The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got & Other Quick Takes: 7QT III Seriatim

A quick explanation about the dearth of posts lately. (At least by my own standards and wishes; perhaps you haven’t noticed.) I have been between jobs since last month and have been using the time to take care of some personal business and long-neglected tasks at home. I start new employment next week, which will be good for my head since I only function well under routine (and coffee measured in the gallons) and have found myself saying: “What day is this? What week is this? What month is this? Is it really almost November? How old am I? How long have I been asleep? Who were you again?” I agree with Flannery O’Connor: “Routine is a condition of survival.” Thus next week I can get myself back on a regular routine, including reading and writing, and that means I should be able to post about 3-4 times a week. The blog will start going in some varying directions, as well—not different directions, just additional ones long promised. So stay tuned, regular readers.

II.

When I was a graduate student, I made a conscious effort to try not to write in an academic style. My first year, I had used all the proper jargon, and all the expected academic logjam of syntax (snooze yawn zzzzz), and only ended up hating everything that I had written. When Sir Walter Scott wrote about Dr. Dryasdust, he knew whereof he spoke. I didn’t want to be Dr. Dryasdust. So I said to myself, “Why are you doing this? Why not write about literature as though you actually do love it and think it matters and ought to be read?” (I remember Joseph Heller’s wonderful line in Catch-22: “He knew everything there was to know about literature except how to enjoy it.”) Only one professor—Dr. George Goodin—understood what I was up to. Everyone else told me I was being overly subjective, but Dr. Goodin said to me, “You’re trying to do something that’s very difficult to do: write literary criticism the way Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence do.” (He might have added G.K. Chesterton! Though actually, I was trying to imitate John Irving’s manner of writing about Charles Dickens.) “It’s easier,” Dr. Goodin said, “to write like professors write. But I hope you keep trying.”

It’s easier to do it that way, but keep trying to do it this way, the hard way: What better advice could there be? Dr. Goodin also told me that he would read anything I gave him, which was wonderful encouragement.

III.

Also at Southern Illinois University, I got some related advice from Dr. Jack Brown—God rest his soul—who taught excellent courses in Shakespeare and Milton. I think I learned more about how to read literature from Dr. Brown and Dr. Goodin than from anyone else. In Milton, Dr. Brown devoted one entire class session to reviewing some English history, as background to the proper understanding of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and much of the rest of Milton we were going to read.

Many of students were bored with this; I suspect they wanted to complain about how Milton hated women. That’s all anyone did in graduate school in those days. For all I know, that’s all anyone does now. At any rate, after class was over, during office hours, I assured Dr. Brown I knew what he was up to: You can’t understand Milton without understanding English history. He noted that he had always tried, and failed, to have a course in English history be required for graduate students. It is not just Milton; it is hard-going to understand half of English literature without knowing the history. “Well, I’ll just learn it on my own,” I told him.

“And you can learn it on your own!” Dr. Brown told me. “People have this mistaken view that, in order to learn something, you need to take a course in it or get a degree in it. But the sensible thing to do, when you want to learn a subject, is just to read.”

If someone tells you to “Write about what you know,” they’re full of it. My motto is C.S. Lewis’s: “I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.” You don’t have to go out and lay waste to Troy before you can write a war novel. Who are all these people—like Ken Follett—writing historical novels set in the Middle Ages? Do they all have time machines? Do they all have Ph.D.’s in medieval history? No. It’s called research.

Dr. Brown’s soapbox was: Before you read anything else, read Virgil. I never understood why. He also preached what he called “the four essential English writers, plus one of your own choosing.” The four essential writers were Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, and Shakespeare. My fifth was Dickens.

Of course, Dr. Brown was a dinosaur. Which is why he was such a great teacher.

IV.

My mother has always told me that she knew I was going to become a writer when I was in third grade and I wrote a story about being locked in Jimmy Carter’s trash can.

I suspect that this story was a political allegory.

V.

The only thing I know about writing is this: that you have to work hard at writing the kind of stuff you want to write. It does no good, if you want to write 700 page novels, to listen to others tell you that people only read short stories anymore. Don’t listen to them; if you’re not coming up with short stories, you’re not a short story writer, and the quickest way to stop writing is to spend years trying to learn how to write something you don’t have it in you to write in the first place. Write the 700 page novel. Learn how to do that. Read 700 page novels; learn how they work, learn how they’re paced, learn what they sound like, learn how many characters are needed for a 700 page novel, learn how many subplots you need to keep going. If you’re a good writer, readers will find you even if you’ve written 2000 pages. And frankly, any novel by Charles Dickens or Leo Tolstoy reads faster than the three-page pontifications of Dr. Dryasdust. Les Miserables reads faster than a 250-page snoozer by Martin Amis. It’s also better.

Contrariwise, a friend once told me that the reason most of Hemingway’s novels are so lousy is because he was a short story writer trying to write novels. And it’s true; no one can convince me that The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are better than “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” I suspect the same is true of Flannery O’Connor, whose two novels don’t measure up to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People.” But she didn’t live long enough for anyone to know. Faulkner may have just been a freak who could write both great short stories and great novels. But few of us are Faulkner.

Be the best at your kind of writing, not someone else’s. Figure out how you naturally write; then figure out how to be the best at that kind of writing, and not second- or third-best at some other. Your audience is the kind of people who read the kind of stuff you write. Write for that audience, not some different one. Find your audience, not another writer’s.

Apart from that, I don’t know a damn thing.

VI.

When Prof. Linda Hooper of the Dickens Project at UC-Santa Cruz was asked why Charles Dickens was such a great writer, she didn’t try to complicate matters: “One of the reasons why I believe he’s a great writer is because he wasn’t just a novelist. He was an editor, he was a journalist. He wrote letters all the time, he wrote plays, he wrote poems and songs. He’s someone who wrote all the time.”

The novelist John Irving has a different view. “There was a standard of language there,” he says. “Comic language; embellished, enhanced language; very complicated sentences; lots of asides, as if the writer were talking to several sides of his own personality at once, as if everything were parenthetical, set apart by dashes, semicolons galore, colons every four or five lines. None of this one comma, one period, and out Hemingway bullshit.”

The actor Ethan Hawke has a different view. “What I most admire about Charles Dickens is the sheer tenacity of him—how he just writes these stories after stories, and the bigness and the grandness of the stories, and yet he takes his time and all the small details are there.”

They’re all right.

VII.

Someone—I think it was Joseph Heller, but I can’t find the quotation; maybe it was Vonnegut—said that he never wrote anything funny where the comedy was the point. The point was always deadly serious, but he couldn’t approach serious without being unintentionally comic along the way, as though by reflex. I think that’s absolutely right. Dickens would have approved. Dr. Dryasdust would not.

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