Wise advice for writers

Dani Shapiro

In my brief review of Dani Shapiro's Still Writing earlier this week, I didn't mention any of her advice for writers, the whole point of her book. Much of what she says is wise, even inspired, so let me list a few of these points now.

1. Writing, after all, is an act of faith.

How true. When one begins writing anything, even with a pretty good idea where you are heading, you never really know where you are going to wind up. Or even if it will go anywhere. So many writing projects turn out to be dead-ends.

2. I've learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I'm doing.

This relates to her comment above about acting on faith. Overconfidence can be risky in any endeavor, but I'm not sure that is entirely what she means here. She frowns upon outlines, preferring instead to follow where her story and her characters take her. Sometimes our best vacations are those where we don't follow an itinerary. Elsewhere she says that writing from an outline is like painting by numbers.

3. Write the words "The Five Senses" on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk.

When Shapiro writes fiction, she wants to know what her characters are seeing, hearing, smelling, etc., on every page. Not that all these sensations find their way into her story. Most of the time they don't. But she wants to know what they are.

4. We're so vulnerable when we share new work.

She tells some horror stories about herself and other writers sharing their work too soon or to the wrong person. In one case, a promising young writer never recovered from the experience. A good reader can find something, such as a repeated word or an illogical series of events, that the writer missed.  But a good reader also knows how to point out flaws without damaging the writer's confidence.

5. It never gets easier. It shouldn't get easier.

Good writing should just look easy. Paul Theroux comments in Figures in a Landscape that Ernest Hemingway's writing looked so easy that it gave other writers the illusion that they could do as well. They couldn't.

6. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope for is that we will fail better.

Perhaps that is why near-perfection put the careers of young writers like Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger on ice. How could they hope to improve on To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye? Everything and everyone can be better. That's what keeps all of us going, trying to do better next time.