On the Writing Process
Advice for Writers
This essay is advice to new writers. If you aren’t a new writer, or if you have no trouble writing thousands of words a week, or if you aren’t interested in writing as a craft, then this essay will not be for you. If you are a writer, or if you are a reader with an academic curiosity about writing, read on.
I’ve been reading Janet Burroway’s textbook, Writing Fiction, which is generally quite useful, especially when it comes to such aspects of craft as setting and point of view. By far the least useful chapter is the first, “Whatever Works: The Writing Process.” Admittedly, the title is quite useful, insofar as it clues the reader into the fact that the writing process which works for them will be the writing process which works for them. There are no hacks or tricks. The best process will be the one which reliably gets you from point A to point B.
The internet abounds with advice on writing process, and it is a popular topic of interviews, which means that most writers have been forced to divulge the trivial details of their routine (or lack thereof) at some point or another (“Do you write in the morning?”; “Do you drink coffee before you write?”; “Do you leave off writing in the middle of a sentence, like Mick Jagger did?”; etc.).
Some of this can be useful. Some of the broader advice given by writers on writing is quite useful, but much of it amounts to little more than a description of what worked for that particular writer, and each writer will have to figure out for him or herself whether they write better immediately after rising (before the dreams have cleared out of the brain) or after several cups of coffee or before bedtime.
Some advice on style also falls into this category. Once you get past Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, a great deal of writing advice is very specific to genre and even to one or two authors (“Never use adverbs,” “Always use adverbs,” “Never use a word other than ‘said’ to indicate a character speaking,” “Never write a paragraph longer than three sentences,”1 etc.).2
This essay will add to the growing collection of advice on writing process, although my primary contribution will be to convince readers they don’t really need as much advice as they think.
First, learn the basics of form, structure, grammar, and punctuation.3 Some writers think these conventions cramp their style. The greats get to break the rules all the time. Why should we have to abide by them?
First, you need to understand a rule in order to break it skillfully. As Benjamin Dreyer puts it in Dreyer’s English, “I’m an enthusiastic subscriber to the notion of ‘rules are meant to be broken’ – once you’ve learned them, I’d hasten to add [emphasis added]” (Dreyer 7). Dreyer also notes that unless you are trying to confuse your reader (about which I will have more to say in a later essay), following the rules ensures that the meaning of each sentence is clear and intelligible to readers.
Second, Cormac McCarthy may not have used commas or semicolons or quotation marks, but most people aren’t Cormac McCarthy. Burroway quotes Flannery O’Connor as saying, “you can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much” (Burroway 205).
Second, develop discipline. Any good writing advice will mention this. No successful writer actually gets by on inspiration from the Muse or substance abuse alone. All of them develop the habit of writing frequently. Beginning writers who want to learn about the routines of experienced writers (“Do you drink a fifth, snort cocaine, and start writing at midnight like Hunter S. Thompson or do you wake up at four and meditate over a cup of coffee and then write until breakfast?”) are looking for some trick which will help them get inspiration often enough to write every day. There isn’t one. You learn to write every day by writing every day. Just like anything else, practice will pay off.
For me, this was relatively easy. I’m not all that interested in surfing the web, or video games, or social media, or watching television, so unlike many, I don’t struggle with distractions when I open Microsoft Word. However, as lack of attention or difficulty focusing is an increasingly common lament these days, it is necessary to offer a word of advice to those who do struggle with distracted thoughts.
Read Cal Newport’s Deep Work. If that doesn’t solve the problem for you, download software on your computer to block internet browsing and social media, turn off your phone, or even consider writing with pencil and paper. As you practice typing away at a blank page for twenty or forty or sixty minutes on end (you can take a quick break every forty-five minutes or every hour in order to relax your mind), you will stop getting distracted so easily and you will find it easier to fall into the rhythm of writing as soon as you open Word (or Scrivener, or Vellum).
Third, read books. Read articles, too – anything you can. You will write better the more you read. You can read poetry and speeches and even try memorizing passages you like (in order to develop a sense of rhythm). All of these will also train your mind to engage with words for long periods of time. And this will make it easier to write every day without distraction. These habits are like compounding interest – they build upon themselves over time.
Fourth, spend some time exercising, preferably outdoors, preferably without distraction. If you don’t need music to exercise, make sure you have some portion of the day where you just sit with your thoughts or listen to the world around you. You need time to think, to let your mind wander, to observe the world, and to relax your overstimulated brain after too many hours on the internet. Your brain evolved to look for food out in the jungle, not to sit in a room with constant entertainment. You need to keep it healthy if you want to be able to write well.
Numbers three and four will also help you generate ideas. You will begin to find that the more you write the more ideas you have, until you have more ideas than you can ever possibly write. Many writers find that they never run out of material. In a newsletter all the way back in 2021, I quoted Dashiell Hammett (through a fictional character) on this subject saying that, “Where in the name of God do you get the notion that writers go around hunting for things to write about? Organizing material is the problem, not getting it. Most of the writers I know have too many things on tap; they’re snowed under with stuff they never get around to.”
Burroway writes, “Some writers are lucky enough never to be faced with the problem of choosing a subject. The world presents itself to them in terms of conflict, crisis, and resolution. Ideas for stories pop into their heads day after day; their only difficulty is choosing among them. In fact, the habit of mind that produces stories is a habit and can be cultivated, so that the more and the longer you write, the less likely you are to run out of ideas [emphasis added]” (Burroway 10).
I’m one of those writers. It would depend on the topic, of course. I’ll probably never run out of short story ideas. I could write book reviews every single day and never run out of material. I couldn’t write on sports, or the stock market, or celebrity culture, or fashion, or any of a number of popular topics more than once or twice. I could write on politics every single day and never run out of ideas. I could do that without commenting on stories which are mostly driven by social media. Fitness would be easy as well. I could write every day on running and nutrition and lifting and health without struggling for topics.
Novel ideas come to me frequently, but it’s harder to put those into reality than it is a short story. Again, this is restricted to genre. I rarely have any ideas for horror or romance novels, but science fiction and fantasy come fairly easily.
Beginning writers may struggle to find ideas, but once they are established, most writers don’t struggle anymore. Novelists may struggle more than nonfiction writers (who are often plugged into a conversation which generates opportunities for comment and response regularly enough to sustain a career). Short story writers won’t struggle as much as novelists, because it’s easier to come up with a simple idea for a story than a complex one, and because you have more invested in a novel than you do any particular short story.
The trick, again, is to read widely and write frequently. If you don’t have anything to write about, write about anything that comes into your head. You don’t have to show this to anyone. Eventually, you will have more interesting things to write.
The other way to come up with topics is to watch people in the real world. If you talk to people and observe their ways, you’ll find enough stories and enough characters to fill dozens of novels.
Finally, ideas come more from discipline than they do from the Muse. Almost every successful writer will mention this in any interview or article on writing advice. Burroway writes, “perhaps influenced by the philosophy (although it was not always the practice) of the Beat authors, some new writers feel that ‘forcing’ words is aesthetically false – and yet few readers can tell which story ‘flowed’ from the writer’s pen and which was set down one hard-won word at a time. Toni Morrison has said that she will frequently rewrite a passage eight times, simply to create the impression of an unbroken, inspired flow… over and over again, successful writers attest that unless the prepare the conscious mind with the habit of work, the gift does not come. Writing is mind-farming. You have to plow, plant, weed, and hope for growing weather” (Burroway 16).
Still, even disciplined, experienced writers to whom ideas come naturally experience writer’s block. I’ve written about writer’s block at length in the past. Burroway writes that a newspaper editor told her, “Writer’s block always represents a lack of information.” She thought this didn’t apply to fiction until she “noticed I was mainly frustrated when I didn’t know enough about my characters, the scene, or the action – when I had not gone to the imaginative depth where information lies” (Burroway 18).
I can confirm this. Ideas for new stories may inundate you. But the idea for what will happen next in your work in progress may prove elusive. This is frustrating, but common. Every time I find myself unable to write, it is because I don’t know what will happen next. I solve this in the moment by procrastinating – I work on something else, which means I still spend time writing, even if it isn’t what I am supposed to be writing at that moment. Thus, my hard drive is littered with unfinished works in progress, some of which I eventually publish.
Deadlines have the benefit of forcing you to stop procrastinating and to come up with something, by brute force if necessary. But I’ve also found that spending time away from the page, doing something physical, preferably outdoors, also goes a long way towards helping you figure out what happens next, which is why I am so insistent that writers do this.
Writer’s Block is About Fear – Except When It Isn’t:
Burroway quotes Tom Wolfe as saying, “What’s called writer’s block is almost always ordinary fear” (2). She goes on to add that when her students complain about their own laziness, she tells them, “laziness, like money, doesn’t really exist except to represent something else – in this case fear, severe self-judgment, or what Natalie Goldberg calls, ‘the cycle of guilt, avoidance, and pressure’” (2). If Burroway had qualified this statement by saying that all of this was conditional, and that it applied to some writers, but not to others, that might be fine (although some economists might quibble with her explanation of what money is), but she doesn’t. And so, I feel the need to state for the record that sometimes laziness is just laziness.
At least for me, one hundred percent of the time that I’m lazy or I procrastinate on various writing projects, I’m not afraid of anything and I don’t experience guilt. It’s that I’m tired and I really just don’t want to do it right now. I’m pretty sure most people – even most people who aren’t writers – will know what I am talking about, because almost everyone who works a job or attends school experiences this on at least a semi-regular basis.
The reason it’s important to make this distinction between ordinary laziness and the emotional-angst variety is that the strategies for overcoming it will differ.
For writers who aren’t afraid of the blank page, but who feel in the moment that they don’t have the energy to write anything because they’ve had a long day at work or with their kids, old-fashioned, boring, ordinary discipline will be the best cure for laziness. Writers struggling with self-doubt, shame, anxiety, or overly harsh self-judgement may need to embrace some other tactic, one aimed at dealing with uncertainty or emotional difficulty. But writers whose laziness is not driven by fear of the inner critic or anxiety about confronting inner demons will not benefit much from any kind of introspective, therapeutic self-examination, which will just end up being another excuse to procrastinate.
New writers will want to know: is there a trick to overcoming either or both of these dilemmas? Yes and no. The short answer is no. But the long answer is yes – it’s the thing which works for you to get you started and keep you writing, and that thing is going to be different for Tom Wolfe than it was for you and it’s going to be different for me than it was for Flannery O’Connor. You’ll have to figure out what this is for yourself. For most writers, it will eventually be force of habit. For me, I can’t really say, because I never really feel intimidated by the blank page and I usually start writing already knowing what I want to say and often stop writing before I’ve finished saying it. So, I may not be much help on that score. I spend a lot of time thinking alone, although I never intentionally go someplace to think about what I need to write (opportunities just arise). If you rarely have time to yourself, and if you lack opportunities to think, you’ll need to cultivate those, in addition to cultivating time to write.
One common trick I would caution new writers against is substance abuse. Drugs and alcohol may work. They’ve helped some writers. But survivorship bias is strong. Most writers are not Hunter S. Thompson. Most would have died or fallen asleep in the gutter long before they’d written anything like he did. Stephen King writes memorably that he was afraid for a very long time that if he stopped drinking, the muse would go away. He did and it didn’t. And he realized that it was a crutch. It wasn’t helping him write, that was just the excuse he used to justify continuing to drink.
Jack White (of the White Stripes) once said that one of the reasons he didn’t use drugs was that he thought they actually hampered creativity. He said that as great as the Beatles were, all the songs they wrote while on drugs didn’t really count. Those songs were the drugs talking, not them. I’m not sure whether I believe that or not, but I do think it’s important for writers to recognize that there isn’t anything – not a substance, not a bio-hack, not a bohemian lifestyle, not an online tool, not a clever and intriguing emotional disorder or mental health problem – which can be creative for you. It has to come from you. You can learn to be more creative through practice. But it still has to come from you.
Final Advice: Everything is Symbolic
Human beings often respond to symbols of which they are unaware. Because they do not realize that they have absorbed symbolic information merely through living within a particular society for a period of years, they actually think they have never been influenced by ideas whose names they have never heard, or by thinkers who lived centuries before their birth. Moreover, they fail to see how things which they take for granted are the product of centuries of evolution. If you have ever referred to a banker as a vampire, you have invoked a medieval anti-Jewish slur rooted in the fact that Jews could charge interest while Christians were forbidden from usury (as well as the fact that something in the human gut whispers to us – incorrectly – that a person who does not physically make anything, but who makes money by lending it to those who do, is freeloading off of the hard work of others).
Burroway writes that, “symbolism as a method has sometimes been treated with scorn in the hard-nosed contemporary canon, while prose that is flat, spare, and plain has been praised as more truthful. Yet it seems to me incontrovertible that the writing process is inherently and by definition symbolic. In the structuring of events, the creation of character and atmosphere, the choice of object, detail, and language, you are selecting and arranging towards the goal that these elements should signify more than their mute material existence. If this were not so, then you would have no principle of choice and might just as well write about any other set of events, characters, and objects… people constantly function symbolically. We must do so because we rarely know exactly what we mean, and if we do we are not willing to express it, and if we are willing we are not able, and if we are able we are not heard, and if we are heard we are not understood” (196).
She uses the example of the phrase “as innocent as a cabbage” which invokes ancient tropes about the salt of the earth and the virtue of working, country people (as opposed to their cynical, decadent, citified counterparts).
By writing literally anything you are using symbols which were invented many years ago to represent sounds, and which are put together into groups of symbols which represent words. And those sounds and words represent thoughts. Until we can observe each other’s thoughts directly, we will be stuck with using symbols to translate and convey meaning.
Moreover, symbolism does not end with letters. If you write about rain, or food, or drink, or sacrifice, or crossroads, or churches, or country, or city, or any number of objects or practices or types of people, you will inevitably invoke symbols. If you do not understand them, you may do so clumsily and may therefore confuse your meaning. (Or you may unintentionally conform to ideas which have been ingrained into you throughout your life and which you have never fully considered. If the characters in your novel find themselves in a fierce rainstorm at an appropriate moment in the tension, a rainstorm which rages until it “washes them clean,” you have unwittingly conformed to basic literary tropes you may never have been taught.)
This goes back to what I said about learning to be more creative. The more you read and the more you understand the interplay of ideas and how ordinary life is suffused with concepts many of us have never thought through, the more you will begin to notice the symbols and ancient meanings around you, and the more creative you will be. You will see the world differently, and you’ll find it easier to make connections other people don’t see.
You also need to get out and live a little. And when you’re out, you need to pay attention to what people do, how they act, what they say, how they talk with one another, how they interact, and what meaning they place on objects or places or weather or vacations or anything. The more you do this, the more you won’t run out of material to write about. (Or, “material about which to write” as the case may be.)
There is a danger here, as there is in any attempt to “re-enchant the world,” and as there is in any creative work. Perhaps I will write more about this someday, but as silly as romanticism and its modern heirs (Dead Poets Society comes to mind) may be, there isn’t nothing to the stereotypes about artists and poets. Jack London, John Keats, Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway, Charlotte Bronte, etc. – many writers lived short and sad lives. Some lived too deeply and their stars burned too brightly. For others – once you look too hard into the symbolism of the world, sometimes you begin to see things you can’t unsee.
But many writers signed up because of that. There’s something alluring about the poetic archetype that makes life worth living. Something which is hard to give up. Many creative personalities are drawn to that allure. Most creative types feel they didn’t choose the work. It chose them.
If you are one of those, you will already know. If you aren’t and you’d like to be, you can. Like anything in life, it comes with tradeoffs. And as with most things, it comes with practice and work and experience.
All of which is a long way of saying that everything in this essay could be summed up as, “If you’re new to writing, keep at it. You’ll learn. It takes time. You get better. Don’t worry too much. Work hard and try to learn as much as you can. Habit will carry you farther than any hack or trick or muse ever could.”
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This last one is an unfortunate product of journalism in the age of the internet. Internet readers may be lazy, but it isn’t much to expect that at least some of them have the attention span for longer paragraphs, especially on Substack.
Also, if you are an American writing in America, British rules of style and usage are not more correct. They are incorrect.
It is often pointed out that English is an anarchic, laissez-faire language. Unlike French, it has no central body controlling rules of grammar and punctuation. Where, then, did these rules come from? They developed organically, evolving gradually over time in an example of spontaneous order. That doesn’t mean these rules (ex. subject-verb agreement) or conventions are any less real or less important. That said, some “rules” are stylistic preferences and not a matter of good grammar. I happen to prefer the Oxford comma, but it is hotly contested. Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief of Random House, and as much an expert as anyone can be (at least in America) for a decentralized, chaotic language, argues that rules such as “never end a sentence with a preposition” or “never begin a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but,’” aren’t real rules, but are unnatural conventions which some have unsuccessfully attempted to impose upon a language which has thoroughly resisted them. I still avoid ending sentences with prepositions, except in rare cases. But regular readers will know that I have never refrained from beginning sentences with ‘and’ or ‘but.’