Advice from Me to Me

If you could go back in time and give your younger self advice about writing, what would it be?

"Advice" by laughlin

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Tour dates are coming together for Our Narrow Hiding Places, which you can preorder now, or buy wherever books are sold on 8/13!

• LAUNCH: 8/13 - Greenlight Books ( Brooklyn) with Jason Diamond

• 8/20 - PRINT Bookshop (Portland, ME) with Rachael Conrad

• 8/22 - Water Street Books (Exeter, NH) with Tim Horvath

• 9/10 - Chappaqua Public Library (Chappaqua, NY) with Edoardo Ballerini

• 9/19 - Barnes & Noble (Princeton, NJ) with Laura Spence-Ash

For more information on events, check on my website at this link!

And if you’re interested in my Advanced Revision Workshop (fully remote) at 92NY, you can apply until Aug. 5th!

Thanks!

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Wrapping up a year-long novel incubator class last month (of which I helmed just the second half) I was struck by the remarkable work the writers in the class had done, and how far the final results were from where they’d started, only ten months earlier. It wasn’t simply a matter of the accruing of hundreds of new pages, but the writing itself was more confident, more inventive, more sophisticated than the earliest pages I’d read. I say this not to toot my own horn—as ever with teaching the creative process, the results come mainly from the natural growth of each writer, which I’ve only clumsily tended and nurtured and tried to shelter through the weather. Mostly I’ve just tried my best to keep up with them as they shot up.

For a final reading, I shared an essay from a former professor of mine, Alice McDermott, from her excellent book of craft essays, What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Towards the end she meditates on a fascinating question—what advice would she give to her younger self, if she could?

It is the kind of question, she explains, that one is often asked in interviews and by students. It’s sort of a silly one too, she admits, because the truth is that she knows her younger self would never listen to a word of what her older self tried to tell her. Writers are often stubborn this way—I know I am. We figure things out by trying and failing and eventually admitting we have to make adjustments. But if someone just steps in and says, “Hey, why don’t you do it this other way instead?” we’re pretty much universally inclined to say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Still, McDermott engages with the question and comes up with some advice she’d share if she could. You should read the essay (and the whole book) to see what she says in detail, but the advice is broadly helpful.

First she would remind herself to “beware of the temporary within the contemporary”… meaning that it generally backfires when we try too hard to write something that’s very topical, very now because we tend to be terrible judges of what about the present moment is going to end up mattering (or even remembered) in five, ten, fifty years.

Thinking of Robinson Crusoe, and the scenes where Crusoe chooses to abandon his boat in the storm (a choice that leads to everything worth writing about) she would remind herself that “every novel is a shipwreck”— meaning that we shouldn’t panic when the well-structured and highly-organized vessel we set sail in suddenly hits uncharted rocks and needs to be abandoned. Every novel should be a little smarter than its author, and a book that doesn’t fall apart on us partway through is (only to become reinvented in some bold, fresh way) probably isn’t worth writing or reading.

Words matter, she advises. Always labor over them, and never write badly. In the end the focus you make on the words themselves will also inspire richer characters, more interesting story, and realer worlds.

Her final piece of advice is to not fear sincerity. She talks about reading an older story with her students and seeing them cringe at the naked emotionality of some dialogue between two characters. Instead of cloaking things in irony and subtext, they simply say what’s on their minds, and this seemed to be so foreign to the students that it shocked them. McDermott remembers thinking in a similar way as a young writer, and how vital it became to unlearn that mode.

Again, I barely do these bits of advice justice here, and highly recommend you read the full essay. The whole book is a master class in writing—in fact I think you’d learn more from it than you would from an actual master class, and it’ll be far more affordable an investment.

In any case, McDermott’s piece made me think about what advice I would give to my own younger self—really, what advice I wanted to give to my students. (Many of whom were older than me, actually. Age has very little to do with all this.)

And I realized that, fortunately, as I’ve been writing these Substack pieces for almost three years now, I have a pretty good idea of what that advice might be… so I went back through all my posts and tried to see what patterns there have been.

I came up with eight bits of advice:

1) Read more & be open-minded in the day-to-day: both are crucial to letting inspiration into your process. So much of the work of writing doesn’t really involve doing much writing. This can be oddly frustrating, at least it is often to me—because I want to just get down to it. Instead I have to remind myself constantly that what comes out is only ever as good as what goes in. Feed your head with good books, and keep your eyes open throughout the day. You don’t need to be scribbling every detail down in a journal, though there’s nothing wrong with that. But writing has to be about life, and often we forget to do the living part—at least I do.

2) Be a good literary citizen: help other writers when you can, show up for them, basically do all the same stuff you've done this whole year for each other. This question comes up a lot, and it is something I failed to understand early on. I remember in my school days thinking that it was cheating to “network” or to ask for help at all. I saw my classmates often as competitors, not collaborators. I kept to myself and did my work and that produced a lot of great results. But later on I realized I had missed a big part of the process—I hadn’t gotten to know the amazing people I was sitting around that workshop table with. Now I try to remain as active a part of the literary community as I can… not because it’s going to get me somewhere, or because I want to be liked… though surely those are some part of it. But really it is because this is a tough and strange career, and the only people who understand what it takes and means are other writers. I’ve needed that community over the years, not to help me get ahead but simply to stay afloat. Help others and it will help you.

3) Don't rush: most of my regrets in the past twenty years are over sending things out just because I was impatient and/or excited, not because I knew it was perfect. Here’s the advice I ignored from so many people… to just. slow. down. I always had this feeling like the clock was ticking. If I didn’t get published, and quick, I’d be a failure. It wasn’t really until I’d gotten older and realized that a) you can publish something weak or sloppy and end up regretting it and b) you can write something great that never gets published and it is still a success. These are hard things to accept, but twenty years in, I’m finding myself thanking my lucky stars for some of the rejections that came for work that was good, or fine, but not my best—I’m glad, now, that those things are safely in my drawer and not out in the world. On the other hand, the stuff that I really believe in, and which takes much longer than I expected, is almost always the best stuff, and what I’m proudest of.

4) Be reckless & revise: this is my version of the old "write drunk and edit sober" but basically don't be afraid to go nuts and be sloppy on the first draft, you'll spend 90% of your time revising no matter what. As someone who has been teaching classes mainly focused on revision recently (sign up before Aug. 5th!) I’ve come to realize that most writers don’t want to hear that most of the job is revision. We all love to create! That burst of inspiration, that rush of passion… we burn brightly and it feels wonderful. But then comes the hard, slow work that most of us dream of just avoiding. We fantasize about that perfect novel that just comes in a two-month blur. But that’s not how it really happens. We ought to be reckless and wild in that first draft—try everything and trust your gut. But then comes the work of figuring out how to make that amazing chaotic mess into a work of real art—and that will be much longer, and much harder than we want it to be.

5) Take care of yourself to do your best work: begrudgingly I admit, I get a lot more done, and much better work, when I sleep/meditate/eat healthy/exercise/drink rarely... super-annoying but it makes such a difference. Getting older, so far, seems to be mostly a matter of realizing that the things that came effortlessly to me before now require a lot of fine-tuning and care. When I was younger I could eat junk and drink too much and barely sleep and not stop to do the reading or go to therapy… twenty years later I’ve found that getting good work done requires living more thoughtfully. I wonder, sometimes, if this is because my body and mind are aging, or if it is that I simply have developed higher standards for my work, which require me to put my best foot forward. I’m sure it’s really both.

6) No one stops you but you. I’ve worried a lot in my life about failing, or disappointing others, such that if a book didn’t sell, or an advance wasn’t earned out, that I'd lose an agent or editor—really the fear was that someone else would decide to end my career. But eventually, and by failing a lot, and even losing agents and editors, I came to realize that nobody else ever gets to tell you to stop. You fail, and you decide to keep on writing, and that's the end of it. We can always find convenient excuses and ways to blame others for why we can’t succeed. But when we tell ourselves that story we believe it, and then we’re really done. So tell yourself another story—about how you got back up again when no one else thought you could, and showed everyone what you’re really made of. I’ve published five books now, but I’ve written almost twice that number. Looking back now I can see the moments I could have stopped, thinking I’d blown it permanently… and I’m glad I didn’t let them lay me low for very long.

7) Ditch the phone. This is super annoying, but I've come to realize that my smartphone is probably the biggest drag on my creativity and productivity in my life. At the moment I see this almost through the lens of addiction—as in, other people I know seem to be able to easily put their phones away and focus on work, but I have come to see that I can’t, or at least not without some real effort. But when I have been able to step away from the phone for longer and longer periods of time, I notice the difference very very quickly. Creativity requires time, focus, and freedom—three things that our smartphones are always ready to take away from us. If I could go back in time to 2009 and tell my younger self to keep the phone I had then, I would.

8) HAVE FUN: This is the whole thesis of this Substack, but it is something I have to remind myself of nearly constantly, because I take writing seriously and I care a lot about what I’m doing. But at the end of the day, having fun with it is the most important thing that I can do. When you're enjoying what you're doing, other people will too. If you're not, they won't either. It's so easy to lose the fun of creativity and writing and make it into work—to some degree that's important, but we have to find our way back to the fun as soon we can.

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Next month I may be away from the Substack for a bit while I’m dealing with the events for Our Narrow Hiding Places and more—but I’ll be back soon, I promise, and I hope to see you out there!