by Colum McCann
Toward the middle of a project, your reading should be more directed, more focused, more in the vein of proper research. You are on fire now, you are moving. The prose writers should try some poetry, and the poets should be steeping themselves in some prose.
Toward the end of a novel, you should be thinking of turning your bookshelves around, throwing away the library key, fleeing the cage. At this stage you are pure flight, pure motion, pure wing. Your story has only one purpose—and that’s to find where it is that it will land.
At this point, you do not need any other writer whispering in your ear. You will intuit this landing space in the silence of your own head, and generally not by reading others. This is not to say that you won’t find inspiration elsewhere, but make sure the elsewhere is suitably distant. At this juncture, read away from your discipline.
But what happens if you discover that, after all is said and done, someone seems to be writing the same story as you, or that it is already signed, sealed, and delivered? As long as you are sure you didn’t consciously plagiarize it, don’t worry. Seriously. No two stories are ever the same. None. None whatsoever. In fact the only one likely to know about this possible repetition is you.
Stories are not about plot, they are about language and rhythm and music and style. If you believe in your own story, and write it well, it will find its readers. Good work will endure. Just don’t make the mistake of becoming a pale carbon copy of someone else. Be careful when transcribing your notes. Make sure that the words are yours. But let’s not forget that our voice has come from somewhere else and nothing is ever truly unique. So if you are compared to another writer, bow your head, blush, be thankful, and move on. And, please, if you did unconsciously make a mistake, and echoed a line, acknowledge it. No excuses. No stammering. It’s a big language but every now and then it’s going to repeat itself.
The only thing that should surround a good line is another good line. This is how you carve your voice.
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
—NADINE GORDIMER
Writing fiction can hurt people. In fact, it can shatter them. It doesn’t matter so much if it hurts just you alone, but if it begins to hurt others, especially those near and dear to you, you should smash that mirror you’re staring into.
Stop writing about yourself. Don’t steal directly from your friend’s life. Don’t write about your father’s woes. Don’t use your girlfriend’s body for literary cartography. Don’t use your boyfriend’s neuroses to bleed out an extra paragraph. Don’t take events from what some call real life and then transcribe them to the page. There’s nothing heroic about stripping your friends or family down in front of your own eyes, even if it is literary.
If you’re writing a novel, get out of your own head and into the bigger world. Invent the neuroses, invent the cartography, invent the woes. Create a new father in which your own father can be embedded. Change the name. Change the face. Change the time. Change the weather. It will be a relief. Your father will then emerge full and alive, but unrecognizable, allowed freedom to exist in an entirely new body. In fact he will probably have more depth. So too will your own life.
Of course there are notable exceptions. Maybe you’re a journalist. Maybe you’re a social historian. Maybe you’re Karl Ove Knausgaard. Maybe you’re that poet who believes that his life is there to be written upon. Maybe you think you matter more than you truly do. But what’s the point in excavating your family when you have in your power the ability to create a whole new family alongside your own?
And don’t expect—even in fiction—for written things to be true just because they happened. This is no excuse. They have to happen on the page. With rhythm. With style. With a fierce honesty that is true to experience, not to fact.
All writing is imagination. It creates out of dust. Even what they choose to call nonfiction.
In the end imagination is a form of memory-making. Use it. What we’re talking about here is a responsibility to freedom. This is not about avoidance. It’s about a much deeper truth that lies within you, but you maybe haven’t yet acknowledged.
Trust me, if you stop writing directly about yourself you will feel liberated. Everything you know will end up inside everything you have imagined. Your characters will be far more true when they are freed by creative intent.
When you supposedly avoid yourself, you will have only done one thing, a great paradox: you will have written yourself. And you’re the only one you can, or should, damage.
From this, then, you can go on and re-create.
I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing.
—HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Depression is an occupational hazard, young writer. But don’t wallow in it. Don’t become fossilized in despair. Don’t paralyze yourself in the aspic of gloom. If you stare into the abyss long enough, it will stare out from you. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the over-examined life can be soul crushing too.
So, don’t shirk your responsibility to find some sort of meaning, no matter how dark. All good books are about death in one form or another. Celebrate it. Find where it intersects with life.
Allow the act of the imagination to revive you. Write to outdistance yourself from misery. Write so the world doesn’t close in upon you. Write so you eventually open new directions.
All of this is not to outright refuse or even refute the idea of depression. It happens, sure, but please don’t succumb to it completely. Dig your characters out of the ice in which your reality has encased them. More than anything, you will be digging yourself out too.
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
—ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Sit down—right now!—right now!—and write yourself a credo.* What is it that you believe in? What is it that you want to do with your writing? Who is it that you want to speak to? What is your relationship with language? How, if at all, do you want to see the world shifted? Continue wanting to know what it is that you want to know. Try this at different times of your career. Maybe even try for a credo every single year, or at least one every five years. Keep them together. Watch yourself flourish—or not. And if not, why not? Why not? That’s a credo in itself.
* * *
* A Credo for 2017: At certain points in history it is only the poetic that is capable of dealing with brute reality. You arrive at the conjunction of these two forces—reality and fiction—and make a decision about how to proceed. There you stand, on the edge of two tectonic plates. What you have to do, then, is let the facts go. Let the figures go. Let the simplicities disappear. Let the sound bites drown. Descend into language instead. Fight the abyss. (C McC)
You must write as if the very fate of the world depends upon it.
—ALEKSANDAR HEMON
Maybe the best way to gauge the true importance of what you’re doing is the Bus Theory. You wake up in the morning. You get to your workspace. You concentrate. You dig. You create.
At the end of the workday—be it an hour, or a morning, or the whole livelong day—you walk out into the world. The traffic slides by in the street. The world is its ordinary self. You still carry your quiet sentences with you. A little distracted, you step off the curb. Suddenly there’s a whoosh of air, a blast of horn, a whack of diesel, a scream. The bus misses you by inches. Less than inches. A whisker away. It’s not so much that your life passes before your eyes, but your novel does, your poem does, your story does. You step back onto the street and catch your breath. You know, like everyone knows, that you do not ever want to be hit by a bus, but if you are to be sideswiped—if the world is fated that way—then the bus must at the very least wait until your book is completed. If I have to go, Lord, please allow me the dignity of writing my last sentence.
This Bus Theory—which might also be called the Theory of Purpose—will help get you out of bed in the morning. It proves the value of your struggle. The
work matters. The story needs to be told.
Death is not an option, at least for now.
Storytelling is an escape from the jail of the self, leading to the ultimate adventure—seeing life through the eyes of another.
—TOBIAS WOLFF
Why do we tell stories? Why do we have a deep need to tell one another that which is real and invented both? Why do we need to lean across the table, or the fireside, or the fabulously intertwined wires of the Internet, and whisper “Listen”? We do it because we’re sick of reality and we need to create what isn’t yet there.
Stories and poems create what is yet to come. A sentence spun from the imagination is a powerful embrace of what is new. Literature proposes possibilities and then makes truths of them. In storytelling we are given some of the most profound evidence of being alive.
The word fiction really means to shape or to mold. It derives from the Latin fictio and the verb is fingere and the past participle, interestingly, is fictus. It does not (necessarily) mean to lie, or to invent. It doesn’t mean that it has no part of what is “true.” It is about taking what is already there and giving it a new form.
Literature can be a stay, or a foothold against despair. Is that enough? Of course it’s not enough, but it’s all we’ve got.
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
—OSCAR WILDE
Embrace the critics, especially the idiot who wounds you the deepest. Don’t stew. Don’t lash out. Don’t talk behind his back. Walk up to him at the bar or coffee shop. Ask him if you can buy him a drink. Watch him sip. Sip your own. Thank him for his review. Clock his surprise. Pause a moment, then tell him—with a straight face—that it was the worst-written review you have read in a long time. Say it without anger. Don’t walk away. Hold your stare. See if he has a sense of humor. If he understands you, and hangs around, and laughs, he just might be the critic you want. Go read his review again: he possibly has something important to tell you.
Every now and then there is nothing better than having somebody turn your work inside out. Still, the fundamental rule is, don’t believe the critics, good or bad, but especially the good ones. The thing is that if you believe the good stuff, you must, by natural corollary, believe the bad.
Try not to become a reviewer yourself. Some writers do it bravely, but you’re bound to hurt somebody along the way. Leave the reviewing to the reviewers.
In the end it’s good advice to say, “Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it,” because the fact of the matter is that the greatest load of shit will probably come from yourself. So, be humble. Be open to being your own critic. Every now and then we have to walk up to ourselves and buy that ugly mug of ours a drink.
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
—SALMAN RUSHDIE
You should be exhausted when you finish your story. You should feel as if you have just ripped yourself open and that there is nothing more to give. You should doubt yourself. You should be convinced that you are a charlatan. You should know that anything good you wrote was entirely accidental. You should be sure that you will never be able to do it again. You should have no idea how you got here and no idea if you will ever do it again. In fact, you should be convinced that you won’t.
This exhaustion is the moment of greatest celebration: that’s when you know you’re almost finished.
If we are not sometimes baffled and amazed and undone by the world around us, rendered speechless and stunned, perhaps we are not paying close enough attention.
—BEN MARCUS
Gogol said that the last line of every story was, “And nothing would ever be the same again.” Nothing in life ever really begins in one single place, and nothing ever truly ends. But stories have at least to pretend to finish.
Don’t tie it up too neatly. Don’t try too much. Often the story can end several paragraphs before, so find the place to use your red pencil. Print out several versions of the last sentence and sit with them. Go to your park bench again. Discover silence. Read each version over and over. Go with the one that you feel to be true and a little bit mysterious. Don’t tack on the story’s meaning. Don’t moralize at the end. Don’t preach that final hallelujah. Have faith that your reader has already gone with you on a long journey. They know where they have been. They know what they have learned. They know already that life is dark. You don’t have to flood it with last-minute light.
You want the reader to remember. You want her to be changed. Or better still, to want to change.
Try, if possible, to finish in the concrete, with an action, a movement, to carry the reader forward. Never forget that a story begins long before you start it and ends long after you end it. Allow your reader to walk out from your last line and into her own imagination. Find some last-line grace. This is the true gift of writing. It is not yours anymore. It belongs in the elsewhere. It is the place you have created. Shake up their perception of the world. Combine worlds. Combine words.
Your last line is the first line for everybody else.
That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
—EDNA O’BRIEN
Young writer, has the passion of our calling been robbed from us? It often seems that the crisis of our age is that we are living in stunned submission to the circumstances of the times, the rule of politicians and bureaucrats and hedge fund managers and others in their closed-neck shirts. We are being bought off by our affair with the contemporary drug of choice: ease. At the same time, twisted social outrages are unfolding at our feet. Political parties talk about building walls. Universities invest in fossil fuels. Corporations celebrate themselves while pyres burn. The problem with so much of our reality is that it operates from a flat surface, a screen, and it does not address itself to the contoured world we live in. So, get off the couch. Get out the door. Onto the page. All of this is useless if it’s just a pep talk. Your words are not a consolation prize. Justify your rage. Take pleasure in the recklessness of your own imagination. So much writing nowadays seems to suffer from a reduced moral authority, not just in the minds of the readers, but in the minds and indeed the language of the writers ourselves. Writing is no longer part of our national idea. We don’t look to our authors in the way we did decades ago. Nobody fears what we have to say. Why is that? We have allowed our voices to be devalued in favor of comfort. Our moral compass is off-kilter. We have given in to the tendency to be neutralized. We live in a culture where increasingly we are mapped—we have GPS’d ourselves to death. We have forgotten how to get properly lost. This is not some bleeding-heart simplicity, nor should your response to it be. So, embrace the challenge. Never forget that writing is the freedom to articulate yourself against power. It is a form of nonviolent engagement and civil disobedience. You have to stand outside society, beyond coercion, intimidation, cruelty, duress. Where power wants to simplify, you should complicate. Where power wants to moralize, you should criticize. Where power wants to intimidate, embrace. The amazing thing about good writing is that it can find the pulse of the wound without having to inflict the actual violence. It is a way of recognizing the hurt without praising it or suffering it. Writing allows the illusion of pain, while forcing us to grow up and recognize our own demons. We touch the electricity of suffering, but we can, eventually, recover. We carry the scars, but that’s all they are: scars. We have to understand that language is power, no matter how often power tries to strip us of language. Want to know your enemy? Read their books. Watch their plays. Examine their poetry. Try to get to the heart of them. The grievance you know is so much better than the unknown. The impulse to change comes from encountering the multiple and complex shades of the world. Be aware of what you are writing against. Stand up. Be aware that to
be a hero, you might have to be able to be the fool. Alas, poor Yorick, poor Citizen, poor Falstaff, the role of the hero often seems ridiculous, but the best of them are willing to play it anyway. Against war. Against greed. Against walls. Against simplicity. Against shallow ignorance. The fool should speak the truth, even when—or maybe especially when—it’s unpopular. Don’t be embarrassed. Don’t give up. Don’t be cowed into silence. Stand on the outside. Become more dangerous. Have people fear your bite. Restore that which has been devalued by others. Don’t let the passion of your calling be ridiculed. Raise your voice on behalf of those who have been drowned out. Don’t allow the begrudgers to render you useless. Value the cynic. Yes, praise him even. He is useful. He is one you can still teach. Don’t back away from engagement. You must talk about the grime and the poverty and the injustice and the thousand other everyday torments. You must speak of life no matter how bitter or lacerating. Our writing is a living portrait of ourselves. Good sentences have the ability to shock, seduce, and drag us out of our stupor. Be what a diamond is to glass. Scrape your way across. Transform what has been seen. Imagine the immensities of experience. Oppose the cruelties. Break the silence. Be prepared to risk yourself. Find radiance. Ready yourself for scorn. Embrace difficulty. Work hard. Face it, you’re not going to write a masterpiece before breakfast. Your song will exact a price. Be prepared to pay. Write, young writer, write. Claim your proper future. Find the language. Write for the sheer pleasure we take in doing it, but also for the knowledge that it might just shift this world of ours a little. It is, after all, a beautiful and strange and furious place. Literature reminds us that life is not already written down. There are still infinite possibilities. Make from your confrontation with despair a tiny little margin of beauty. The more you choose to see, the more you will see. In the end, the only things worth doing are the things that might possibly break your heart. Rage on.