My cousin Matt Smith asked me about writing the other day. He’s an aspiring writer himself, and I shared my thoughts on what a writer really needs to know. I think most aspiring writers would benefit from this advice, and I was lucky to have a few people around to give me similar advice when I got started.
Taking the Romance Out of Writing
If you just enjoy writing and want to do it for entertainment and never show it to anyone, then ignore this and keep writing and have fun. If you want people to like what you write, if you want to be published or get writing gigs, or if you want to write for a living, these next few paragraphs are the key to getting there.
Becoming a successful writer is hard work. You need to learn about writing, learn about grammar and punctuation and sentence structure and most importantly you need to learn that you don’t actually write for yourself. You write for your editor and for your readers. You must know what they want and be able to give it to them and no one will give a damn about your writing but you. And that can be awfully lonely, being your only fan. It sucks to have a great idea and a fascinating character and not be well versed enough to show people how great these ideas are. Everyone has ideas, very few people get good enough to present them eloquently enough that people will give a shit.
Getting a few books on the nuts and bolts or grammar and punctuation and sentence structure will be a good start. Then you can read about character development and plot lines and lots of other fun stuff that doesn’t help most writers much anyway.
Then you need to learn that a great piece of writing is not written. It’s rewritten, and rewritten again. If you haven’t gone over a piece three or four times making changes, it sucks. No matter how good you are, the first draft isn’t any good and the second draft needs work. Great writers, whoever you like to read, whoever you might be a fan of, turned out great stuff because they worked their ass off rewriting. I’ve never written anything that was good enough the first time to even send to an editor, and I write better first copy than most.
Amateur writers all want to sit in a cabin by the lake and write and have the finished pages pile up, but it doesn’t work that way. A writing project is never finished, it is either abandoned (I can’t look at this anymore, I’ll send it to my editor) or taken away (My editor wants this right now) or sometimes betrayed (this will never be good enough) and occasionally taken away (someone said this is good enough to be published now) but it is never finished. If you put a piece of writing down and say “That’s finally done. Yay!” it better be amazing. It better be Hemingway at the very least. You can put them aside to gain perspective on them and come back to fix them up some more later, but don’t think that you have written a piece, rewritten it once and now have a finished product. If people aren’t falling all over themselves upon reading it, then it wasn’t really done, you were just too lazy to make it great.
Take note of what your favorite writers do and also of mistakes they make. I love William Gibson, but sometimes his sentence structures are out of whack and sometimes he gets too descriptive and tells too much without showing. I also love Hemingway, but he can write with an edge so rough that it wears you down and you feel abraded by it. Everyone makes mistakes, so take note of them and make sure not to make them yourself. If a book is really great, keep it and refer to it and think about why it was great. Steal from that book and everything else you read. Use the concepts and the way they handle things and use the way the see the human psyche, just don’t use their words. The bad writers imitate, the great ones steal.
If you are a writer, then you write. If you didn’t write today, then you aren’t a writer, you’re just another bum who says “I’m a writer” or “I want to be a writer.” No one ever said “Man that writer was so good, he wanted it so bad and told so many people he was a writer.” If you are serious about, then you will write every day and you will write when you don’t want to and you will rewrite things that you are tired of looking at and you’ll get through that first million words pretty quick. I’m told that after a million words writing gets a little bit easier. I’m approaching that million word mark this year or next, and I’ll let you know if the people who told me that are full of shit or not when I get there.