Some Notes on How to Be a Writer

some questions I've been getting from new writers over the past year and years

[Henriette Browne, A Girl Writing]

Hi all, I screwed up my promise to write three times a week but I had deadlines and I swear I will do it right soon. I am also going to start answering your questions on writing and publishing so feel free to comment below or write me with questions you have that you might want me to answer. I am going to begin with these elemental ones:

should I be a writer? I love to write & I hate what I am currently doing

Okay, this is not an easy question but “I love to write” is important. Something I find fascinating is how often writers claim they hate writing. I think they are just saying that usually because it is the worst job on earth to have if you hate it—there are very few rewards but love! I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was four. I loved it and I loved it so much that is was the one thing I focused on until I actually achieved it—published journalist at age 19, published author at age 29. Still, I don’t know if I would tell everyone who “loves to write” to become a writer. What do you write? Facebook posts, tweets, journals, emails? Those are not really signs of writing ability. Have you been writing and sitting on full manuscripts and just thinking of those gives you joy? Would you be willing to endure endless years and years of rejection and humiliation—not to mention poverty and tedium—in their honor? If the answer is truly yes, then you may be a writer. Just ask yourself why you think it is better than what you are currently doing. And remember writing is just you at a desk, hunched over your computer for many hours, often every day in row, for many years. And your book coming out is just you doing dances for your publisher—after the first few readings, it becomes a chore, and you remember it is a job. You will somehow always disappoint your publisher, you will always have less readers than you imagined, and it will always just go back to you at your desk agonizing over things that may or may not even make the final cut.

how can I fall into a writing routine? I am undisciplined!

Okay, well, this is where I confess that I have never been a writer who writes daily—UNLESS I am an artist residency where the whole point is for me to write, uninterrupted, for many weeks and there is nothing else to do. I don’t love routine, I don’t love turning writing into a 9 to 5, I love to be irregular and erratic and inspired. When I do write, it is intense and a marathon and just extremely focused and productive. But I also can’t afford to write daily—I always had other jobs that made it impossible. Having said that, yes, great, write daily if you can! It doesn’t mean you will churn out gold constantly (in fact, some writers I know who write thousands of words daily are some of the worst writers I have ever met) but it means you increase your odds perhaps.

I often share with my classes a boot camp model for writing that I developed—it’s designed for you to crank out a first-draft of a manuscript in one month, assuming you can handle 3000 words a day for 30 days. Basically what you do it you wake up and generate—only generate, so nothing you edit, just new material that is very rough. You do this for a couple hours. Then you take a LONG break—tend to the dishes, skim the news, take a walk, watch a movie, bake a cake, read a novel, eat, etc. Then by the evening—perhaps before dinner? I like using food as a reward—you return to what you generated and you just edit that, no new material, just editing. Do that for a couple hours. You end up going to sleep with a clean house and you wake up the next morning and do it again. In dividing the tasks of the generator and editor you compartmentalize the main hard tasks of being a writer. And that long midday break allows you to forget what you created so you can turn to it with a fresh eye. This model really works for me at residencies, when this is all I have to do—I have yet to do it in “real life.” But please know even though you edit daily writing this fast does not mean a complete manuscript in a month—set aside many more months (and sometimes years!) to really edit it into shape.

how can I get published? I send out my work all the time but I don’t know how to get an agent or editor.

Okay, this is the most unpleasant part of this game: the commerce side. But you need money to eat, so it is a must that you respect this aspect. You need to get paid for your work. Times like this quarantine period where people are talking about movies and books so much prove that art is very necessary for the daily life of humans—so your labor deserves proper compensation. I don’t want to say networking and contacts are a big part of this, but they are. Every published writer had some sort of connection—a professor who was an author, a conference where they met editors and agents, a loved one who is an industry insider, etc. You cannot do this thing without the contacts. So you need to find a way to build bridges—and once you build them, do not burn them down even when it is quite tempting to do so! You should apply to conferences (Tin House has a good one)—many offer funding. You can even try grad school, or the low-residency model which allows you to have your normal work life aside from two residency periods (about 10 days twice a year around holiday time), and the rest is just one-on-one email exchanges with your professor who reads your work in spurts over a semester. You can also try connecting with authors over social media. I have some followers who have been messaging me and interacting with me online for years—I have never met them but I feel I know them. They often ask me questions about the business side of writing and I try to offer them help, because we have made some sort of connection over the years. I think the worst resources for aspiring writers is those “how to” books on the writing business—they become outdated fast and they are often full of inane formulas that never really work but just sound good. The writers you like don’t write books like that!

how does a long book, whether novel or memoir, work? I am intimidated by the size!

Well, you may be intimidated because you are not a writer of long forms and that is okay—the short story and essay are highly legit forms of writing! But you might just be intimidated because it actually is intimidating to tackle a long project that will be part of you for many years. For me, the best way to deal with this all is simple math. I find math comforting, so bear with me! But what I do is I think of my own habits and what that translates to. . . so, for me, all my short stories are about 30 pages (I am a novelist!) and I generally write chapters (that I call “parts” often!) that are also 30 pages. Thirty is my natural rhythm for whatever reason—it is good to identify what yours is. Then I imagine what an ideal length for a novel is. For me, it’s about 300 pages. Then it is basically just a matter of the most simple math to figure out a strategy: 300 divided by 30 equals 10. So I just need to create a plot that I can distribute in 10 parts that are each about 30 pages long! That’s it. I love to then outline, keeping in mind things will always change. But if I don’t think of things in bite-sized pieces, I get overwhelmed and confused. I even like to break up my essays into episodes—episodic form is a great comfort to me. I don’t know how else to think about all this. I do think realizing that this beast will take you many years is an important mindset to inhabit. Nothing in writing comes easy, that is a constant.

Okay, what else can I answer this coming week? Let me know!