Posts by Jim Dempsey
It’s been a while since I’ve written for the wonderful WU community. It’s good to be back. I’ve been busy, and I thought it might be useful to let you know what I’ve been up to. I think it’s a situation many of you will recognize.
I moved to a new city recently, to a whole new country, to Portugal. One thing I knew I would miss was my old writing group, and I knew that finding another group here, where I could write in English, could be tricky.
I hadn’t even moved to Lisbon, with all the multicultural opportunities a capital city can offer; I had moved close to a smaller town, called Caldas da Rainha, just one hour from Lisbon and the international airport, and known as the city of creativity. It has an excellent, internationally recognized art and design school too, so I wasn’t exactly isolated.
But there wasn’t a writers group.
There was, however, a regular open-mic event for writers, called Wordplay. It’s an incredible, inspiring, foot-stomping, table-banging occasion with writers reading original work in whatever language they write in: Portuguese, English, Spanish, Turkish, whatever. It had it all. And I had met my people.
I spoke with the organizer, Jazz Meyer, a fellow editor, writer and filmmaker. We talked about writing, and she mentioned she met up regularly with another writer ,and they would both be keen to expand their meetings to include others.
A Sense of Community
And that was it. We started our writers group in November 2023, which now has a core of around ten people, and we often have fifteen or sixteen people each time. And it gives everything that all good writers groups give.
It provides support. With writing being such a solo activity, it’s important to check in with other people at times, especially those who are in a similar situation.
And because most people write on their own, it’s also easy to skip a day. Or a week. Or even a month, which can continue for a longer time, and can run into being a very long time. Meeting once a month forces you to write something that just might get you back on track.
A writing group helps you see your progress too. You can revise based on the feedback you receive. Through writing exercises, you can pick up and develop new techniques, new perspectives and experiment with different ways of writing. Over the months and years, you can see how your writing has improved and, equally as rewarding, see how the writing of others in your group has progressed.
Every writing group is different, but if you’re thinking of setting one up, here’s how we do it.
Structure in Creativity
Our meetings start, of course, with an introduction, and we get straight in to writing. We start with a simple prompt like: write 50 words that tells us three things about you, but one is a lie. The others have to guess the lie. This is great in the early days for getting to know each other. An exercise at the start also helps to shift your brain from its usual problem solving, list making processes into something more creative.
We then get to pieces we’ve written based […]
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My book group just had our Christmas dinner. It was such a good night we hardly discussed this month’s book (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin). While we were all chatting, a man put his hand on my shoulder, leaned into me and said, ‘I don’t know what you’ve done or how you did it, but,’ he looked up at my book club colleagues, ‘Well done, buddy.’ And he finished with a hearty pat on my back.
Why did he say this?
He seemed to be impressed that I was the only man among 16 women.
I was too slow to react, trying to work out how I knew this guy. But I didn’t. He was a stranger.
One of our group was much quicker. She called out, ‘Read more books, mate!’
I joined the group about 18 months ago, when I first moved to this city. It seemed like a good way to meet people through a shared interest in books. I didn’t know they’d be all women, although I could’ve guessed. In any book club I’ve been , wherever, in the world, I’m usually the only guy.
But I wasn’t there to meet women. I was there to meet people. And maybe even make friends.
Developing trust
It can be easy to meet people (for some of us) when you move to a new place. And some of those people might even be friendly people. But it’s more difficult to make friends.
You might spend time with those first people you meet – go for dinner, have a coffee or visit some of the local sights – but to become friends with them, really friends, takes something extra.
It’s difficult to pin down what makes truly great friends. You’re likely to have shared interests, values and experiences, for example.
A love of books is a good place to start, I thought. But if you only meet once a month and not everyone has much time to hang around after the discussion, it can take a while to really get to know the people and become anything like good buddies.
Then I met someone who wanted to start a group to discuss Stoic philosophy. I knew more or less what stoicism was about after a friend – a true friend – had introduced me to Marcus Aurelius some years ago, so I joined this group too.
This also involves books, and we have readings each time on a particular topic. In our last meeting, we happened to discuss friendship. The Stoic philosopher Seneca said this about it:
Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak as boldly with him as with yourself…’
Clearly Seneca should join a book club to have the chance to make some female friends, and he seems pretty intense too. I don’t think every friend has to be on the heart and soul level. I have a friend with whom I could leave a bag of money in small notes and know he would never touch a single one, but I can’t believe everything he tells me. But then I love fiction. I have another very good friend who will arrange to meet […]
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Like almost every other aspect of life, artificial intelligence is also having an impact on the publishing world. People are using AI to generate story outlines and even whole novels. Some people sell these novels without stating how much help they got from AI, cheekily passing it off as all their own work. Others, even more cheekily (to put it mildly), publish bot-generated books under established authors’ names, much to the surprise of these authors who, of course, see none of the profits.
Amazon is struggling to keep these fraudulent texts out of its platform. Teen and young adult romance genres have been particularly inundated with low quality, AI-produced texts. Amazon’s response so far is to limit the number of books a self-publisher can upload in a certain period of time and require them to disclose if the work is by a bot.
And there can be other less obvious detrimental effects as interns and editorial assistants can be tempted to use AI to summarize book proposals coming into publishers and literary agents, which means they could lose out in the nuance of a text and fail to gain essential editorial skills that will benefit the industry in the future.
On the other hand, many publishers believe that machine learning can benefit them by streamlining the production process, bringing books to the market earlier and making it easier for readers to find what they want.
What are the odds
Despite these advantages, most articles on AI predict doom and gloom and the death of humanity. People have predicted such apocalyptic scenarios before, and there have been many stories throughout history that deal with this kind of threat. Maybe we can learn from them and find a way to deal with any machine that decides to take over the world.
As Dave King pointed out on WU recently, these fancy programs – and some of them are very fancy – are not in fact intelligent but rather operate more as probability machines. The term artificial intelligence is more of a marketing gimmick. It’s catchier and sells better than ‘probability algorithm’, regardless of how cool that algorithm is.
Like Dave, I like to look to the past for my thesis because technology being sold as something smarter than it truly is is not a new thing. Dave talked about the centrifugal governor breakthrough for steam engines in the eighteenth century. I want to go further back than that – to ancient Greece.
My inspiration came from a podcast series by an artist called Blindboy. He describes a situation similar to the one much of the media would like us to believe is occurring now or in the very near future, where artificial intelligence becomes so smart it decides to wipe out its creators. Blindboy points out that this is a not a new scenario but has in fact occurred in many ancient cultures – if we are to be their stories. The ancient Greek version goes something like this (apologies for my very brief summary):
Ancient solutions
Zeus – a god – and Prometheus – a Titan, so not quite a god – developed humankind as a kind of pastime. They wanted to play around with these little creations, much like many people […]
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One of the many things I genuinely enjoy about Writer Unboxed is the comments section after each article. The comments can often develop into a discussion that elaborates on the original topic and they can bring a range of perspectives on the subject.
Sophie Masson’s excellent article on working with an editor really stood out for me in the last month. In the comments, Barry Knister had a great questions about ‘knowing how to judge the judgments of an editor.’ Check out that discussion if you haven’t already because it has some great insight for anyone thinking of hiring an editor.
For me though, it got me asking another question. Where does an editor’s responsibility lie? Is it with the author –or to the readers, who will ultimately consume the product?
There is, of course, a strong argument that we editors are primarily responsible to the authors. After all, they or their publishers/agents are the ones paying for the service. But writing, and therefore editing, is not, and should not be, only about money. Editors also have an ethical responsibility.
Sure, much of that ethical responsibility is tied up in the contract with the author/publsher as the codes of conduct we sign up to when we become members of a professional editing society clearly state. The editor has to provide a quality service, often before a certain deadline.
The job of editing
My question, however, is about that service. To understand were our responsibility lies, we have to understand what it is we do.
We work on text. We revise or suggest revisions. These might be small-scale changes – commas and colons – or large-scale changes where we suggest major manuscript rewrites.
But what’s our ultimate purpose as we do this? Is it for the author to sell more books? That could be part of it, although the author will only sell more books if readers are happy with the edited text.
The text is, after all, intended to be read. And, for me, the editor’s job is about making sure the text is easier (for wont of a better word) to read. By that, I mean there should be no room (or at least as little room as possible) for the reader to misunderstand, misinterpret or be misled by the text.
In other words, the text should be as clear as possible for the reader to read. That’s one way of looking at it, at least.
Does that mean we are ultimately responsible to the readers, to make their experience the best it possibly can be?
Perhaps. But while we make and suggest all those revisions, we also have to respect the author’s intention – even when that intention is to confuse the reader (take a look at the example I used in an earlier article from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy).
Understanding readers
So, editors have to be sensitive to the author’s intentions, but surely we also have to be sensitive to the readers’ possible interpretations. That means understanding how readers will see the book while also understanding how the author wants the readers to see the book.
But what if there are no readers, beyond the author’s mother, for example? With experience, an editor can tell if that’s likely to be the case, and it’s better to not take that job and […]
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We can all write, right? Most of us learned to write at school. Many of us then went on to write as part of our work: reports, plans, assessments, etc. And, in these days of social media, most of us write messages, posts and emails. Some of us even still write good old fashioned letters.
So, while it might be fair to say that most people write in some capacity, it’s not the case that most people are writers.
What’s the difference?
I think most people would feel misled if you said you were a writer because you spend most of your working day compiling reports. You probably have a more accurate job title.
Even those who write stories every day and are regularly published are more accurately called journalists than writers, although some journalists are also writers.
Merriam-Webster defines a writer as simply “one that writes.” The Cambridge Dictionary goes a little further and says a writer is “a person who writes books or articles to be published.”
Anybody can pretty much publish anything these days, and there are people who publish books that have so many basic errors and where the story is so incoherent that most of us would not consider that person to be a writer. That, as Truman Capote scathingly said of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, is typing, not writing.
Meanwhile, there are many people who have completed several works but, for many reasons, have not had them published, and yet we would consider them to be writers.
Which means we expect a certain quality to writing, whether published or not.
Pour your heart out
And yet, because so many of us can write (but let’s not forget the more than 700 million globally who cannot), many people think it’s easy to write – that it’s easy to be a writer. All you have to do is sit down and tap away at a keyboard and, after a while, you’ll have a book.
When I tell people – some people – that I coach writers, they think it’s a waste of time, either because most of us learned to write in school and so that should be enough, or because writing is something that takes talent that you either have or you don’t.
There’s no need for creative writing courses, they say, or to go on retreats or study for years to get an MFA or whatever other piece of paper; all you have to do, say these cynics, is write. Follow those lessons most of us learned at school and you’ll soon have a book – if that’s what you really want.
Hemingway agreed. Almost. “There is nothing to writing,” he (arguably) said. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Most of us here know about that bleeding. We know it takes more than an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters to produce the works of Shakespeare. And I don’t believe an infinite amount of artificial intelligence units will cut it either – at least, not until they learn to bleed too.
And that is true of any art. But, for most other artistic endeavors, it’s expected that you spend years learning from the experts. It takes time to know how to capture a scene in oil on canvas.
Pretty much all of us […]
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There’s a section in Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones that has stayed with me ever since I read it. The main character, Charlie, uses a racial slur at the dinner table. It’s clear he doesn’t know what the word means. To enlighten him, his father comes to him later “with a stack of books… It felt important, and it was clear to me that he thought it was significant too.” The books were by Southern writers: Welty, Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor and a dozen or so by Mark Twain.
Those books changed young Charlie. He gained a different perspective on the world just through reading those books. That’s how powerful reading can be.
But that’s not the case for every young person. Charlie’s father was a schoolteacher, and probably a good, committed one too. But that’s not everyone’s experience of reading at school, and not mine either.
Too often we’re given books you’d never choose to read. That’s not a bad thing, as any book club member will tell you, but the books should be appropriate, or at least, their relevance should be clearly explained.
Disillusioned from the start
Instead, many young people books by people long dead who lived in worlds very different to our own, sometimes in a form of the language that is no longer recognisable to us. We are then asked to decipher what this author wanted to say. And somehow we’re supposed to think this guy (it’s often a guy) is great simply because we’re being taught about that book. Learn it, pass the exam, then you can forget about it if you want.
With the certainty of the adolescent mind, we decide (without necessarily weighing up the arguments in the way they’ve been trying to teach us) that these books and authors are most definitely not relevant. Our conclusion often is that books are boring, all of them.
There are certainly many wonderful teachers who inspire a long-lasting love of books and reading, but often, like Charlie, it comes from someone closer to home.
The mentor
For me, it was a neighbour, Peter Hainey. We lived in a social housing area in the west of Scotland, similar to the projects in the US. Peter was in his 60s at the time, close to retirement. All his kids except his youngest daughter had already moved away from home. The daughter was in her final year of high school when I had just started. She and Pete’s wife would make themselves scarce on a Sunday evening when I visited, coming in occasionally with tea or sodas or to retrieve something they’d forgotten, and always for a quick chat as well.
Peter taught me chess too, and, between moves, we discussed the books he’d leant me the week before. They were mostly nature books, some beautifully illustrated, but all infused with a love for the natural world that Pete and I already shared. Others were war books. Pete had been a POW in World War Two and he told me some of his experiences, leaving out a lot of detail – detail that my young teenage self was desperate to know – but always with a strong sense of the absurdity of war.
And then there were the novels, of course, many of them along the same lines […]
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Some years ago, maybe almost 20 years ago, I was running a series of workshops for young writers, and we organized a trip to a dance troupe. We thought this would offer some entertainment and a way to explore other creative activities. But the dancers got us involved too. All of us. Including me.
“I’m not much of a dancer,” I protested.
“That’s OK,” said one of the dancers. “Just listen to the music and listen to you body, try to feel if the music touches you somewhere.”
I tried. I wanted to be open to this.
I felt the music in my thumb, so I started tapping out the beat. That then became more of a slap as the rest of my hand got involved. Then my shoulders joined in. Arms. Legs. Before I knew it, I was dancing. Really dancing. It was fantastic. I loved it.
I was reminded of this experience recently when I read the following line from David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous:
“A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And ‘making sense’ must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses.”
Sensational
The idea that you can feel as well as hear music is something I think we can all recognize, but we can also experience other sounds as a sensation. The classic example is the squeak of chalk on a board. But try it with other noises, maybe a birdsong or even a passing car, and see if you can feel that sound in your body, maybe a specific spot. Don’t think about it too much, just try to sense it. What does it feel like?
It’s easy to make the connection between smell and taste too, as you can get an idea of how something will taste from its smell. And both taste and smell have the power to invoke a memory – your ex’s after shave or perfume, that first vacation by the sea.
But can you imagine the taste a sound might have? That’s more difficult, but it’s worth trying. What would that chalkboard squeak taste like? Think about it for a moment. I’m getting something sharp and metallic.
And this is something you can use in your writing, to add richness and to, as David Abram says, have your story make sense.
Rich flavors
Food, for example, can invoke all five senses. You can imagine the taste just by looking at food, then, as I mentioned, the smell is so important. Then there is the actual taste, which comes with a texture and maybe even a crunch.
And think about noisy eating. That can invoke a feeling, an emotion even, and a very strong one in some cases, especially those who have misophonia.
There is also synesthesia. I had a colleague who could hear colors to the point where her neighbor’s drapes would give her a severe headache.
But we can all try to experience this mix of senses and add that to our writing to add another dimension and shift away from obvious connections and even cliches. The warm sweetness of a sunset; the blue feel of cold steel; the soft, pale sheet of wind covering your skin.
Again, you don’t have to think too much about the sense a particular […]
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Like many of you here, I wanted to be a writer from a very young age. I wrote stories as a kid and, in my 20s, I persisted and became a journalist and wrote radio dramas. I was being paid to be a writer. Ambition achieved!
Except journalism, and even scripted dramas, is not the same as creating your own story from conception to completion. So I did that. I wrote a novel and sent it out there.
Within two weeks, an agent asked for the full book. I was so excited. I was such a great writer! My next piece of writing would be my resignation letter. Then the rejection slip came. I collected about 120 in total. I still have them.
I clearly had more to learn. So I did. I read all the books on writing: Anne Dillard, Stephen King, Natalie Goldberg, John Truby and many, many more.
I took courses, got a master’s degree in creative writing, joined a writers’ group, then another, subscribed to blogs, newsletters, forums. All of it. And I wrote another three novels. All of them were rejected, many, many times.
Camaraderie
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of all of this was meeting other writers and exchanging experiences and, of course, writing. The other authors appreciated my feedback. Often, as the writers’ group/workshop/course would break up, someone would stop me and ask if I wanted to read more of their work. Sure, I’ll read it. Quite a few went on to have their short stories published and even their novels accepted.
Although I was still revising those four novels, I was spending more and more time on other people’s writing. I loved it. I loved reading those stories, picking out what didn’t quite work and then managing to pinpoint exactly what that thing was and why it didn’t work.
I was finally putting all that effort and study to good use. And it was helping people. They were getting published. And I was thrilled about it. I forgot about my old manuscripts and the pages of ideas I had.
I’ve found what I’m good at, and it’s not writing novels, it’s editing them.
But that means I haven’t achieved my long-held ambition.
I still write though – as you can see. Just not novels. I’ve found something that I love doing, and I get a lot of satisfaction from my work. There’s still a lot of creativity, and it feels like I’m helping people (my second career choice was some kind of health care professional).
So I’m fine with not reaching my goal.
It’s fine to fail
That’s not always the case though. I still set myself goals that I don’t achieve. I failed to write my WU articles for the past two months. I feel bad about it because these monthly ramblings are important to me.
And there I have to stop myself.
I didn’t “fail.” Life got in the way and I had to make choices, and I benefited from those areas where I did put my attention. And I’m grateful to the WU team for being so supportive and understanding. And these aren’t “ramblings”; these articles are thoughts and suggestions that I hope will help others.
It’s difficult in those moments where we feel like we have “failed” to be kind to ourselves, to be grateful […]
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I probably shouldn’t reveal this as it’s something close to me and my partner, but since it’s Valentine’s day, so maybe the spirit of romance will forgive me. It’s nothing very intimate anyway, and I mentioned to her that I was writing this article and she seemed OK about it. So I guess it’s all right if I tell you. Just you.
So, here goes: I write letters to her.
Not a huge revelation, I know, but no one else knew about this until now. And now you know too.
They’re not really what you’d describe as love letters. I don’t think I’ve ever used the L word in them (I’m sticking to that “show don’t tell” advice). Without giving you too many details, the letters are more about how I felt in specific moments we shared (a walk along the beach, a sunset) or, when I have to travel, what I miss about her.
And I usually write these letters when she’s not around, when I have a quiet contemplative moment to myself. Sure, I could tell her all these things. And I do. But, as I’m sure you will appreciate, there’s something just that little bit more special about putting your thoughts into words.
Here though, for the purposes of this article, it’s not the content that’s important but the process.
I traveled recently, on a trip where unfortunately she couldn’t join me, and it was when I was writing my letter to her that I noticed the process.
I realized that I usually write a first draft on my phone, in a memo app. I almost always have my phone with me, so it’s more convenient than a computer. Plus, when I have my laptop open, I’m usually busy with work and emails. I can have my phone with me when I’m in the plane, on a train or having a coffee or eating lunch on my own.
A thought arises, something I want to tell her and, before I know it, that leads to another thought and another until I’ve written a couple of pages.
But I find the phone a poor writing tool, and, being an editor, I can’t help but tinker. So I send that text to myself as an email and then open it on my laptop and go over the text once more. Draft number two.
That special touch
The first time I wrote one of these letters, I wanted it to be a little different. I wasn’t going to email it to her and have my email lost among all her work stuff. And I wasn’t going to print it off and hand it over. This letter had to be more special than that. So I bought a pad of nice paper, colored envelopes and even a pen that would write nicely – this letter had to be handwritten, of course.
So, with my corrected text on the computer screen in front of me, I take my pad of nice paper and that beautiful ballpoint pen that writes so smoothly, and copy out the letter by hand.
This last time though, I realized that I don’t copy the letter exactly. I make changes as I go, and these have to be careful changes because I don’t want to scrub out words or strike through […]
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Everyone wants their writing to be successful in some way, but what is a successful novel?
That starts with your definition of success.
If you measure success by the amount of books you finally sell, then you’re probably setting yourself up for some disappointment. Exact figures are hard to come by and are complicated by whether you count ebooks and audiobooks along with print books.
It’s estimated that 15% of new books published by the top 10 publishers in the US will sell fewer than 12 copies in a year; only 0.04% will sell more than 100,000. It’s generally considered that a book needs to sell 5,000 copies to break even; 85% of books don’t achieve that.* Reports suggest that self-published books sell five copies on average, but that seems on the low side to me.
Acknowledgement
Maybe it’s enough to get a publishing deal from a traditional publisher, to get that kind of industry recognition. That’s a fair aim, but so many of us in the WU community know how difficult that can be as the rejections pile up.
The decision by a publisher or agent to take on a book is such a subjective process. One book might resonate strongly with one reader because they relate positively to the content, but another reader’s own personal experiences and biases might set them dead against the idea of publishing the same story.
I see this in my own work with Arkbound publishing. We have a committee to decide on the proposals we receive precisely because of how subjective such decisions can be. Our opinions very rarely vary too much – great or poor writing will always be recognized – but it’s interesting to see where opinions diverge, and so we go with a majority decision, meaning no one person has the responsibility for rejecting a work.
With the odds seemingly against you, why bother spending all that time and immense effort to write a book?
There are, of course, many benefits to writing.
Research has shown that it can help you organize your thoughts. Dr M Cecil Smith of West Virginia University suggests that writing ‘requires focusing of attention, planning and forethought, organization of one’s thinking, and reflective thought, among other abilities – thereby sharpening these skills through practice and reinforcement.’ Walter Ong, a professor of English literature and philosophy, stated that writing is necessary to help the human mind achieve its full potential.
Cognitive psychologist James Pennebaker has researched how writing can help people overcome trauma, even with short writing exercises, and found that people feel happier, or at least less negative, and experienced fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety after a series of writing exercises. Other research suggests that people can be healthier as a result of writing as it is likely to boost the immune system, and writing has been shown to improve chronic conditions such as asthma and arthritis.
Aims
But I don’t think many people sit down to write a novel with the specific aim of improving their health, unless you’re writing about a specific trauma or experience. But writing so you can have fewer visits to the doctor is rarely the main motivation.
Most writers are looking for something more. And if becoming a bestselling author or landing a lucrative publishing deal are out […]
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Every year, more than 400,000 people participate in NaNoWriMo to write 50,000 words of a novel over the 30 days of November. Phew! December gives you time to breathe now, right? No, I know it doesn’t. You’ve got other stuff now.
NaNoWriMo, though, and other initiatives like it, can be good to get you really put some words on the page. They provide a community feel, and social media feeds are full of encouragement over the month from fellow participants. It helps to make writing fun – well, that’s the intention – and it works on a psychological level too when you see others struggling but persisting (or not).
It’s also a strong motivational tool to declare to others your commitment to do something; it’s a common technique for helping anyone stick to a behavior they’d otherwise find difficult, and that could be giving up an addiction or finally achieving a long desired goal.
Of course, not everyone makes it to the end or has the 50,000 words they set out to write. Others will have more than that or are still adding to their word count to make it to “The end.” Many might have found some inspiration in what they wrote and will be rewriting and reworking the rough draft they developed over the month.
No time to wait
That inspiration doesn’t have to come from a NaNoWriMo effort and you can, of course, at any time, apply the same techniques of writing with a daily word count, telling others of your commitment and getting support from fellow authors.
Even then, you might not reach that goal you set out to achieve. But there are many benefits to writing in general and more specifically by setting yourself writing goals, whether you achieve them or not.
To be a writer, you have to write. That seems obvious, but many people wait for inspiration, for their muse to appear, but it really helps to force yourself to write sometimes, and initiatives like NaNoWriMo and the many others can help. These can show you that you don’t need to wait for some divine intervention to be able to get words on the page.
It takes some determination. It takes hard work – especially to get started – but it is possible to get a significant chunk of writing done even if you don’t really feel like it. It doesn’t have to be every day and you don’t have to hit a specific word count; sometimes it’s enough to make the time to get a paragraph or two done to show that you can do it even when you’re not in the mood.
Throw nothing away
It might be that you look back at those paragraphs or whatever you’ve written in the month, week or whatever and find that you just don’t like what you’ve written. Still, the practice of writing will help make you a better writer anyway. And the fact that you can look at something you’ve written and judge that it’s not up to standard means you’ve already progressed as a critic of your own work – as long as you don’t go too far with that.
And maybe you’ll find those first draft chapters at some later date and be inspired then. Maybe this was not the […]
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This morning, while walking my dog, I was reminded of a snippet about writing that is simultaneously the best advice and yet also the worst. I cannot remember where I heard it or where is saw it (if you know, please put the source in the comments), but it is something that has stuck with me and often comes back to me. It goes like this (and I’m probably paraphrasing here):
The best thing about being a writer is never having to say, ‘You should’ve been there.’
It’s such a great piece of advice because it is something to which every writer could want to aspire to, to tell a story in such a way that the reader can feel like they were in that moment too. Surely, that’s what all writers want to achieve, to let their readers experience the story rather than just read a description of events.
It’s also a little like the advice to write every day. I mentioned this in my earlier article on writing advice, and yes, it would be great to write every day, but sometimes life has other plans. This advice above similarly sets a very high bar. It’s almost setting you up to fail before you even start.
Portrait of a landscape
I was reminded of this quote on my dog walk because I often take a picture of the same scene. Every time I go there, it’s different. Different colors, different sounds and smells. Every time, I try to capture that moment. Then I look at the picture and I always feel a sense of disappointment. It doesn’t matter how many shots I take, I can never get close to replicating the landscape as it is when I look at it.
My first thought when I saw the photos this morning was that I wished I could paint. I think if I could paint, I could recreate the splendor as my eye saw it.
But clearly there is more to the moment that only the scenery. As I mentioned, there are the sounds and smells: the shrill whistle of the curlew, the woosh of wings as a squadron of cormorants swoop overhead; the slight sting of pine in the nose, the lung-clearing scent of eucalyptus. Then there’s the sensation of my feet crunching on that dirt road and the chill of the early morning autumn air on my face and hands. Plus the delight of seeing how much Dexter, my mongrel dog, seemed to enjoy being there.
And so I wondered if a truly great writer could capture the experience of such a scene. Could a writer portray the beauty of the landscape without resorting to an overly ornate description? Could any wordsmith accurately recount the sensations and emotions of the moment?
It’s already quite a feat to be able to fully appreciate such a moment without being preoccupied with the day ahead or with days gone by: reliving that argument, all the things you should have said, or what you’re planning to say at that meeting later today or even just wondering what you’re going to have for dinner tonight. All those things that you should, would or could have done.
Meditation and mindfulness training helped me to appreciate these moments, and there are many other methods […]
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My mother gave me a manuscript to read recently. She’d been raving about it for months. It was a gripping read, she said, a real page-turner. “It’s brilliant,” she told me as she handed me the typewritten (not computer-printed) pages. “You’re going to love it.”
It was a gruesome whodunnit with a police lieutenant as the main character who gets thrillingly closer and closer to the killer, but the bad guy always stays that one suspenseful step ahead.
But the language was stilted, the story veered off at random tangents, the police procedures were unrealistic and there were many major plot holes. The ending was rushed and entirely unsatisfying: on the final page, the lieutenant’s partner gave a sudden and completely impromptu confession. He was sorry and he shouldn’t have done it.
The thing is, he couldn’t have done it. He’d been with the lieutenant when at least two of the murders were committed. But after the confession, that was it, case closed. The end.
It’s not that my mother doesn’t know a good story when she sees it. She loves reading, and she will happily give up on a book if she doesn’t find it engaging within the first 50 or so pages. She was just a little closer to this particular story than most.
She had gotten the manuscript from her friend whose husband had written it many years ago, but he had since died. It was certainly a huge achievement for him to type out a whole novel on an old electric typewriter in his spare time. It had taken him years, and his widow was immensely proud of him, as she should be.
But she also wanted an honest answer from me: was it any good?
Cognitive bias
We all know that being too close to a subject can cloud your objectivity. This is why family members are not always the best people to critique your writing. Even professionals can be blinded by their closeness to a project. I’ve known editors who have worked with their partners all the way from developing the story idea through the rewrites until the final version. They then gush about how this is a modern classic and a guaranteed bestseller, but change their tune when the rejections roll in.
This doesn’t mean that publishers and agents are always calmly objective. And they shouldn’t be. You don’t want someone to accept your book just because they think it’s objectively good. You want an agent and publisher who is passionate about your book and who will defend it and promote it as if you were a close family member.
This is where the difficulty comes in. You want your agent and publisher to be biased in favor of your book but you need honest feedback to make your story so good that an agent or publisher will take it on and promote it.
How do you do that? How do you know if your book is any good, if it’s ready to send to an agent or sell well if it’s self-published?
Strong support
We’ve already established that close family are unlikely to be reliable. They want you to do well, and if they don’t, then their judgement will be clouded by those other issues they have. That’s not to say that you should ignore […]
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It seems obvious that writers would write about writing. Elizabeth Gilbert, Patricia Highsmith, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Annie Dillard are among the many well known authors who have written about writing. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is my personal favorite. They seem to take that old adage of “write what you know” quite literally (more on that later).
I see it as a sign of generosity; people who have achieved a level of success sharing their knowledge in that hope that it helps someone else.
And we’ve all sign snippets of their advice in our social media feeds. That profound sounding sentence or two (sometimes taken out of context), pasted onto an attractive background and dispensed into the world for others to make of it what they will.
I’ve done it. My favorite is from Mark Twain:
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
But, yes, as an editor, I suppose I would pick something like that.
Inspirational stuff
And I’m not saying we shouldn’t post these fragments of guidance. They truly can be inspiring, especially if you just happen to get the right one at exactly the right time, the one that really speaks to you in the moment.
But they can’t all be right, can they?
Twain, for example, is credited with first saying, “Write what you know.” To which Gore Vidal said:
“‘Write what you know’ will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all.”
That is (not uncharacteristically) harsh. The “write what you know” maxim has since been rubbished by more than Mr. Vidal, but it is perhaps more misunderstood than incorrect. It doesn’t mean that everything you write has to be biographical. I’m sure Mark Twain intended it to be taken more that you should write something that only you could write. Neil Gaiman explains it perfectly:
“The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.”
Edit what you have
Another common piece of writing advice is to write every day. I’m not sure who said that first, but the author Jodi Picoult has this to say:
“You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
Note that she’s not specifically advocating writing every day, but she does have a point that writing something is better than nothing.. However, having a goal to write every day doesn’t work for everyone. You might miss one day, then promise to catch up tomorrow. Life gets in the way and you don’t, so you resolve to write three days’ worth the next day. Something else comes up and you can’t complete your goal. For some people, that can invoke a sense of failure or even stress to write so many words in a single day to catch up.
For other writers, they have to give themselves that aim of writing every day, maybe at a set time every morning, otherwise they never manage to get any writing done at all.
Personally, I like Lauren Tarshis’s point on this:
“Writing is a craft that you can learn […]
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