How to Succeed in Writing with a Little Trying
If you think you’ve written something great, you probably haven’t.
If you think it sounds nice, reads well, looks pretty, has a thoughtful idea — it probably doesn’t. Scrap it. Rip it out of your notebook, cross out the lines, shred the pages, delete the document, burn it down.
And then start over.
You’ve written something great when you know you have — not when you think you have. Not when there’s a hint of doubt or an inkling of a possibility that it’s subpar or lukewarmly mediocre. Or, on the contrary, you’ve written something great when you are utterly sure that you haven’t. When you think it’s rubbish, risky, a shipwreck of a piece. When you have the strongest feelings in the world that tell you it’s absurd, avant-garde, challenging, dangerous. But the strongest feelings will often yield the best work, the most insightful lines, the deepest art.
Write so that you scare yourself.
My best work has come from a hunch, a guess, a question, a wondering what if, a half-baked idea, a riddled musing, a sleep-ridden proposition at 3 a.m. So many times they’ve stolen into my thoughts quietly, politely, timidly, and shyly, and other times, they’ve come crashing through the walls and swinging from the chandeliers. But when they come, however it is that they may, I take notice — I take note. So take note. And now take some notes.
Be impulsive. Sit down and let the words just spew and sputter and stutter and stop on the pages. Finish your thoughts, leave cliffhangers, ask a question and forget to answer, use too many punctuation marks, script dialogue, do whatever it is that lets words and ideas begin to take shape somewhere outside of your headspace. You’ll end up with incoherent dross, but among that flotsam and jetsam, you’ll find some sweet melodies, a stanza of poetry, and maybe even a few corresponding harmonies. You’ll find feelings you didn’t know you could explain like that and the tips of icebergs you didn’t know you had. You’ll find flowers nestled in your thorns and deep thoughts tucked behind your spiraling stream of consciousness. And those are what you keep. Those are what make the process, the effort, the pages and pages of terrible metaphors and dry descriptions, the long nights of burning the midnight oil, the ink stains on your fingers, the cramps in your hands, the creases in your brows, the hunched over posture of your back — those few bits of beauty and brilliance are what make it all worth it.
And those are what you keep. Those are what you take. You extract them from among the uselessness of the other syllables, and you replant them in a nicer garden, one with more sunshine and consistent care and better watering. You let them live and grow there; you let their roots deepen and strengthen; you let them thrive and become something more than the baby seeds they once were. And then from there, you prune, and you harvest. You learn what to keep and what to toss, what stays and what goes. You learn when to nip something in the bud and when to foster its potential more, and as you go, your garden grows. It flourishes and dies and flowers and tries. It goes through cycles and seasons and all sorts of storms, but it keeps growing. It rears its stubborn head and keeps growing because it can’t afford to not.
That’s how you write. Or at least, that’s part of it.
Experiment. Be more like a mad scientist. Throw caution to the wind and try on different words, styles, voices, and methods for size. See what fits. See what doesn’t. See what you want to continue with anyway. You’re not Goldilocks — there won’t always be something that’s “just right.” What works now may not in a few years. What felt good when you were seventeen won’t always feel great when you’re twenty-four. Time moves on, you change, you grow and learn and fail and try again. That’s the way life works, and that’s the way writing works too. You can’t find one style that helped you get all As on your AP English papers and use it for the rest of your life. There won’t be a panacea. You have to be flexible. Go a little crazy, be a little daring, give yourself the grace and the space to experiment.
Let the words sit on your tongue. Move them around, taste their sweetness, their saltiness, their bitter acidity or their satisfying silkiness. Play with the rhythm. Learn how to properly spell rhythm.
Be like The Bard and give iambic pentameter a spin or be like T.S. Eliot and let your words lay like a patient etherized on a table.
Restrict yourself with a rhyme scheme or give yourself the freedom to dream in free verse. Make short sentences. Or don’t. Or do.
Or let your words link themselves together in a never-ending chain that seems to stretch towards the horizon where the sun is setting on a tired day.
Let Dickens inspire your use of commas, the way they can allow a sentence to contain so much, yet so little, all at once, together, in a unified state of existence, in the best of times, in the worst of times, and in the times when you’re trying your best to add a tone of suspense, intrigue, and out-of-breath shakiness.
Let yourself remember all those literary terms and poetic devices you were forced to memorize in middle school. Let yourself remember and then use them. Alliteration, metaphor, simile, zeugmas, allegory, onomatopoeia, imagery, personification. Don’t disregard them as something that stifles creativity or gives you flashbacks to seventh grade English. Give them a test drive. Because sometimes something strikes you — like a lightning bolt to the ground. Or sometimes it’s subtle, stealthy, subconscious — a new star appearing in a constellation that you hadn’t noticed before. Don’t let yourself miss out on victories because you were too good — or too afraid — to experiment.
Know how to use clichés. They’re clichés for a reason — more often than not, there’s a semblance of truth behind them. But that doesn’t mean you can weigh down your work with regurgitated phrases from the public domain. If you find yourself cornered in by a cliché, use it to your advantage. If a cliché must be used, if there is no way around it, if nothing else succinctly conveys something as well as that one particular adage does, then use it, but use it well. Quote it, cite it, put it in a tweet, but make it your own. Give it a new take. A cliché is like one of those unnecessary car chase scenes in an action movie — absolutely terrible, almost humorous, and exhausting if done poorly but interesting and exciting when done well. Do it well.
Don’t filibuster. Quality over quantity (it’s a cliché, see?). Don’t string words together in an attempt to give yourself those two extra paragraphs or that final push to be over 2,000 characters. The amount of words you have is meaningless if they’re not doing anything, if they’re not accomplishing what you want them to, whether that’s to entertain, inform, evoke emotion, persuade, or whatever other reason you’re writing for. Don’t let your words run you into the ground. Don’t let them drown you, bury you alive. Don’t collapse beneath the sheer weight of their emptiness and the boredom and confusion they hold. If you don’t succeed in your goal, then why bother writing any of it to begin with?
Find your voice. Don’t try to wear someone else’s clothes. You’re not two people stacked up in a trench coat — no one ever believes that ruse anyway. C.S. Lewis was an incredible speaker, teacher, theologian, and writer. He was an absolutely terrible poet. Most aren’t even aware that he wrote poetry, since he’s often associated with his books like Mere Christianity or The Chronicles of Narnia. One look at his poetry will show you why they are not among his crowning achievements. The thing about Lewis’ poetry is — because I have no doubt that he would have been able to compose some wonderful pieces if he figured out and fixed his problem — that he was a great imitator. He knew how to mimic other people’s voices, how to mime their styles, how to draft up his work by modeling them. And there’s nothing wrong with having other writers or people whom you look up to, who inspire you — we should all have those. They will challenge us, push back the boundaries of our horizons, give us new flavors to taste and ideas to revel in. The problem comes when we mistake emulation for inspiration — and that’s what Lewis did. He focused too much on the other poets and the way their voices sounded, and his became a mere echo, bouncing off theirs and getting lost among the choruses, never landing on a spot to claim as his own. Don’t be like Lewis. Don’t take on someone else’s voice. Admire it, gawk at it, dwell in it, let it sing you to sleep — but don’t fashion yourself a mask out of it. You will be uncomfortable wearing it, and you will fool no one. You owe yourself — and the world — too much to resort to a cheap trick.
Don’t linger, but don’t rush it. Let your words marinate for a while. Let them boil and simmer and slow cook — you’re making a nice bouillabaisse, not an instant ramen Cup Noodles. Sometimes great ideas happen instantaneously, and sometimes, it takes a day or two for you to realize that that sentence you wrote isn’t half bad. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes it takes a good night’s rest and a fresh cup of coffee for you to realize that your whole premise is wrong, and the grammar resembles that of your three-year old nephew’s. Give yourself some time to think it over. But don’t sit and stare at it. Don’t write and rewrite and work and rework a sentence until the words are bruised and have lost any sense of meaning. Mix up your batter, pour it in a pan, put it in the oven, and then walk away. Set a timer, maybe, but don’t pull up a chair to watch the cake rise as it bakes. Give it time.
Criticism. It will come. Make sure your skin is tough enough to receive it when it does. Armor up. Not everyone is like your mom — it’s in her job description to tell you that you’re wonderful. Have people you can trust to tell you the truth, and then be brave enough to demand that truth from them. And you can’t get defensive when you don’t like what you hear. Sometimes they’re right, and you just have to man up and accept that.
If you were going out and had stains and rips and spots all over your clothes, you’d want someone to tell you, right? Think of this as your friends pointing out the stains and rips and spots in your writing. It’s okay — and normal — to feel defensive, hurt, angry, bitter, and annoyed in the moment of criticism (as long as you keep it inside), but later, you’ll realize that they were right, and you’ll be thankful that they didn’t let you walk out of the house looking like some sort of roadkill.
And if you’re feeling tough, if you’re feeling courageous and perhaps a bit audacious, go to your most honest friend. The one with the sharp tongue and the quick responses. The one with no filter. The one whom you love but are hesitant to introduce to your other friends. Let them have a crack at it. Let them crack all your eggs and then learn how to use those beaten up yolks to make some sort of new omelet that’s better than the first.
Grammar. For the love of all things orderly, please employ proper grammar and mechanics. First drafts are messy. Second drafts are sloppy. That’s okay. Get it all out of your system.
Final drafts are crisp, clean, incredible. Final drafts know when to use commas and when to use em dashes; they employ semicolons and colons accordingly, and they don’t have typos, run-ons, or subject-verb disagreements. They are pristine and as close to perfect as you can manage. They will obviously not be perfect — no one and nothing is — but they will strive for something like flawlessness.
Don’t splice and dice your punctuation. Don’t fragment your thoughts. Don’t use exclamation points unless they are absolutely necessary. Don’t use the words “stuff” or “a lot.” Don’t use the same simple structure for every sentence. Follow the rules but know when you can break them. Your first, second, and maybe even third drafts have permission to be painfully incorrect. They’re allowed to have technical problems. When you write at first, just write to write. Write to release all the words and thoughts flowing through your veins. But then arrange them. Rearrange them. Organize them. Put them in their proper places in the proper order. And learn your homonyms. Too, to, two, their, they’re, and there are the most unforgiving. And whether or not you use the Oxford comma ultimately doesn’t matter, but pick a side, stay loyal, and be consistent.
Conclusions. It’s your mic drop moment. It is your chance to leave your audience speechless and staggeringly star struck by your brilliance. Don’t say what you’ve already said. If you have to reiterate what you just spent however many paragraphs and pages explaining, then you didn’t do your job right. Your reader just spent time reading through your words — tell them why they matter. Tell them what to do next. Tell them where to go with it, what a potential sequel could be, hint at a future, declare war and then march on. Tell them why you just wasted minutes — maybe even hours — of their time. They just invested in your pilot episode — tell them where the rest of the series is going. You gave them a business proposal — tell them what your ten-year plan is. Give them something beyond the basics, beyond the foundation you so painstakingly built. It’s important to know how to make an entrance, how to catch them hook, line, and sinker and make them want to stay for whatever rollercoaster ride is next, but perhaps it’s even more important to know how to exit. Be memorable. Open the cage and then run, exeunt, pursued by a bear.
