Writing Commandment Number Four: Be Purposeful

4. Be Purposeful

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the responsibility of a writer, if there is such a thing.

I wrote an earlier post in which I claim (with the help of Stephen King & others) that writing is a form of telepathy. Writing is a solitary act, yet it obviously invites others to participate after the act is completed.  My words and ideas, as I sit in my writing burrow (which is actually a little known place called Starbucks), are my own, yet they become yours as you read them.

This is a humbling concept.  To think of my words flooding another's mind is invigorating, surely, but also intimidating.  As a writer, I offer these words on the page, and the reader is free to converse with it, even disagree with it, but once I send it off, I am no longer active in the debate.  The writer must say what it needs to say or be left vulnerable to the reader, who, presumably, will have something to say about it.  It is up to me, the writer, to answer the questions of the reader, within the writing, before the reader has asked them, before they've even thought them.

How is one to do this?

You must know what is you mean to say, and say it.

That is not to say you have outlined the entire story and are closed to anything the text has to say about itself.  As any writer will tell you—if they are serious with themselves—The text, the story, is its own entity. It does have its own agenda, it leads you places, it skips parts and cuts characters and offers resolutions you may never have discovered if you tried to write the entire thing in your mind before setting it on paper.

This is what a first draft is for. Set down the story.  Follow it, move with it, figure out what it wants, but set it down.  Once you have done this you can, you must, figure out what it wants to say, and say it.
Revise it until it is clear.  Joyce Carol Oates says, "For the serious writer, writing is revision. For nothing is ever as good as it could have been" (In fact, she takes this Be purposeful commandment so far as to say, "The first sentence cannot be written until the last has been written").

The point is, there is no good writing that 'just happens,' inspired or otherwise.  You can't sit down with a character or a scenario and just write and write and write until you find something that resembles an ending.  Of course you could, but you should never leave it at that.

You need to ask what the story is about, what is it saying, what is it doing, who is it speaking to, and then revise, revise, revise.

At the same time, though, if I am causing these words, these ideas, to flood into your brain and potentially cause you to change the way you look at the world, the purpose of my story better be something of worth.

It's often said (and I won't deny the claim) that writing is therapeutic.  But if its only purpose is to help its author work through some unresolved issues, it will not be as powerful as it could be.  Writing needs to move out of the author's own sphere of thinking and into the world it has been created in.

But what is this worthwhile something? 

It's almost definitely going to be different for every writer writing.  And, for that matter, every reader reading.

Stephen King says (and I promise I'll stop talking about him, sometime): 'The job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story's web of lies..." Of course fiction isn't true, but it ought to offer a truth about the human experience.

The novels and stories that have most affected me, that have literally changed the way I view the world—Leo Tolstoy's, Anna Kerenina. Philip Roth's, American Pastoral. Lloyd Jones's, Mr. Pip. Carol Shields's, Stone Diaries. Emma Donoghue's, Room. Cormac McCarthy's, The Road. Don Delillo's, Falling Man. Lorrie Moore's, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling In Peed Onk." Joyce Carol Oates's, "The Girl With the Blackened Eye. Any of Alice Munro's stories. And I'm sure there are others—these stories have offered a true depiction of the world we live in.

None of them are identical, obviously.  But somehow they have managed to get outside of themselves and into the world, showing the reader something significant about this thing we call, Life.

As I write this, I have a picture of myself at seventy, eighty maybe, playing sudoko or working on a crossword puzzle, looking up from the newspaper (or some digital version), saying, "Who said that? Oh that wasn't me. That was some pretentious twenty-something-year-old who didn't have a clue, as if he had a sniff what Real Life was back then."

But for now—before I've even published a single work (don't tell anybody), before anyone would have any reason to listen to me—I'm willing to say that if you want to be taken seriously as a writer, as an artist, you must Be Purposeful.  You must figure out what your story needs to say, and say it in a way that is worthwhile to the reader, in a way that causes the reader to be forced into a confrontation with the true human experience, pleasant or otherwise.

At least that's what a young writer might think...

Writing Commandment Number Three: Read

3. Read

Yeah, yeah, these commandments are hardly revolutionary.  Any writer who knows anything writing will likely say Read and Write if you want to get better at the craft.

"Every good writer I know or have known began with an insatiable appetite for books." - Richard Bausch

"You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading." - Margaret Atwood

"Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it." - William Faulkner

"Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors." - Francine Prose

It goes on and on.  Writers have an obsessive compulsion to read.  If ever I'm feeling the dreaded writer's block (which I don't exactly believe in, but that's another blog entirely) threatening to fall on top of me, I pick out a book and read.  Whenever I'm stressed out, or tired, or bored, I find ten or twenty minutes here or there, and read.  I think this is true of any serious writer. If you don't have time to read, or feel you could go without it, you should snap your pen in half and toss your notebooks in the recycling bin. No one will have time for your writing, if you don't have time for reading.

There's no better way to learn everything from plot structure and character development to how to use a comma, or a stupid em dash, than by reading the masters that have come before us.

But rather than give my version of all the previous commands to read, I'm simply going to give a few examples of books I think a young writer (or anyone, for that matter) should read.

a).  Read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis


This, I'll admit, is totally a nostalgic choice.  I can say with a fair amount of certainty that these books are what turned me into a real reader.  I read books before this, I know I did. But I was taken up in these books, and I entered a mild form of depression as I started the seventh book, and almost lost my mind once it was finished.  There was something inside of me that started to burn while I read the series—the love of reading a good story, and I ran out to buy The Hobbit as soon as I finished.  I have never not been in the middle of a book since reading it.

b). Read Life of Pi by Yann Martel


From C.S. Lewis, I went to J.R.R. Tolkien to Madeleine L'Engle to Philip Pullman to George McDonald to J.K. Rowling to Stephen R. Lawhead to T.H. White to whoever else.  Basically, if it was a magical world, I wanted to spend time inside of it.  My friend told me about this book that was winning awards about a boy who gets stuck on a boat with a tiger named Richard. And I somehow got the picture that they talked to each other and made friends or whatever.  I thought it was magic. Maybe Richard was the new Aslan.  Maybe the boat could fly. I don't know.  But I ordered it from Amazon, and got to reading it as soon as it arrived.  I read it straight through, and I can honestly say it changed my life.

 It changed my life in two ways:

          1) It was the first 'realist' novel I had read outside of school, and began my shift from fantastic literature to realist literature.  Actually, I hardly ever read anything that's not realist anymore.  That's not to say I don't appreciate fantasy. or whatever.  I have just grown to love realist fiction. And I can say beyond doubt that Martel helped me realize that love.

          2) It was the first time I payed attention to what the writer was doing, rather than just immersing myself in the story.  I was blown away by the book.  I won't ruin the story (cause you're going to go flying to read it, right?), but I'll say that coming to the end, I realized the whole story, up to that point, may be entirely different than what I thought it was.  He was able to tell two separate stories at one time, which were the same story. or something. Read the book. It's awesome.  It started me thinking about the ways writers crafter their stories, and really kickstarted the desire to write in my brain, or gave it a boost.

c). Read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood 


It's a speculative fiction of a dystopian future, something Atwood has basically mastered.  It is so outrageous, yet utterly believable as something that could happen in this world we live in.  Read it, then start recycling.

I haven't read anything of hers that I didn't like, but this was my favorite (so far).

d). Read A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby


I found this book on the discount shelf at Chapters.  It looked cool, so I bought it.  It's about four characters that meet on the same roof, each with their own plan of jumping off.  Sounds morbid, but it's a great read.  It was my first encounter with alternating points of view in the same book, and Hornby crushes it.  Each character is unique and believable and interesting.  Truthfully, almost anything I've read from Hornby has been great. He wrote High Fidelity & About a Boy & Fever Pitch & An Education & others. For a fun read that still makes you consider the world beyond yourself, read Hornby.

e). Read Alice Munro

Seriously.  If you want to see a master story teller in action. Read Alice Munro.  Every single story I've read by her has affected the way I think about writing in some way.  She's a complete genius.

f).  Read On Writing by Stephen King


I think I've referenced this book in every single blog post I've written.  The book changed my writing life in so many ways.  Truthfully, I haven't read any of his other work.  I've always been scared of it, but he friggen knows how to produce, and he has some really simple, but profound things to say about the writing process.  I think about the things he says in this book every time I sit down to write.

I could go on like this for a long time:

Joyce Carol Oates. Tim O'Brien. Cormac McCarthy. Katherine Mansfield. Julian Barnes. Emma Do\noghue. Neil Gaiman. Carol Shields. Lloyd Jones. Anne Tyler. Umberto Eco. Flannery O'Connor. David Mitchel. Milan Kundera.  Mohsin Hamid. Aravind Adiga. Barbara Kingsolver. David Shields.

Ok. I'll stop.  It is one of the most beautiful things about literature that one book, leads to another, to another, to another, ad infinitum.

If you want to grow as a writer, read books. It's the only way to learn.

At least that's what one young writer might think...

Any books you would add to a Must Read List?

Writing Commandment Number Two: Write!

*After reading Richard Bausch's Letter To a Young Writer, which consists of ten tips for writing, I have assigned myself the task of writing my own letter to a young writer in the form of blog posts in which I will offer my Ten Commandments of Writing (as I see them now, as a young writer myself).*



2. Write


You must write. The minute, the second, inspiration hits, you need to drop what you're doing—eating, showering, sitting on the can, driving, homework, whatever—get a pen and paper, and write.  The minute the fairy dust is sprinkled upon your brain, you must run, as if the world of literature depended on it, to write what these beautiful pixies have to say.  Otherwise, you'll never write anything.

Just kidding. Forget inspiration.  I used to 'get inspired' at the movies, or while listening to music, or while reading a good book.  So I'd do what I thought I'd supposed to do. I'd write in my little notebook.  It would undoubtedly just be a reproduction of what had given me this 'inspiration,' and was most certainly not anything worth sharing with anybody.  What I thought was inspiration was really just an emotional reaction to the piece I was interacting with.  This is a good thing, but it is not at all what a writer needs to 'wait for' in order to get writing.

I am not denying the occurrence of true inspiration.  Ask Plato. He'll tell you that artists are possessed when they are creating real works of art. Ask Margaret Atwood. She'll tell you the Margaret Atwood, in the act of creating—sitting at her desk, scratching it out on paper or typing it up, actually writing—is not the Margaret Atwood who does interviews or readings, or who sips her tea.  Ask almost any artist. They'll likely tell you that when their best work is produced it is out of some kind of supernatural or unexplainable sort of inspiration. The muse, or whatever.

What I'm saying is that if you wait for this inspiration to hit, you may produce a nice little sonnet here or there, you might sketch out a beautiful vignette sometime or other, but you will never produce as much as you'd like to, and you'll most likely give up on this writing dream.

If you want to be a writer, you must write.  You've gotta put aside time to write. I've heard it said that if you are a true writer, you'll automatically make time for your writing.  This may be the case; I can feel my whole body starting to itch—beginning in my fingers and earlobes—once a certain amount of time has passed without my being able to write. I will put aside anything in these moments in order to write. I get what they mean. Still, it takes practice.  What if you're 'itching' to write, but haven't been inspired.  This is when I would get frustrated. I'd be anxious to write, but couldn't get my brain to move its thoughts from my head onto the page.

Write anyway.

If you have no idea what you are going to write, sit down and put your pen on the paper, and write words, or sentences. Write whatever pops into your head.

Stephen King says:

          Don't wait for the muse.... This isn't the Ouija board or the spirit-world we're talking about here,  
          but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks.  Your job is to make sure the
          muse knows where you're going to be every day from nine 'til noon or seven 'til three.  If he does
          know, I assure you that sooner or later he'll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his
          magic.  - On Writing


You may not like his writing, but he is one of the most prolific contemporary writers of our time. And he knows a thing or two about the writing process (One of my commandments should probably be 'Read On Writing.' It'll change your writing life. It did mine for sure).  After reading this, I determined that at the Very least, I would go writing once a week.  King suggests every day, but with school, two kids, a job, and a wife to schmooze, it's not easy to make time daily.

Still, that once a week is a lot more than I would have if I simply waited for the Muse to inspire me.

If you want to get anywhere with your writing, if you want to improve your writing, you must write, whether the pixie dust is in the air or you feel like you're pushing your pen through molasses with each new word.

It's very simple: Sit down and write.

At least that's what one young writer might think.

Letter To a Young Writer

I read Letter to a Young Writer, by Richard Bausch, because it was part of the required reading for a creative writing class I was taking.  I'm almost positive I would never have read the thing if I hadn't have taken the class—mostly because I still have never heard his name anywhere else.  In it, he gives his ten commandments of writing, "of what [he has] been able to learn from reading or being around writers who are better than [he]."  They are well worth taking a look at, especially number four: Train yourself to be able to work anywhere (in my opinion).

I'm not gonna write about Bausch, though.  

After we read the piece, our professor said he thought about making one of our assignments, Write a Letter to Yourself, a Young Writer. He didn't, but he asked us if we thought that would be a good idea.

I think that would be a good idea.

I am twenty-eight. I mentioned in an earlier post how I cheated on a poetry contest in 10th grade, and how that eventually led to my desire to write.  I have been taking this desire seriously for about the last three years.  I know I'm not the youngest of writers, but I'm unpublished and gung-ho and still believe I'll write some sort of world-altering work of art, someday.  

I'm not gonna write a letter.  

I'm gonna write a series of blog posts, to myself (and I guess to whoever wants to read them), entitled The Ten Commandments of Writing for a Young Writer.  I'm not sure I have ten commandments yet.  But I have at least a couple. And I'm just going to add the rest to the blog as they come to me.  

So that means they won't be in any sort of hierarchal order.  I'm sure I'll think of better rules as I read or hang around writers who are better than I.  But here goes with the first.

1. Think of your characters as if they are real people.

Yeah, yeah, of course you should think of them as real.  If you want them to be believable, they have to seem real, or whatever.  But this is what I mean: Other people think about themselves as much as you think about yourself; Other people have been thinking about themselves since the minute they were capable of thinking.  

What does this mean for your characters?  

I have three sisters, one older, two younger.  We have been pretty close for a long time.  We spent hours playing together, fighting each other, adventuring in the forest (which was really a clump of trees on the outskirts of a golf course), playing barbies or G.I. Joes or whatever.  I hung out with them, especially my younger sisters, throughout high school and afterward. One of them is married to the guy who stood with me as my best-man at my wedding. We can spend hours reminiscing about summer holidays or Christmas holidays or piano lessons or whatever.  My youngest makes me laugh harder than anybody (with the exception of my wife, maybe) in the world.

I know them.

But not long ago, my youngest sister, Katie, told me of the games she used to play with Joni, our other sister, games I had no idea they ever played (and no idea how they even dreamt them up).  She told me she had this thing where she could never fall asleep unless she knew someone in the same room as her was awake (they shared a room).  She'd, every now and then, whisper Joni's name, and Joni would whisper back, "Awake." If Joni didn't whisper back, Katie would wake her up. Then she could fall asleep, knowing someone else was awake to watch over her.

This is not overly strange, I don't think.  But it is something I never knew about them.

It sort of concretized a concept I've been trying to wrap my head around for a while. That is basically that every person walks around living their life minute-to-minute, second-to-second, the same as I do.  I seem to have this notion in my head that when I leave a room, the people left in it stop living.  They just disappear into some sort of dark abyss until I come back to join them so they can keep going.  Of course, I know this isn't true. I know they're there; I wonder what my wife is doing while I'm at work, I think about the fun my son is having at his grandma's when she's looking after him, I miss Joni as she lives in the next province over, but it's almost impossible for me to think in a concrete way about how they all are living, exactly as I am, with unending thoughts about whatever they want to think about, which is—if they're anything like I am—usually themselves.

I think this way about my characters too.  I tell the story I want to tell.  It starts with them in their living room, or at the piano, or in their car, but I almost never think about what they were doing before the first sentence.  I try to think of "who they are." I try to "become the character"or whatever, to get inside of them, but how can I do this if I don't even know what they were doing before I introduce them to people?  Or after I've finished telling people about them?   

What I'm trying to say is this: 

Your characters should think about themselves as much as you think about yourself. 

Your character ought to have lived an entire life before they enter your story.  They ought to keep on living after it's done.  The more of that life you can imagine—weather you put in the story or not—the stronger your characters will be.  

At least that's what one young writer might think...