What I Learned by Not Taking Writing Advice

  

What are some of the best tips you've taken on board from other writers whose work you love? Name the writers and their book that inspired you, and how it did so. 

 

There is an old classical warning: be afraid of what you ask, because you might not like the answer.

 

When asked what tips I’ve taken on board from other writers, my first answer is: none.

 

That sounds more contrary than I mean it to be. I have learned an enormous amount from other writers. I’ve simply never thought of what I learned from them as “tips.”

 

I suspect the expected answer might include some of the usual—and deservedly popular—books on craft: Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, or Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. But I was never particularly interested in “How To” books about writing. Perhaps I’m suspicious of the premise. “How to” can suggest that there is a method to be followed, or that we should aspire to reproduce someone else’s success. I don’t want to be another writer, or even to write like one. I want to sound like myself.

 

There is also something peculiarly modern—and perhaps peculiarly American—about our appetite for optimization. Everything becomes advice, a hack, a set of habits, ten things successful people do before breakfast. Writers are not exempt. Apparently, somewhere out there is the secret that will put us in the top one percent of people sitting alone in rooms making things up.

 

I’d rather read.

 

When I first started reading, the stories that captured my imagination were Greek and Roman myths. They seemed to contain greater truths, universal and sometimes esoteric. I read to pierce the veil, to find the reality behind the obvious. Reading was a quest.

 

Perhaps that is why my first literary love was poetry.

 

Poetry taught me compression: how an image can carry more than its apparent weight, how the concrete can express the abstract. T. S. Eliot called this the objective correlative. Mallarmé and Valéry could create an image and distill an experience into something simultaneously precise and almost untranslatable. They taught me more about writing than being told what a writer ought to do.

 

Latin was also part of my education. It taught me grammatical structures, rhetoric, and the architecture hidden beneath language. English was not my first language, and I had my struggles with it, compounded by profound hearing loss. I developed compensatory mechanisms. I watched people. I paid attention to gestures, expressions, silences, and all the little things people communicate without realizing they are communicating.

 

Writers are often advised to eavesdrop on conversations. I did that too, although not always accurately. The mishaps probably account for some of my humor and perhaps my reserved demeanor.

 

I remind people that knowing English is an achievement that shouldn’t be taken for granted. It is a damn hard language.

 

What poetry taught me about compression eventually found its way into my dialogue. Elmore Leonard and others are routinely held up as exemplars of dialogue, but I want to study comedians because they are masters of timing. A comedian understands that changing one word—or putting a fraction of a second in the wrong place—can kill a line. Cinema taught me something related: visual compression. A glance, an object, a cut can accomplish what several paragraphs might otherwise explain.

 

And then there are writers who taught me things without ever offering advice.

 

Philip K. Dick could write some terrible dialogue, but his ideas were extraordinary. What mattered was the question underneath the story: Is the world what we think it is? Is the person we think we are who we really are? He, too, was trying to pierce the veil. From him I learned that the idea animating a story can matter more than technical perfection.

 

Eduardo Galeano showed me that history could be rendered as poetic prose without becoming didactic. He could compress politics, memory, violence, irony, and human experience into brief passages that retained the force of history without sounding like a lecture. His work showed me that political writing need not announce itself as political writing.

 

Umberto Eco taught me something else: erudition need not preclude wit. Ideas, history, semiotics, theology, politics, and social criticism could coexist with playfulness. Intelligence did not require solemnity.

 

Those lessons matter to me because I write crime fiction. I didn’t choose crime because I couldn’t write Literature with a capital L. I chose it because crime fiction has enormous potential for examining power and corruption: who possesses power, who abuses it, who suffers because of it, and who gets to decide what constitutes a crime in the first place.

 

Genre has never seemed like a limitation to me. All literature works within conventions of one kind or another, and every book must ultimately encounter an individual reader. Reading is Rashomon: put the same book into the hands of ten readers, and you may get ten different reactions back.

 

The few writing resources I have deliberately consulted have therefore been practical rather than inspirational. Because I couldn’t afford a professional editor when I started—and because I’ve encountered published books that made me wonder whether anyone could either—I had to teach myself how to edit.

 

For that, Renni Browne and Dave King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers was genuinely useful. What I appreciated was its method: state a principle, then demonstrate it on the page, often by examining or revising recognizable prose. It gave me something practical to interrogate rather than a commandment to obey. I suppose it is the closest I come to a writing tip.

 

Learn the technique. Understand why it works.

 

Ezra Pound famously said, “Make it new.” I would revise it to: Make it yours.

 

Whatever I’ve learned as a storyteller, I’ve learned primarily by reading, watching, listening, failing, and figuring things out for myself. What you teach yourself tends to stay with you because it has been tested against your own instincts. It becomes knowledge rather than imitation.

 

So perhaps my original answer was wrong. I have taken plenty from other writers.

 

I just never thought of any of it as advice.