Craft Essays On Writing
My current favourite essays and interviews on the practice of writing
Hello, I’m an overfed, undermoisturized, anxiety-ridden, forty-year-old who writes difficult stories. This is my space to whine about it. There is no paywall. There never will be. Please subscribe.
There is no dignified way to say this: I am obsessed with how other writers write and why they write what they write. I wish this was scholarly curiosity but, alas, it is not. It is nosiness. The immense pleasure I get when, at odd hours and with increasing desperation, I read about their lives and their craft, is addictive.
How messy are they, if at all? Do they write terrible stories that never see the light of day? Is their creativity a tap that never stops flowing or do they, like me, grab their heads and try to recall synonyms for the word something? How do they write through grief or depression or divorce or rejections or harsh criticism? Do they have seven voices in their heads like I do?
I'm not looking for technique, exactly. I have technique. What I'm looking for is the specific comfort of watching someone who is better than me admit that they, too, have sat in front of a blank document and considered taking up gardening instead. Anything that makes me feel less lonely about my own writing.
I can’t ignore the ones that have made us. An annotated version of Joan Didion’s Why I Write, the title of which takes from George Orwell’s OG Why I Write. Susan Sontag’s On Style. Anne Dillard’s Write Till You Drop will be on any list I make every time. The fierceness with which Dillard says give it, give it all, give it now and to not save anything good for the next time, is advice to live and die by.
Because I write best when I forcefully surrender myself to humility (and sometimes even get down on the floor) to produce something remotely readable, Cheryl Strayed’s Write Like a Motherfucker will always be something I return to over and over again.
Salman Rushdie’s Is Nothing Sacred. He answers this with a simple ‘no’, which I love, but also speaking of voices in my head:
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and godmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.
I’ve always thought that the oft-repeated advice of “show, don’t tell” has multiple strengtheners which include Chuck Palahniuk’s take on “thought” verbs. Despite a lot of discourse on taking Chekhov’s advice with a grain of salt, it cannot be ignored and Palahniuk’s essay remains a foundational one.
Lily King talks of the doubt that takes over while writing and the relief when readers click with it.
Karen Babine’s Eight Variations on the Idea of a Sentence is a keenly observed study of the sentence as the granular building blocks of stories.
Benjamin Schaefer’s We Need to Talk About Bad Writing is very new and a whole mine of gold writing advice in which he works through grief and mental snags, while covering different writing practices to produce consistent work, giving oneself permission to produce bad work in order to become good, and ironically, sage structure-building practices which may seem problematic at some point. He says this exactly the way it exists in my head:
I truly believed that novel could be great—and I still believe it—but my investment in writing it had warped into an attachment to its success, which impeded my ability to approach the novel with any semblance of equanimity. The stakes were simply too high if I failed to get the novel to do the thing I wanted it to do.
Is It O.K. to Mine Real Relationships for Literary Material? by Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison floats the one-dimensionality of real people on the page and that will always remain surprising (fascinating?) to me.
Matthew Salesses on writing diversity which in turn is inspired by Junot Diaz’s MFA vs POC, is another brilliant account of depicting people of colour in literature.
Rachel Howard’s Gesture Writing on finding the essence of a written piece and capturing it.
Sheldon Costa says the following in his essay, One Man’s Trash: Reflections on a Failed Novel, last year, while reflecting on a novel he wrote that failed to sell:
At the end of the day I leaned into my fiancée’s office and announced that I was going to start building things out of trash.
And I sometimes think how many time I’ve told my husband some version of that while writing my stories. So this essay now sits in my list of things-to-read-when-wanting-to-improve.
There are so many more. My list grows every time I open my browser. Or check social media and someone has a recommendation. I think I will make this list a running one on the blog here. To stay updated, please subscribe below.
Happy writing!
Amrita