Writing Advice, part 2: On Reading and Rules
Here follow the last five points I made in my email to the RSD:
6. Own books. Libraries are great, but… It’s important to have a collection of good books right at your fingertips. That way when you find yourself having a teachable moment, that moment when you remember what so-and-so did especially well that’s like what you need to do in your own writing, you can reach for so-and-so’s book on your shelf and see how it was done, just when you’re fully motivated to learn and use it.
7. Read old books. By knowing how English has worked over a period of more than three centuries, you gain an understanding of how language changes and adapts. This will help you you understand how *you* can adapt language, making it your servant and not your master. Even books too old to have been written in English can be great helps. Sometimes story and image matter more than the precise language in which they are conveyed, so check out Herodotus and the Old Testament (esp Genesis, I&II Sam., I & II Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah) and Attic tragedy. Also the less old greats of other languages, like Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe.
8. Because language does and must adapt, learn when to throw the rules out the window. A major turning point in my writing was when I realized that the second line of the Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” is such a communications masterpiece as to utterly nullify its being a grammatical abomination. (In case you forget or don’t know: Line 1: “Well she got her daddy’s car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now.” Line 2: “Seems she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now.” Brilliant.)
9. Read for wisdom. The best writers have been those driven to try to make sense of the world. They do so with varying success, but it is their thirst for wisdom, not just knowledge, that also makes many of them dig deep for an understanding of how to communicate what they learn. So: Francis Bacon, Erasmus, Penn, Gibbon, Drucker. (Note that Penn’s writing is as bad as it is good, so you need some discernment if you’re to learn from it. Good and bad often live in shocking cohabitation; as Randall Jarrell admiringly wrote, “… only a man with the most extraordinary feel for language—or none whatsoever—could have cooked up Whitman’s worst messes.” In a less dramatic way, this is true of Penn.)
10. Take risks. One of the great advantages of writing for editors is that they’ll tell you when your experiments fail, and as long as you don’t waste too much of their time, they don’t mind your taking risks. Thus you can try the less straightforward way of saying something. What most editors won’t do is tell you, if you give them plodding, no-risk writing, how it can be made more interesting. If they were that creative, they’d be writing not editing. Pruning excesses is their business, supplying the excesses is yours.
February 24th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Spending a great deal of my time writing, I’d add a few more points:
1. Writing is about the ideas and story, not about the writer and his or her pet phrases. When it doubt, write simply to express the important points and leave your ego out of it.
2. If you start with clear thinking, it’s amazing how coherently you can write.
3. Treat the first time through as a draft that can go to the circular file, but don’t look for perfection of expression. By the time you find it, you and your audience will have died centuries ago.