Monday, November 14, 2011

Ten "Truths" about a Writing Life?

  1. It’s best, at least in the beginning, not to think about what you’re writing—a poem, a story, an essay, an article—but to let the material tell you what it wants to be.
  2. The worst problem writers face? The tendency to judge too soon, and too harshly.
  3. The writing life, like any other “career” in the arts, involves sleeping with the enemy: rejection.
  4. Joan Didion says, “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Janet Malcolm wrote in The New Yorker that writers are “con men,” “preying on people’s vanity” and “betraying their confidences.” When you write about other people, especially in nonfiction, your characters are (or were) real people. They live both inside and outside the story. Yet your obligation is to the telling the truth even at the risk of betraying a subject.
  5. You want to say, “I am a writer.” But when you do you feel like a fake. It seems presumptuous, even ridiculous. Publishing is the only cure for this.
  6. Maybe some of the shame we feel has to do with what we imagine “being a writer” is. Perhaps we all need to ask ourselves another question: “Why do I want to do this, especially when it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone else?”
  7. Dancers who love performance but dislike the endless rehearsals that lead up to it will never be very good dancers. Writers who dislike the messy process of making things with words will eventually give up. And they should.
  8. Terrible career advice: “Be a poet. Be a novelist. Be an essayist.” What currency do such dreams have in an age of high unemployment? Put more bluntly: “Are you hopelessly naïve, or what?”
  9. When we’re beginning as writers, we’re drunk with admiration for successful writers, in many ways embodied by our favorite writing instructors. We take their classes, as many as we can. We are thrilled when they say nice things about our work. Devastated when they don’t. More than anything, we want to write like them. You’ll never get anywhere until you get over this.
  10. To borrow a metaphor from E. B. White: Writing is like a frog. It can be dissected but it always dies in the process. This is a lie. While writing is a very individual process—what works for you may not work for me—it is no mystery. Believing this puts your work in peril.