YOU HAD ONE JOB! The Best Writing Advice I’ve Ever Gotten
By Matthew Norman | September 17, 2021 |
All right fine, two decades later, I’ll admit it. Back in grad school I may have been a little overeager. Probably a lot overeager. While most of my fellow MFA candidates approached the program with an enviable amount of cool, professional detachment, I was about as cool and detached as a sugar-crazed toddler running wild through Disneyland.
In my defense, I’d spent my entire life up to that point surrounded by non-writers. In grade school and high school, my aspirations to someday become a novelist made me a favorite of English teachers, but a curiosity to my classmates. In college, my best friends were business and finance majors. The first bits of my post-undergrad adulthood were spent in cubicles writing advertising for insurance companies and government contractors.
And then, suddenly, there I was, in a Washington, DC suburb called Fairfax, VA at George Mason University, and I was literally surrounded, for the first time, by people like me. They’d read the books I’d read. They knew the authors I knew. Like me, they’d put their real lives on hold to forgo logic and reason and study the art of make believe. My enthusiasm to be there among them was simply uncontainable. Which is why when author Susan Shreve asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to have their story workshopped first my hand went up as if it’d been launched by a t-shirt cannon.
I looked around. Mine was the only arm raised. “Um, yeah,” I said. “I’ve got a story ready, I guess.”
At that stage of my career, I hadn’t really learned about drafting and rewriting yet. So, when I said I had a story “ready,” I actually meant “done.” Although I may not have admitted it, as far as I was concerned the thing was good to go. I mean, I’d spellchecked it and everything. You can imagine my surprise a week later when I sat and listened to that same room of fellow writers absolutely tear my “finished” story to pieces. I won’t belabor the details, but when the workshop was over I considered calling campus security and reporting that I’d been murdered.
As part of the curriculum, writers were entitled to one-on-one conferences with our professors after our stories were workshopped. When I arrived at Susan Shreve’s office a few days later, I was still reeling from the beating I’d taken. Seriously, I’m pretty sure I was noticeably limping.
“So, how do you think it went?” Susan asked.
This struck me as an unnecessarily casual question, like a firefighter asking, So, did you enjoy the dumpster fire?
I told Susan I was bummed. I told her I thought the story was good and that my classmates had treated me and it unfairly. “I feel like they just…they just didn’t get it, you know,” I said.
Susan was quiet for a moment. Her expression was sympathetic, nurturing. A seasoned author and teacher, she’d been handling the egos of dejected writers for decades. However, when she finally spoke she did so firmly. “Matt, it’s your job to make them get it.”
I’ve been given so much advice in my life, on writing, relationships, auto maintenance, finances. For better or worse, the vast majority of that advice has immediately bounced off my forehead and gone crashing to the pavement. Susan’s advice that day, though…it stuck. She was right. I’d made the classic rookie writer mistake of blaming the reader for my shortcomings. Although the sentences I’d written were probably fine, and the story was serviceable, I’d failed to make that classroom full of fifteen or so people understand what I was trying to say.
As writers, it is our job—perhaps our only job—to make…our…readers…get it. As far as goals go, this one is maddening because it’s both abstract and subjective. Here are some tips, though, that I believe will help. And, spoiler alert, like everything else in this stupid business, they mostly involve a lot of rewriting.
Fight the Urge to Immediately Disregard Questions & Criticism
When someone is confused about something you’ve written—when they don’t get it—it’s easy to write them off as an idiot and throw a latte in their face. Don’t do that. Put your ego aside. Listen to what they have to say. Even if they aren’t articulating themselves clearly or perfectly, they’re probably hovering around a legitimate problem with your story or manuscript.
Put Context Where It Belongs: On the Page
The story I wrote all those years ago was about a teenage girl in rural Nebraska who finds out she’s pregnant and accepts that her dream to run off to California is now over. A little background about me: I actually grew up in Nebraska and went to college there. Although my upbringing was far more suburban than rural, I understood small towns, and I knew a lot of people who’d lived in them. So, when one of my classmates asked why my main character didn’t just get an abortion, I was stunned. And when another classmate asked why my main character didn’t just dump her dopey boyfriend and take off anyway, I was damn near speechless. Didn’t these people know how deeply conservative Nebraska was, or how logistically difficult it’d be for a scared teenager on her own there to get an abortion? Didn’t they know how shackled one can feel after a lifetime of practical Midwestern thinking? The answer to all these questions is no, of course they didn’t. And here’s the thing: it wasn’t their job to know. It was my job to provide the context they needed to get why my main character felt the way she felt and ultimately did what she did. Don’t expect your reader to know what’s in your head. Instead, put it on the page. If later you find you’ve been too heavy handed, no problem, you can just trim it back. (See my previous comment about rewriting.)
Obsess Over Your Characters’ Motivation
Along with failing to provide the appropriate context, I’d also done a bad job of committing to and communicating my main character’s motivation. Hence all those “Why didn’t she just do this?” and “Why didn’t she just do that?” questions. Looking back, I’m not sure my main character actually even wanted to go to California. Maybe she just wanted to fantasize about someplace warm. Maybe she just wanted a boyfriend who knew how to tuck in his shirt. Who knows? The me of twenty years ago certainly didn’t. If you make it clear exactly what your character actually wants, you’ll write a better story, and, more importantly, your readers will be far more likely to go along for the ride. If your character wants X to happen, they’ll do Y and then they’ll do Z. The reader may not love their choices, but at least they’ll get where they’re coming from.
Dig Deeper & Write Better
Finally, as long as we’re listing my failures, it’d be naïve of me to think that some of my story’s problems didn’t have something to do with the fact that I was a (then) twentysomething male in a major metropolitan area writing about a scared teenage girl in the heartland. My intentions were pure, certainly, but I hadn’t worked hard enough and written well enough, frankly, for my readers to completely lose themselves in my character. To them, quite rightly, she felt like exactly what she was: a girl written by a guy. As writers, we’re constantly inhabiting characters who aren’t us. That’s practically the job description. However, when we seek to inhabit characters who are especially not us—like different in gender, race, age, religion, sexual identity, etc.—it’s our responsibility to dig as deeply into our powers of empathy as possible and to write as well and as thoughtfully as we can. Because, yeah, the goal is to make our readers get it. But we want them to believe it, too.
Providing context is important, but trusting your reader to understand what you’re saying is important, too. How do we effectively balance these two things? As a reader, what are some of your barriers to “getting it?” As a writer, when have you failed to fully engage your readers, and what made you realize you’d failed?
Matthew Norman is the author of five novels. His latest, Charm City Rocks, is out now from Dell. His debut novel, Domestic Violets, was nominated in the Best Humor Category at the 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards, and his second novel, We’re All Damaged, was an Amazon bestseller. His upcoming novel, Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon, will be out in October. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Baltimore and holds an MFA from George Mason University.
Thanks for this reminder. It’s such a basic “job” to help the reader Get It, and no matter what we do we can’t make every single one do that… but context is so important. And such a delicate Goldilocks balance. I can’t wait to read All Together Now!
Hey there. Thanks so much. I love that…”Goldilocks balance.” Nice.
Matthew, the day I walked into my first meeting of a local writing organization, I too recall the joy of finding “others like me.”
(My brother, visiting a session with me one day, said, “It’s just like AA only you don’t have to be an alcoholic to attend.”) I too was an eager beaver way too soon (although I still maintain that hubris is necessary to even think of writing a novel, since if we knew ahead of time how hard it was, we’d never start). My work has also been shredded by my peers in a workshop, followed by the fearsome one-on-one with an accomplished author, making me wonder why the heck I paid so much money to be placed in this personal hell.
But I’ve never written about these things in such an entertaining way with such a lively, resilient voice, with the bonus of such a cogent and useful list of takeaways from these experiences. Thank you!
“Put it on the page”—it took me years to understand what that even meant, but it is so key. And building context and relatable motivation remains my biggest challenge to overcome with each manuscript.
I don’t often have time to read every post from my fellow WU contributors, but today you have won a fan in me! Will go back and read previous posts.
Thanks so much Kathryn. I appreciate it.
“It’s your job to make them get it.” YES!
I’m shamelessly stealing this catchphrase for my writing groups. Of course any problem isn’t in what the story was meant to be, it’s in the writer being able to bring it all across to the reader — the reasons, the background, the tone, all of it.
Even if it’s That One Reader who just insists on missing what everyone else saw… it’s our job to find what’s *possible* to miss and make it easier still to find, because that person represents a share of other readers that will make the same “mistake.” It’s our job to… not to twist the story into knots trying to satisfy everyone, but to know that we need to meet our readers a lot further than half-way.
Hey, Ken. “…a lot further than half-way.” Absolutely! I’m going to shamelessly steal that. So, we’re even.
I love EVERYTHING about this post, Matthew–especially that bit about revising being the main work of writing. But also all of it–spot-on advice in every way.
Thanks for posting. I’ll be sharing.
Hey, Tiffany. Thanks! Glad you liked it.
Great insights, Matthew. And this should be on a post-it stuck to the top of every writer’s computer monitor:
“It’s your job to make them get it.”
AMEN.
Wow, I just did that!!
Hey, Keith. Thanks. I like the idea of being a post-it. Have a great weekend.
I can totally relate! After one particularly brutal (and public) critique of my work at a writers conference, I wanted to crawl under the table and curl into a fetal position. The story got rewritten (a dozen or more times) and is now under contract for release next year. Thanks for the reminder that our work is for the reader.
Hey, Jane. Nice. Congrats! I didn’t mention this in the post, but I rewrote my story about a dozen times, too, and it eventually found a home in George Mason’s literary magazine. A victory!
Love this post! And my job! I received a very detailed and helpful conference critique that’s helping me do it. And already I’m loving the results. Thank you!
Thanks, Vijaya. I love my job, too! :)
Thanks for this very helpful post, Matthew. In addition to great advice, it also made me smile as I pictured your boundless enthusiasm and ambitious, but naïve early attempts at storytelling. Hopefully, you still retain your enthusiasm for your work, which judging by the recognition has improved markedly over time!
Thanks! Yeah, four books later my skin has thickened a little, but I still love it as much as I did when I was a kid. Have a great weekend!
I laughed and I nodded. Thank you for the wit and wisdom.
And thank you especially for that last section, recognizing your own lack of authority in writing from that perspective. It’s something I’ve had to do before too, a few times, and it’s never easy, but it’s always important.
Thanks! It’s definitely never easy…but it’s so important. We owe it to our readers. Having a diverse set of beta readers helps, too. I’m fortunate to have a wonderful crew of readers who can tell me when I’m doing it wrong.
Hi Mathew, Ditto to the major point that clarity should outweigh beautiful or powerful writing. If the reader doesn’t understand the purpose of the journey, all the beauty along the way won’t make the trip memorable. Also wanted to mention: Susan Shreve. and her novel, YOU ARE THE LOVE OF MY LIFE. It’s a book that truly spoke to me for many reasons, and I’ve kept a note to remember it. I think it’s time I see if I can get my own copy. Thanks again, Beth
Hi, Beth. Thanks. And Susan is just wonderful, isn’t she? She ended up being my thesis advisor, and she blurbed my first novel. Such a great writer and teacher. I could write ten more posts about all the fantastic advice she gave me at Mason. Her son is a really good writer, too: Porter Shreve.
Fantastic post! The advice is spot on. New writers don’t know what don’t know. Craft takes time, more than anyone realizes. As someone who is revising the cringe-fest that is my very first published novel (taking it back from the publisher), it’s now visible where I’d missed the mark on a few things. Love that advice that it’s our job to make the reader get it…and care.
Hey, LG. Good luck with the revision. That would be an interesting post: revising your own published novel.
Great post. Another piece of advice I have found very true, is that when readers tell you there’s a problem in your story, they are very probably right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are probably (I’d say almost invariably) wrong.
Feedback is so vital, can be hard to get outside writing courses, and those who are willing to do it for you are to be treasured. If you will do the same for them, it’s a huge win-win.
Develop a thick skin as soon as you can, be seen to take advice on board graciously, and your work will flourish.
Hey, Julia. Thanks. Yep, that thick skin thing is absolutely vital.
Great article thank you.
And I am just going to snitch these wise words Matthew… and pin them to my wall.
‘It’s your job to make them get it.’
Thank you for sharing.
Hi, Janet. Snitch away!