How do people become better writers? Many of the books, videos, and classes that make up the Writing Industrial Complex will tell you that great writing can be reduced to a set of tips, tricks, and formulas anyone can apply and produce the next great work of (pick your genre).
Happily, this is mostly bullshit. Formulas can help you make formulaic work––work that sells, even. But the kind of writing that gets inside the reader’s head/heart and changes them, the kind of writing a reader will come back to decades later, is always the result of a process that can’t be taught or repeated. It’s talent + reading + writing + time. While that might look like a formula, the variables are in constant motion. Good writing remains, for now, a uniquely human mystery––one of the precious few things we have left that can’t be quantified.
So what are writing teachers for? This is the first post of The True Story––writings on writing by me and fellow writer/teacher Shelby Wardlaw, for other adults who want to grow as writers. I want to start by telling you to take anything we say with more than one grain of salt. The notion of an “expert” writer is ridiculous. All writers, however great, start anew with every blank page, and all writers are as different from one another as are any two people.
But if experience can’t give us a formula, it does give us a general map of the terrain. The Swamps of Procrastination. The Cliffs of Invention. The Valleys of Revision. The Vast Sea of Whatever I Might Write Next.
What Shelby and I can offer are signposts along your travels, inspirational war stories and cautionary tales. Tips, too, to use where they’re useful and ignore where they’re not. Between comments on these posts and the classes we teach (online and off), we also mean to open a space for conversation and community––because every student is a teacher and vice versa. Welcome! We’re going to learn a lot together.