Writing Advice

8th December 2017

Life today is like gripping the sides of a roller coaster as it careens around bend after bend and then races down the vertical drop and chugs up the other side before falling off to zero gravity again. So, I'm holding on and screaming out and getting up at 4am because my mind is racing and the walls seem to be falling like Jericho around us.  A reader of my novel wrote to me last week, asking me for advice for anyone embarking on "the writing life," and I am reminded amidst the chaos that this blog started out life as a commentary on my own writing life. So, back to basics:

When people ask me about becoming a writer, I feel my first obligation is to disabuse them of the idea that the writing life is glorious and romantic. True, there are a lot of writers who have never disabused themselves of this idea, and so they see their life as a grand gesture (in some cases like Hemmingway and Hunter Thomas, Virginia Woolf, only to be appropriately finished off in a final grand gesture.)
Who was it that said, if you can even conceive of doing anything else than becoming a writer, do it?
I have been at this lark for decades. And decades. I have written solidly for decades and decades, and have a substantial oevre - nine books at last counting and moving into the writing of the tenth. Call it a disease. Call it compulsive behaviour. I won't contradict you.

Novice writers often ask: where do you get good ideas to write about? Stephen King in his outstanding book On Writing, says "Out of the clear blue sky."  Tradition has had it that they come from the muse, which I suppose is the same thing. Jung would say, "Out of the collective unconscious," and I would most likely go along with him. (And this is why the writer/artist is so important to culture and why totalitarian regimes go after them.)

But it is a tough sisyphean climb, and I suppose you don't know if you're cut out for it, until you put on your climbing shoes and head up the slope. 

But know that the task is not romantic. It's full of doubt and self-reproach. If you can imagine tearing out your heart and watching it be assailed and smashed, then by all means go ahead.  Though it is hard to imagine it with your entrails hanging from your fingers, writers and artists in general hold out the hope that one day the universe will give it all back to them.