Karl Whitney: In the gold rush of writing, choose your shovel wisely

I’m something of a devotee of books about writing. I like to have them nearby when I write, even if I rarely consult them. I’ll read them and put them aside or buy them and get around to reading them when I get the chance — or never read them at all.

But the reality is that I’ve only ever found one truly useful: Jack Hart’s Storycraft (now in its second edition from the University of Chicago Press). It was helpful for me when I was first thinking about how to write narrative nonfiction — how to go beyond a journalistic piece and move towards something that engaged with wider questions, treated interviewees as characters in a larger story, and had a narrative shape that made it satisfying.

There were diagrams illustrating how a writer might structure a piece of factual writing, and I drew my own version of those diagrams when I was planning my work. To see writing explained in such a practical manner was refreshing, and I took what I needed from it and went off and wrote my first book.

Nevertheless, even I, an at-times fervent devotee of the nuts and bolts of writing, will admit that there’s more to it than the practical aspects. It’s reassuring to jump through the hoops that have been set up by someone who’s been there before, and who’s thought about it seriously. 

But that approach can become formulaic. There’s a balance to be achieved between inherited structures and instinctive improvisation. And, for some, there’s a spiritual aspect to writing, or a sense of personal expression, that goes beyond practical questions of the craft.

I’ve noticed a tendency towards vibes in writing books lately — a vagueness that feels writerly in a literary way without really saying anything significant. The language is poetic, and the atmosphere is dreamily seductive rather than sternly practical. 

While reading them at least, these books make you feel like a writer, and I wouldn’t denigrate that. (You need to imagine yourself as a writer before you can actually do it.) But I also wonder whether it presents writing as yet another spectacle to consume, rather than a practice with which anyone can engage.

The first time it really hit me was with Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night: On Writing (Daunt Books), which struck an odd balance — somewhere between memoir and writing guide — and provided peculiarly phrased advice such as ‘write into your eyes’. 

Part of me thinks that actually this kind of deeply idiosyncratic advice is an acknowledgement that every writer differs, and that general advice can only go so far before it collapses into either universal banality or eccentric statements that probably only apply to the author alone.

Lately I’ve been reading Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a Poetry Class, by the South Korean poet Lee Seong-Bok (translated by Anton Hur; just published by Allen Lane). 

Presented as a series of aphorisms about the craft of poetry, it circles around some writing advice commonplaces — keep language simple, bear in mind sequence and structure, keep things concrete rather than abstract, don’t overthink during your first draft, have an idea of who your audience is, read your work out loud to help root out problems — while comparing the act of writing poetry to, well, virtually everything.

There’s plenty of hyperbole about how poetry should be ‘more precise than mathematics’, or that it’s like sex or death or rock climbing or boxing or a rotting corpse or urination in cold weather. I have no doubt that writers want to believe this kind of thing, because the reality of sitting at a desk grinding out a daily word count is considerably less seductive to both them and their readers. 

Instead, the writer feels compelled to sell an image of writing that captures the imagination, making it seem heroic somehow. An urge to overdramatise the creative process leads the author towards exaggeration. The book doesn’t tell you much about writing, or about poetry for that matter, but enables you to daydream pleasantly about writing for a little while.

The growth of books about writing

Over the last few years there appears to have been a huge upsurge in interest in writing — in becoming a writer. At the same time, writers’ incomes have come down significantly as advances have been reduced. It has become increasingly difficult to find an agent and to get a book deal. It’s a buyer’s market.

A writer needs income from sources other than writing itself, and, since there’s a significant demand for writing advice — people want to crack the code, even though there isn’t one, and achieve success — writers take on teaching, or provide editorial services. During what seems to be a gold rush they, having tried their hand at sifting for nuggets, wisely choose to sell shovels.

The published book becomes a calling card for these services and their status as a writer is one that can be marketed effectively. Maybe you’re so all-in as a writer that you have no choice but to believe in the romantic notion of writing; or maybe you’re selling it to people who you’d be better off being honest with. 

There is great satisfaction in writing, but it comes from a complex process of trial and error, from an ongoing dialectic of self-admonishment and self-delusion that might eventually produce a work of which you’re briefly proud.

So, when I read a writer’s hyperbolic, melodramatic description of writing, I wonder: what are they selling here? Perhaps it’s just that readers need to believe in the persistence of the power of the individual artist’s imagination in an era of TV writers’ rooms and artificial intelligence.

Or maybe such writers truly believe the kind of magical thinking that they project onto their own work practices? Could it be that it’s better for some writers to shroud the mechanics of their practice even from themselves? When your writing is flowing you, understandably, might not want to break the spell. 

Either way, when it comes to writers writing about writing, useful practical advice tends to get mixed in with some woolly stuff that might well make you daydream about writing but probably won’t be strictly applicable to your own work.

But what’s wrong with dreaming? Nothing, really. John Gardner, the writing teacher and author of The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist, used to refer to the novelist’s job as creating and sustaining the fictive dream. Break the dream and you lose the reader. 

On some level, writing is dreaming. At the same time, as an author you don’t want to be trapped inside someone else’s dream.

Ultimately each book about writing only really advances one writer’s view of what writing is, and that view might not chime with you at all. You’re getting a subjective view of a practice that can be approached in a wide variety of ways. 

It’s something of a truism to say that the best way to be a good writer is to be a good reader. You read critically, take what you need from another writer’s work and move on. The same goes for books about writing. Tread carefully and don’t buy everything you’re being sold.