How To Take Your Writing To The Next Level — According To Three Famous Writers
But only if you’re really ready to start winning . . .
1. “Nurture your feelings.” — Flannery O’Connor (1912)
Flannery O’Connor let her resentment fester until it drove her to greatness. This is why she’s considered the first great Master of Fine Arts student, as she used this to crush it at the famed University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, from which she graduated in 1906.
A Catholic, she would employ self-flagellation when she thought she was starting to warm to her classmates. Every time someone published in a journal she’d been rejected from, she would sneak into their homes while they were out and steal a pair of their socks, which she’d use as part of an effigy of that person that she would ritualistically burn during the next full moon.
When asked about this in an interview with Colliers after she’d published her first vampire novel — and last work — Wise Blood, she said,
You need to nurture your feelings — in particular, spite. Feed it a balanced diet.
It’s a zero-sum game out there, so if you can’t properly resent other people’s successes, especially when they are talentless hacks capitalizing on humanity’s fondness for mawkishness, sentimentality, unearned righteousness, and false hope for a better world, you won’t amount to much as an artist.
2. “Seduce the reader.” — Samuel Pepys (1812)
Samuel Pepys is perhaps the most famous diarist in English letters. When his hands weren’t busy dipping the quill, they were busy trying to dip his quill, so he was less known for his scrivenings among polite society. However, what his contemporaries didn’t know is that he wrote fiction under the nom de plume Daniel Defoe, a wildly popular figure in his day. Fights would often break out at booksellers over new copies of his latest works.
You see, “Defoe” was highly attuned to period tastes and sensibilities — but more than that, he gave the readers what they didn’t even know they previously wanted. How did he accomplish this? He employed an extensive network of orphan spies around London who would report back to him on prominent critics and powerful tastemakers. He then employed, in his novels, what pickup artists now refer to as “the neg.”
No one could resist. Still, much of his sales went toward the procurement of citrus fruits for his spies, as scurvy was an impediment to business.
In one later diary entry from October 1798, he wrote,
It is no great observation that one must seduce the reader. But most only go so far in their writing as to commit the equivalent of a witty remark or a stray brush of the hand on another’s arm or coccyx, as a timid gentleman might attempt with a naive country innkeeper.
Instead, I find it of the utmost fruitfulness to gather intelligence on the reader — or rather, more specifically, on their representatives in the critics and discerning nobility whose opinions are adopted by the public. Some might call this stalking, but I call this romance.
(Fun fact: Groundhog Day was based on Pepys’s theory of romance!)
3. “Sacrifice.” — Toni Morrison (2016)
Toni Morrison needs little introduction here. She’s still the last real American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her novel Beloved is taught in high schools and colleges across the country, while her musical Song of Solomon is the third-longest running show in Broadway history.
When it comes to writing, though, she doesn’t mince words. In a recent interview on Ellen, she said:
It’s all about sacrifice. Namely, human sacrifice. I have a replica of an Aztec pyramid in the backyard. Once a year, on the winter solstice, I take a volunteer from my graduate writing seminar and cut out their heart in exchange for my agent’s contact details. This appeases the gods and I find I have great ideas for the entire year.
I hope you’re inspired now. Get writing!
Dane A. Wisher is based in Brooklyn.
