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.
Junot Diaz spent five years trying to write a novel. Five. But try as he did every single day, nothing worked. It was stuck at the 75-page point and refused to budget.
So he decided to give it another go. He dug out the manuscript and tasked himself with finding something, anything, good in it that he could salvage. What happened?
Spent the whole night reading everything I had written, and guess what? It was still terrible. In fact with the new distance the lameness was even worse than I’d thought…
With nothing else to do except became what he calls “a normal” (no bookstores, no hanging out with writer buddies, definitely no reading the Times Sunday book section), Diaz just went back at it:
There were no sudden miracles. It took two more years of heartbreak, of being utterly, dismayingly lost before the novel I had dreamed about for all those years finally started revealing itself. And another three years after that before I could look up from my desk and say the word I’d wanted to say for more than a decade: done.
Sometimes dedication and time are all you have to throw at the book. But eventually it can work. Dedication will win out, not a burst of inspiration.
Keep going.
Mike Royko, the Chicago columnist who set the template for pugnacious yet thoughtful commentary and deft political satire, wasn’t sure what he wanted to be when growing up. In his March 16, 1990 Chicago Tribune column, “Why Be a Writer? Think of Your Feet” (collected in One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko) he described being a seven-year-old and helping his dad at work:
Watching my father dashing up those steps at 5 a.m., sweat pouring down his face, I learned two things: 1. Being a milkman was hard work. 2: I didn’t want to be a milkman.
Royko learns about other professions like house painting (“Housepainters drank a lot. My grandfather and his cronies said that was because fumes from the paint were hazardous but shots and beers were an effective antidote”) and many other menial jobs (bowling alley, landscaping, machine shop). Rather than declare that this was the true and honest kind of labor, he came to a simple conclusion: “They made my flat feet hurt.”
Then Royko read an article about Ernest Hemingway’s typical day:
He would arise, have a bit of breakfast, and write until about noon. Then he and a pal or two would get in his cabin cruiser and spend the rest of the afternoon sipping tall cool ones and fishing … This impressed me as a sensible way to earn a living, and that was when I began thinking about becoming a writer…
We don’t all get the Hemingway life. But no writer ever said their work was murder on the knees or involved inhaling toxic fumes.
It’s hard for writers to avoid making themselves the subject. They do, after all, spend most of their time with just themselves and the page. Theoretically, they think of the reader. But they’re not around. The writer is. Always.
This can cause you to be just a little too present in the work. Noticeable. Drawing attention. John McPhee had some thoughts on this, which can be guessed from the title of his piece, “Omission“:
When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between the subject and reader, get lost…
The reader might like you. They may even have chosen your work because of other things you have written. But fundamentally they are there because they want to know what you have to tell them.
Get to it.
Some books turn out exactly as the writer imagined. Not many, though.
Shelby Foote understood how crucial it is to never ignore something good, even if it doesn’t fit with your plan:
I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else…
Follow that digression. See where it takes you.
The new Joan Didion Collection from the Library of America is a monster, but in a good way. It packs together an incredible seventeen works, ranging from her best-known collections of essays and reportage (The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem), novels (Run River, Salvador), and later works (The Year of Magical Thinking). It’s pretty much all here, really only missing her and John Gregory Dunne’s screenplay work (which is fine) and her early film criticism for National Review (not fine, somebody needs to collect those).
I wrote about the collection for the Spring 2025 print edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books:
If there is any disagreement that we are at Peak Didion, the November 2024 publication of the Library of America’s three-volume Joan Didion Collection should settle it. This is the kind of hefty doorstop that announces An Important Writer You Should Have Read, but unlike some such LOA sets, this one presents one classic after another with virtually no padding, giving the full sweep of Didion’s career as it evolved across decades of American ferment, imperial overextension, and social entropy…
Booker-winning novelist Ali Smith believes you don’t have to worry about the reader in the end:
All a writer can do is work with language to get the story right. Full stop. & I’ve always believed that what readers feel is readers’ own business…
This is liberating. But it is also a challenge; a gauntlet thrown. Because it means that there is nothing else for the writer to worry about.
Nobody else can or will write the book that you can write…
It’s up to you.
There’s nothing wrong with planning out your writing. Some people need it. Organizing things can keep you from introducing things in your first chapter that can kill plot possibilities for the conclusion if you’re not looking ahead.
Also, knocking out a detailed outline is a fantastic way to procrastinate getting any real writing done.
But avoid limiting yourself.
Roddy Doyle explains:
Change your mind. Good ideas are often killed by better ones…
Writers sometimes worry they have a limited amount of material and shouldn’t waste it. This isn’t true. If you’re meant to be a writer, the ideas will come. If you think of a better one, go with it.
The legendary improv comedian, screenwriter, and underestimated director (yes, standing up for Ishtar) Elaine May had a motto which has been repeated in different iterations for decades:
The only safe thing is to take a chance.
According to her long-time comedy partner Mike Nichols, this wasn’t as contradictory as it sounds:
If you stay safe, and don’t take a chance—don’t do something that’s different from the last thing, something that makes you nervous and holds dangers—if you keep trying to do the thing that worked last time, the encrustations of mannerisms begin to take you over. And pretty soon you’re no good at all—and therefore not safe at all…
Avoid those encrustations of mannerisms at all cost.
Part of a writer’s job is capturing the world around them. This includes paying attention to physical things from landscape and weather to clothing and food.
But it also means listening to people. All of them.
Go ahead and eavesdrop. It’s research.
Mary Karr’s breakthrough memoir The Liar’s Club was not just a brilliantly written book, pulsing with dark wit and cutting insight, it was also pretty unsparing about herself. Years later, she wrote in The Art of the Memoir about how she started The Liar’s Club on the assumption she’d be telling the story of her father leaving her. But when she really looked at what happened, the opposite was true:
I’d spent decades discussing his abandonment in therapy, and it was true he’d drunk himself off a barstool when I was just twenty-five. But the view that he’d ever left me was tacit hogwash – a convenient lie I’d told myself to salve my own guilt about leaving him…
In an interview with The Writer, Karr talked about the necessity of confronting the truth, even if doing so might not cast you in the best light:
The reader will forgive you anything except lying.
Every writer is a fantasist. Whether they’re writing a kitchen-sink domestic drama, romance, YA series about talking dragons, or a mystery novel about a blind accountant who solves crimes, the challenge is the same each time: Make readers believe the world you are creating and the people who inhabit it.
J.R.R. Tolkien explained the importance of this in his essay “On Fairy-Stories“:
The story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed…
Leave nothing to chance. Visualize every aspect of your fictional world. Keep the illusion going. Make readers believe.
A Rhodes Scholar who left Oxford to join the Marines in 1968, Karl Marlantes served one tour of duty in the Vietnam War before returning home and spending the next few decades trying to understand what happened over there and how to communicate it to anybody else.
In “Why I Write,” Marlantes described being surrounded by protestors once in 1970:
They shouted obscenities and jeered at me. I could only stand there stunned, thinking of my dead and maimed friends, wanting desperately to tell these students that my friends and I were just like them: their age, even younger, with the same feelings, yearnings, and passions…
So he spent the next 30 years writing Matterhorn, a wrenching masterpiece which is just about the only Vietnam War novel that deserves mentioning in the same breath with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
Marlantes did this to tell his story. But he also wanted to bridge that gap he felt back in 1970:
Ultimately, the only way we’re ever going to bridge the chasms that divide us is by transcending our limited viewpoints. My realization of this came many years ago reading Eudora Welty’s great novel Delta Wedding. I experienced what it would be like to be a married woman on a Mississippi Delta plantation who was responsible for orchestrating one of the great symbols of community and love. I entered her world and expanded beyond my own skin and became a bigger person…
Put the words down. Build a world. Get the reader out of their own skin, even just for a moment. It’s one of the great rewards of writing.
The late Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024) was a poet who did a lot of things most people don’t expect poets to do. She started her own publishing company. She recorded an album with a gospel choir. She even interviewed James Baldwin on television.
She also gave good advice to those willing to listen:
I know some writers say you must write every day, but I believe you should read every day. Learn something every day.
Even if it’s only something new to cook or to eat. Even if you just sit in your backyard and watch the birds or the squirrels. Give yourself over to something new.
Embrace the possibility. Why? Because you have to have something to talk about. Something you can connect for yourself and for your readers.
Writing is about sharing. Be sure you are in a giving way…
You never know, that recipe might come in handy for your next story.
Sometimes when stuck for inspiration, or just as a way of jump-starting things, William S. Burroughs liked to use something he and his friend, painter Brion Gysin, developed called the “cut-up method.” It’s not difficult, per Burroughs:
Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like…
Is that cheating? If you listen to most media theorists, we have been in the age of collage for a few decades now. Give it try. You never know what might come through.
Chris Barsanti 
You must be logged in to post a comment.