Eight Letters To A Young Writer
A Timeless Advice for Writing Anything
Dear friend,
Let me begin with a confession: I am not qualified to give you advice. For a start, I am a young writer myself (hardly older than you or perhaps even younger), and for another, there are few things more resistant to tutoring than the creative arts.
Most importantly, I know so little of your specific situation that in giving you any counsel, I fear I have to restrict myself to generalities. So you will forgive me what follows, and perhaps in these paragraphs find one or two things that will be helpful to you.
Take them not as rules but as suggestions; as reminders about things that I myself wish I had known sooner.
Letter 1: Simplicity
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• Be simple: Never use a big word where a small one will do. Use simple words fortified by a few bigger ones. There are many who use big words to mask the poverty of their ideas. Don’t join that crowd.
• Remove clichés from your writing: Clichés dull the uniqueness of your ideas. They are elements of herd thinking and writers should be solitary animals. Common clichés include: money doesn’t grow on trees, don’t judge a book by its cover, and so on.
• Avoid adverbs: Let the nouns, adjectives, and verbs bear the action of your story. “He smiled” is much stronger than “He smiled wickedly.” Interrogate each adverb when you edit. Spare none.
• Read: Read more than you write. Don’t worry about those who worry so much about originality that they end up writing garbage.
• Rely on observation: You can’t fool the reader. It is bogus to write about mud huts and village streams when you spent your whole life in Dubai. Your environment is interesting for its own sake. Pay attention to her conversations.
• Be courageous: Nothing human should be far from you. Write about everything and help your readers share a solidarity in the complications of the human condition.
• Avoid narratives that have a single meaning: They are boring. Paint better scenes and evoke a feeling.
Letter 2: Freedom
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• Like Josef Kainar’s anecdote, writing is your grandmother and you can do to her what you damn well please. Your independence as a writer is your own; do with it exactly what you want! Be free. Let your inner compass function and work your facts into the texture of your story.
That way, your reader feels he has not only read “about” something but has been “transported” to a specific place; a place so specific he’s sure you must have been there yourself.
Letter 3: Voice
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• Though writing is silent, mute ink upon paper, when we read, we “hear” something — the throes of sadness, the thrills of joy, and the sudden burst of humor. Sometimes we can even make the educated guess of who the speaker is…whether young or old.
What all great writings have in common is that the VOICING is secure. There is evidence, throughout, that the tale is told precisely the way the author wishes it to be told.
Letter 4: Inwardness
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• Make your writings personal, uniquely addressed to the reader. Take your audience into your confidence without appearing to do so. Let him wonder:
“How does he climb into our heads — yet not our head but my head — and from that vantage point unfold a narrative that appears to be written with only me in mind?”
Letter 5: Artistry
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• Imbue art from other sources. Writing is an art and the lessons of artistry are to be sourced from all over.
Letter 6: Home
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• The stories are here. Keep a journal. Describe your day, your environment, your aspirations, anything.
The lines may not constitute a masterpiece but let them capture a lived moment; a described moment that would otherwise have vanished from the world’s record.
Letter 7: Interviews
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• Sometimes what you’re after isn’t in a book. It’s something with a different kind of potency. So much of that is online now. We’re lucky to live in these times.
Listen in on great minds. Hear them grapple with the mysteries of creativity.
Letter 8: Fearlessness
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• So much is going on in our environment. They are frustrating. Turn your anger and fury into something creative. Fury can make a writer fearless, and fearlessness is required of us right now.
Perhaps it will become apparent to you that you are indeed called to be a writer. Then accept that fate; bear its burden and its grandeur, without asking for the reward, which might possibly come from without.
Those are Rilke’s words. They should be yours too.
I wish you continued insight and hope you and I will both continue to fail better — failure of a kind which might even be better than certain kinds of success.
Here comes the new year loping shyly into view. It will be sweet.
With love,
Teju Cole.
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Written by Teju Cole and published in the Nigerian dailies, “Eight Letters to a Young Writer” evolved as a fictional exercise addressed to an imaginary young Nigerian writer.
What you have above are my key takeaways from the 41-page masterpiece.
