Per novelist and theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet:
The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.
Writer’s Desk: Pure Writing
Tag: authors
Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘The Writer’s Year 2026’ on Sale Now
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
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
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: Be Good to Other Writers
Sherman Alexie has some advice for how to help out other writers:
When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author. Be effusive with your praise. Writing is a lonely business. Do your best to make it a little less lonely…
Writer’s Desk: Self-Doubt is Okay
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
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
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: Make It Natural
Poet Elizabeth Bishop was regularly praised for her realism and the lack of artifice in her work. Though some readers may have felt that kind of writing simply flowed from her pen naturally, it was no accident.
Per Bishop:
Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural…
Writer’s Desk: Copy from the Masters
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.
Writer’s Desk: No Shame in Writing Fast
In his enthralling new biography on William F. Buckley, Sam Tanenhaus says the following about his subject’s approach to his work:
Like so many writers he loathed the act of writing, but like very few he did it with speed and efficiency…
Buckley spent a career making use of that efficiency. For many years, he wrote multiple columns a week while editing the National Review, hosting Firing Line, and publishing dozens of books (sure, some were padded collections of columns and letters, but still), not to mention swanning around high society affairs, going yachting, and generally engaging in the life of a gentleman. He accomplished this through efficiency. Not messing around. Knowing what he wanted to say before firing up the word processor.
In 1986, Buckley took to the pages of the New York Times to make an argument for fast writing. A scold over at Newsweek had snarked that Buckley sometimes spent a mere 20 minutes on his newspaper columns, which was apparently too little time for serious writing. Buckley responded in indignation:
It is axiomatic, in cognitive science, that there is no necessary correlation between profundity of thought and length of time spent on thought … I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition. I asked myself the other day, Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time? I couldn’t think of anyone. And I devoted to the exercise 20 minutes…
See what you can get done in that much time. Hold yourself to 20 minutes. Then do it again the next day. And the next.
You might be surprised.
Writer’s Desk: Run With It
Here’s what Kaveh Akbar told Tin House about how he plans out his writing. In short, he doesn’t:
I never know where I’m going! I think certainty is death to a poem. The language always knows more than we do…
Don’t tell the words what to do. Let things flow.
Writer’s Desk: Sondheim on Quantity
Some people work and work even if nobody else can understand why. Interviewed not long before he passed away in 2021 at the age of 91, Stephen Sondheim talked about productivity:
George Bernard Shaw kept writing plays until he was ninety-four. Of course, the last fifteen years they were terrible plays, but he did write them…
One could always just watch TV, of course. But in the end even writing a terrible play (or novel or poem or agitated essay about the state of modern literature) will make you feel better than most other things.
Writer’s Desk: Attention is Good
If a writer publishes and nobody notices, did it actually happen? To the writer, absolutely. That’s weeks, months, or years of gnashed-teeth labor in those pages. But to the rest of the world, not so much.
Ron Chernow’s mammoth new biography of Mark Twain shows how the great American humorist, sentimentalist, lecturer, anti-imperialist scold, and failed entrepreneur got people to read what he wrote. First, he lived a hell of a life:
Mark Twain discarded the image of the writer as a contemplative being, living a cloistered existence, and thrust himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, capturing the wild, uproarious energy throbbing in the heartland…
Brimming with material, Twain then grabbed the nation by its lapels:
A protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick, he courted controversy and relished the limelight. A ferocious bargainer and shameless self-promoter, he sought fame and fortune without hesitation and established the image of the author as celebrity…
There are limits to this approach, of course, as any writer whose publisher has anxiously inquired about their social media reach knows.
But what Twain knew is that people are busy. They have a lot of things they would rather do than read what you wrote. Harlan Ellison wrote stories in bookstore windows.
Do what you have to do.
Writer’s Desk: Pay Attention
Mary Oliver won many awards over her career, starting with the Pulitzer. But the poem of hers that has resonated the most has a very simple and telling title, “Instructions for Living“:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Those three lines contain everything a writer needs to remember.
Chris Barsanti 
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