Some Advice for New Writers

LMFAO so I’m going to spare you the sappy mewling over “my process” and the agonizing over writer’s block and the wax and wane of genius and the emotional suffering of the open page,  that is for another post. But here I want to address people who are just getting started in a writing practice. This additionally gives me a bit of a break from the pretty heavy and technical analysis I’ve been doing. My main qualifications for writing this is that I have written a lot, with some success and perhaps an equal or greater number of failures. Let this be a lesson to you. 

We begin. 

My main piece of advice, WHEN YOU ARE BUILDING YOUR WRITING PRACTICE, is to focus on quantity and not quality. You are not going to be very good at writing when you start, unless you are some kind of prodigy. And even if you have natural gifts, these are tended even by the very greats, cultivated over years and decades. The best teacher is writing itself, and in the early days, when you can’t reasonably expect quality, it makes no sense to torture yourself about it. 

The most important thing to do when you are trying to build a writing practice is TO PRESERVE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH WRITING. If your relationship with writing begins to decay — you start to dread it, it makes you feel bad about yourself, you are disappointed that your first draft isn’t a monster mega bestseller material — you will fail to build a writing practice and you will fucking quit. So the FOCUS of your early efforts needs to include significantly reducing the pressure that you are putting on yourself, and beginning to stack and work and the hours that will inevitably build to good writing. Always, always lower the stakes for yourself; fundamentally change your goals from “I am going to write a masterpiece” to “in 5-10 years I will write a masterpiece, AFTER I’ve build my way up to that point”. It is worth it to engage in a writing process over the long term and you MUST change your mentality to making it about the long game. Put as little expectation on yourself as possible except that you write, and that you maintain your relationship with writing in the rocky early years where you suck and all is pain and suffering and you are at risk to ultimately abandon, far too pre-maturely, your earnest dreams of writing. 

Several years ago I grew very sick, and I was eventually diagnosed with the brain disorder, bipolar one, a psychotic disorder. Before my treatment and diagnosis, I was cognitively impaired for many years, eventually to the point that I couldn’t write at all after once being a very prolific writer and editor. When I was finally hospitalized on an emergency basis, I was in the hospital for a month, and had sustained brain damage and brain inflammation. After spending most of my life in pursuit of writing, I could barely read. 

It took a long time before I could write again, but when I did, I knew it would do no good to despair of the capabilities I had lost. So I started to write my way out of it. This is not an inspirational story. But it did give me a sort of fresh start, as I worked to rehabilitate myself, and it felt very much like starting from an earlier place. I would have literally killed myself if I had focused on the early results of this rehabilitation. But, knowing it would take time from having taken the time before, I knew I had to lower expectations, reduce pressure, and get back in the rhythm, focusing on quantity over quality; the quality came later, through the other parts, and I put my head down and kept cranking. I wrote two drafts for two different books — now sitting on the shelf, they aren’t very good — and then resumed publishing in the public sphere. It paid off, and I am writing at a higher level than ever before. Three years after being out of the hospital. It was worth it. 

So my advice is to optimize for writing more. Focus on volume. It is more instructive to write a lot and learn about the rhythms of writing. It is useful to edit — but edit other people’s work. Anything you can. People’s admissions to grad school, pitch in on a writing project at work, volunteer to read over whatever the people around you are working on, papers, blog posts, website copy, etc.  

I had a professor once who said “the novel will teach you what you need to know”, and I have found a lot of truth in that. Write a lot. Write and don’t look at it again. Read books and copy them. Write fragments and half stories, poetry. Above all, you need to focus on momentum and velocity, your goal is to keep moving. The biggest threat to aspiring writers is that you stop writing. Thus you must remove the primary causes of stopping writing, which include, primarily, self-castigation that one is not living up to a story they made up in their head about their own magical writing capabilities. This also means endeavoring as best as possible to put ego and expectation aside. During the early stages of my rehabilitation I simply told myself not to worry at all about what it looked like, but to write for a year, and reserve judgement until the conclusion of that year. And at the end of that year, taking stock, I was well pleased, well on my way. 

Aspiring writers are all guilty of imagining that they will sit down and write brilliant words on first try. But this is not even true for most of the greats. Hemingway used to hand-copy The Great Gatsby over and over in order to learn how to write. So the first thing you need to do is neglect that sensation entirely. If you have in your mind to write The Next Great American Novel, do NOT start with the idea you have for that. If you must see some Great Work in your mind, then do not use it for your first attempts to build a writing practice. Save the true desires of the heart for when they can be manifested. And remember that that is indeed your goal: to BUILD A WRITING PRACTICE and to start on a TRAJECTORY OF WRITING DEVELOPMENT. NOT to “write amazing stuff”. You MUST change your orientation from your goal being to “write a groundbreaking piece of literature” or something of the sort; this will stop your progression. When you are ready to do that masterpiece, you will know; and now, at the beginning, is not that time. See your writing practice over a long time horizon. People publish their first book in the 60s, even later. Please keep in mind the time horizons under which great writing unfolds, and know that that is the collective wisdom of generations of writers.  

So. I suggest that at least for the first time period, 9 months to a year, that you focus on volume. You will learn just by writing, without agonizing over its quality, or trying to save something that you are doing in the infancy of your writing practice. 

I *do*, however, encourage publishing if you are able to put the fear and ego enough aside to do it. Yes, even if it’s crap. If you don’t want to put it on your main account, create an alt, start making some writer friends, other ones who are about as amateur as you, and start publishing your work on a blog. Even having a few readers is excellent and a joy to cherish; in this age of mass consumption and virality as the measure of success, it is too easy to forget the greatness of being read even by a single other person, and what they will hopefully gain from it. 

If you want to write, like for real, you need to chill the fuck out and reduce the pressure enough that you are able to mentally survive the early years of poorly work, in exchange for a later gift.