Advice is in italics.
Really bad advice is in bold italics.
United States
We all (English speakers) live in the United States unless we make the deliberate effort not to.
Write in an unAmerican way.
Exclusively read American writers – they’re the only game in town.
Further Reading: Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Voice
‘Oh my God,’ think most start-up writers, ‘I need to find my voice. I need to find my voice as fast as I can. Until I find my unique, original, unmistakable voice, nothing I write will be worth anything.’
Most writers don’t find a voice, I would argue. They find Obstacles. New ways of saying things demand new things that need to be said.
It’s not how writers say the world, that’s a relatively surface thing, it’s how they see the world. If you see the world differently, you will need to find different ways of expressing what you see. However, if you are happy to admit that the world is already pretty much being seen as well as it can be, then you may as well give up. (In this previous sentence, you might choose to replace ‘the world’ with ‘the genre of X’. Some writers ambitions are limited, say, to the Extremely Violent Crime Novel rather than the world and all things in it.)
Find the blockages in language. What wants to be said?
Avoid reading entirely. You don’t want to be influenced.
Further Reading: Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries then all her diaries and letters.
Writing
At the end of two years on the MA, one student said, ‘You know, writing is hard.’ All the tutors were delighted.
If you’re in the shit, keep writing. As Randall Jarrell said, ‘Each day brings its toad, each night its dragon.’
This will be the last piece of really bad advice: If you find writing hard, don’t write.
X
The thing that is missing. The factor. You won’t know what it is.
Yaddo
That your writing circumstances are not perfect should be blamed for nothing. Even if you were on some juicy grant at Yaddo, they wouldn’t be perfect either.
Zombies
Zombies are unavoidable, so they had to come in here. They are as useful for my argument as zebras.
It is very easy to write as a zombie; it is very hard to write as a zebra.
A version of this was published a while ago, somewhere or other, and it was commissioned by Nick Royle. Thanks to him.
