15 Nuggets of Writerly Wisdom, Redux
Today’s post is a reprise of one from November of 2023.1
I think it’s worth a rerun because:
Still true.
Unless you’ve dug about in the archive, most of you haven’t seen it.
I’ve updated/edited it a bit.
Before we get to that, a reminder that the Birth Year Project is still open for business. Past years can be reached from an index on the home screen. Here’s the most-recent BYP post. As I’ve said before, the list of “years done” is outdated (the fix eludes me). Here’s the correct census: 1939, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1950, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969, 1971, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1992.
Welcome to new subscribers/followers/list junkies. Thanks for stopping by! Oh, and please don’t skip the footnotes . . .
Nuggets Redux:
Sometimes we use shorthand to remind ourselves of nuanced/layered truths. They’re not dumbed-down/simplistic, just highly compacted, concentrated, essential. They’re tools we use to get our work done. Some help us focus as we write, some help get us into the writing chair (and keep us there).
Here are fifteen of mine (with a little extra drill-down this time):
1. “A writer is a reader moved to emulation.” [Saul Bellow]2
Such a basic truth, but it blended into the background so well I never really saw it. It wasn’t the world, per se, that made me want to write, it was books, words on paper—even the look of words on paper. In the earlier post, I wrote: Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. Today that line sets off my crap detector—sounds true-ish but says almost nothing. Here’s the rewrite: In my case, reading caused the writing.
There are novelists who claim not to read fiction while drafting a book (can’t risk contaminating their own voices) . . . but, boy, it was never like that for me. Reading primed the pump, switched on the machinery, lit up the neurons. I don’t mean in general, I mean I routinely went straight from reading chair to keyboard.
In a wider sense, reading voraciously and across genres and out of your comfort zone makes your work smarter, less insular, less self-satisfied. You learn the art of reading like a writer—one eye on story, one on craft. Beyond this, I think each of us has key books in our lives—ones that cracked us open, letting facts/ways of seeing that once pinged off our outer shells get inside where we’re vulnerable.
[A few months after the original post, that idea bloomed into Reading Project [9]: You Are What You Read, in which I took a stab at naming twenty formative books in my life, then encouraged you to do likewise.
This still seems like a good thought experiment. Remember: it’s not about listing your favorites. Ask yourself which specific books (regardless of what the world thinks of them) made you want to write, had a discernible role in shaping (or re-shaping) who you are as a writer. I recommend it.]
2. A good story is “a vivid, continuous dream.” [John Gardner]3
Of course, vivid. But also, continuous. Keep your reader inside the dream, inside the bubble. Skip the same-old, same-old. Don’t waste our time, don’t betray our trust. Crank the crank another crank. Fascinate us. Keep us reading.
You know those fail videos: You only had one job!!!
That’s yours: Keep us reading!!!
3. A story is a thing.
It’s an art object, constructed of words. You build it and re-build it over multiple sittings―you re-see it, you add stuff, chop stuff out, purify it, make it cohere better, screw the language into focus, and so on.
Why does this need saying?
Maybe, for you, it doesn’t—because you get it, you and I are simpatico.
Or maybe you flat-out disagree. You reject this characterization of the work you do. You’re not a thing-maker, you’re a communicator, a guide or shaman or fellow sufferer. My focus on “the art object” kind of offends you, seems mechanical or soulless. You’re not about technique, you’re about heart.4 Maybe “art object” strikes you as elitist, etc.
Or this could be a false distinction—maybe we’re simply describing our process differently. Maybe my harping on design and precise language, etc., comes from the fact I like revision a lot more than composition. Maybe I buy the ten-thousand hours idea.5 This could be a right-brain/left-brain issue . . . when we need the entire brain.
In any case, I stress the art object because, when I write fiction, I think I’m making an art object, a noun; this approach helps me unify and aim writing.
Last time, I ended this point by adding that if your writing is a noun, it can described by adjectives, and riffed a little—your piece might be brisk/peppy/fizzy . . . or shimmery/smoldery/ sneaky/sly . . . or blithe/dreamy/distractable . . . or crude/jittery/insistent . . . or—
4. No voiceless grist. [Donald Newlove]6
Here’s the full quote: “Do you want to wake up thirty years later facing a shelf of voiceless grist with your name on the covers?”
If you’ve followed this Substack awhile, you know voice is at the heart of my understanding of fiction. Last year, I devoted three posts to this:
Later that year, there were two posts about fiction with multiple voices:
5. A memorable character is “a bright, human image.” [William Gass]7
Neat plots and lovely writing are terrific, but fiction sticks to bones when we’re given characters we care about, ones we know intimately, ones we can’t stop watching and listening to, feeling attached to.
Last time, I left it at that. If you’d like a little more on this, see the note.8
6. Action reveals character.9
People do what they do because of who they are. A different character would handle things differently, make different choices, pay attention to different facts, be injured or amused or baffled by different things.
7. There’s no such thing as description, there’s only construction. [William Gass]10
I can’t tell you how joggled I was by this idea. It’s truly radical.
Here’s what I take it to mean:
Whatever’s in your story is in your story because you put it there. Not the world, not the reader’s expectation, you.
It all matters, nothing’s random, nothing’s filler.
If it’s raining in your story, I used to tell writing students, it’s because it’s a story with rain. A story without rain is a different story.
Or I’d say: You’re the production designer. Your job is to decide how bright or dim the picture it is, what colors dominate, whether they’re pale or deeply saturated, primary or pastel, whether the textures are dry/rough/bumpy/scratchy or glassy/slick/reflective, how abruptly or languorously or repetitively things happen, whether the sounds are piercing or sparse or whispery . . . all of that. It’s designed. By you!
Even a story based on a real-life event. Feel free to write journalism if you want. But writing fiction means you own the material—your only responsibility is to your vision.11
8. Reading is linear.
Stories unfold sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, section by section. They have the element of duration. Things aren’t given all at once, they come in sequence, there’s drama to the unfolding.
Obvious, right?
Except there are really two sequences:
the order of events as experienced by the characters,
the order of events as experienced by the reader.
These can be in sync, or not.
In sync means the reader’s awareness is aligned with the character’s.
Out of sync means the character’s sense of what’s going on differs from the reader’s. Out of sync can be fun stuff, can lead to all kinds of alternate story designs/strategies. I don’t have room to unpack this further here, but there are a handful of examples in the note12).
OK, back to reading is linear: However a story is organized, whether events come chronologically or bounce about in time eccentrically, the experience of reading has its own shape, its own beginning/middle/end, each of which has a particular mood or emotional climate. We enter the story ignorant, expectant, open-minded but wary. Then we get caught up in the narrative; things get more complicated, our involvement deepens; our expectancy now has stuff to focus on—out in the real world, a car honks, a Cessna passes overhead; we’re oblivious. Eventually, we hit the home stretch, where we encounter a familiar paradox, wanting to rush to the finish line, while simul-taneously not wanting the reading to be over.
Here’s the bottom line: Good stories feel aimed, purposeful. They’re not a bagful of story matter, they have shape, they unfold: beginning, middle, end. The beginning/middle/end structure is embedded in the whole, and in each of the parts, right down to the sentence level. This, then this, then this. Good stories lean forward.
9. Make it decision-rich.13
Even if your story idea feels unoriginal as you start, the more choices you make, constructing it, the more it becomes yours.
Writers differ as to process—some love the energy of pounding out big messy rough drafts, some find composing hugely burdensome, but love revision (my fondest dream, I used to tell people, was to wake up and find a first draft on my desk). Be that as it may, you have to spend enough time with your story.
Let me say that another way: Your writing mind is a filter. Run the story through it again and again—that is, through you—and it will become unique, a one-of-a-kind artifact.
10. Remember the body.
Keep the writing physical. Give us images we can see, things we can touch. Prefer the short hard Anglo-Saxon words—make them your default until you really need an abstraction.
A caveat: cheesy how-to manuals/websites also advise you to “remember the senses”; as a result, novice writers often sound like they’re following a checklist—she sees this, smells that, hears . . . and so on. The way to avoid this paint-by-the-numbers approach is to inhabit the character’s moment deeply—which few details are needed to make it real for a reader? Show those, skip all the rest.
11. No extra words.14
12. Triggering subject, true subject. [Richard Hugo]15
Something gets you started―an event, an image, a memory. As you write you move toward your true subject, what it’s really about. If you stop before you get there, you don’t really have a story. Think of the dual meaning of the word “passage’—don’t be a writer who disembarks too soon.
13. “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” [E. L. Doctorow]16
You can’t see everything at once. You may know what comes next, but not what comes after that. Living with ignorance can be frustrating, even debilitating. But the longer you spend with your story, the more it will reveal itself to you. For a writer, ignorance is a necessary evil.
No ignorance, no discovery.
14. You make your own luck.
As Woody Allen famously said, “Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.”
Good things happen to those who sit at their writing desks regularly.
My long-ago mentor, Bill Kittredge, put it this way: Go into your writing room and stay there four hours. You don’t have to write. Except you can’t do anything else.
But what do I even mean by “luck”? Not the kind that lands your manuscript in the right editor’s in-box—nor any of the fluky extra-literary stuff that befalls you. I mean the kind that pops an amazing word or image or understanding into your awareness, when a millisecond earlier you were clueless.
We’ve all had such moments—it was totally out of the blue, we say, the light bulb lit up, lightning struck. That’s how it seems, but I think luck in writing is more like tectonic plates suddenly giving way from built-up pressure way below the surface.
15. It’s not a race.
There’s always someone smarter, faster, prettier, more gifted, more sophisticated, more focused, more driven, more handsomely rewarded. There’s not a single one of us who doesn’t feel, at times, like a fraud, a poser, who doesn’t have “self-esteem issues,” who doesn’t mutter inwardly, If I were a real writer, I’d—
Be that as it may, you have your own work to do. Do it.
In honor of that thought, a sign I saw in Iceland:
Bellow: I’d love to tell you where this came from but I’ve never tracked it down. Saul Bellow said a lot of smart things about writing, so this is probably his—if it isn’t, it’s still true.
Important clarification: You don’t want to write Bellows’ book (he already did that); you don’t want to be Bellow, you don’t want to mimic his voice or re-use his material. You want to follow his example.
But what does “follow his example” mean? I think it means:
permitting yourself to recognize a viable story idea in your own history, the history of others, or in the wilds of your imagination . . .
visualizing it as a book, constructed by you . . .
persisting until it’s done—despite your demons, despite the world’s utter indifference, despite the hideous technical problems the work throws at you.]
Gardner: The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (1984).
Heart: One long-ago afternoon at Bozeman High School (I was doing a week-long Writers-in-the-Schools gig), I talked with a girl—sophomore, junior?—and pointed out a couple of spots she could work on (as in revise, slightly) . . . can you picture the look she gave me as she said, Because of you I’ll never write again—?
10,000 hours: This comes from Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success (2011). There’s a good description of the book’s argument here:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4662388/
Newlove: First Paragraphs (1992).
Gass: Fiction and the Figures of Life (1978).
Bright, human image:
In film and IRL, the eyes/ears interact directly with pixels and sound waves. In writing, it’s the mind’s eye, the mind’s ear (oh, and mind’s skin!).
Seeing the film of a novel you’ve read, you might say, Hmm, that’s not how I pictured her— We get what you mean. The thing is, you never really did have her pictured. Victorian novelists, Trollope say, would spend half a page detailing a face; we quit doing this—it came to seem clunky/old-fashioned, and we no longer accept the face as a reliable measure of personality/worth. But even a Trollopean catalog of features doesn’t equate to a photograph—ten viewers of a film see one image; ten readers of a novel see ten images.
I love that Gass wants us to write bright, human images, that he urges us to avoid drab/formless/stereotypical characters. He’s right: they lock us into the story.
[I know I should to quit while I’m ahead here . . . nonetheless, a final thought: Now that I’m slipping from “old guy” to “very old guy,” I find myself visited by the old nursery rhyme, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” the line life is but a dream hitting me nakedly, minus the soothing mother/child patina. I take it to mean: All this, our lives on Earth, is just a shimmer in the dark. Whew. So these days when I think of Gass’s bright, human image a nearly unbearable poignancy washes through me. Our bright characters, like our own cherished selves, are just holograms, real-seeming, but immaterial, trillions of brain cells firing at once.]
Action reveals . . . This is the oldest principle of fiction writing. It remains true and fundamental. But it applies best to traditional storytelling. Some newer strands of writing rely less on characters—some flash fiction, some postmodern writing, some writing that abandons the practice of creating human-like entities. We can be delighted or moved by such fiction, but for reasons other than the pathos surrounding a character’s choices—for the dazzling construction/design, maybe, for the boldness of its juxtaposition/collision of images, which work on us more akin to how visual art does.
[Sometimes I wonder how many false convictions in real-life crime cases come from too-narrow or too-stereotypical views of how a suspect should act in a given situation.]
No such thing as description . . . This is really a continuation of A story is a thing. Gass again, same book.
The material is yours: Typing this just now, I remembered a piece that ran in The New Yorker in 2022—Ted Geltner’s account of how one of my all-time favorite short stories, Denis Johnson’s “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking,” came to be written, how Johnson’s personal experience morphed, year’s later, into a work or art:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/american-chronicles/the-terrifying-car-crash-that-inspired-a-masterpiece
Character’s sequence/reader’s sequence:
Sometimes a narrator is depicting a much-earlier time in her life, highlighting the mismatch between who she is now and who she was then (as in Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen . . . William Maxwell does the same in So Long, See You Tomorrow). Or the story is told via diary entries—from the character’s POV the subsequent pages are still blank, but not the writer’s, and often not ours. Or it’s a “frame story”—the main story lives inside a narrative device (as in Little Big Man where the last survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn is interviewed in extreme old age; in the film version, a craggy voice-over reminds us now and then that we’re seeing a story within a story; in The Usual Suspects the plot hinges on our forgetting that it’s a frame story, that what we see is actually a character’s fib). Some-times a novel will open like a juggler throwing up ball after ball, not connecting them via the act of juggling until they’re all in the air (just about the time the reader’s wondering what the hell all these people have to do with each other). Some novels present a sequence of first-person narrators (as in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Ernest J. Gaines’ A Gathering of Old Men). Some novels dart about in time (as in many David Mitchell’s novels); some novels are a sequence of separate stories related only by theme (as in Dahlia de la Cerda’s recent Reservoir Bitches). Sometimes the place stays the same but the time-plane changes (as in Alan Garner’s Red Shift or Daniel Mason’s North Woods). There are stories like Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (first a play, then a film ) where the scenes are given in reverse order: the last thing we see is the lovers’ first locking of eyes; the two of them are blissfully ignorant of all that lies ahead . . . which we’ve already witnessed; the effect is heart-rending. There’s even a novel in which time itself moves backward, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. A man suffers an electric shock that awakens a separate consciousness within him. Trying to figure out who he is, this doppleganger observes how things happen. Example: a woman nearby is crying; the outer man applies his hand to her face, then yanks it away; she stops crying. OK, the doppleganger concludes, the man’s a soother, a comforter. I know how gimmicky this all sounds, but as the macro story goes further back in time we learn the profound reason for the device. for why everything is backwards (I won’t spoil it for you).
Decision-rich: Years ago, when I was learning backgammon, a friend and I played in a small tournament. I had two weak opponents and was stunned to find myself in the final round. The guy I faced was no novice. I’d read the backgammon books [one was called Backgammon for Blood]; I knew what the conventional wisdom advised, but my opponent’s moves seemed confusingly unconventional. Anyway, I lost in jig time. Driving home I talked this out with my friend and had a kind of epiphany; later on, I saw how it applied to writing.
Each turn in backgammon starts with rolling the dice. You have no control over the numbers that turn up; the skill comes in seeing how to use the two numbers. A short game tends to increase the role luck plays; longer games are likelier to depend on the canniness of a player’s choices. My opponent’s moves made the games messier/more complex in order to downplay luck and play up his skill. I came to see that this dynamic also applied to fiction writing. You can start with a plot/character situation that seems overfamiliar/stale/ordinary but if you stay with it long enough, if you put it through the filter of who you are enough times, it will become one-of-a-kind, yours.
No extra words: I was terribly pleased with myself for saying this so tersely. Ha ha.
But it was too naked. “No extra words” is about revision, cutting, consolidating, picking up the pace. The good news: learning how to do this is the easiest part of writing well. The less-good news: you first have to know which words are the extra ones.
In the Sixes [3]: Sentences, I talked about editors asking me to cut stories down by X-amount, how I went about it, and how essential cutting is. I encourage you to have a look at #6 in that post.
And as long as we’re on the subject of saying it quick and tight, I get to show you my all-time favorite compact sentence. It’s from The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s book-length travelogue/”novel”/meditation on mortality, which begins with remarks about the life of Thomas Browne [1605-1682, physician, author of Urn Burial]. For Browne, Sebald tells us, there was no antidote . . . against the opium of time. A few sentences later, he writes:
Indeed, old families last not three oaks.
Hugo: The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (1979).
Headlights: E. L. Doctorow, “The Art of Fiction No. 94” in The Paris Review (Issue 101, Winter 1986
Jeez, David, reading your lists (all pf 'em, but I'm thinking now of this one) makes me feel soooo DUMB! Who'd a thunk there was so much to think about when writers go and do some writin'?
Thanks for this post! I needed the reminder to use sensory language.