I was asked about writing by a fellow Redditor (handle redacted unless they want it added here):

I was wondering if you had any other tips for a young writer. I think you may have a better idea for the tips most of us need: not entirely how to write better, but just about the expression of writing as a whole.

I responded with the following.

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On Writing Well and Truly

I’ve given this some thought. Here’s my one piece of advice. It’s the most important and substantive that I have:

Approach writing first as a craft. Not an art.

Learn writing the way a journeyman carpenter learns wood. The journeyman doesn’t start by building a massive wardrobe with mahogany inlays and beautifully exposed tongue and groove joints. He knocks together hundreds of well constructed, durable, simple but elegant and highly serviceable cabinets.

At some point he attains a level of fluid ease with his tools and materials. He knows how to work different types of wood without ruining them. He can bring out the beauty in a piece of the most expensive teak as easily as he can work a mundane slab of pine into something gorgeous. He does it with absolute precision and he can do it reflexively, from muscle memory.

It’s when you get to this point that you can be truly creative with your work in a way that’s original and innovative. You’ll have a distinct style and voice and force in your writing that creative writing students would slice off a testicle to achieve.

When you reach that level your writing won’t feel like a journeyman thrashing about using a chisel where he should be using a plane. It will feel like the work of a master who’s in control and knows exactly what he’s doing, and that’s how you keep people reading.

Let’s apply this metaphor directly to writing. Rather than majoring in English or creative writing and limping along in an MFA program as a professor slowly turns you into his doppelgänger, go into a field of writing that’s a trade:

Journalism.

Now, you’re going to hear a lot of doom and gloom from inexperienced defeatists about the death of journalism. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Journalism is no more dying than novels are dying, and that’s because we have a deep and enduring need for storytellers.

Oral tradition is where stories begin, writing is where they are built into a lasting thing. Journalism is the practice of telling the stories of every day events to every day people. Journalism isn’t going away. Newspapers had a rocky decade and a lot of journalists were on the ropes, still are, but in every field there are people who just do it because it’s something to do.

Those are the people who’ve been culled from the herd. Not the passionate ones, not the ones doing it for love over money.

Ninety percent of the writers you find in small to mid-sized newspapers are there because it’s their hometown, because they can float by and make a paycheck. Not because they want to be better writers and journalists.

As a journalist you will not be doing glorious creative work at first. You’ll be that journeyman.

But by buckling down and applying yourself as a journeyman you will gain something invaluable. Something no creative writing course or MFA program can give: experience in the real world. You won’t be able to avoid it – it’s integral to the study of your craft and your job.

You will be forced to acquire the stories of real people in their own words every single day.

The Achilles’ heel of creative writing courses, and writing classes in general, is that you essentially skip the journeyman stage and go straight to the work of a master without the long and deep well of experience that allows the master to do his work with true artistry and originality.

It’s not easy for people with the temperament of writers to approach people and question them directly and effectively about their lives. It doesn’t come naturally. We’re inclined to sit in a dark room all day thinking up stories, rarely venturing out.

This is well and good, and necessary.

But if you never know how people operate in the real world, or how the real world works, you will never write with the stamp of authenticity about anything but your own life. This limits your fiction terribly.

You’ll get one good book out of your own life as you’ve lived it. This is why I consider writers like Brett Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney failures in the long run. It’s all they’ve ever managed to write.

But if you understand how city government actually operates and the daily hassles of municipal workers, or how the police force goes about its business and what the average cop puts up with, or how waste management guys handle the daily routine, or a hospital maternity ward functions, or a tow truck driver builds his business from one wrecker to ten trucks over the course of two decades, or why the people who go to the local soup kitchen are there and who they are and why the people volunteering there are volunteering, you will be able to create real characters in your fiction that talk and act in a way that’s impossible to fake.

These are realms of knowledge and experience I never would have sought out on my own. I was forced by the nature of my work to learn them.

You don’t have to abandon all creative efforts while you’re studying and practicing journalism. Every journeyman who becomes a real master attempts to build those big, glorious projects in the secrecy of his own shop for a long time before he reaches a level of competence and confidence that allows him to show his work to the world.

You’ll find work in journalism if you apply yourself to the craft with the same passion and assiduity that you would otherwise be applying to useless creative writing courses.

I recommend that you use all your spare time and energy to do just that if you decide to take the harder but more rewarding path of journalism. Apply yourself creatively and persistently in the secrecy of your own shop. Learn from your failures.

In the mean time you will be talking to people. A lot of people. More people than you’ve ever interacted with or talked to before. You’ll be assigned a wide range of stories that take you from a trailer park family who just watched their home burn to the ground in an electrical fire to a $100-a-plate fundraiser dinner for a local politician that’s full of rich, self-satisfied and moribund slugs.

You’ll acquire an intimate understanding of everyday dialog – the way people really talk rather than the way you imagine people talk as you hack out the one measly 500-word short story a week for your creative writing class, struggling for inspiration because all you know is your childhood and college.

As a practicing journalist you will produce writing on a scale that its orders of magnitude greater than you would as a creative writing or English major. More than anything, writing a lot is how you learn to write well.

Journalism is a production environment. There’s nothing sexy about that, but it is ultimately satisfying. There won’t be many people paying attention to your journalism at first. But then, there won’t be many people paying attention to your creative writing, either.

If you want to learn how to grab your style by the nuts and slap out 500-words in two hours on deadline, and do it in a way that gets people responding and arguing and debating, study journalism.

You’ll learn how to condense your opinion into a newspaper length column, and that will force you to focus on delivering the maximum in the minimum space. As a result you will learn to use more visceral and direct language.

You’ll learn how to get to the point without wasting the reader’s time. Something that creative writing courses don’t teach. Creative writing classes are a luxurious and expansive thing. They give you the space to be an “artist,” and sit in your ivory tower producing the minimum.

Being an artist is not something you waltz into straight out of highschool, it’s something you earn.

As a journalist you will have a viable trade at the end of college, one that you can take into the world and get a job with. There are a lot of creative writing and English majors trying to get jobs as journalists when they graduate with $20,000 in student loans and a fuckload of panic on their back that’s riding them like a rabid dog.

In the eyes of the hardened 20-year-veteran editors at papers, they look like spoiled children next to the worker and craftsman who’s been studying journalism for the last 4-years.

News editors laugh at creative writing and English majors applying for jobs at papers. They don’t understand the first thing about how to interview and ask questions that can peel back the shell of the most recalcitrant subject, or knock out a story on deadline.

That’s why you’ll find a comforting number of English and creative writing majors managing the local Domino’s or Walgreens. They can’t get jobs writing. Your creative work isn’t going to sell at first, not enough to support you. Point blank.

Unlike those sad saps you’ll be able to make money off your hard earned lessons right out of the gate. You’ll be learning the nuts and bolts of the craft like a seasoned mechanic.

You won’t be that asshole with his muscle car on blocks in the front yard for five years, standing around in the glow of a yellow sodium security lamp at night with his buddies drinking Bud Light and talking about how he’s getting it perfect. Telling them for the hundredth time how it’ll be the most awesome machine on the planet one day.

You’ll be able to pull an engine, strip it to the block, rebore the cylinders, and throw it back in with a turbocharger roaring out of the hood in three weeks.

Hell, you don’t even have to wait until college is over to begin writing journalism for money on the freelance market, but in the beginning for the first couple years you’ll probably be too busy learning the craft to do that.

So there it is.

If you’re serious about writing and you want to write well and truly, if you one day want to write fiction that resonates with people from the highest literary circles to the most down and out guy screwing the barrel of a .357 magnum into his mouth while he sits on a busted spring mattress in a twenty dollar motel, dispense immediately with the cheap plastic hallway of creative writing and MFA courses and learn your craft.

Then be an artist.

-MSJ

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