The best advice I could find
Book reccos, course suggestions and advice from other genres to inspire you
Craft: Turn to your bookshelf
I have a love-hate relationship with New Year’s resolutions. I love the hope, the possibility that lives inside a list of to-do’s. I hate the whiff of failure that lives at its margins.
But here’s the thing: when I find one of these lists, tucked into last year’s journal (the one I committed to writing my morning pages in, every single day, that shockingly, still has dozens of blank pages awaiting the cresting tide of my creativity), I am often surprised to find that I have completed at least one or two of the items I’d forgotten I’d committed to paper. Not to tread too far into Goop territory, but there is something powerful about committing your intentions to paper. And as a writer, I think there is value in stepping back, surveying what you’ve accomplished, and thoughtfully—yes, perhaps even strategically—thinking about where you need to strengthen your skills or redirect your energies.
Because I’m a reader as well as a writer, of course I turn to books for inspiration and direction. What follows is a list of some of the ones that have helped me as I’ve struggled with various aspects of craft. Perhaps one or two of them will help you too.
The beauty of words
I’ll admit that I am someone who has come to appreciate poetry later in my life. Of course, I consumed high school’s mandatory servings of poetry—Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth (it was the 80s: I don’t think there was a woman, or anyone living, in the bunch). Then as a university journalism student, I avoided poetry as something that (a) wasn’t practical and (b) didn’t speak to anything in my life. It’s only been in the last decade that I’ve circled back around, seeking out poets and poetry whose words and themes resonate—and whose word-by-word skill teaches me as I read. One of my favourites is Mary Oliver, and her book A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry is a wonderful primer for anyone who works with words. Oliver gets into the nuts and bolts: the “chosen sounds” of poetry and the devices of sound writers can employ to achieve their goals; the mechanics of the line, its meter and rhythm, the tools of constancy and variation, how we start and end lines; diction, tone and voice; imagery and more.
Another book I stumbled upon in a second-hand shop (really, is there any place better than a second-hand bookstore?) is Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from “Listening and Writing” by Ted Hughes. Published in 1967 and reissued in 2009, the book is essentially a transcription of a series of radio lectures Hughes delivered for students, covering everything from writing about animals, weather and landscape to capturing family members and other people on the page, as well as chapters on writing a novel. I literally laughed as I read in the introduction that the book was intended for 10- to 14-year-olds, since its reading level would probably place it as a university text today. Unstated but obvious as you read it is that the book presumes all readers to be boys—and most of the writers cited are too, with a bit of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop sprinkled in. It is of its time, as well, in its inclusion of words and descriptions of people based on race or religion that wouldn’t stand today. Still, there is advice on its pages worth following, including this, about setting out to describe something:
“That one thing is, imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic….You do not look at the words either. You keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing that you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them…then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other.” p. 18
Later, Hughes writes
“As in training dogs, these exercises should be judged by their successes, not their mistakes or shortcomings.”
I’ve never thought of myself as a dog-in-training…but the advice is good: any writer aiming to build their skills should build from what they are doing well rather than staring at their failures.
Which you are you?
One of the challenges of personal writing—memoir, essay—is figuring out which you is on the page. Particularly in work where you are writing about the past, it can be tough to figure out perspective, and tease out what you knew then from what you know now. One book that has helped me tremendously in pulling these threads apart is Sven Birkerts’ The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again. (It’s part of the Graywolf Press “The Art of” series on the craft of writing, and every one that I’ve read has been worthwhile.) In it, Birkerts explores at length the “double vantage point” of the memoirist, the technique of inhabiting a scene or a moment (“then”) and shifting to reflecting on that scene from today’s vantage—and knowledge—point (“now”), what he at one point calls “narration braiding with hindsight reflection”. (p. 29) This back and forth is something we often do naturally in telling a story from our pasts, but Birkerts’ close examination of the techniques and terrific examples drawn from a range of writers is so valuable in providing clarity on what the technique can achieve and how best to deploy it. I recommend this book to every struggling memoirist (and if you’re a memoirist, you’ll certainly be struggling as some point).
Getting emotional
While I draw hard lines around separating fact from fiction, that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from fiction—and books written about fiction. One I found particularly helpful in considering both how to craft compelling nonfiction characters, as well as thinking about the emotional arc of those characters and the manuscript itself, is The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass. What struck me about Maass’ book is his understanding that reading is an emotional experience. As he puts it:
“[Readers]…don’t so much read as respond. They do not automatically adopt your outlook and outrage. They formulate their own. You are not the author of what readers feel, just the provocateur of those feelings. You may curate your characters’ experiences and put them on display, but the exhibit’s meaning is different in thousands of ways for thousands of different museum visitors, your readers….Emotional craft…[is] a way of understanding what causes emotional impact on readers and deliberately using those methods.” pp.3-4
Filled with exercises geared to helping fiction writers explore their made-up characters, the book is equally useful in helping nonfiction writers understand where they may need to interview more deeply or probe more diligently to uncover motivations and emotional truths (their own and those of the people they are writing about), and how their structural and other choices create an emotional experience on the page. His chapter on the “emotional plot” of your book provides a valuable lens through which to examine your book’s structure, and the chapter on the reader’s emotional journey helps us as writers consider how that structure pays off for the reader.
Top to bottom
There are dozens of great general writing guides, but one I particularly like is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. I loved Le Guin for her Earthsea books, which I read as a teenager, and then rediscovered her as an adult as I read her writing on craft and her essays on feminism. Steering the Craft is a slim volume, but it is filled with sound advice on everything from punctuation and grammar to sentence length, point of view, voice and more, as well as almost a dozen writing exercises. Every writer will learn something from it.
How do you do this?
I am one of those people who, in the back of her head, is always convinced that she’s doing this wrong: not interviewing quite effectively enough, researching in a way that is probably leaving all of the gems still hidden in the source materials I didn’t get to, sure that someone else could wrestle this narrative onto the page more effectively. When I was doing my MFA at Goucher College, I remember asking Dick Todd, one of my mentors and an editor of outstanding skill, how anyone manages to write a book, given the challenges involved in the research and writing. Todd, in his dry way, thought for a moment, and then said, “Well, I guess, first, you do it wrong.” (Todd died this year, and the New York Times Magazine has a wonderful piece about him in their year-end The Lives They Lived issue, featuring a conversation with some of the writers he worked with, including Tracy Kidder and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.
Every writer gets it wrong along the way—and every writer does it differently. Two books I found particularly useful in helping me see the range of ways to approach nonfiction are The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton and Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call. Both feature some of the top American nonfiction writers reflecting on how they do what they do, and provides lessons and insights into how any aspiring nonfiction writer might approach their craft as well.
Learning from other genres
In recommending The Emotional Craft of Fiction, I touched on what we can learn from other genres. I’m a huge fan of dissecting other forms of storytelling to gain insight into how to more effectively tell nonfiction stories. Some books I’ve found useful across genres include:
Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor by Lynda Barry —and, frankly, all of her other books as well (One Hundred Demons and What It Is, among others). Barry is such an inventive, thoughtful and brilliant creator (some might even say a genius, given her MacArthur Fellowship) that you can’t help but be inspired by her insights on craft and creativity.
Sleuth by Gail Bowen and Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith. Bowen is terrific on decoding the mysteries of mystery writing, and while Highsmith’s book is a little less directly instructive, it provides interesting insights into her approach to writing—especially in challenging the accepted and expected tropes of her genre. (We rewatched Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley over the holidays, and it is such a terrific example of a successfully plotted thriller—and she’s so good at giving you a glimpse of the small slights that Tom Ripley hangs onto in justifying his actions—at least to himself.)
The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil—yup, comic books! This guide provides a great overview of a three-act structure, advice on keeping the action moving, secondary characters and more.
Radio: An Illustrated Guide from the team at This American Life, gives you a 32-page step-by-step introduction to “how to make a radio story.” It’s available as a PDF for $2. It was later expanded into a 226-page book, Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio, by Jessica Abel. Both include sound advice (sorry, I couldn’t resist) on structure and storytelling.
Exercises
Deconstruct: Choose your favourite song. Or your favourite painting. Or your favourite television episode. Take it apart: Look at how it is put together, how it is structured, what components are used to build it, how its creator deployed her skills in creating an emotional response in you. What one aspect most delights you? Most surprises you? Pull out a piece of your recent work, and look at it with an eye to employing a technique, a tool, an approach informed by what that creator did with her work.
Rank your skills: Make a list of your top five skills as a writer. Maybe you are terrific with structure; strong with story ideas; good with pacing; ok with word choice; and ok with research. Choose one of the items in the bottom three, and make improving there your focus for the next three months. It’s easy to keep doing what you do really well, and to get paralyzed by what you do really poorly. Focus on building your skills by improving on something you’ve had some success with—but where you’ve still got room to grow.
A course, of course: It can be tough to keep yourself on track, by yourself. Commit to improving your craft by signing up for a writing course. There are dozens of options, online and in person. If you’re in Halifax, check out our winter offerings at the University of King’s College, which include arts and pop culture writing, memoir, romance fiction and an exploration of your aesthetic geared to helping writers define and reconnect with their artistic passion.
Check your region for courses offered by your local writers’ organization (in Nova Scotia, the Writers’ Federation).
And a couple of online options to consider: Catapult and Creative Nonfiction Magazine.
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What I’m Reading
I finally finished Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, and it is every bit as good as its opening chapters suggested it would be. It is fascinating from a structural point of view, and staggeringly well reported. Cep’s insights into Lee’s struggles with the book she appears never to have finished will resonate with any writer who has wrestled with a story. In this Longreads interview, Cep talks about her own research and writing process.
Other Good Stuff
Read If, with all of the recommendations in the rest of this newsletter, you’re still looking for something to read, check out this list from LitHub of the best nonfiction of the past decade. I can see three or four at least that will be joining that bedside pile of guilt…
Watch On the topic of learning from other genres: I love this short video on screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s approach to structure.
And on the subject of movies: Go see Little Women! Writer/director Greta Gerwin’s braided narrative shifts the story backwards and forwards on parallel time tracks that converge/diverge at the end of the movie, beautifully giving us the story of the younger March sisters, their older selves and Jo March’s development as a writer. Themes of the economic dependence of women and the creative impulse—the desire to be seen to have a brain and a soul as well as a heart, as Jo puts it—are beautifully integrated as well. A pleasure on every level.
Listen I asked my sister and podcaster extraordinaire Tina Pittaway what I should listen to next, and she recommended this Longform interview with New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. I love Tolentino’s writing and analysis, so I’m queuing it up now!
Book Industry Stuff
What gets lost when local journalists get laid off? Not exactly a book industry story—except that local newspapers are both a training ground and a source of research for nonfiction writers. The New York Times captured this glimpse of some of the “lost” stories of recently laid off journalists.
Books + Beer: A bookstore in Sarnia, Ontario is running a short-short story contest, where the winning stories will be published on beer bottle labels.
Welcome to Halifax, Wattpad: Online storytelling platform Wattpad plans to open a second headquarters (HQ#1 is in Toronto) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As someone who made that move seven years ago, I understand the attraction!
Publishing trends of the decade: Check out this list of trends that changed the way we read.
Book launch advice: Thanks to Jane Friedman’s Hot Sheet newsletter for the tip on this: A guide from BookBub on promoting your new book. Packed with plenty of good advice on researching your audience and publicizing your book.
Tweets & Stuff
How we should all react to gifts
Every writer’s wish
A feast for the eyes
Obligatory Photo of Buddy
Buddy says “Be the candle, not the darkness.”