Writing Advice Never Works (Except When It Does)

5 things I do at the start of every book project

Photo of the author’s notebook

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I hate writing advice. Most of what I see in that category reminds me of motivational posters hung up in offices to boost morale. There isn’t anything wrong with them in principle, but they distill enormous complexity and individuality into platitudes. Be concise. No. Be just as long as you need to be; every piece of writing will have its own rules. Write in the morning. Um. Why? Feels like the old (false) equation of early rising to productivity. Use active voice. Yeah, sometimes. And sometimes not. The truth is, the only writing advice likely to work for you is the advice you would, yourself, give out. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t share our writing habits. Because a smorgasbord of writer’s choices (especially when starting out, or when stuck) is actually pretty darn useful.

Some writer habits are pretty strange, too. Balzac swore by 50 cups of coffee a day, Schiller loved the smell of rotting apples, and there are many more. My own aren’t quite as odd. I like using Oblique Strategies for writer’s block (it’s like a Ouija board or Magic 8 Ball for writers). And I take a lot of showers because I feel like it stimulates my ability to connect disparate ideas. I also bake, clean, and procrastinate like a boss. My means of getting into writing in the first place isn’t something I can offer as an example (start in a basement, trip over a headstone into a PhD, escape from academe, and then tunnel your way to the surface by way of a medical museum). But there are a few habits that carry over from project to project. Here are my top five:

1. Book buying. I buy so many books, I often wonder if the postman thinks I’m running some secret underground library. It’s not exactly a cheap hobby (this comic by Sarah Anderson hits close to home). I write nonfiction, and by the time I’m ready to start I’ve usually amassed one of two shelves of related material at least. My talismans! My fortifying wall! My wallet is empty! I think new or young writers worry that what they read will color their own writing too much — or fear that they will accidentally “steal” someone’s style. But we are all in dialogue with every writer we’ve encountered; the solution is simply to read many more books. I’ve said this before: All books are natural siblings. Buying them supports fellow writers, too.
2. Yellow car spotting. Once I’ve collected materials, I sit down to read. But the books I read are not always the ones I will reference in the writing. I might be working on a history of interwar medical practice in Berlin — but reading The Gene, an Intimate History by Mukherjee and Life’s Edge by carlzimmer, or Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker and Fuzz by Mary Roach. So much of what we do as writers comes down to pattern recognition. I like to call it Yellow Car Spotting. If you are planning to buy a yellow car, you will suddenly see them everywhere. And if you are working on a project, everything you read will help that project along in some way.
3. Calendaring. We live in an age of conflicting schedules. Even in the present pandemic-fueled work-from-home revolution, there are still enormous draws on everyone’s time. If you have a job (most writers have secondary employment), there are the various necessities of keeping it. If you have pets, they need walking, cleaning, feeding. If you have kids, oh my God. Your time isn’t even yours. That’s why I hate the “work this time of day, for this long” advice. You can’t predict your days… but you can calendar them. Not usually a verb, but I’ve learned to weaponize this feature for my benefit. I make blocks of writing time and I won’t let myself schedule other things in those blocks. They can be any size, they can move, they can skip days. And I don’t have to write during the blocks if I don’t feel like it. Sometimes I just use them as a break from overscheduling. That extra thing someone asked you to do, suddenly, because it would just take a teeny amount of your time? Can’t. It’s been calendared.
4. Lunch. Obviously, one must eat. But I use my lunches to meet with a fellow writer. I’m very lucky, in that we both live in the same city and usually manage to meet twice a week during our lunch breaks — but it can be done remotely, too. (I know because we were forced by Covid to work out a system using Google chat.) This is one habit that I hope never to be without because meeting regularly with someone who also writes, and so understands the peculiar twists a mind gets into while working out the manuscript kinks, is utterly invaluable. I’m not sure how any writing gets done properly without interlocutors — I am very certain mine suffers cruelly when they’re missing. I feel like this is my one really solid and safe piece of advice: find like-minded people on roughly the same writing rung as yourself. Community is a very big deal in what can be an isolating experience.
5. Actual writing. I have no idea how to make this one sexy. When it all comes down to it — writing is, of itself, a habit. You do it every day. And you get better at it. In the end, we simply sit down and write. It’s not a tip, or advice, or a trick. It is just what we do.