Writing Craft
How to Write Like the Best — Writing Tips from the 2023 National Book Festival
Plus, why old catalogs are good for research
The Walter E. Washington Convention Center was bustling with book enthusiasts August 12th, 2023, at the annual National Book Festival (NBF). With at least four different rooms set up for different topics, there was something for everyone: young adult, horror, fiction, economics. Some of the sessions were more like TED talks (Stanford sociology professor Matthew Desmond on his research in Poverty, By America; food historians Cheuk Kwan and Anya von Bremzen discussing food around the world), while others were like group therapy (Elliot Page discussing his memoir, Pageboy).
I mostly stayed in one room: the Inspiration Stage. Peering out over the second floor balcony, I jotted down notes from fiction writers sharing how they get inspired, what tools they use to organize their process, why they write.
Here are some top tips from the best writers:
- Use the sunshine method to impart a message.
- Don’t get hung up on being perfect.
- Get help — whenenever and however best fits your process.
- Write to heal.
- And more specific pointers, including why old catalogs are good for worldbuilding.
1. Use the sunshine method to impart a message.
In one of Aesop’s fables, the elements of nature compete to make a man take off his coat. Wind blows, and blows harder when the man clutches his jacket tighter. Rain pours and pours harder, but the same thing happens. Then, the sun shines steadily brighter, and the man willingly takes off his jacket.
This was a key takeaway from many of the writers at the National Book Festival: the message you want to send may be medicine, but make sure to wrap it in the honey of a good story. I’m roughly paraphrasing S.A. Cosby — and he would know. He was there to share how emotionally difficult it was to write All The Sinners Bleed, a novel about a Black cop in the Deep South trying to solve a murder while wrestling with the seemingly paradoxical nature of being both Black and blue.
To paraphrase Stephen King, the story always comes first; everything else is bells and whistles. Horror writer Tananarive Due explained further: racism and lynchings are too traumatic, too horrific to face head-on. But remove it from reality, find a clever analogy, and you just might have an entertaining story about ghosts, demons, or anything supernatural. The supernatural story can convey the same themes and open up the same conversations without triggering you to put down the book.
…the message you want to send may be medicine, but make sure to wrap it in the honey of a good story.
Luis Alberto Urrea has a slightly different approach. Instead of weaving trauma into supernatural analogies, he uses straight-up humor. During his panel on families and intergenerational trauma, especially for people of Latine descent, he proclaimed, “Laughter is a virus that infects us with humanity.” He argued that laughter opens us up to receive messages that might otherwise be difficult to hear.
To top off a story, Due’s co-panelist and fellow horror writer Grady Hendrix gave the following suggestion: life is already so unsatisfying, why not give readers a happy ending? With haunted houses in particular, Hendrix isn’t a fan of the current occupants simply escaping (leaving future occupants susceptible to the house), but he doesn’t want the house to swallow up the occupants either. Happy endings are a win-win for the reader, who gets a satisfying conclusion, and the writer, who gets the intellectual challenge of building a story towards a desired outcome.
2. Don’t get hung up on being perfect
Amor Towles comes up with his premise in a flash, then dwells on it for about two years until he has the story nailed down from start to finish, then he writes.
Esmeralda Santiago plasters sticky notes all over the slanted ceiling of her attic workroom — but never consults them after starting the book. The sticky-note-plastering is a ritual that helps her detangle the threads of her story ex-ante.
While authors had different approaches, the commonality was this: they never got hung up at any point in the process, especially the beginning. They tackled the story however they could, by sketching out the premise quickly, or wrestling with sticky notes.
3. Get help — whenever and however best fits your process
Luis Alberto Urrea acknowledged a major personal drawback: he’s not that organized. To mitigate this shortcoming, he recruits his wife. In drafting his recent novel, based on his mother’s involvement as serving as a donut dollie on the frontlines of World War II, Urrea found himself wanting to fit all of WWII in his head. His wife suggested they create a timeline. Thanks to her organizational skills, he was able to find traction in writing his story.
While Urrea got help early on, S.A. Cosby put off help until after he’d finished a draft. Cosby actually wrote the entirety of his murder mystery novel using the words “Black Sheriff” as a placeholder for his main character! He knew little about the protagonist beyond his race, occupation, and how he was going to solve the murder. Yet, Cosby couldn’t answer why: Why did Black Sheriff persist when the going got tough, even dangerous? What did he have at stake?
Cosby interviewed actual Black cops only after he’d hammered out the plot. By diving into the psyche of real-life figures, he was able to add more depth to the main character’s psyche. This elevates the book from a neat intellectual puzzle to a gripping story that gets readers rooting for the hero — because that’s what the protagonist is, now that he has an internal struggle to overcome (in addition to the external problem of solving a murder).
Whether you need help organizing at the beginning, or need to wait until you have a working draft to get input, get help — whenever and however best fits your own process.
4. Write to heal
Remember that horrible thing that happened to you? Make it worse, then make it happen to your main character. This is the recipe for a good story, according to horror writing pals Tananarive Due and Grady Hendrix. But it’s also, they hinted, a way to give yourself an entertaining way to discuss something that harmed you, whether it’s racism or family drama.
…whether you write to delve deeper into yourself or to relate to other people, whether you retcon your proto-self a happy ending or are happy to simply not be so affected by what happened to you, writing can help you heal.
Nonfiction writer Ruta Sepetys visits her childhood in cringeworthy detail in You: The Story. She read a passage that made the moderator simmer with rage at a former bully, while she herself put the book down with a smile and a sigh. How grateful she was to be at a point in her life where she could relay a moment that had tormented her for years in front of a roomful of strangers as if it was nothing!
Sepetys went on to encourage the mostly young adult audience to keep writing to understand the world and themselves. She reminded listeners that you don’t have to show your work to anyone; you can always keep it to yourself. Therefore, why not write for yourself?
Novelist Amor Towles had a different take, though. He insisted that it’s important to get out of your own past. While he reached into his own adolescence to relate to his characters, he wanted to use this opportunity to relate to people he had barely interacted with in real life. This, for him, was healing. By taking the focus off of himself, he was able to remind himself that he was not, by far, the most important person in the world — and in that, he found solidarity. Remembering his insignificance helped him feel less alone.
So whether you write to delve deeper into yourself or to relate to other people, whether you retcon your proto-self a happy ending or are happy to simply not be so affected by what happened to you, writing can help you heal.
Bonus tips
Here’s an assortment of very specific advice:
Build in a counterpoint
Think of offsetting one element (e.g. a character) with another. Heroes are only as good as the villains they overcome (S.A. Cosby). The counterpoint doesn’t always have to be an antagonist. If your main character is a rebellious seventeen-year-old grappling with newfound adulthood, give him an eight-year-old sibling (Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway). The childlike innocence of the little brother’s worldview serves a stark reminder of what the jaded protagonist lost.
Specificity leads to trust
Walter Mosley describes a fridge handle, and you feel like you can see the rest of the room (Tananarive Due). That specificity and attention to detail helps you build trust with your reader. Of course you don’t need to necessarily have the entire world in 4K definition, but enough for the reader to trust that you know what you’re doing (and set aside any nagging doubts that the world they’re inhabiting isn’t completely believable.)
On that note…
Catalogs are good for research
What did people wear? How much did a can of sardines cost? Seeing all this splayed out across magazine pages leads to specificity you can use towards building your world (Tananarive Due).
For more on the National Book Festival 2023, you can check the schedule here and see most of the talks on the Library of Congress’s YouTube channel here.
