Other people’s words about … how to write

Why does the talented student of writing stop? It is usually the imagination, turned to creating a story in which you are a failure, and all you have done has failed, and you are made out to be the fraud you’ve feared you are. You can imagine the story you might tell, or you can imagine this other story — both will be extraordinarily detailed, but only one will be something you can publish. The other will freeze you in place, in a private theatre of pain that seats one. These writers were — are, in many cases — people who know how to write. What they don’t know is how to become unstuck. How to leave that theatre they made for themselves, how to stop telling themselves the story that freezes them.

I discovered I needed to teach not just how to write, but how to keep writing. How to face up to who you think is listening. Is the person listening more important than you? Or is the story you would tell more important than you? I was teaching how to stand up and leave that room in your mind so you can go and write — and live. But the question after that, always, is, Live with what?

From ‘On Becoming an American Writer’
in ‘How to Write an Autobiographical Novel‘
By Alexander Chee

I’ve read a few how-to write-a-book guides, and in doing so I’ve found some useful tips along the way, although I’ve never found anything that really sustained me in them. When I read Alexander Chee’s essay, ‘On Becoming an American Writer’, I realised why.

What I was looking for when I picked up those books, what I’ve been looking for all along, is advice not on how to write, but on how to keep writing. By which I mean, how to sustain yourself, how to live with yourself — as a writer, yes, but also as a human. Because if you are a writer, or if you see yourself as someone who could be a writer, or if you see yourself as someone who has written something and wants to write something else (and these are not the same things, though they are on a continuum) — if you are any or all of these things, anyway, then the two things are wrapped up in each other, impossible to disentangle, writing and being human. Writing and living. Writing and keeping going.

Front garden tree, Christmas Day, 2024

I am not particularly good at sustaining myself, either as a writer or as a human. I tend to be plagued by self-doubt and self-loathing — to such a degree, in fact, that I would call this tendency both instinctive and self-destructive. It certainly doesn’t make me very productive. I find myself often frozen in place, as Chee puts it, in that private theatre of pain that seats one.

What sustains me when nothing else does is that writing, the very process itself, feels meaningful to me. Maybe this wouldn’t be enough to keep another writer going, but for me at least, it is what I always return to in times of doubt and frozenness.

I don’t know why writing feels meaningful to me; if pressed, I couldn’t even articulate what its meaning is to me. But still — beyond the search for happiness or wealth, neither of which things I have ever lastingly found through writing — there is this: writing feels meaningful to me. That is what sustains me.

Lately I’ve been reading …

• Doom — once a simple noun, often attached to its twin, gloom — has taken on a life of its own in the past few years. More than a fleeting feeling or an emotional response, it’s become a philosophical stance and, for some, a way of life: Michaela Kavanagh visits Ben Green’s post-collapse property, where he prepares for life after environmental collapse. Along the way, Kavanagh considers the difference between those who believe the climate is doomed and those who believe that we can still do something about it. I found Green’s response fascinating, though all the way through this piece I kept thinking: If global warming continues, won’t his garden die, anyway?
• The end point of great fiction is not necessarily wisdom or enlightenment. It is really just another kind of scrabbling around in the dark, scratching here, then over there, carving out tunnels, kicking up dust, managing strife: So much has been written about Alice Munro in the wake of her death and her daughter’s revelations that it’s hard to say anything new at this point, but I found this piece by Sebastian Smee thoughtful and on-point. Shame, Smee writes, is a theme that permeates all of Munro’s fiction — and did so throughout her writing career. Perhaps this is why her fiction will endure despite what we now know about her life.
• What follows is a set of tools I’ve found useful both for the inward business of attending to my state of mind, and for the outward work of trying to do something about the climate crisis — which are not necessarily separate jobs: Rebecca Solnit, in a piece from three years ago that remains today as relevant as ever, on why not giving in to despair is the most important thing we can do to change or slow the course of climate crisis.