“I’ve now written three novels, but I don’t know how to write them. Each has been the result of its own esoteric, inefficient and frustrating process, each a genuine surprise. I have yet to write the book I planned to write, yet to write in the period of time I imagined the book would take, yet to sustain one way of working through an entire book. I try lots.”
For a writer, there is nothing quite a blank page. That first moment of opening a notebook or document to begin is an exhilarating tightrope walk between hope and fear.
At first, the blankness is an opportunity.
“That incredible freedom you have with the blank page … Writing the first draft of a book is the biggest high you can get, because there are no rules.”
You can share your experiences, look at them again with more objectivity, and make sense of your best moments as well as your failures.
Or, you can create from scratch. Characters and unexplored worlds can step from your imagination into the reader’s mind.
You can create someone you relate to, someone you’ve always wanted to be, someone you can’t quite understand—explore what motivates people, what makes them grow, decline, and change.
Writing can be limitless possibility.
“I remember an immense feeling of possibility at the idea, as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given leave to open any I liked. There were more doors than one person could ever open in a lifetime, I thought (and still think).”
The blankness can also transform into a brick wall. When you feel unable to write something worth reading, the white page can taunt you: Do I have nothing of value to say?
Writer’s block can feel like nights when 3 o’ clock in morning hits and sleep still evades you.
Each minute crawls by. Five possible hours of rest turns into four and fifteen minutes turns into three and a half. The stress of not sleeping makes it harder and harder to get to sleep. Will you be awake all night? How do you escape the cycle?
A while back, a well-meaning friend of mine asked if I’d been writing lately.
I answered with, “I’ve been thinking a lot about writing—in other words, no.”
Then, he responded with words I’ve heard many times before: “Just write.”
This is age-old advice: just sit down, push yourself to write something, and the words will come.
“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.'”
In fact, there are an endless amount of successful writers who can claim the answer to writer’s block is to “just write.”
“Compel yourself to write several hours every day no matter how bad you feel.”
“I think writer’s block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough, sooner or later something will come out.”
“I encourage my students at times like these to get one page of anything written, three hundred words of memories or dreams or stream of consciousness on how much they hate writing — just for the hell of it, just to keep their fingers from becoming too arthritic, just because they have made a commitment to try to write three hundred words every day.”
It’s possibly the most common writing advice there is. And, if you’re feeling blocked, it’s also possibly the most useless.
To realize you’re blocked, you most likely already tried to write. And, yes, you can force yourself to sit there weeks on end, dumping your stream of consciousness out, hoping that eventually something better appears.
But, doesn’t there have to be a more useful approach than the simple, “try again”?
In competitive chess, when you lose a game, the best way to improve isn’t to just blindly try again at the next tournament.
If you want better results, you prepare. You study what went wrong, looking over your losses and mistakes. You study materials (books, articles, annotated games) from stronger players, addressing the weak points of your game. Only then do you throw yourself back into competitive play.
So, I set out to find advice for struggling writers that goes beyond “just write”.
Lately, I’ve become a bit of an addict on reading about the craft of writing itself, including interviews and memoirs by great writers of the past and present. Here is the writing advice I’ve found most effective.
1. Expand your life experience.
“Write all the time, they’ll tell you. Write for your college newspaper. Get an MFA. Go to writers’ groups. Send query letters to agents.
What do they never say? Go do interesting things.
…So if you want to be a writer, put ‘writing’ on hold for a while. When you find something that is new and different and you can’t wait to share with the world, you’ll beat your fat hands against the keyboard until you get it out in one form or another.
Everything that is good in my writing came from risks I took outside of school, outside of the “craft.” It was sleeping on Tucker Max’s floor for a year. It was working as Robert Greene’s assistant. It was working at American Apparel, watching the office politics and learning how to get stuff done. It was dropping out of college at 19. It was saying yes to every meeting and introduction I got, and hustling to get as many as I could on my own. It was reading dozens of books a month.
It was going to therapy. It was getting into pointless arguments. It was having friends who are smarter than me. It was traveling. It was living (briefly) in the ghetto. I was able to write about the dark side of the media because I put myself in a position to see it firsthand.
All these things gave me something to say. They gave me a perspective. They gave me a fucked up writing style that makes my voice unique.”
The craft of writing is often misunderstood in two different directions, each on the extremes.
- There’s the old-fashioned impression of writing—that it’s reserved only for refined individuals who have offices full of leather-bound books and ornate pens, who exclusively consume single-barrel bourbon neat, who are full of wisdom to share about the great wars and crises of humanity.
- On the other hand, with such a low barrier to entry in modern times (it costs nothing and can take as little as 10 minutes to start your own blog or upload your manuscript to Amazon self-publishing), it can be seen as an easy craft, suited for everyone.
Both of these extremes are off the mark. At heart, the most important part of being a writer is having something to say and wanting to share it.
To have something to say, you have to live. You have to make mistakes, lose things that matter to you, lose yourself, recover, and make brand new mistakes.
If you stare at the screen and your mind goes blank, the first step of writing your novel may be stepping outside of your front door.
“Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.”
“But you’ve also got to be prepared to get out and do stuff and look around and engage with people. You’ve got to engage your senses. You live your life, and that way you can bring something new to the table, because otherwise you’re just a compiler or an editor of other people’s experiences.”
Experience more, but with a grain of salt:
“When I was young, I idealized writers like Hemingway, Jack London, Orwell, writers who were active in the world. There’s no question at all that when I joined the army there was a kind of literary impulse behind it. I’d learned all the wrong lessons from Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque and James Jones, all these writers I admired—they were telling me, Don’t be such a fool as to get yourself in a position where you’re going to get shot for nothing by some other fool. And all I could think of was, Jeez, they wrote these great novels because they put themselves in danger and traveled to places where nobody cared if they lived or died. Great! That’s for me!
…the appetite for “experience” is natural to young writers. I’ve seen it often, and surely I had it, no question. But to get back to Flannery O’Connor, what kind of experience did she have, afterall? She spent, what, one year away from her farm in Milledgeville? Yet her stories are full of life and drama and real humanity, and it’s because she kept her eyes open. Experience is about seeing what’s around you, not going different places and putting yourself in danger—it’s about being attentive, seeing how things work, what they add up to.”
