In fact, it’s remarkably rare to stumble upon writing advice that’s neither too nebulous (“never give up!”) nor too unrealistically prescriptive (Stephen King may be able to write 2,000 words every single day, but most of us cannot). To that end, I want to share a few gems of genuinely useful, actionable writing tips I’ve picked up over the years: tips that have not only worked for the authors giving them, but which have also done wonders for me personally.

1. Start anywhere

This is one of the most popular pieces of writing advice out there — I suspect because many writers suffer from perfectionism, which can make starting each new piece incredibly difficult. I’m no stranger to this predicament: the pressure to get every word right from square one can feel insurmountable, especially when penning something as intricate as a book. Indeed, this is why so many authors spend months outlining to minimize mistakes down the line.

But sometimes, in the (paraphrased) words of Flaubert, you simply have to shut up and get on with it. Or take this actual quote from Hemingway, which puts it a bit more positively: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” True, it must be noted, doesn’t always mean beautiful and profound, and it certainly doesn’t mean perfect.

If Hemingway doesn’t do it for you, one has to respect the pure pragmatism of this line from Jane Austen, from a letter to her sister Cassandra: “I am not at all in a humor for writing. I must write on until I am.” Even when you find it hard to write truthfully, begin anyway, and sooner or later you will arrive at the truth you wish to tell.

2. Get up early — or stay up late

When it comes to advice, there’s nothing like a clear, evidence-backed directive. This is one such tip: according to overwhelming testimony, if you want to become a successful author, you need to start getting up early. Or, if that doesn’t jibe with your Circadian rhythm (I’ll be honest — it never has for me), staying up late can produce a similar effect! In a nutshell, you must find a time in the day with no interruptions or impediments to your creativity.

My favorite source for this particular piece of writing advice is Ursula K. Le Guin, whose writing schedule recirculates on Twitter every so often just to remind us all what an icon she was. Still, even Le Guin couldn’t write at all hours of the day; by her own admission, after 8 pm she would become “very stupid and we won’t talk about this.” She consistently capitalized on those morning hours because she knew they were her most productive.

Toni Morrison, another famously early riser, nevertheless acknowledged that inspiration manifests differently for every writer. “Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process,” she said in one interview. “For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives.” You don’t necessarily need to be up for first light — but whatever your own “golden hours” are as a writer, take advantage of them.

3. Record interesting things and don’t hoard details

This one’s a two-parter courtesy of Andrew Sean Greer and Annie Dillard. Lots of writers talk about taking details from the world around them, but few have done so to the extent of Greer, who revealed in a recent AMA that almost every bit of scenery from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Less came directly from real life: “One rule I had for Less was that every detail had to be something I wrote down in my notebook while traveling… I did not want to invent a ‘fantasy’ of a foreign country, but the real thing.”

As with Toni Morrison watching the sunrise every morning, you don’t need to be quite this rigorous to make use of Greer’s strategy. Simply start recording more facets of real life — if you don’t already have a dedicated details notebook (or page in the note-taking app of your phone), start one today and make an effort to add to it.

Not sure what this might look like? Another favorite anecdote of mine on the subject comes from Marina Keegan, author of The Opposite of Loneliness, who maintained a 32-page document of interesting things ranging from “descriptions of a waiter’s hand gestures, to my cab driver’s eyes, to strange things that happen to me or a way to phrase something.” Basically, anything and everything that draws your attention is fair game.

The only trouble with recording all these details is that you may not know when to use them. But according to Annie Dillard, any time could be the perfect time. “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book,” she urges in The Writing Life. “Give it, give it all, give it now.” This applies to other aspects of writing as well — winning turns of phrase, brilliant plot devices — but I’ve found it especially helpful in the context of real-life details.

4. Follow your protagonist’s lead

Every great series, novel, and even short story must be based in strong character motivations — otherwise, the story has no reason to exist. So if you’re struggling with the direction of your story, the best thing to do is zero in on your protagonist’s motivations. Or, as Ray Bradbury artfully put it: “Find out what your hero wants, then follow them.”

This is easier said than done. One thing I personally have trouble with is separating my characters’ goals and personalities from my own; I often find myself rereading a scene I’ve just proudly finished, only to find it’s completely inconsistent with a certain character because I’ve unconsciously projected my own desires onto the page. And while I do think it’s useful to relate to your main character in some ways, they need to be their own person (as much as a fictional figure can be) in order for them to go on an interesting, satisfying journey.

Hence the emphasis here is on following their lead (again, as much as you can with someone, well, fictional). To facilitate this, flesh out your main characters before you get the narrative underway. Fill in character profiles with questions like “How did their childhood shape who they are?” and “What would they do if someone they loved were in danger?” It might seem silly to answer questions that won’t even come up in your story, but it all contributes to a deeper understanding of how each character will perceive and react to everything that does.

5. Invest yourself emotionally

Other than “get a cat,” this is probably my favorite piece of writing advice ever — it’s by far the most powerful way I’ve found of getting other people invested in my work. And as you’d imagine, it also makes the creative process that much more enjoyable and exciting!

Robert Frost expressed the mutual benefits of this strategy quite succinctly: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” This doesn’t mean you’ll experience these emotions in the same way as your readers; indeed, the misfortune of being the author is that you can never truly catch yourself by surprise. Still, you should know when you’ve hit upon something good. Every “aha!” moment you have when planning your story will hopefully translate into a moment of narrative satisfaction for your readers.

That said, the trick here is not to become so emotionally invested that it hinders your writing. As I mentioned, this often happens to me when it comes to character motivation. It can also be challenging to detach yourself emotionally when it comes time to edit. But better to be too invested in the story, in my opinion, than not invested enough. (Susan Sontag would agree — she said, on the subject of starting a novel, “The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.”)

Of course, at this juncture, I feel obligated to return to one of my very first points: not every piece of writing advice is going to work for every author. But in my own experience — and in that of some of the best literary minds of the past two hundred years — these five tips are bound to set you on a strong path.

Savannah Cordova is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors and publishers with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. In her spare time, Savannah enjoys reading contemporary fiction and writing short stories. 

The post #5onFri: Five Bits of Writing Advice (that Actually Work!) appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today I am delighted to have Jarett Kobek on the show!

Jarett published his first novel, I Hate the Internet, last year with a small indie publisher and it immediately took on cult status and received rave reviews. His new book, The Future Won’t Be Long, centers on one of the characters (Adeline) featured in I Hate the Internet and is set in my favorite city, New York!

Listen in as we discuss Jarett’s latest novel and his techniques to keep a book based around technology relevant even when the tech in the story becomes obsolete.

In this episode Jarett and I discuss:

• The art of explaining everything, and why you should use the technique.
• His tips and tricks for keeping the technology in a book relevant for future generations.
• When to set a project aside and how to go back and edit it later.
• How to grow your characters through multiple books as well as in a single book.
• Why readers want to read multivolume stories.

Plus, Jarett’s #1 tip for writers.

About Jarett Kobek

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. He is the author of the novella Atta (2011) and the novel I Hate the Internet (2016), an international bestseller that has appeared, or is scheduled to appear, in seven languages. His latest novel The Future Won’t Be Long is available now.

The Future Won’t Be Long

The Future Won’t Be Long is a provocative, ecstatic story of friendship, sex, art, and ambition in the twilight days of New York City’s East Village (1986-1996).

The story centers on Adeline—featured years later in I Hate the Internet—a wealthy art student in New York City who chances upon a young man from the Midwest known only as Baby in a shady East Village squat. The two begin a fiery friendship which propels them through a decade of New York life punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat, Wojnarowicz, by the Tompkins Square Park riots, and by the rise of club kid culture. Adeline is fiercely protective of Baby, but he soon takes over his own education. Once just a kid off the bus from Wisconsin, Baby soon finds himself at the center of the club kid social scene, cavorting with Michael Alig and James St. James at The Tunnel, Limelight, and Alig’s infamous “Outlaw Party” at a midtown McDonald’s. As Adeline and Baby both develop into the artists they never expected to become, Kobek pays tribute to the last gasps of the gritty, drug-fueled scene of the East Village as gentrifiers begin to trickle in.

Kobek, himself a graduate of NYU, writes with a native’s sensitivity to New York, especially about those who come here with hope and those who come to escape their pasts. Riotously funny and wise, The Future Won’t Be Long is a euphoric, propulsive novel coursing with a rare vitality, an elegy to New York and to the relationships that have the power to change—and save—our lives.

I Hate the Internet

What if you told the truth and the whole world heard you? What if you lived in a country swamped with Internet outrage? What if you were a woman in a society that hated women?

Set in the San Francisco of 2013, I Hate the Internet offers a hilarious and obscene portrayal of life amongst the victims of the digital boom. As billions of tweets fuel the city’s gentrification and the human wreckage piles up, a group of friends suffers the consequences of being useless in a new world that despises the pointless and unprofitable.

In this novel, Jarett Kobek tackles the pressing questions of our moment. Why do we applaud the enrichment of CEOs at the expense of the weak and the powerless? Why are we giving away our intellectual property? Why is activism in the 21st Century nothing more than a series of morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves? Here, at last, comes an explanation of the Internet in the crudest possible terms.

If you decide to check out The Future Won’t Be Long or its companion I Hate the Internet, we hope you’ll do so via these affiliate links, where if you choose to purchase DIY MFA makes a small commission at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 174

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 174: Story and Context — Interview with Jarett Kobek appeared first on DIY MFA.

Since there are so many great American novels that deal with this theme, I’m actually going to break this into two posts: this week, I’ll focus on such novels with male protagonists, and in a few weeks, I’ll do the same with female protagonists.

Five American Novels For the Outsider in all Of Us

The Deerslayer

By: James Fenimoore Cooper

This is generally considered to be the first distinctly American novel, and Natty Bummpo—also known as Hawkeye—is an iconic American figure. Like many Americans, he is a child of two worlds, and struggles to find where he fits. He’s white, but was raised by Native Americans. This dual identity is a struggle for him throughout Deerslayer and Cooper’s other books, including, Last of the Mohicans.

He is the consummate outsider. Hawkeye never really resolves it. But like many Americans, Hawkeye approaches this with a stoicism that doesn’t ever give way to romanticism. There’s no waxing eloquent in this book. He remains a man of the wilderness, an expert hunter, and can’t ever blend into life with other settlers. He becomes wild, with an animal’s cruelty and gentleness, a constant contrast to the other settlers. In an essay about this character, D.H. Lawrence writes: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

By: Mark Twain

In the nineteenth century, most novels, including Twain’s own The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, employed a narrator so that, even when common characters were featured, there was a buffer between the gentle reader and these rougher types. Twain did away with that in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and ended up writing a great American novel.

When he started the novel, it was supposed to be just another boy’s adventure story, like Tom Sawyer. But Mark Twain did two very different things in Huckleberry Finn: first, he gave the narration over to Huck, the destitute son of the town drunk. He then further complicated matters by having Huck take off with another outsider: the runaway slave, Jem. When the Huck and Jem’s little raft crashes into a ferry boat, Mark Twain put down the novel for five years. He had realized he’d happened on a much greater story than Tom Sawyer. That story eventually became this novel, a rich and complex look at one boy’s struggle to reconcile what his community has taught him about slavery, and what he learns through traveling with a slave. The core of the story is Jem’s humanity. The book was published in 1885.

Moby Dick

By: Herman Melville

When Herman Melville died in 1891, many were surprised to learn he was still alive. A reclusive author who had enjoyed moderate success in his life, Melville was favored with an obituary in The New York Times. They called him “Herman Melville, the author of Typee.” There was no mention of Moby Dick, a massive, obscure novel that hadn’t sold out its three thousand copy print run. Eventually this novel was discovered, and of course has become a classic of American literature. A lot of readers are turned off by its thick prose and long, languid descriptions of whales. Melville goes into clinical detail about things like blubber. But Moby Dick has stood the test of time, I think, because many Americans can identify with its main character.

Like Hawkeye and Huck Finn, Ishmael is looking for himself. The beginning of the book encompasses this struggle in one glorious line: “Call me Ishmael.” We never know if that’s his real name, but we do come to learn why this young man names himself after Abraham’s bastard son, the discarded outsider. So many American stories begin that way. Ishmael seeks answers at sea. What he finds is a monster hunting a monster. This book has short chapters, and reading one a night will give any reader plenty to think on—and some beautiful sentences to ogle over.

The Great Gatsby

By: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Like Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby is an examination of a towering figure, through the eyes of an outsider. The narrator and main character of The Great Gatsby isn’t actually Gatsby himself. It’s Jay Carroway, a man who must work for a living, but runs with the rich, frivolous crowd of party-goers that populate the Hamptons in the summer. Through his eyes, we see them, their beauty, their shallowness, their tragedy. And, as it turns out, their king—Jay Gatsby—is an outsider himself. A soldier who earned his fortune in illegal business.

The book ends on an uncertain note, questioning one of the fundamental promises of American life: that we can outrun our pasts, and remake ourselves. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s towering characters are reason enough to read the book, but his descriptions of the incredibly particular—a green light on the end of a dock—and the general—America itself—are worth the read. Here’s one of my favorite sentences: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” 

Freddy and Fredericka

By: Mark Helprin

I went back and forth on this one, because its main character is actually British. In fact, he’s the future king of England, and he’s less-than-loosely based on Prince Charles, and his wife on Princess Diana. But since the author is American, and the book concerns America, I think it qualifies. And it’s certainly a great novel.

Freddy and Fredericka shows us America through the ultimate outsider perspective: two English monarchs, who have been dropped off via helicopter with a mission to reclaim the colonies. It’s part Don Quixote-level satire, part love story to the author’s country, an often hilarious, startling beautiful adventure where Freddy and Fredericka, a feckless couple with little affection for one another, fall in love and gain wisdom while looking for work, hopping trains, guarding a national park and even advising a presidential candidate. By narrating his story through an outsider from our mother country, Helprin is able to gently lampoon both cultures, and draw together many threads that still unite them.

There are so many great American novels that focus on this theme. What else could we add to the list?

The post #5OnFri: Five Great American Novels That Feature Outsiders appeared first on DIY MFA.