Writing Advice

Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life. 

Louise Erdrich – It gets better 

How to Start a Novel

I’m an obsessive collector of other people’s opening lines. With my phone I take photos of the good and the bad. When I find one I really like, I scribble the writer’s first sentence down in one of those Moleskine notebooks people always give me for Christmas. Translated into my handwriting, the line becomes less legible, but I can see more clearly how it works.

The first sentence of a novel is an entryway. An open door. But how many doors have you seen in your life that you’ve actually wanted to walk through? It takes energy and trust to cross a threshold. You may have to take your shoes off. Stop fidgeting with your phone. Prepare. Be alert. Some clumsy fool with a baseball bat could be waiting on the other side, ready to clobber you to death with his unsubtle story.

Often the visitor turns around and walks away; the first line is frequently the only line a reader reads. If that opening sentence tries too hard, or holds no special friction, the book slips from its holder’s hands – back onto the table, or the shelf, ready to be replaced with a magazine, or a snack, or a screaming child. Knowing this fact makes an opening sentence extremely difficult to write. It is like the shirt you will wear to the most important first date of your life – except the date could be with anyone, and you have no way of guessing at their taste, and you have to choose between all the imaginable shirts on earth.

The first sentence of my novel The Great Mistake changed its clothing often. While procrastinating, I found it instructive to try out the opening lines of some favorite books that dealt with a similar place (New York), time period (nineteenth and early twentieth century), or ideas (fate, death and the creation of public space).

Here is the first sentence of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime: ‘In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York.’

I like how that capitalized ‘F’ at the start of ‘Father’ asks for attention – but in a modest way. The manner of a humble son? A mystery is seeded in the novel’s first line merely by capitalizing one character. That’s a canny investment – like building your own house in New York in 1902. And that repetition of ‘New’ is the first hint of a rhythm, is it? A prose that will proceed by emphasis and repetition, like the jazz that is the novel’s subject and its soundtrack. Starting the book with building a house at the crest of a hill also seems notable. It signals this writer’s ambition. We don’t yet know if the book’s structure will collapse – but its entryway inspires confidence. We step inside.

Jonathan Lee – Notes on Craft

Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking

Don’t panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends’ embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there’s prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.

Sarah Waters – Rules for Writers

a beautiful and spiritual thing

Don’t be afraid and just write what comes to you. Be bold, be daring and don’t conform to anything other than what feels right to you. Poetry is a beautiful and spiritual thing, but it has the power to change the way that we view the world. Poetry is our past, present and future and, as poets, we are contributing to the cultural history of our species when we write. Poetry touches the human spirit in a whole variety of different ways. Poetry also challenges what we find to be acceptable as a society, and poetry is an expression of feeling that can be used to make a statement. I’ve always maintained that you can tell the political and social state of the country based on how pissed off the poets are. Also, if you submit and you don’t succeed, don’t get too down about it; it doesn’t mean that your work isn’t good, or your work isn’t valid, it just means that this opportunity isn’t the right one for that piece of work. Keep going and you’ll get it out there, don’t give up or give in.

Bee Parkinson-Cameron – The Poet

Landscape as Character

Growing up in County Down from the 1960’s through to the 1980’s, I lived close to beautiful places and was fortunate to have family who delighted in nature and were convinced of the importance of sparking the same delight in the next generation. That my grandparents farmed the land strengthened this connection. There was no denying the reverberations of The Troubles. Still, on the shore, in the fields, hills and woods, there were sure sources of inspiration and hope to be found.

My second novel Peninsula (Dalzell Press, 2020) draws strongly on this relationship with my native County Down. While I chose to fictionalise some elements of the setting, it is very much inspired by the area of The Ards and Strangford Lough. This landscape connected naturally with our words and family story-telling. It felt right to learn and remember all the names of wild flowers, trees, creatures, as if by naming and remembering we acknowledged them individually. Not really ‘as if’, more ‘because’. For as long as I can remember, I’ve regarded Nature as a breathing presence, a gathering of presences, living around and alongside us, a belief which has fuelled and is no doubt apparent in my writing.

The specific natural environment plays an integral part in the lives of the characters of Peninsula. As its attributes are described and gradually revealed in more detail – physical features and qualities, history, associated memories, strengths and vulnerabilities – the landscape assumes the weight and dimensions of a substantial character in its own right. Here there is an otherness which will act and be acted upon; a reality with the power to steady and uplift; an authentic force to be reckoned with.

Tanya Ravenswater

Landscape as Character

love poems

Do not write love poems, at least at first; they present the greatest challenge. It requires great, fully ripened power to produce something personal, something unique, when there are so many good and sometimes even brilliant renditions in great numbers

Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet

one thing I love about writing

Write What You Really Think

I think that whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one’s own strange self on the page. From the day my husband told me he was leaving, I was writing — a lot. I wanted to make something of my altered life, to break into song, to cry out on paper. Reminding myself that no one else would ever see what I wrote — with my ballpoint pen in my wide-ruled spiral notebook — helped me be less censored and less afraid. Later, I could decide to show or not, because whether anyone ever read it was not the most important thing.

Writing or making anything — a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake — has self-respect in it. You’re working. You’re trying. You’re not lying down on the ground, having given up. And one thing I love about writing is that we can speak to the absent, the dead, the estranged and the longed-for—all the people we’re separated from. We can see them again, understand them more, even say goodbye.

Sharon Olds
Heartbroken? 6 Ways to Pull Yourself Back Up

the lines I’d begun to hear in my head

Poetry really came to me. Maybe that sounds too mystical, but what’s wrong with mysticism? I remember hearing poems in what I now know is iambic pentameter in my head in those minutes between sleeping and waking when I was a small child. I didn’t know what that language was, but I found it comforting and physically pleasurable. In elementary school I was by no means a shining star, but when asked to write a verse for the inside of a Mothers’ Day card, the rhyme and meter was effortless to me.

Poetry really arrived after my dad died when I was seven. It was no longer an instinct; it had become a necessity. It rose up to meet my need. That isn’t to say I began writing poems at seven, but that I had begun to see and hear and think like a poet. Even at the funeral, my noticing had become charged. The ant on the rose. The sharp corners of the flag folded into a triangle. The sound of the wind flapping the sides of the tent over his coffin. The creak of the mechanism that lowered him into the ground. This noticing wasn’t garish, really, but held a kind of objectivity.

I didn’t start writing actual poems until I was in early high school. Luckily, girls were required to take typing class (ah, the luck of our subordination…) and typing became the key to getting the lines I’d begun to hear in my head onto the page. It allowed me to begin to see the poem as having a presence on the page. As my own body came into uncomfortable blooming, so did the body of the poem.

Back then, in my rural high school, there was no “creative writing.” Poetry was an unknown entity. I didn’t really know that what I was writing were poems. I believe my ignorance was fortunate. It ushered in invention. There was no one to imitate, no pressure to conform to a standard.

[….]

Most of my education in poetry has been self-teaching. Therefore what I know is like an inland lake — shallow in places, unexpectedly deep in others. Teaching in both undergraduate and MFA programs has extended my education. I learn what I need to teach. I’m a hodgepodge.

There are limitations in that scenario, but it has allowed me to maintain some of my early ignorance. At times, my ignorance has begotten innovation, playfulness, improvisation — an aesthetic that is all mine.

[….]

I’m interested in the rural, but I approach it via degrees of formal experimentation. I think of my work as punk-rural, in that my it emerges from rural spaces, but looks for the toughness, the strangeness, the absurdity, the taut stringiness, the rage and pain of it all as opposed to the homespun. The rural is no less punk than the urban. Roadkill. That’s my aesthetic. Naked dancing on the water tower. Cheez Doodles and a Coke. Cigar-smoking ghosts on the riverbank. I love what I call “freaking form”—learning traditional forms so that they can be usurped, upended, repurposed, like a bathtub that can be made into a shrine to the Virgin Mary. I’m sort of an anti-intellectual intellectual, a geek about the literature and visual art of the past but I like to bring it down, downtown, here where I live, with the earthworms and gravediggers.

I am guided by instinct, the unconscious, and help from the dead in my poems, which Kevin Young, describes as, “a poetry that speaks from the mouths of those gone that aren’t really gone, a poetry of ghosts and haunts. Of haints: not ain’ts.” For this reason, I’ve always thought my poems are wiser than I am. I don’t know how we can read poetry, or teach it, or write it, without a finger on the pulse of the mystical as well as bringing our intellectual heft to the party. To talk about a writer’s poem in workshop, or a collection of poems, is at best a full-body act. We encounter the body of a poem with our bodies before we even read the words. At best, a workshop can be a circle of human beings who each brings their subjectivity, memories, blind spots, fears, ghosts, dreams, ideas, insights, and imaginations to the room. We build a collective, a zone, and from that zone, poetry becomes possible.

Diane Seuss
Interviewed by Frances Donovan, 4th December 2019

Write

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

Ernest Hemingway
Paris Review issue 18 Spring 1958

write your own goddamn truth

Read a magazine before you submit your work there. It’s really important to feel connected to the mission of a magazine that is publishing your work. If you don’t know where to submit your work, think of writers whose work you admire and read the magazines they’re publishing their work in. Ultimately though, the work is more important than where it’s published — it’s a cliché, the whole high school “be yourself!” pep talk, but seriously, write your own goddamn truth. You’re the only person who can.

Yasmin Belkhyr
Interview with Anuradha Bhowmik
The Minnesota Review 10th November 2016