About Jennifer   | For WritersLesson OneWhat your mother never told you about writing I wasn t going to do this right away, but it seems a shame to launch a new website and leave this very important issue undiscussed. That said, this will probably change a thousand times before I m satisfied with it, so if you re reading it now, consider yourself a Beta tester. I'm talking to beginning writers, here. Established writers understand all of this, but they may not put it on their own websites for fear of looking too weird. It's a little late for me to be concerned about that, so here I go. First, all writers will tell you to learn your craft. Sure, but how? By doing it. Write, write, write, then write some more. Be willing to be bad; everyone is in the beginning. But here s the key point: Don t go to your family members and friends for criticism or advice. Go to the pros. Take classes, read books on writing, do anything but subject yourself to the oh-so-humiliating experience of announcing to your intimates that you are a budding writer, and then presenting them with your first efforts. (Unless you re five years old, in which case you will be proclaimed a genius right there on the spot and published on the refrigerator! It gets a little trickier as you get older.) Please understand that becoming a writer is a long-term proposition. You wouldn t wake up one day and say, I m a neurosurgeon! and expect people to lie down under your saw. In order to become a licensed neurosurgeon, you would expect to go through years of studying biology, chemistry, anatomy, pathology, and I don t know what else. You would go into debt as you completed your studies, watching with envy as your friends bought real estate and nice cars. You would put in endless hours as an intern. You would have to invest all of your youth in this one thing because you believed it was your calling. You might even wonder if you were going to live long enough to see it happen! It's no different for carpenters, computer programmers, painters, sculptors, football players, or any other vocation on the face of the earth, except that they can sometimes earn while they learn. You probably won t. But for some reason, people do think it s different for writers. Everyone just is a writer. They know it in their hearts. They just know they could do better than this one or that one, that if they put their fingers to the keyboard they would be the next Dave Eggers or Johnathan Safran Froer but hey, who s got the time? If this is really what you want to do, you will make the time. No excuses. You will write short stories or graphic novels or children s fables or anything else, but you will write. You re not going to write a novel out of the gate. It is too unwieldy and difficult to manage. A long-form project is best left until you have some idea of your style, your voice, and the mechanics of writing a good scene. A novel takes months and months of dedication to accomplish, sometimes years. It s so maddening at times imagine working on the same document for a year that you will want to tear it up and forget you ever started. Are you getting the idea that you have to be mentally tough to be a writer? That you have to be a near monomaniac to do this? Are you willing to let social and professional opportunities pass you by, with no ego gratification coming your way for years, to say nothing of money? Okey dokey, then! Let s talk about the weird stuff: The most inevitable thing for a writer, even more than death and taxes (writers die, but they don t always have taxable incomes before they do), is being asked the question: Where do you get your ideas? Most writers resent the question because they don t know how to answer it. They give a jokey response like At the idea store! or they try to manufacture a more sensible one like I get them from stories I read in the newspapaers or something. I have a different take on it. I believe that all ideas come from the right side of the brain, from the subjective mind. Think about it. That crazy right brain tells you stories all night long in your sleep, some of them so bizarre you can t believe they came from your own mind. Believe it. And trust it. It will supply you with endless ideas if you put it to the task. Tell it that you need inspiration. Tell it you re out of ideas, or you don t know where to start, or you don t know how to finish and voil ! The ideas will pop into your head. They may in inchoate, scattered, even frightening or they might be exactly the thing you were looking for a story point, a character that was missing, the solution to your whole damn mystery! But once you turn the spigot and get things flowing, once your subjective mind realizes it s going to be listened to and valued, you won t be able to shut the stupid thing up. It s bursting with ideas it wants you to consider. I was once writing a scene, a police interrogation, when suddenly a Barry Manilow song popped into my head. Okay, we all know that particular type of torture, some song that drives you crazy and won t leave you alone. But I thought, Maybe I m supposed to use the song in this scene as absurd as that thought was. I did, and even as I was writing it, I thought, Well, this is coming out of the book. No way can I make this thing work. But on the second or third pass, I realized what Righty had been trying to tell me and was able to write the scene. I still had my doubts about it, but when I passed the book over to my police detective friend, he wrote back: That scene in the police station is f---ing brilliant! What happened was that Righty came up with the idea, and Lefty quite naturally almost discarded it on the spot as too absurd. But Lefty knew enough by this time to sort of trust Righty when he came up with a crazy idea, and decided to believe that somehow it could be made into a great scene. This is where all that training comes in. Lefty is an editor, an organizer. Lefty knows how to tweak a scene, to smooth out problems. But it must be recognized that Lefty is a skeptic and is resistant to ideas that come out of, uh, right field. You have to find a balance between the two. You can t have one without the other. Righty will supply you with and endless stream of ideas. Lefty will build the bridge over the stream. (And if you think that s a worthy metaphor, you d better get busy reading those books on writing!) Time is running out on this little exercise. I ve got to get the website launched, and dear darling Ryan is probably about to throttle me. Good thing he lives in Pennsylvania and we re doing all of this via email. Come back soon for Lesson Two! |
