Five Pieces of Awful Writing Advice (from the masters)

1. Don’t keep a notebook (Stephen King)

“I think a writer’s notebook is the best way in the world to immortalise bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around.”

Terrible advice, for one simple reason: none of the rest of us are Stephen King. He’s written around 70 books. He writes and writes and writes. Squashed by a fucken van, six weeks in hospital, dusts himself off, keeps writing. Apparently sits down and churns out 6 pages (1500 words) a day, every day, no problem. In terms of idea generation he is a phenomenon. He’s not like you or me.

Don’t get me wrong – ideas will come for the writer. They always do, whether you wish them to or not. But you should write them down. I absolutely have a document where I keep all my big ideas that one day might (or might not) become a short story or a novel. When I go back and look through it every few months, I’ll see some truly stupid thoughts, but I’ll also see a few where I think: I’d forgotten about that. Let’s try it.

Little ideas, as well. A quirk of a character, a line of dialogue, a cool description, whatever: write them down, people. Memory is a fickle beast. That seemingly brilliant idea, diamond bright and shining, might pass from your mind and no matter how hard you try the next morning or the next day or week, it is lost forever.

I begin my novel, The Escher Man, with an old Chinese proverb: the palest ink is better than the best memory. Our memories are rich, layered, the cornerstone of our humanity, the prism through which we understand ourselves and the world around us. But our memory function also sucks. We forget all the time, we misremember: eyewitness testimony is notoriously the least reliable form of evidence. So. Keep a notebook. Write it all down, little or big.

2. You must refrain from rewriting (Robert Heinlein)

The third of Heinlein’s five rules of writing: you must refrain from rewriting.

Wrong, dickhead. I know many writers who are capable of putting down fresh words that spark, and in a pretty damn fine order. I know some whose first drafts are clean. But even those freaks have to spend time, getting hands dirty, down in the mine of editing and rewriting.

My first drafts are not clean. Indeed, they’re a fucken mess and I thank god no poor bastard has to read them.

As Ernest Hemingway said: the only kind of writing is rewriting. Much like any absolute, it’s not entirely correct. But he’s mostly correct, and way more so than Heinlein. Polishing those sentences, layering those scenes, foreshadowing those twists, and all the rest, in large part will happen through the rewriting process.

But there’s one more reason to rewrite. In traditional publishing, we now live in an era of harried editors and overworked agents. Gone are the days where you can submit an undercooked draft and expect your agent to put everything aside and spend weeks or months honing it with you. Gone are the days where a debut author can deliver their lump of quartz with assurances of gold contained within, and expect a diligent editor to extract it.

No. And the simple reason is this: there are a lot of great books out there. Sure, an acquiring editor may quite like finding a diamond in the rough. But if they can choose between that and a second author who has presented them the diamond on a velvet cushion, why on earth would they take the former?

I’ll end with Heinlein’s second rule, which unlike his third, is one of the all-time best: you must finish what you start. For beginners, in particular, it might be the single most important. I know a lot of authors, when they start out, who are bursting with ideas. They begin, the words flow, and then the hard work begins of drafting and rewriting and world building and character and dialogue and… oh my god this is too much. But gee I had this other banger idea – maybe I’ll start on that.

Easy and seductive. But you must resist. You must finish what you start.

3. If it doesn’t come bursting out of you… don’t do it (Bukowski)

Bukowski’s poem, so you want to be a writer, argues, essentially, for this: unless touched by the hand of the muse herself, don’t write. It includes stanzas like:

if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.

And:

unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

I show a reading of this poem to writing students whenever I get the chance, and ask them what they think. Almost always the reaction is: well that’s bullshit.

They’re right.

Staring at your computer screen, searching for words, agonising over this scene or that character. Well, that’s writing. That’s pretty much the whole thing. Hard work, beginning to end. Yes, there are moments of inspiration. Yes, sometimes you’re in flow (see below). Yes, sometimes, oh so rarely, a scene or a character will come out of your soul like a rocket. You’ll write it, eyes wide, and wonder where the fuck did that come from? Yes, there is something ineffable in creation.

But mostly it’s not. Mostly it’s a grind. Writing is hard work. Mostly those who publish novels are obsessive and disciplined and focussed and have a bloody-minded refusal to give up.

4. Stop while you are going good (Hemingway)

Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day.

This is an interesting one. Hemingway’s idea that was if you stop after a certain point (x amount of words) when the words are flowing (especially then), it will be easy to pick up the thread the next day and continue. I get it, and I even kept to this for a while (500/day used to be my target)(and, for the record, 500/day still is my minimum target).

But I’ve thought about this advice on and off over the years and believe when you’re really in flow, you shouldn’t stop.

Here’s why: it’s fucken rare. It’s almost a state of altered consciousness, being in flow. Nothing exists but the story in your head and the page on the screen in front of you, and you have to get it from one place to the other. You lose a sense of time and surroundings, your brain hyper-focussed. You look up and suddenly you’ve written several pages and fuck me they are good.

Yes, sex is great, but have you ever been in flow writing the last ten pages of a challenging manuscript that, up until that point, had taken ten years? Oh yeah. Hit me baby, one more time.

I’ve often wondered, in an uniformed, pop-psychology way, whether this habit of Hemingway’s also came from a deep fear. The fear that one day those words simply would not come. That he’d wake up to a blank page, unable to write again. This is the great fear of many a writer, including myself: one day, the tap of inspiration will be turned off and the source of living purpose gone forever.

Because that is how it did end up, for Hemingway. His output tapered out to near zero. Towards the end of his life he was asked to write a tribute to John F Kennedy for his inauguration, and yet after a few weeks could only manage a few sentences. It seems to me if the words are flowing, let them flow. Put them down while you’re hot, because no-one knows what tomorrow will bring.

5. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things (Elmore Leonard)

In defence of this stupid rule, Leonard was a crime writer, writing about known places, and so his particular genre may have lent itself to this advice. Especially in the hardboiled style, an economy of words is an essential component. I do love when character or setting can be conveyed with a few well-chosen lines, elegant sentences that can yet evoke the imagination. It’s a real art, an important skill to learn.

But for the most part this advice is absurd. Imagine saying this to a fantasy author? Imagine Game of Thrones without great detail used to describe places and things? It wouldn’t be the same work, and nor would it be anywhere as good. The food, the banners, the cities, the creatures, the landscapes (The Wall, King’s Landing, The Eyrie, the Twins, Harrenhall, Winterfell, these, and so many more feats of the imagination, and feasts for the imagination).

I write hardboiled science fiction, so I try to be as spare as possible in my writing (in many ways the opposite of the GRRM approach). I’ve tried very hard to emulate the hardboiled greats, and give the reader just enough to fire their imaginations, to allow them to fill in the blanks. However, I still needs must describe certain settings in detail. The Old Quarter of Hanoi in my debut 36 Streets (as just one example), is, in its own way, a vital character in the novel. Those descriptions have been consistently praised by readers and reviewers as being immersive and rich and absorbing. Detail was required. The sights the sounds the smells the tastes, all of it, overwhelming, of that extraordinary city, Hanoi.

I use detail sparingly, and, again, I admire writers who can use few words to evoke vivid characters, whole scenes. However. Elmore Leonard’s advice is so writer-dependant that I’m not sure it is even half right. Think about your genre, think about who you are as a writer, think about the reading experience, and go from there.

 

That’s it. I’ll end with the two golden rules. I’ve mentioned these before but they’re worth repeating: Write every day of your life, read deeply and widely, and see what happens.

 

The Escher Man is available in all good bookstores everywhere, Amazon (sigh, also everywhere), and here, for US readers.

36 Streets, likewise, is available in all good bookstores everywhere, Amazon, and here, for US readers.

Signed Editions: contact me at: voight0kampff (AT) gmail.com, if you are interested (though note that postage outside Australia can be a little pricey).