Letters to a Young Writer

by Colum McCann

  You have to put in the time. If you are not there, the words will not appear. Simple as that.

  A writer is not someone who thinks obsessively about writing, or talks about it, or plans it, or dissects it, or even reveres it: a writer is the one who puts his arse in the chair when the last thing he wants to do is have his arse in the chair.

  Good writing will knock the living daylights out of you. Very few people talk about it, but writers have to have the stamina of world-class athletes. The exhaustion of sitting in the one place. The errors. The retrieval. The mental taxation. The dropping of the bucket down into the near-empty well over and over again. Moving a word around a page. Moving it back again. Questioning it. Doubting it. Trying it in bold. Looking at it in italic. Increasing the font size. Spelling it differently. Putting it in another accent. Shifting it around again and again. Single space, double space, justify right and left, go back to single space. Sounding it out. Figuring the best way to leave it alone. Hanging in there as the clock ticks on. Not conceding victory to the negative. Railing against the attractively defeatist. Understanding not only what words are for, but also what words stand against. Getting up off the ground when you’ve punched yourself to the floor. Dusting yourself off. Readjusting your mouth guard. Sustaining what you have inherited from previous days of work.

  Don’t worry so much about your word count. Your word cut is more important. You have to sit there sharpening that red pencil or hitting the delete button or flinging the pages into the fire. Often, the more words you cut, the better. A good day might actually be a hundred words less than you had yesterday. Even no words on the page is better than no time at the page at all.

  Insist on your own persistence. The words will come. They might not arrive as burning bushes or pillars of light, but no matter. Fight again, then again and again. If you fight long enough, the right word will arrive, and if it doesn’t, at least you tried.

  Just keep your arse in the chair. Arse in the chair. Arse in the chair.

  Stare the blank page down.

  The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

  —JOHN BERGER

  It’s ridiculed as the most inane question, but still everyone asks it: Where do they come from, these ideas of yours? Guess what? Much of the time a writer doesn’t actually know. They’re just there. They have arrived unbidden. You hit on something that grabs the muscle of your imagination and begins to tighten down upon you until you feel a cramp. This cramp is called obsession. This is what writers do: we write toward our obsessions. You will not be able to let it go until you find words to confront it. It is the only way that you will free yourself.

  The trick is that you have to be open to the world. You have to be listening. And you have to be watching. You have to be alive to inspiration. The general idea may come from the newspaper, it may come from a line overheard on the subway, it may be the story that was sitting in the family attic. It could have come from a photograph, or another book, or it might have sideswiped you for no good reason that you can yet discern. It might even be the general desire to confront a larger issue—the rape of the environment, the root causes of jetliners flown into buildings, the endlessly awful election newsreels unfolding in front of our eyes. No matter. No one story towers over any other. All you know is that it has to be made new to the world and you must begin to investigate it.

  Careful, though. Ideas on their own may be fine, and they may make good politics, but they will not necessarily make good literature. You must find the human music first. The thing that outstrips the general idea. The quark of the theory. The grace note within.

  You begin with a small detail and you work outward toward your obsession. You are not here to represent cultures or grand philosophies. You don’t speak for people, but with people. You are here to rip open the accepted world and create it new. Often a writer will not know the true reason for writing until long after the work is finished. It is when she gives it to others that its purpose becomes apparent.

  To not know exactly where your story is going is a good thing. It may drive you mad for a little while, but there’s worse things than madness: try silence, for instance.

  Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

  —ANNE LAMOTT

  The whole point of good literature is to make newness durable. You are creating alternative time. You are making vivid that which did not exist before. You are not just the clockmaker, but the measure of the clockmaker’s creation. You are shaping past, present, and future. This is quite a responsibility. Respect it.

  Guide your reader into the story. Trust me, you say, this may be a long trip, a strange one, a difficult one, a painful one, but eventually it will be worthwhile. At the right moment you can create miracles.

  Finding the “moment” of the story—or even the “moment” of a scene—can be one of the great revelations of the writing process. You recognize what this moment means: it is the point at which everything changes, not only for your characters but for you as well. You are getting to the heart of what matters. The fulcrum. The crux. If you miss it, everything else will fall apart.

  Your duty is to make the reader see and hear. With the right word, you will find the balance of imaginative richness and form. You have to drag the moment reluctantly from silence. As a writer, you are alive to every sentence. Your imagination is creating a reality. It is as if you are unpeeling time. You gain new territory. You become a hero of consciousness.

  All well and good, young writer—a hero of consciousness indeed—but be aware that this will cost you effort and pain. You will tear your hair out. Grind your teeth. Rinse your heart out again and again. You will think yourself in constant rehearsal for a performance that might never arrive.

  One day you might find yourself hating writing precisely because you want to make it so good. Yet this awful truth is just another form of joy. Get used to it. The sun also sets in order to rise.

  Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

  —GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  One of the great joys of fiction writing is discovering who your character truly is. There is little better than creating someone from the dust of your imagination. But inventing a character from scratch is not simply a matter of ransacking the low shelves of the nearest fiction-supermarket. Your characters must be intricate, complicated, flawed. They need to step up and bear the weight of reality. They need to be a heartbreaking mess of flesh and bone.

  We tend to think and analyze in broad sweeping characteristics (honesty, perception, integrity, etc.), but for the purposes of good storytelling you must know your character in the most exact detail. Forget all the chatter about protagonist and antagonist, and all the workshop riffs about dynamic characters or static characters—what you must do is create someone real. A common saying in literature is that “character determines fate,” which (probably) means that a well-drawn character will take actions consistent with his/her motivations. So, character helps determine a specific outcome in the story. But the story will be nothing if the character is not part of a great human stew. We have to make them so utterly real that the reader can never forget them.

  Writing a character into being is like meeting someone you want to fall in love with. You don’t care (yet) about the facts of his/her life. Don’t overload us with too much information. Allow that to seep out later. We are attracted by a moment in time—a singular moment of flux or change or collapse—not by grand résumés or curricula vitae. So don’t generalize. Be specific. Go granular. The reader must fall in love with your characters quickly (or indeed, learn to hate them quickly). We have to have something happen to them: som
ething that jolts our tired hearts awake. Make it traumatic, make it mournful, make it jubilant, it doesn’t matter—just allow your reader to care for the physical body that your words evoke, the person behind the language. Later on in the story we can settle down with them and get to know them in a wider sense.

  Sometimes we take a character from our own immediate lives and we build a new person upon that scarecrow. Or sometimes we take well-known characters in history and shape them in new ways. Either way we have a responsibility to write them into life. You owe as much to your imagination as you do to history.

  They may be made up, but your fictional characters will eventually become real in the world. Jay Gatsby is real. Tom Joad is real. Leopold Bloom is real. (Or at least as real as the seven billion people in the world that we haven’t yet met.)

  In the end you should probably know your characters as well as you know yourself. Not only what they had for breakfast this morning, but what they wanted to have for breakfast. This little slice of literary bacon won’t necessarily appear in your story, but you must know it all the same. In fact, the answer to just about any question at all should be on the tip of your tongue. Where was your character born? What is her first memory? What does her handwriting look like? How does she cross at traffic lights? Why is there a burn mark at the base of her forefinger? Why is it that she limps? Why is there dirt under the fingernails? Where did the hip scar come from? Who would she vote for? What is the first item she shoplifted? What makes her happy? What terrifies her? What does she feel most guilty about? (You’d be amazed how many writers never even ask these simple things of their characters.)

  You should be able to close your eyes and dwell inside that character’s body. The sound of her voice. The texture of her footsteps. Walk around with her for a while. Let her dwell in the rattlebag of your head. Make a mental list of who/what she is, where she comes from. Appearance. Body language. Unique mannerisms. Childhood. Conflicts. Desires. Voice. Allow your characters to surprise you. When it seems they should go right, send them left. When they appear too joyful, break them. When they want to leave the page, force them to stay a sentence longer. Complicate them. Conflict them. Give them forked tongues. This is what real life is all about. Don’t be too logical. Logic can paralyze us.

  In the end, if you don’t know your character, sit down and write a letter to her. Your first line might be: Why don’t I know you? You might be surprised by the reply. It is, after all, you writing back to yourself.

  Does this sound extreme? So be it. It’s extreme. Writing goes to all the extremities.

  Nabokov says that his characters are just his galley slaves—but he’s Nabokov, and he’s allowed to say things like that. Let me respectfully disagree. Your characters deserve your respect. Some reverence. Some life of their own. You must thank them for surprising you, and for ringing the doorbell of your imagination.

  Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand—but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

  —ZADIE SMITH

  Good writing is art and verisimilitude both. This applies to fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poems, even journalism. We have to hold the possibilities of truth and invention together in the exact same place. The truth must be shaped. And it needs a lot of work in order to get there.

  Some people seem to think that invention is about telling lies. Far from it. Invention is about carving out the authentic. We use our imaginations in order to access the deepest darkdown things.

  In the end it is only the well-chosen word, whether ornate or bare, that is capable of dealing with truth. This word, or this series of words, must give shape to the brutality of our lives, but it also must give meaning and credence to the destruction of that brutality. Only that language which is capable of reaching the poetic will be able to stand in opposition to that which is wrong. In other words, nothing short of your best work will do. Language is a great weapon. It must be complicated, layered, even frustrating. It must be felt. It can be astounding, or confounding. It should say the things we knew, but hadn’t yet made sense of. It should give us pause. It should make us nod. It should give us silence. This is not about lying, it is about shaping, molding, guiding. It has to be true to your spirit of invention.

  And what is this supposed “truth” anyway? Maybe truth is that which the world is aware of, but does not yet know. It is your job as a writer to tell the world something it does not already know. This is easily said, but difficult, maybe impossible, to do.

  Still, seek out those truths that are not self-evident. The more freedom a writer has, the more she must become a critic of the place she lives. Look around you. Depth begins at home. Find out what is wrong and then begin to write about it, in order to write away from it. Even if you’re creating an elsewhere, you are still writing about what is close to home. You don’t owe allegiance to your government. Nor to accepted ideas. But you do owe allegiance to that elusive notion of truth. Elusive, why? Because once you have found it, it has probably already changed into something new, something even more pernicious. There will always be new cruelties to confront. New problems to occupy. In the end writing solves nothing. Be joyful about that. But—at the same time—never forget that it matters. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. Whitman says we contain multitudes. Joyce says that good writing re-creates life out of life. Who are we to argue with the greats? Just strike the word down on the page. No preaching involved. No sermonizing. No pointless barking at the passing streams. Just earnest endeavor and grit. A true mining of your world. The ability to force yourself into the darkest corner in order to discover something that hasn’t yet been said.

  Yes, I know, these words are so easily conjured up, and so difficult to accomplish, but no matter, you have to do it. Look closely at yourself, your community, your loved ones. Speak out. You should write so as not to fall silent. That’s the truth, or the closest we might get.

  In the end we are bound to court and even favor disappointment. We finally understand that there is no absolute truth at all. Still, what should continually interest you is the difference between authentic thought and flotsam, between honesty and intellectual flummery. So, just because something actually happened to you does not mean that it will make a true story, or even a good story. Just because someone said it in “real” life doesn’t make it superior. Just because someone says it is true doesn’t mean that it’s actually true. Make it true. Imagine it into reality. Take the real world and put layers on it. Just keep it honest. And your best work will emerge. Truly.

  The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

  —ANAÏS NIN

  Carry a notebook. Find one small and pliable enough to fit in your pocket, slim enough that it doesn’t weigh you down. Be judicious with it. Don’t spend your day with your face in its pages, but write in it when you get a chance. Images, ideas, snatches of street dialogue, addresses, descriptions, whatever might eventually make its way into a sentence. The smallest detail might be key to a whole new way of thinking. These are small sparks that might eventually illuminate a whole book with their light. Fill it up. Date the notes if you can. Don’t lose it. Please don’t lose it. Write your address and phone number in the inside flap. Ask anyone who finds it to please return it: offer a small reward. But if you do lose it, don’t despair—a good image should have tattooed itself on your brain anyway.

  This is the essential, aesthetic factor—rhythm, the harmonious rhythm of relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest. That is the epiphany.

  —JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  Be a camera. “Language” us into vision. Make us feel as if we are there. Colors, sounds, sights. Bring us to the pulse of the moment. See the whole landscape at first, then focus in on a detail, and bring that detail to life.

  It is a good trick to assume that you have a number of cha
ngeable lenses. Be fish-eye. Be wide-angle. Be telephoto. Zoom in. Zoom out. Distort. Sharpen. Divide. Imagine yourself into the actual camera. Find the words that are glass and shutter both. This is your mind’s eye.

  A writer is capable of all sorts of agility: even if you force yourself into a narrative rigidity, you can still go just about anywhere. The mind is acrobatic. There is no harm in trying all angles. Try first person, second person, third person. Try from the viewpoint of your main character, then try it from the perspective of the outsider. Sometimes the outsider is the one who makes absolute sense. Shake it up. Faulkner it. DeLillo it. Go from present to past. Attempt the future.

  This camerawork relates to a form of presentation too. Be mindful of how the words appear on the page. Line breaks can be vital. Paragraphs. Spaces. Dashes. Ellipses. Keep looking at the words, testing them, probing them. From every angle. Kaleidoscopically.

  Eventually—if you persevere as the camera and operator both—you will hear the right voice, and you will see the right form, and you will uncover the right structure, and it will unfold from there. Then you will learn that you are not just a series of moveable parts. You are light-years beyond a machine. You are inside the issues of the human heart. The camera is gone and you have begun to really see.

  The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.