On Writing No. 2: Finding Craft Books and Essays That Work For You

"Above Tower Falls, Yellowstone" by Thomas Moran

After going back to graduate school in 2017 for an MFA, I made a concerted effort to engage critically with writing from several perspectives. I wanted to learn craft, and the best way to do that—for me— is to read and then put what I read into practice. However, I did not want to limit myself to the things I’ve always enjoyed reading, which would be YA, fantasy, science fiction, and Jane Austen novels. 

My previous graduate degree in English/creative writing helped me in this regard. I was exposed to writers and literature I would never have discovered organically. I came to love realism, particularly writers like Willa Cather and George Eliot, and I found that I did not hate memoirs as much as I thought I did. Essays that I once considered too dry suddenly developed hidden oases. (I will discuss the topic of reading in more depth next month, but I need to mention this to go to the next point.) 

This change did not come overnight. I had to stretch my mind by reading about craft from multiple points of view, particularly those of writers I admire. I began with some well-known books: The Art of Memoir (Mary Karr), On Becoming a Novelist and The Art of Fiction (John Gardner), Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott), and Aspects of the Novel (E.M. Forster). 

From reading about writing, I understood that it was in questioning your work that you grew as a writer. Anyone can throw down some words on a page, but the writer then looks back at what is there and is dissatisfied. 

This realization led me to seek out writers who also questioned their writing, who were not satisfied with first drafts, and who found themselves drawn to engaging dialectically with their craft and with other writers and readers. 

I was on a quest of the type found in those novels I love. Admittedly, the stakes were not nearly as high as for Frodo Baggins or Taran the Pigkeeper, but I found it enjoyable all the same. 

On this trek, I discovered Ursula K. Le Guin’s books and essays on craft and several interviews with her, including Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing with David Naimon. I absorbed them like heat into cold flesh; they were my fire. From this place of warmth, I trailed outward, becoming a many-tentacled thing, reaching and finding (sometimes rediscovering) authors like Jorge Luis Borges because Le Guin would mention them in her essays and interviews. (I’d read Borges in undergrad and loved his short stories. The collection Labyrinths still haunts me the way good prose and a mystery that isn’t quite solved always do.) 

From craft books like these, I realized what a craft book should be. It should compel you to keep going, find more ideas and words, and dig in the shelves for another taste of inspiration. 

Books about writing need to be personally applicable and accessible. A lot of these “helpful” books are dry or too centered on teaching you how to achieve your goals in a certain amount of steps. Steps have their places, but if the author doesn’t show you how to walk those steps, then they won’t do you any good. You’ll keep tumbling back down or founder at the first few. 

I guess what I mean is that the book and the author need to speak to you on a level you know. In even simpler terms, it must be relatable. A few of those books I mentioned at the start are quite dated and very dry, a bit like reading textbooks. They contain good ideas and expert knowledge, but I found it difficult to relate to them. 

In order to wrap up this post, I’m going to provide a bibliography of some of my favorite books on writing—the ones that felt familiar and truly helped me understand my own writing. 

• Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison
• Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver
• The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write (TinHouse Books, 2014)
• No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017), Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books (2019), Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (2017), and The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004) by Ursula K. Le Guin (I placed Le Guin’s together because she is really quite prolific and often carries certain ideas over, such as the “wave in the mind,” between essays/collections so that her collected essays feel less like separate works and more like a larger undertaking comprised of a lifetime of experience and growth. And these are not all of the collections, just the ones I own.)
• Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
• Writer to Writer: From Think to Ink by Gail Carson Levine (If you were obsessed with Ella Enchanted—the book—as a young person, you’ll love this book on writing.)

On Writing No. 1: The Inevitable Question

Soon comes the day when some well-meaning person asks the inevitable question of any writer: Why?

It’s happened to me quite a few times, in fact. All anyone wants to know is the answer to this question, as if knowing it will explain the intricacies of writing. What they do not know is that often, the writer is unsure about the Why as well. 

Sure, we know the lowercase why behind our writing. We write because we are writers. It’s a simple response that encapsulates the projects, the struggles, the deleted words, the breakthroughs, the drafts, the multitude of documents saved in various locations with names like Novel1.5.4FORREAL, and so much more. 

But Why do we write what we write and Why does that question send a bolt of panic through us (or is that just me)? 

Personally, I like asking this question of myself. I enjoy applying the nuance of context to it. Instead of a blanketing ‘Why?’, I look at each individual application of this inevitable question to my writing once I have answered the initial question to my own satisfaction. 

So, I sit down, or I go outside and follow my three-year-old around on his various adventures, and I deliberately question my process and whatever I am currently writing. Why did I choose this point of view for the narrative or the poem? Why did I begin at this point? Why is it in the past tense? Why, why, why, why, why, why, until I finally exhaust that line of inquiry and at last travel into the others: the ‘woulds,’ the ‘hows,’ the ‘whens,’ the ‘whos,’ and, at last, the ‘what ifs.’ 

It is only upon reaching ‘what if’ that I get to the heart of writing. Answering a what-if question requires thinking on several fronts—past, present, and future. It also brings me back full circle to other questions, so questions beget questions, and all of those threads add up to something wonderful: words. Those words build worlds, ideas, memories, and so much more. 

Questions—even those we dread—are worth heaps of dragon gold. Using them to revise or expand a work in progress is an act of careful creation. 

                                                                                                    

Why do I write?

A confession: I did not always like to write, and I dreaded anyone—even myself—questioning the things I did write. The Inevitable Question would invariably send me into a spiral of self-doubt while stoking my feelings of inadequacy. 

It is here that I feel school failed me. I found solace in reading other’s words. I devoured books and always carried one with me. 

However, if a teacher assigned me to write about one of those books? No thanks. I was quite comfortable digesting it internally without putting my thoughts into visible words for someone else to read and grade. Despite my hyperlexic ability to read, comprehend, and remember vast quantities of written information from a very young age, which translated to doing exceptionally well on tests of my knowledge, I was not a strong writer. I struggled to make A’s in my English courses in high school. 

As a G&T student, I was in the upper-level courses—the pre-APs and the APs—and making less than A’s in those would have tanked my GPA. The feedback I consistently received from my teachers was that I was a mediocre writer, lacking source integration and too reliant on personal reflection. I’d make up for these grades by taking tests where I could flex my knowledge retention and recall. 

I sure showed them on the ACT. Well, except for the math portion, where the 25 brought my overall score down to a  32. 

But those reviews of my writing haunted me still. I decided never to write again and to pursue a visual arts degree after high school. No writing there, I thought. Or math. 

It was not until college—and a rather strange freshman Honors English composition course—that I discovered writing was not as scary or restrictive as I assumed. And that those high school teachers were very limited, not only in their feedback but also in their mindsets. 

An alternative hippie taught the class. She wore platform combat boots and fishnet stockings. Her round sunglasses perched on a face devoid of makeup except for thick black eyeliner. Her smoky voice would begin each class with questions: Soooooo, who wants to start the class with an observation about the reading? Why did Barthes/Sarte/Barthelme/whoever we were reading that day write about what they wrote about? What does any of this have to do with us right now? 

She introduced us to Morning Pages and Artist Dates from The Artist’s Way (by Julia Cameron). We did not write traditional research papers like they taught us to write in high school. We wrote personal reflections on the readings. We were investigators. We interrogated the works she had us read and then interrogated ourselves. 

In sum, we learned to ask questions. Suddenly, I grew hungry to write. Here was this incredibly odd woman, sharing ideas with me and encouraging me to write, and I did not feel as if my words were any less worthy than those on the assignment list. 

Why do I write? I write because this one college instructor made me write every day and did not discourage me. She helped me find the writer within me when I was certain that version of me did not exist. 

I write to question the world. I write to investigate life. I write because sometimes I wonder why I still write. 

I always end up here. 

And why not? 

Until next time…