WAKE UP AND WRITE
Finish What You Start
Until you get to the end, you’re just practicing
Wake Up and Write is a regular advice column from Moms Don’t Have Time to Write. Today, we have Stephanie Danler — author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter and the memoir Stray — who shared writing advice on the podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, hosted by Zibby Owens.
“What are the rules? How do you break the rules?”
“I was drawn at a very young age to poetry, which has informed my writing style my whole life. Training helps because sentences and vocabulary are unfortunately probably five percent of it. There is pacing. There’s storytelling. There’s an eye for capturing detail. There are lines of dialogue that are rote and then lines of dialogue that make a piece come alive. A lot of those things you can learn.
My advice, and the way that I learned all of that, was just by reading. When I wanted to write a memoir, I had no idea how to write a memoir. So I read. I read fifty memoirs. I looked at how they were constructed and which ones stuck with me afterward. What was possible? What are the rules? Then how do you break the rules?
The other piece of advice that I give to aspiring writers is to finish what you start.
When you have identified yourself as a writer and you’re full of ideas and you have this life that’s giving you all of these unique experiences…and this voice, and a point of view… it’s really easy to start projects over and over again.
I’m going to write a Hunger Games-style YA novel today. Today, I’m going to write an Ernest Hemingway-style short story. Today, I’m going to write an elegiac piece about my mother.
When I was in graduate school, Sweetbitter was the first thing that I turned in. I did not write anything else for the two years I was in school, and I had a book at the end of it.
That book needed five drafts before it was ready to be published, but I wouldn’t have ever gotten there if I didn’t just get to the end. It’s so hard, but if you can get to the end of something, then you can look at it and say, ‘Oh, this has potential; oh, this needs help here.’ But until then, you’re just practicing.”
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