by Michael Lydon
For two years I’ve been writing “From My Desk to Yours”, a monthly Write the World column, enjoying and learning from your work and, nearly always, responding with heartfelt admiration. Yet I’ve begun to feel that I know your work better than I know YOU, so this month the WtW team and I put the call out for your burning writing questions with the ‘Ask Michael’ prompt—inviting you to share your hopes and dreams and worries as writers. And with the boldness I’ve come to love, you’ve marched into my office and started peppering me with questions. I’ll do my best now to answer as well as I can.
The most common question, phrased many different ways, is: “How do I know if my writing is any good?” My answer: you’ll never know for sure, but always do your best. I’ve listed some practical pointers below to help guide you:
- Show your work to someone you can trust to give you their honest yet supportive reaction.
- Put a piece of writing away for a few months then read it again: does it hold up?
- Experiment in new styles, new subjects; fresh flavors will soon brighten up your standard fare.
- Be your own best critic, but push harsh negativity out the door: take pride in every sentence you write.
- Keep writing no matter what AND equally important…
- Keep reading. Great writers—Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jane Austen, and Dickens—are sympathetic comrades who will feed your mind and your soul. Remember: they all had days when they thought their latest chapter was a total disaster!
“When do I put in descriptions of my characters?” asks Kaitlyn. My answer: when you first introduce them to the reader. For fiction and non-fiction writers alike, the first job is to get a person in a place. Once you’ve got Mary riding a bicycle on a Manhattan avenue or François sipping a glass of wine in a Parisian café, you’ll have brought to life human beings readers can see and relate to. Take a paragraph or two to paint clear pictures of your humans, not every detail, perhaps, those can come later, but enough so that your readers can see them as clearly as James Joyce’s readers can see his memorable character, Buck Mulligan, in Ulysses’ first two sentences
Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air.
Many of your questions—“What draws characters together?” asks Haleistorm, and “How do you structure a plot that is both logical and intriguing?” asks ejhalteman—seem to be about widely differing aspects of writing, but I find that all are about one crucial question: what will a character do next?
Figuring out what characters will or will not do next is the toughest task facing any fiction writer. A story may begin with a creative flash that contains a central and minor character, even a sense of the story’s ending, but just how Bill and Betty will get drawn together from being strangers to husband and wife takes determined writers littering the floor around their desks with discarded drafts. Characters can do anything that a person would do, including die. Characters can embody types, but characters also have quirky cores that make each unique. Characters must not do anything “out of character,” yet as people can change, so can characters. Since what each character does depends on and affects what the other characters do, even a short story creates a network of interrelated characters whose slightest actions ripple back and forth across the network; a tug on one strand tugs on all the others.
So I suggest that instead of focusing on story structure as a writing element on its own, try focusing on character, on creating believable human beings, and see where they take you. That way you’ll get both the improvisatory quality of daily life and the ancient structural rhythms of birth and growth, life, and death.
Catalina Summer asks, “How do you make a story descriptive with detail, but also make it interesting?” My answer: by giving the characters, certainly the central characters, goals that they are trying eagerly, even desperately, to reach. From page one of The Odyssey Odysseus is trying to get home to his wife Penelope; the voyage takes him ten years, but Homer keeps returning to his hero’s fixation until we are as determined as Odysseus that he not be stopped by the endless obstacles life puts in his path. Getting your readers to share your characters’ hopes and dreams—that’s what makes a book a page-turner: they’ve just got to know what Bill and Betty (or Odysseus and Penelope!) will do next!
Some of your questions were easy to answer—“How long, typically, is a short story?” asks MG Cowan; one to thirty pages is a good guesstimate—and some I’ll admit made me chuckle, but don’t forget, I have fifty years as a professional writer under my belt and you guys are starry-eyed rookies. “How long does it usually take to finish a novel and get it published?” asks Zoe Skaggs. Zoe, my friend, there’s sadly no “usually” in writing or publishing novels! The best answer I could give you is anywhere from six months to a lifetime, and even that would be misleading: a book’s voyage from brain to bookstore has as many chills and spills as Odysseus’ Mediterranean hegira. “I’m planning on being an author when I graduate college,” writes Clumsy, “so on average, what would be my salary? Will I have to get another job or will I be able to write all the time?” Sad to say, Clumsy, an ever diminishing number of magazine and newspaper writers are hired on a full-time, salaried basis; nearly all writers today are freelancers, getting paid only for those pieces that an editor deigns to accept. I wish you all great success, but do be prepared for a half-dozen or more post-college years as an unpaid or poorly paid apprentice.
RedWriter wants to leave book writing and instead “get into playwriting and screenwriting.” For RedWriter I do have specific advice: write two or three short one-act plays and get your pals to act them out; similarly, write a five-page short film script and film it on your smart phone. In both cases, study what you’ve done, rewrite anything you think you can improve, and do them again.
To all of you I say, listen to the eloquent words of Opened_Mind:
How do you trust yourself that what you’re writing is good? I’m always worried that what I write is stupid, not good enough to be published. I have no one to read a chapter I’m writing and tell me that I’m not failing miserably. Do I just need to keep writing, trust in myself that what I’m doing is good enough at the moment?
Yes, Opened_Mind, yes, everybody: you must trust yourself, trust that you are good, trust that day by day you are improving. Do show your work to other writers—that’s what Write the World is for! Listen to their comments but follow none of them blindly. Keep writing, keep reading, keep writing! Oh, and by the way, keep writing!
