be missing. Self-doubt throws sand in the gears, but in the process those grains can get ground into diamonds.

Remember Charles Bukowski:

Bad writers tend to have self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt…

Writer’s Desk: Trust Your Characters

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Tana French (Dublin Murder Squad series) writes novels about flawed people. Very flawed people. But her advice to writers about how to approach those characters is simple, clear, and for some likely very difficult to follow:

Your character is always right. No real person thinks they’re being stupid or misguided or bigoted or evil or just plain wrong – so your characters can’t, either. If you’re writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author’s views rather than about the character’s. You can’t make the judgement that your character is wrong; let the readers do that for themselves…

Trusting the character, right or wrong, is another way of trusting the reader.

Writer’s Desk: It Ain’t Easy, Kids

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One of the great pulp writers Florida, and actually America, ever produced, John D. MacDonald (best known for The Executioners, filmed twice as Cape Fear) knew about determination, productivity, rejection, and making a living somehow on what strangers thought about the words he typed on a page.

As such, his advice to young writers deserves a listen:

Most beginners think that writing is a quick ticket to some kind of celebrity status, to broads and talk shows. Those with that shallow motivation can forget it. Here’s how it goes. Take a person 25 years old. If that person has not read a minimum of three books a week since he or she was ten years old, or 2,340 books—comic books not counted—and if he or she is not still reading at that pace or preferably, at a greater pace, then forget it. If he or she is not willing to commit one million words to paper—ten medium-long novels—without much hope of ever selling one word, in the process of learning this trade, then forget it. And if he or she can be discouraged by anyone in this world from continuing to write, write, write—then forget it…

h/t CrimeReads

Writer’s Desk: Copy from the Masters

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Michael Moorcock is among the most prolific and influential British science fiction and fantasy writers of all time. He doesn’t seem to ever get stuck for inspiration.

But when Moorcock needs ideas or advice on how to tell a story, he goes to the greats:

Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters…

No shame.