Writing Lies I’ve Been Told

On Finding Your Own Voice

There exists a certain phase of the writing life when we crave boundaries and walls. We seek out rules and rule makers to help us constrain the limitless possibilities of our imaginations—to make them seem like something we can put on paper. And then comes the day when we burst through those walls, dismantle the fences, shatter the rules—when we trust the shape of our voices, the direction of our inquiries, the form of our words.

These are the rules I am breaking.

It’s Important to Write What You Know

This maxim makes writing seem less scary to the uninitiated—as though I could sit here in my little office and describe the brown leather chair I sit in and the old trunk on which I rest my feet and create my first masterpiece.

But it doesn’t work. I’ve tried. And the result was a really long and really dull essay about the lamp beside me that I later cut to two essential paragraphs and wedged into something else.

All of the best things I’ve ever written started as questions. My first novel, Polska, 1994, began with a need to know what would make a mother abandon her children. The book of writing prompts I co-authored, Clear Out the Static in Your Attic: A Writer’s Guide to Transforming Artifacts into Art, (ironically) kicked off with a question about why writing prompts don’t work for me. And my poems, articles, and essays…

Starting with a question lets me get to the heart of what I find exciting about the subject. As Micheline Aharonian Marcom would say, it lets me write into the heat. That’s where the good stuff is. And I might throw in the Bokhara rug at my feet for atmosphere (hey, inspiration comes from somewhere), but writing what I know about that rug is going to be one hell of a dull story.

Proper Grammar is Your Friend

Grammar rules exist for a reason and I’m not saying you shouldn’t learn them (especially if you’re writing for a business audience). But just as Picasso learned to draw well before reinventing his style (again and again and again), there is a lot to be learned from experimenting with grammar once you’ve learned it.

You can speed up a sentence making it breathless panting urgent by screwing with the punctuation. To slow a sentence down, you can play with the standard syntax. Or, experiment with elision—removing unnecessary words—testing the limits of intelligibility.

The Best Writers Use Clean, Concise Language

Hemingway blah blah blah. It wasn’t until after I earned my MFA that I could really see the beauty in his clean prose. Mostly because I was awash in an ocean of clean prose by writers who were imitating him—most of them without understanding what makes his writing work.

The simple, stark writing of a journalist works for some writers. Others revel in the gnarled composition of a more convoluted writer like Faulkner—writing that forces you to slow down and build layer upon layer of meaning into a stylized vocabulary and structure.

I am not saying that Hemingway didn’t master nuance. But I am saying that simplicity is only one form that the art of writing can take. Try out all the styles that you like—then pick the one that’s right for you and your subject.

Don’t Write with a Thesaurus

I totally know where this rule comes from. I once wrote a story with words like “sinuous,” “girded,” and “wheedled” (that last one I used twice in three pages) which my workshop group found to be overwritten. It was. I was playing with words and trying to find my voice. And I don’t regret a second of it.

I still write with a thesaurus by my side (preferably an actual paper copy). But these days, instead of looking for the most convoluted expression, I’m looking for exactly the right word. I’m learning about where the words come from and what their original meanings are. All of that is helping me use the right language for what I’m trying to say.

Writing with a thesaurus also keeps me from being lazy with my verbs. It’s one of my tics and every time I want to write, “got,” I go back and find the word I really mean to use. Many times the sheer act of thumbing through that book gives my brain just enough of a break to find the word I should have used in the first place.

So if you’re a beginning writer, take in all the rules and advice you can handle. Learn from them, but don’t treat them like doctrine. The more you know, the better you can later wield your pen to strike down all the limitations you (and others) have set for you. I can’t wait to see what you discover.

Isla McKetta writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books, A Geography of Reading, and Moz. She lives in Seattle where she serves on the board of Hugo House.