In Seymour: An Introduction, J.D. Salinger writes about Buddy Glass, who comments on writing advice he received from his brother: “If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself.”
Write the Novel Worth Reading
Philip Baruth, author, most recently, of the novel The Brothers Boswell, says this advice is priceless.
“It is terribly simple advice, but when I first read it, it was a revelation to me,” Baruth says. “I had spent a good chunk of my life writing the sort of books I thought I should be writing, but they were different in style and tone and content from the books I most loved to read and re-read. I’ve read pretty much all of Faulkner, but I can say honestly that I’ve never once re-read one of the novels; they’re brutal and impressive, but nothing I feel the need to revisit.
“I realized that I reach for comedy, for satire, for humor when I read, but that when I sat down to write I was trying desperately to be Faulkner, to be tragic and Literary. And I wasn’t happy in the trying. So I switched to writing the sort of thing I like to read, and for me at least — as another of my favorite writers put it — that has made all the difference.”
Collect Books of Personal Inspiration
Nancy Welch, author of the story collection The Road from Prosperity and Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, a collection of essays, offers similar advice. She is quick to cite those writers who, when she reads them, help her get back into writing.
“Cultivate your go-to books,” Welch says. “When I discovered the work of Alice Munro and realized that it was possible to write about the everyday lives of girls and women in small-town, working-class, lower-middle class–that this was story material and you didn’t always need to have an upper-middle class, Northeast suburban John Cheever family to write about, which was for some reason, when I was an undergraduate, the only things we were given to read. You were either a John Cheever family or you were kind of a hardscrabble Bobbie Ann Mason family, but there was certainly nothing in between.
“So I think that, for me, anytime that I feel that I know I want to write, but I’m just not finding the hook or the voice or the material to tap into, I always pick up Alice Munro’s The Moons of Jupiter or, for some reason, Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips. Those are just writing voices that really speak to me. And even though I don’t write at all like Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood–I wish I did, but I don’t–I just never fail to find, to be able to hear the voices that I need to tune in through them.”
Of course, this is different from Baruth’s advice to read what you want to produce, but Welch says her writers work for her.
“Grace Paley, at a writing conference many years ago, said something that really struck me,” Welch says. “Somebody said, you know, ‘How did you find your voice?’ And she said, ‘I couldn’t find my own voice until I took an interest in other voices as well.’ So, I think that it’s reading, but reading with a pen, or whatever it is you write with or on, really close at hand, because it’s also just constantly writing.
“And writing enough, too, for those words on the page to really begin to come together and make flesh, form characters whose personalities exceed your ideas about them.”
Find the Writing Angels
Suzi Wizowaty, author of The Round Barn, a novel, likewise urges writers not only to read strategically but to make sure that they get themselves in the writing chair on a regular basis.
“When I’m in the midst of working on a novel, I try to set my life up so that I have every morning free, and I do all of my income-producing work from noon on,” Wizowaty says. “I try to set all my teaching in the afternoon or the evening. And I do try to work five days a week.
“It was Sharon Olds who said once that you’ve got to be at your desk: the poetry angels are always around, but you’ve got to be at your desk so that they can see that you’re there.”
Chris Evans - In a previous life, Chris Evans wrote for daily newspapers, large and tiny, in Kansas, California, Florida and Missouri. Today, he ...
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