Writing Advice from an Editor

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Grant, one of the things I love, of course, about the Internet is stumbling across something that you never saw before.

And recently, I stumbled across some of the best writing advice ever.

This is what I’m going to send to people the next time they write me and ask me how to write well.

What did it say? It said, don’t do it. There are enough books already?

Well, you know, he suggests that it was pretty painful.

This is by Landon Y. Jones, who was once the editor of, of all things, People magazine.

But it’s one of the best examples of advice about writing.

And I just want to share some of it.

First of all, he starts out by saying there’s no such thing as a writer who has not faced his or her job with a mixture of fear and loathing.

And then he said it gets worse.

Consider the nature writer Annie Dillard.

I love her stuff.

What she said was, I do not so much write a book as sit up with it as with a dying friend.

I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Oh, my.

Isn’t that powerful?

And he goes on to offer seven habits of highly effective writers.

And I’m not going to go through all of them.

He starts out by talking about how the first stage of writing prose is to make a mess.

Oh, yeah.

To think of yourself as a mop and just mop the floor.

Absolutely.

Get that stuff up and then squeeze it out.

And he goes on to talk about the process of organizing.

And then he offers this advice.

He says, don’t get it right the first time.

Don’t even think about getting it right on the first draft because all good writing is actually rewriting.

The biggest mistake that a writer can make is not to revise.

Rewriting does not mean you have failed.

That’s right.

What’s astonishing about this advice is how closely it is in line with current thinking and writing software.

Where, yeah, there are many injunctions in the software world about premature optimization.

That is, write your code until it works and then move on to something else that works.

And don’t spend too long on perfecting one little part of it until you have pretty much the whole thing kind of scoped out and in some way functional.

And I think that works for novels too, right?

Oh, that’s interesting.

Well, he also talks about at some point during the process, you should write your last line.

I don’t always do that, but I kind of think of the kicker.

Where you’re going with it.

Yeah, then you have a destination, and it’s like a trip.

Then you just have to get there.

And he offers some great advice about if you have writer’s block.

He says sometimes I’ll read a writer I admire just to listen to his voice.

It seems to help me the same way that it helps Michael Phelps to put on his iPod and listen to his pump music before a race.

You absorb one writer’s rhythms and voice in order to unlock your own.

I agree with that.

I find that really true.

So he gives all this great advice, but I think that it’s probably telling that the title of this article is, But Writing’s Still a Butt-Busting Job.

That’s right, yeah.

You know, people sometimes write to me and they say, is there a software program I can use to become a better writer?

Well, no.

You know, it can be painful, difficult work.

It’s not easy.

We will link to this article on our website.

I think it’s just terrific.

And you’ll find it at waywordradio.org.

What works for you when you’re writing?

What makes your writing better?

Send it an email to words@waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-9673.