For this post I thought I would collect some of the writing advice that I keep on and on giving myself. I am my harshest critic. I nag myself. I’m a bore and a bully. I’m unhappy with much of what I write and pelt myself constantly with bits of difficult-to-follow advice that take away most of the pleasure I might have obtained from my writing but also almost always improve it.
You there, I tell myself. Yes, you. Don’t always be so concerned about plot and how to make the story proceed. I know you do this because plot is your weakness but you must think more broadly about your story as a way to envelop your reader in the character’s soul. I didn’t say this, Chekhov did (I paraphrased his words). Imagine, visualize, and intuit more about your character and his world than what is necessary for the story. Even if your story covers an hour, write it in such a way that the reader realizes it is just one passage within someone’s full, complex life. If you do this well the specifics of plot will matter less.
Do not, repeat, do not, get carried away by the pleasure you take in language. Yes, language is fun to play with but what you make with it matters more in the end. So play if you must, but in the end make every sentence work to illuminate the idea, the reason for the work’s being. The language must be in service of the story, except for writers who are so very good with words that words become the reason for the story’s being. But you aren’t like that.
Consider temperature. Stories may be cool or hot. A cool story is written from a distance and allows you to be ironic and contemplative, which I know you love being, but whoever’s reading it has to be at least a little like you to appreciate it. A hot story is written from the middle of a character in the throes of whatever feeling is prompting the story. Hot stories may, by definition, lack perspective. The characters may seem narrowly – foolishly? – centered on their own lives but these stories use a universal language of human experience and so have the potential to touch readers immediately and reliably. Cool or hot is a decision you should make upfront but don’t just default to what comes easier to you. Take up a challenge once in a while.
Yes, you must revise. Sad but true: one’s first attempt to communicate is never very good. But there’s such a thing as over-revising. Over-revising results in self-conscious writing, writing with much of the edge taken off it. Writing that’s supposed to be flawless but is flawed because it’s stripped of spontaneity. Though your first draft may be imperfect in expression, the thought behind it is often the truest. If you over-revise you run the risk of improving the delivery but ruining the thought. Always keep in mind what you were thinking when you wrote your first draft.
-Anu Kandikuppa, 2016 Gish Jen Fellow
