How to Be a Writer

Good writing has a raw, disobedient quality, a feral disposition. So how do we achieve that?

Painting with Green Center (1913) by Wassily Kandinsky.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far, during the 30 years I’ve been pecking away at this— decidedly not famous, but publishing everything from children’s fiction to ad copy to many many many essays to medical journalism and almost everything in between, including, finally, two years ago, my debut memoir, The Part That Burns, and hopefully, in the foreseeable future, my novel-in-progress. I’ve been studying and teaching writing for a couple of decades. Words are my lifeblood.

And we all know beyond doubt that good writing starts with reading greedily and discerningly and well beyond our own tastes—for example, in recent years I pushed myself toward dystopian fiction and have since not only discovered many works I love—Station Eleven, High High We Go in the Dark, Parable of the Sower, The School for Good Mothers—but have also learned things that strengthened my own writing and improved my life (and that last part is not an exaggeration!).

We need to read poetry, too. My god, please, read poetry! Prose writers, especially, have so much to learn from the poets. We need to read the work of young writers and old writers. We need to read, in addition to the classics, the work of living writers and debut writers. And above all we need to read writers who don’t look like ourselves, whose lives haven’t looked like ours, who come from places far from where we live, and most of all, whose voices haven’t risen easily above the white male din that drowns everyone else out.

So yes, we must read truly, madly, deeply, but also, we must take great pains to decode what what we read so that we can figure out exactly what those writers did to make certain passages and whole books so wild and arresting. This kind of reading, this close reading for the craft of it, is what will change us into the writers we hope to become.

Of course, we must write, too, as much as we can, day after day, showing up for the arduous work putting one word after the next, again and again and again.

But there is more to it than that, because building piles and piles of words is not enough. Building piles of words can even teach us bad habits, get us into the practice of writing lazy sentences, sentences that will never sing. So we must also write the hard way. Because while writing for pleasure and catharsis and the satisfaction of a growing word count is well and good at times, we must mostly write for the strain and difficulty and torment of it, for the relentless demands of carving meaning from a flabby, overused language that has become, in the digital age, mostly used for “content.”

Writing should feel like a wrestling match—a grueling effort that leaves us spent and bruised. This effort is how we reclaim the language, and also how we transform and progress as writers, artists, human beings. This effort is where we meet ourselves anew (and isn’t that the reason for it all?) through grasping at first desperately, and then exactingly, after the perfect verb, through the slashing of pages and pages of “process writing” that are important to wade through as part of the hunt for the actual story, but that do not belong to the actual story, and therefore also do not belong in the actual story. This sweaty effort is our chance for a wide-open and unflinching observation of our limitations on the page, and our chance to get back up, go back in there, and try harder.

This effort is where art happens—and it’s the art that matters.

Speaking of art, as writers we need to notice our surroundings with a sense of interest, wonder, and awe. We need to cultivate a searing curiosity about everything and everyone, because curiosity is the genesis of empathy. Our job as writers is to ask why, why, why, why, and be doggedly interested in the multiplicity of possibilities rather than relying too surely on what we think we know.

We need to build great tolerance for uncertainty. We need to learn to love uncertainty, and to choose it over the temptation of knowing. We need to sit quietly in the dark, even if it hurts.

And by all means we can’t obsess constantly on publication or the workings of the industry. If we want to publish, we should worry about that when the time comes. And the time comes when we’re pretty damn sure (which is as sure as we ever will be) that we’ve written something that’s ready—that’s good enough—for publication. In the meantime, it’s probably better to spend our time writing and improving the writing rather than scheming on the best strategy for breaking in.

The perfecting of the writing is an alchemical process that requires an openness to perpetual discovery and refinement. Good writing has a raw, disobedient quality, a feral disposition. That’s what allows it to leap off the page. But achieving prose with that kind of unruly abandon almost always requires an untold amount of grunt work. Good writing that breathes and even gasps on the page almost never comes from focusing on market trends, though many commercially successful books do result from doing exactly that. But a commercially successful book and a transcendent piece of writing are not the same thing. The latter may certainly become the former and it sometimes does, but more often, it does not.

This must be understood and accepted from the outset.

Ultimately, we gain the most from focusing on our writing as a practice no different from meditation—we show up, we struggle, we break through or we don’t, and then we do it again. Only over the course of months, years, decades, a lifetime, if ever, do we begin to see clearly the pattern of our own intricate unfolding within the context of not just our own life, but of everything. The whole world.

Which is, of course, the point.