Psst, Hey Kid!

Advice to my younger writing self.

By Dietrich

Look at you, sitting there waiting for the lightning to strike. Let me break it to you gently, kid: inspiration isn't coming, and if you only write when you feel like it, you’ll just be a guy with a clean desk and a tragic amount of blank paper.

Grab a pen, get your hands on a decent typewriter, and get to work. Then all you have to do is show up, put words down, and keep doing it until it starts to sound like something worth reading. And for the love of God, don’t try to sound like Salinger or Steinbeck. I know they’re your favorites. 

Right now, you’re insecure. You’re sweating it, trying to show off your chops. I know exactly what you’re thinking: you’re going to write three straight pages about the pattern on the wallpaper, the shade of the drapes, and the architectural history of the molding. Let me save you the ink. Nobody wants to read about the wallpaper. The reader wants to know who just walked through the door, what they're after, and what they’re packing under their coat.

You’ll want to show off your research, too. Spend weeks digging up facts just to dump them on the page. Don’t do it. Sift the pile. Pick out the best bits—the smell of coal smoke, a dented fender, the exact shade of a neon sign. That’s your picture. Leave out the rest. If it doesn't move the story, it’s just noise. Don't take the reader out of the scene just to prove you did your homework.

Do yourself a favor. Go open a thick book, find a massive, unbroken wall of scenery description, and watch how fast your eyes skip right past it looking for the quotation marks. Why dialogue? Because that’s where the life is.

Get out of your room. Go sit at a lunch counter, stand on a street corner, sneak into a dive bar where the lighting’s bad. Listen to how people actually talk. Real people don't speak in flawless sentences. They don't use semicolons—and if you use them when characters are speaking, we’re going to have words. People speak in fragments. They interrupt each other. They talk over the good parts, mishear the bad parts, and say everything by saying absolutely nothing. That’s how you show who a character is.

And stop looking for a roadmap. Throw out the checklists and the genre formulas. Don't toss in a bedroom scene or rack up a body count just because you think it’ll sells books. What do you know about that anyway—you’re just a kid. Don’t be cheap, it looks desperate.

The whole game is simple: put two interesting people in a room, give them a history and a reason to disagree, and see what happens when they start bumping heads. Let the plot do what it wants, and make the collision sound like it belongs to them, not to your ego.

Finally, don’t sit there thinking about the great novel you’re going to write "someday." Quit dreaming and get to work. Now, not next year.