As addictions go, it’s not the worst. It’s expensive, but it won’t drain your finances. It’ll eat into your free time, but it won’t compromise your health. Nor will it destroy your marriage or land you in trouble with the law. Still, it’s compulsive, a form of enslavement that routinely leads to extreme frustration and jags of self-loathing. The product? The substance? Writing advice. And regardless of what form it comes in – the eightball of a whole book, the dimebag of an article, or the simple toke of a one-line quote – I’m a total junkie.It started small, as these things often do. Many years ago, I came across a copy of Dorothea Brande’s 1934 book Becoming a Writer. I found what she had to say exciting, I drew inspiration from it, and I suppose in a way I’ve been chasing that high ever since. I’d always wanted to write, but had never taken a class or approached it as something you learn. From as early an age as seven the feel of a pen in my hand was the most natural thing in the world to me, as was the ordering of words in a sentence . . . so that was it really. And there was never a Plan B. In my head I was already a writer. There was just this rather tricky business of getting words down on a page – of how you get started, and how you proceed.
By the time I came across Brande’s book years later, I had actually figured most of this out for myself. In fact, in terms of working habits, style, voice, thematic concerns and so on, I had more or less arrived at where I still am today as a writer. Because I think there is a certain inevitability about the whole process, about the way you write, and what you write – and as with body shape, or the colour of your hair, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it.
But no one points this out to you when you’re young, and as a result insecurity and self-doubt become your default setting. What’s more, you allow a certain seductive, insidious notion to take hold – that there’s this method for telling stories out there, a sort of fool-proof system or code-like sequence of short-cuts . . . if only you could crack it.
Or pay for it.
So after the Brande, I discovered John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, Oakley Hall’s The Art & Craft of Novel Writing, Jack Bickham’s The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes, Steven King’s On Writing, Sol Stein’s Solutions for Writers, and countless others. There was a certain bookshop in Dublin I went to that had a good section on Writers & Writing and every time I went there I’d come away with something new – some new promise of deliverance from the horrors of creative paralysis. In more recent years my habit has been fed electronically, and the supply is now endless. One click and you’re hooked up. But add screenwriting manuals into the mix – Field, McKee, Truby, Snyder et al – not to mention author interviews, content-stuffed websites, and gem-filled Twitter feeds, and it’s practically a full-time job just keeping track of the stuff.
So is there a take-away from all of this? One memorable piece of advice or nugget of wisdom? One system or method that actually works? The truth is I don’t really know. I must have absorbed something over the years, but if so, I couldn’t tell you what. Some of the books are actually pretty good, well-written and informative, and their net effect is usually to send you back to the writing desk, energized and persuaded that it’s worth another shot. But most of them are awful – especially the ones that contain graphs, diagrams, arrows, sliding scales and lists of page-specific plot points. These books peddle what I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of the creative process. They try to reverse engineer material that has already been written, and then lay it out for you as a formula to follow. But this is getting it ass backwards. It’s an attractive prospect alright, an enticing one, because every writer starting out on a new novel would love to have a safety net, would love to be able to take out an insurance policy against creative failure. But that’s not how it works.
Another key point here is that a lot of these books doling out advice are written by people you’ve never heard of. So perhaps it’s telling that whenever I glance at my shelves (I still have a few of those) the one book that calls out to me more often than any other is The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Wit, and Advice from the 20th Century’s Preeminent Writers. First published in 1989, it’s a collection of quotes taken from The Paris Review interviews. And it doesn’t contain a single pie-chart.
It doesn’t really contain advice, either. It’s more a series of dispatches from the front line. We have Thomas Mann, for example, telling us that “a writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people”, or E. L. Doctorow explaining how, in desperation, he kickstarted Ragtime by writing about the wall in front of him in the study of his 1906 house in New Rochelle. But I suppose if I had to pick just one quote – if I had to swap my entire twenty-five years’ supply of product for a single hit – I’d go for this one by Somerset Maugham:“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
”Complete with set-up, reversal and punchline, this is perfect as a joke, but it’s also perfect as an expression of the essential mystery and paradox of the writing process. There is order in it we don’t understand, and chaos we must embrace.