Letters to a Young Writer

  Now you’re pageless and your back is truly up against the wall. A little bit of sympathy from friends can help, but only for a day or two while you cultivate that secret rage that every writer knows: you have to write, simple as that.

  So you open up another file, sharpen the pencil, and settle down once again.

  * * *

  * Okay, let’s be honest here: you don’t actually throw the pages away. Box them up or back them up, put a toe tag on them and keep them somewhere within reach, just in case you might be making a mistake. And someday you might go back to them and find a gem of a sentence here, or the germ of an idea there. But you have to mentally throw them away, at least for a little while, while the new story takes root.

  Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

  —E. L. DOCTOROW

  One of the great rules of writing classes is “Show, don’t tell.” What this means is that you must guide a reader through unfamiliar territory without taking away the experience, the living moments of the story. We read in order to inhabit newness. Move the reader physically through a story. Guide them. And then surprise them once more.

  Try not to say too much in your story or your poem or anywhere else for that matter. Never dictate. (Alas, he dictates.) Avoid pointing out what your stories mean. Trust your reader. Allow the revelation to belong to them. You are a guide in a foreign land. Be kind, but not too kind.

  When you allow your reader their intelligence, they will come back to you again and again and again. Challenge. Confront. Dare. Cleave open new territory. Even confuse them. Then let them go. Say just enough that they can learn the territory for themselves. In this way you’re always a step or two ahead of your reader but even the best of them don’t actually know it. Good stories are written, in the end, by their readers.

  I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

  —JIM HARRISON

  If at first you do succeed, be entirely astonished. Then convince yourself that you will never be able to do it again. The magic of success lies in the proximity and impossibility of the unattainable. And if you do continue to succeed, be wary, be very very wary. The only guarantee is that it won’t always happen.

  Success, too, has the arc of a story: it will end. To some this is a terrifying thing, but to the properly successful person, it is the only ecstasy.

  Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

  —GEOFF DYER

  Just because you’ve typed the last sentence—remember, bloodstains are far more visible than tears—doesn’t mean that you’ve actually finished a book. A book might take a few years to write, but even after it’s written it still has to be finished. Patience and tenacity, please. Patience, I said. Patience. Writing is about seventy-five percent of the job. There’s the editing. And then there’s the editing. Oh, and then there’s the editing. And, after that, there’s the editing again. After that there’s the copyediting. Then there’s the publicity meeting. And then there’s the marketing meeting. Then there’s some more editing. Then there’s the request for blurbs. Then there’s a proof copy. Then there’s the final editing. A tweak here, a tweak there. Then there’s the wait. The pause. The hold. The catch of breath. The wish that you had edited more.

  Then there are the op-eds that you hope to place at the very least in The New York Times. Then there’s the wailing and gnashing of teeth when the op-ed appears in an online journal read by only six people. But, hey, that’s six more readers than before. Then you wait some more.

  You lie awake at night. Then there’s the visit to the seventh circle of hell: the first reviews. Don’t despair too much. Don’t rejoice too much either. You are only halfway through. Then, a month or so before publication, the first six copies come in the post. Take one out of the box. Cherish it. Give it a drink. Give yourself a drink too. Dance around your apartment. Knock over the shelves. Tuck the book away as the first copy you ever touched. Give out other copies to your loved ones: your partner, your mother, your friends who supported you all along. Buy at least twenty more first editions. Yes, you have to buy them, believe it or not. There are no endless free books. But you should get them half-price. Or your editor might sling a box of them your way.

  Do not give all your first editions away. Repeat, do not give them all away. Tuck away five or six of them for you, your kids, your grandkids, and others you love. Hopefully, there will be many more editions in the future. Trust me, you don’t want to end up paying for a first edition of your first ever book. Hopefully, it will be good enough that readers will want it forever. So it sits on your shelf. And then you get ready for the onslaught. You pray that at least some of it comes.

  You have your first reading. You do a small book tour. You find some kindred spirits. A lot of the time you go out to silence. That’s the toughest thing of all. This thing that you have worked on for years, nobody seems to give a damn. But so what? Good writers have stamina. Good writers have perseverance. Good writers have desire. You get back up and you begin again.

  Even better, you have begun your second book long before the first comes out. You have kindled that fire, and the disappointment of the ash-heaped first doesn’t even matter. And if you find—as you should—that the second book is harder than the first, then you are the writer that you always wanted to become.

  Thank you for the manuscript. I shall lose no time in reading it.

  —BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  Blurbs are the published writer’s nightmare. Either he gives them to other writers or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, he’s an arsehole. If he does, he’s an arsehole too—unless he blurbs yours, whereupon he is an angel, a godsend, a creature divine.

  But how do you get a blurb in the first place? You beg, you plead, you cajole. You ask your editor to put her heart on the line. Have her reach out to her stable of writers. She might find someone who likes your voice, someone you can align with. She might even know the phone number of the blurb whore: there are a few of us around, some of us getting a little bit tired (me too, Mr. Shteyngart! ahoy! the exclamation mark! the red lantern of blurbdom!). Ask your agent too, he’s got the phone numbers too. But guess what? Not much is going to happen. Forgive my blatant cynicism. But a lot of the time you’re going to have to do the legwork yourself. Go to the writers you know and admire. Write them a personal note. Be sincere and genuine, of course, but be creative too. Write a letter that crackles. One that shoots electricity along all its lines. One they can’t ignore. (Though they most likely will ignore it—in fact, never ever ever ever expect a reply: some overly generous writers can get twenty or more requests a week, no kidding, ask Gary, he gets twenty-one, sometimes twenty-two, his postman hates him.) Never forget that it takes at least two or three days for anyone to properly read a novel. That’s a lot of time and energy from someone who’s trying to make ends meet.

  If you hear back from them, do a backflip. If they read your work, triple somersault. If they actually blurb it, book a ticket for at least the nearest satellite. But if they don’t blurb it, don’t worry. And don’t hold a grudge. Half the time they don’t even open the mail, mea culpa once again. The rest of the time they are busy chasing blurbs of their own; it’s a back scratcher’s world.*

  A lot of good writers don’t ask for blurbs anymore, precisely because they don’t have the time to give them. So if you fail with an author you admire, don’t disappear down to the river to drown. There are other ways to stay afloat. If you went to an MFA program, you go back to old teachers and you plámás them until they accede. (Plámás—a wonderful Irish word for “flattery designed to bend people to your will.”) If you didn’t go to an MFA program, find one nearby and ask the writers there. Or go to someone in your writing group who has already published a novel. Word of advice: make it as easy as possible for them and, if necessary, even offer your own dream blu
rb in “their” voice that they can then edit and shape. It’s a terrible truth, but some writers only read a portion of the books they blurb, if even that.

  A blurb is pure fluffery. It’s a form of literary porn. Most readers know they’re being fluffed.

  The truth is that blurbs are not for readers anyway. It’s an in-house argument for publishers. They’re for the sales force in your company. And for the bookshops who buy advance copies. They’re for the purpose of the pitch. It’s so your book can get positioned on the shelves by your favorite bookseller. It’s a not-so-subtle whisper in the advance reviewer’s ear.

  So, it’s all a bit of a shell game, yes. But when the good blurb comes, the truly generous one, the one that captures the essence of your book, it’s not a blurb anymore, it’s a shout-out, it’s a violin note, it’s a drum crash, it’s a barbaric yawp across the rooftops of literature that you have written something that has got under the skin of another. Cherish it. Enjoy the feeling.

  Soon you will be writing them.

  * * *

  * “Colum McCann’s chapter on blurbing is full of shimmering heartbreak matched only by an angry lucidity and a peerless semicolon. It is an essential guide not just to how we blurb but to why we blurb. This is a blurb chapter writer to watch. Not since Joyce has an Irishman written about blurbing with such brio and quintessential Ulysses-ness. Blurb chapter prize committees, lay down your other chapters. You have a winner right here.”

  —GARY SHTEYNGART, AUTHOR OF A-BLURB-ISTAN

  No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF

  Often, in the midst of a novel or a story, you’ll be surprised to realize that you have little or no idea where you are going. You’re operating on the fumes of the language and the vague feeling that what you are doing will eventually have texture and depth. It’s a deep-sea dive without very much training or equipment, but suddenly, a few feet down, you hit upon a word or an image and you realize with a start that this is the path you were meant to take. You don’t know why. You don’t know where. You don’t even know how. It is a form of astounded hearing, a secret listening. You have made a daring raid on the inarticulate. This feeling has its own energy. You have to follow it. You’d be a fool if you didn’t at least pursue the sentence in whatever direction it is taking you.

  It’s like solving a perplexing question in deep-sea physics: Why was I allowed to come to such a depth? There is a moment when the solution is so simple and evident that you wonder why you hadn’t come upon it before: when, like Archimedes, you notice the bathwater suddenly rise. You know what you have found, what you’ve been seeking for years.

  The simplicity of it is stunning simply because it seemed so difficult in the beginning. Now it is there. It has appeared. Somehow the inarticulate has been ransacked. It exists because writing is about trying to achieve a fundamental truth that everybody knows is there, but nobody has quite yet located.

  Follow it.

  Build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

  —EDWARD ABBEY

  Writers write just about everywhere. In ships. On trains. In libraries. On the subway. In cafés. In writers’ retreats. On top of fridges. In plush offices. In jail cells. In the hearts of hollowed-out trees. There’s a good deal of shite talked about writers in their garrets (I sometimes work in a closet, for crying out loud), wearing blindfolds to block out the world, but it doesn’t really matter where you write as long as you feel comfortable there.

  Still, a book will reflect the room in which it is written, so make it comfortable, make it intimate, make sure you belong there, that the space is yours. What helps? A good chair, of course: spend your money on this. A decent posture. A few feet to stretch in every now and then. A couple of photographs (maybe one of your characters as you imagine them, or the landscape she dwells in). Or a favorite quote—“No Matter”—tacked up on the wall. A pencil? Yes. A pen? Yes. A typewriter? Yes. A computer? Yes. A tape recorder? Yes, if that’s your style. Maybe all of the above: it doesn’t matter how you write, it’s what you write. But if you have a computer, try to make sure you have a way to guillotine the Internet. Best of all have no Internet whatsoever. Try not to smoke. Try not to have a drink at least until the end of the working day. Keep your favorite volume of poetry handy. Write advice to yourself in a notebook or on the wall. Try not to eat in your workspace: crumbs attract other dwellers.

  Avoid writing in bed and even avoid your bedroom if possible: why spend all your dreams in one room? Enjoy the generosity of others. If someone offers a cabin, take it. Sit by the ocean or sit by the lake. You don’t necessarily need a window but sometimes it helps. Get out and about. Take a walk. Allow yourself to be lost. Follow a trail deep into the distance.

  If you think it will help, go to the writers’ colony (what a strange word, colony, it suggests the tinkle of ice somewhere, or the presence of birds, or indeed the arrival of ants). Go there with purpose. Be generous to the other writers, but hide away from them while you write. Your book is the only book. Close your door. Turn your phone off. It is your time to be selfish. Let others pay the bills. Let others worry about the dog for a while. Escape. Take your clothes off. Dance around. Play music. If you have a favorite writing album—buy And Now the Weather by Colm Mac Con Iomaire—put it on auto-repeat so that the music seeps into the background and becomes then part of the landscape of your language. Keep the room a little cold: this will preserve the wakefulness in you.

  And when you have finished a book, or a story, change your desk around a little, put up new photographs, tack new pictures on the wall, move the world, undust yourself.

  Here it is: a room with another view.

  It is dangerous to live in a secure world.

  —TEJU COLE

  And what about that MFA writing program? The truth is that nobody can teach you how to write. A program might allow you to write, but it will not teach you. But allowing is the best form of teaching anyway.

  So, go to the MFA program if it feels right, but don’t expect some writer to solve it all for you. Go there to mess up. Go there to find a safe place to fail. Go there to find a community of readers. Go there because you will get a chance to breathe amongst others who are learning the exact same art. A single word in a workshop might knock six months off your writing curve. Be patient. It is an apprenticeship. It is likely to frustrate you at first. In fact workshop can be one of the most humiliating experiences of a writer and even a teacher’s life. In the end of the program (or the pogrom), you might be more mystified than ever before. That’s okay. This too will settle. Give it time. Often a lesson is not properly heard until years later anyway.

  A couple of words of advice—don’t go straight out of college. Give yourself a year or two to live your life. And live it out loud. Live it dangerously. That way you will have something to write about. You will destroy the blank page when it stares back at you.

  Young writer, listen please: Avoid the bloated MFA programs that charge fifty grand (yes, fifty grand!) a year in order to saddle you with a back-alley classroom and a second-rate teacher. A good deal of the time these programs are a final resort for washed-up poets and novelists. (Then again they might be good teachers for that very reason: they have been through the mill and they might guide you away.) But whatever you do, don’t go to an MFA program to impress your great-aunt Gertrude, the Ivy League queen. Go where the words matter.

  Research the program carefully. Find the place that fits. A landscape that suits you. Students who suit you. Be aware of who will be your teacher. And be wary of what they promise. Make a commitment to your work, but don’t forget that part of being at an MFA program is that you will be working with at least a dozen other young writers: you will have to be selfish and selfless both.

  In the end you are the one who will do all the learning. The fact of it is that there is no school but your own school. (I got rejected by all but one of
the MFA programs I applied to, and in the end I just wrote on my own. I’m not interested in using the rejection as a badge of honor, however—I know I would have learned things quicker if I had gone to an MFA.) Still, you don’t have to go to an MFA program in order to learn how to write. Did I say this already? Writers write. They position themselves on their arses and they…write.

  So, revere the cabin in the woods if that’s where you end up. Revere the long days of silence and shuffle in the shithole apartment. Revere the fellowship. Revere poverty. Revere the inheritance. Revere whatever path you take. In the end nothing will matter but the actual words upon the page: who cares if they came from an MFA or not?

  Find yourself a person who knows these things, be it colleague, friend, or even enemy. Find a teacher. Give him or her a break. The best teacher will know that she is not teaching you at all.

  What is there to do, then? Be guided by others who have failed—and failed willingly—before you. Be generous to their failings. Most of the time they did not get it right themselves. But they just might get it right for you.

  Read the greatest stuff, but read the stuff that isn’t so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you’ll go away and only deliver telegrams at Western Union.

  —EDWARD ALBEE

  It’s hard to say what you should be reading while you’re writing, but I will say this: At the start of a novel, you should be reading as widely and voraciously as you can. The writing can go anywhere and you are likely to be inspired by whatever you read. You are preparing to migrate. Reading at this stage will only help the lift-off.