The Elegant Variation: Advice for the lovelorn...I mean writers

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April 16, 2010

Advice for the lovelorn...I mean writers

I have to give a speech this weekend to a group of young and aspiring writers. I was told they'd want to hear about my process, and about the writing life, both personally and professionally; I was told they wanted advice. I quickly drew a blank. Advice? For writers? Isn't anything I might say hopelessly subjective? There is good advice out there, some really wise books about the subject. But I think the truth is that even if you hear these smart and reasoned pointers, you still have to stumble and flail your way to your own wisdom before the words of others make a useful, deep kind of sense. As I stared at my blank document, all I could think about were those newspaper romance columns. Advice for the lovelorn. I got sidetracked. I started to think of what I might say if I were Miss Lonely Hearts. This is what I came up with.

1. Love should bother you.

2. If someone asks you where your favorite place in the world is, you will answer Tahiti or New Zealand or Jones Beach, but you will really be picturing your lover's body.

3. You will never know your partner.

4. You should never know your partner.

5. You will never know how things will end up.

6. You should never know how things will end up.

7. But if you get to the place where things do end, your level of surprise and emotional distress should be tempered by your sense that you could not have ended up any place else.

8. Every day you will have to recreate your love.

9. It will get better with age.

10. Don't panic.

I don't think I can show up at my speaking engagement and deliver love advice and still get paid. But I do think I can extrapolate:

1. Your work will bother you. It will follow you around like an annoying little brother, pinching you every so often, even when you want to be doing other things with other people. When you hit on an idea that feels rich to you, it will not leave you alone. And when you try to attack the idea with words on paper, and when you fail again and again, and swear that you are ready to put the idea away, that it just doesn't work, you will find yourself lying in bed at night still thinking about it. If the idea is meaningful enough to you on some very visceral and emotional level, you will have to do battle with it until you make a narrative out of it.

2. Your work will feel like a wonderful place you can go. It will feel like a place you have to go. It might feel like the only place in the world where you can really explore and express every hidden, beautiful, ugly part of you. It will be your home ground.

3. People will ask you what your work means and you will try to explain it to them, but you won't really be able to explain it even if it sounds like you are saying something intelligent.

4. You should not be able to explain it. There should always be something ineffable and mysterious about it, even for you. If you've got all the answers, your work will not soar.

5. If you write with a narrative goal in mind, or if you write trying to shoehorn themes and big ideas into your work, it will become leaden and sink.

6. The only way to write fiction that will take someone else by surprise is to let your work take you by surprise too. Get lost. Be scared. Have no idea where you're headed. All those wrong directions are really right directions because they get you where you want to go.

7. You'll know you're at the end when you write something utterly unexpected and surprising to you, and then, when you try to write past it, you can't. You'll realize that without saying what you thought you were going to say, you've said it.

8.. Fiction is a living thing. Each day, you have to recreate not only the work, but who you are as a writer. You have to ask yourself all over again why you're doing what you're doing, and how you're going to do what you want to do, even if you gave yourself a perfectly good answer the day before. Don't stop making yourself answer that question. It's crucial.

9. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

10. Your work will often look horrible and embarrassing.It will be unoriginal. It will fill you with shame. You will lie down on your bed and think that no one has ever written more awful, ungainly sentences than you. Get up off the bed. Don't panic. Like any kid - your work has to go through its awkward, pimply faced adolescence before it emerges as something another person might want to look at, hold in her hands, take into her heart.

Like all advice, take it or leave it. Even if you reject some or all of it, the process of considering it and tossing it out will get you closer to identifying what writing means for you.

Thanks TEV readers for letting me into your world for the week. I loved reading all your comments and I appreciate the book suggestions. I hand you back to your fearless leader. Cheers!

Posted at 06:58 AM | Permalink

Comments

Thanks so much for the writing (and love) advice. Some of your comments brought me to tears, confirmed that this journey is doing what is supposed to to. I certainly feel better knowing that this path is familiar to many writers. I have enjoyed your voice this week; thank you for lending yourself to TEV! Take care.

-EZH

Posted by: Emerson Zora Hamsa | April 16, 2010 at 07:42 AM

For your audience of young writers the most useful advice might be: be patient, spend as much time as it takes to get characters, scenes, plots exactly right, don't do as I did early on, send things to agents or editors before they're ready.

Posted by: Ward | April 16, 2010 at 07:59 AM

This is such a great post.

No one knows all the answers. All the answers are personal. Write your truth.

Thank you.

Posted by: Mayowa | April 16, 2010 at 08:22 AM

Historically, writers have been the worst lovers possible, the Brownings being perhaps the one happy exception to that rule. So I would avoid anybody out there to avoid falling in love with one if at all possible. I mean, actors are probably better choices, and that tells you something.

Posted by: Niall | April 16, 2010 at 10:09 AM

I was alternately choked up and nodding in agreement with a big grin on my face reading this post. I write poetry, not fiction, and I didn't even notice until rereading that you specified "fiction" anywhere in this piece. Every single item here feels perfectly apt for any writer.

Posted by: adugger | April 16, 2010 at 03:53 PM

So good. I like how you had to go through love to get to writing. I am writing memoir but #5 spoke to me the most.

Posted by: Judy | April 16, 2010 at 07:03 PM

This is quite possibly the best advice I have ever heard on writing. OH MY GOD, THANK YOU for this!

Posted by: Kathryn Paterson | April 16, 2010 at 08:18 PM

Thanks for it, Mark...A reader from Panamá.

Posted by: Sergio | April 16, 2010 at 08:48 PM

This is good, heartening advice.

Posted by: Chabon McSafran-Foer | April 19, 2010 at 03:22 PM

That's good stuff, thanks

Posted by: Reed Sanders | April 19, 2010 at 08:08 PM

Poignant and straight from the heart. There are pearls of wisdom here.

Posted by: Diane Dehler | April 19, 2010 at 09:39 PM

Amen! I especially love #9 and #10. I'm sharing this dose of inspiration with the members of the Writers' League of Texas.

Posted by: Cyndi Hughes | April 24, 2010 at 10:02 AM

This is wonderful, and is now printed out and over my desk. Thanks for getting into my brain and heart.

Posted by: jessica handler | April 25, 2010 at 07:45 AM

i revisit this from time to time. it's still be best love (and writing) advice i've read.

Posted by: kelly | March 24, 2011 at 11:33 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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TEV DEFINED

The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen

This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it.
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

With rave reviews from James Wood, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner, it might not seem like we need to tell you to drop everything and go read Netherland, but we are telling you, and here's why: The way book coverage works these days, everyone talks about the same book for about two or three weeks, and then they move on and the book is more or less forgotten. Whereas a berth here in the Recommended sidebar keeps noteworthy titles in view for a good, long time, which is the sort of sustained attention this marvelous novel deserves. A Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness, it's an unforgettable New York story in which the post 9/11 lives of Hans, a Dutch banker estranged from his English wife, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious cricket entrepreneur, intertwine. The New York City of the immigrant margins is unforgettably invoked in gorgeous, precise prose, and the novel's luminous conclusion is a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging. Our strongest possible recommendation.
Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.
The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt

David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)
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The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)
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*Now in Paperback*

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The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers by Vendela Vida

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The Sea by John Banville

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Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

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Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
The Rider by Tim Krabbe

Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

April 16, 2010

Advice for the lovelorn...I mean writers

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

April 16, 2010

Advice for the lovelorn...I mean writers

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism