The Wax In My Ear

All good writing is built with solid fundamentals executed by a trained mind. The cliche goes “write what you know” because people who don’t know what they’re writing sound like it. I know from failing first-hand and witnessing countless failures by others. I stopped failing as much when I took control of my progress as a writer and started jumping through aggravating but necessary hoops. The advice that follows has been collected over the course of my bachelor’s in Creative Writing, and could save a lot of time for aspiring writers.

Myth vs. Reality

According to Charles Bukowski:

[A good poem] has to come out like a good hot beer shit. A good hot beer shit is glorious man. You get up, you turn around, you look at it. You’re proud. The fumes, the stink of the turds, you look at it, you say ‘God I did it, I’m good’–then you flush it away. Then there’s that sense of sadness, and just the water is there… You just do it. It’s a beer shit. It’s nothing to analyse. There’s nothing to say. It’s just done.

As paid careers in writing go, poetry is the hardest to collect a paycheck from. A would-be writer can learn a lot from a successful poet, even if they don’t intend to write poetry. Bukowski’s tip? Good writing comes effortlessly. But what about good writers? Do they come out like beer shits? Not quite.

Jack Kerouac’s most famous novel, On The Road, inspired an entire youth movement centered around what is now known as Beat culture. The novel is still well-regarded today, and is known for its typed, continuous manuscript. In person, The Scroll (as it is known) gives gawkers the sense that Kerouac sat down at a typewriter with coffee, cigarettes, and drugs and stood up with a Bukowski-esque beer shit of a Great American Novel about two young men traveling the country. This is a fine myth, but the reality is that Kerouac was very insecure about his writing. He spent years developing his ideas in notebooks before cobbling that scroll together. After The Scroll, On The Road was edited several times before the manuscript became the novel.

Kerouac’s first attempts at On The Road were in French. Years before those aborted attempts, Kerouac went to Columbia University: where he wrote sports articles for the student newspaper. After he dropped out of Columbia and washed out of the United States Navy, Kerouac helped dispose of the dead body of a man his friend killed in self-defense. Kerouac turned himself in, and earned his bail out of prison by agreeing to marry a woman who’d pay it. That marriage was later annulled. The point of all this chaos is that Kerouac not only learned how to write before he tried to write a novel, but he also led an interesting life so that he’d be the type of person who had a novel in him. On The Road wasn’t his first novel either: Kerouac collaborated with the older William S. Burroughs on a true crime story about the killing he was party to, which was entitled And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, and published posthumously. After that book, Kerouac wrote The Town and the City: his first novel. Only then did Keroauc start On The Road–in French.

It was Kerouac’s cumulative experiences which built him into a good writer. He was educated, he was mentored by experienced writers, and he led an interesting life. With all that working in his favor, Kerouac still had to work hard, practice, and make terrible mistakes before he ended up with the novel which defined his career.

Recovering From Shit Writing

My mentally disabled cat crapped all over the first short story I ever wrote. Nothing of value was lost when the poop soaked through my scrawl because the story was awful: it was a stiff imitation of Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. It deserved to die. Every writer’s first short story is shit. Unfortunately for most writers, not all those first stories are conveniently shit upon, and so they never take the time to reflect and learn why they should write differently.

As with all things, in writing, shit happens. Unless a writer knows which turds to stack for fertilizer and which to discard, it is possible for an amateur writer to sow the wrong words in spoiled soil. The result is a novel, or a story, and it’s taken six months, or worse, years to write, and it’s terrible. Most young writers don’t realize that their own bad writing is the worst enemy of their work. Most writers don’t find this out until they’ve gone so far in the wrong direction that they’re terribly discouraged by how much time they’ve wasted. So what’s the lesson? Learn to sort your shit so you waste as little time as possible.

Young writers save themselves from their bad writing the same way alcoholics stop themselves from drinking. First, you have to admit you have a problem. Then, you have to want to improve. Following from that, you set attainable goals and meet them one day at a time. Depending on your current level of skill and education, what these goals should be can vary wildly.

Where To Start

Start by learning from as many master writers as you can. Look up their lectures. Read. Read all sorts of things. Intentionally read things completely unlike the things you’d like to write, because you never know how your mind might make use of them. Also read the things like what you want to write so you are aware of what your work will be compared to.

There are dead masters and living ones. Dead writers provide advice through the examples set by their work, but can’t edit yours for obvious reasons. Live masters may edit you if you are lucky, and they will at least direct you to reading material for study that will help you learn to edit yourself. Study by itself does not lead to skill–there must be practice. Writers have developed institutions which makes practice more efficient: workshops led by master writers.

The goal of any workshop is to foster two separate trades in a writer: the craft of writing and the process of editing. Workshops connect masters with aspiring writers, but before you can participate in one, you have to learn how to do it without being a burden on your fellow writers. Before a beginner’s workshop can take place, an instructor guides you to resources which will allow you to understand the technical language which editors use to dissect writing. Writing-related definitions of terms like ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ are the stuff of the comprehensive manuals you’ll devour. These manuals are books like John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Gardner does an excellent job of establishing a theory as to what separates a successful sentence from a failed one, and his entire book is full of sound advice echoed in writer’s workshops all over the United States. Elements of Style is better for brushing up on grammar than style. With one of their novels, your favorite author can teach you more about style than Strunk and White ever will. However, many people need Strunk and White in order to overcome problems with their grammar which were never corrected in school.

Once introductions are over, workshops teach writers to edit by forcing them to constructively edit and comment on the work of their peers, as well as submit their own work to this scrutiny. At this stage, writers are broken of any egotistical notion that what they wrote was clear and easy to understand. The reality of encountering the minds of your readers for the first time will scare you away from bad habits. Gardner emphasizes that every written work is a conversation between the writer and the audience. It is very easy to lose your audience, and a writer who isn’t aware of how that audience processes their work will unintentionally work against the interests of their piece and alienate readers.

Anything beyond this point is the territory of workshop leaders and professors. I’ve been the former, but don’t have the credentials to be the latter. My parting words of advice are to be like Kerouac: work your ass off, give a damn, and keep trying new things.