THREE WRITERS ON WRITING

I've been doing NaNoWriMo for just over ten days now, and am currently sitting very happily on a word count of 18,356. I'll do a more involved update soon, but for now let's just say I'm well on track and pleased with how I recovered from a few lazy days of little to no writing.

One thing that I've always found really helpful when I'm writing, or just pursuing general creative projects, is reading about writing. Not so much the super technical stuff, I don't think knowing the ins and outs of the use of an oxford comma is especially inspiring, but books in which writers talk about their craft and their experience. I've been rereading my three favourites recently, and thought I would share them.

STEPHEN KING - ON WRITING

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes.

I have to confess that I haven't actually read many of Stephen King's novels. What I have read I've enjoyed, but horror isn't something that I always gravitate towards. Fortunately On Writing stands on its own as a wonderful memoir in which King recalls how he became a writer, and what he has learned about the craft along the way. I love reading about his years as a young unpublished writer, and the way in which he felt compelled to create stories just for fun. His writing advice is simple and practical. He dips into some of the more intricate details, such as avoiding a dangling participle or the passive voice, but focuses on the fact that when you understand the 'rules' you then know when to break them. To King, writing is largely about giving yourself permission to write something badly the first time, and having faith in yourself to improve it, or write it better next time. He also takes to task the idea that one must 'feel' like they are a writer, or that writing is somehow a craft one has to earn or live up to. When I first read this, as a teenager with big dreams and zero confidence, that was exactly the kick that I needed to stop trying to be pretentious, and to just be myself. 

VIRGINIA WOOLF - A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. 

This is a slim but provocative meditation in which Woolf confronts the realities of being both a writer and a woman in the early 20th Century. In her inimitable style, graceful and poignant, she discusses the fact that women's writing has never been taken seriously and, during certain times in history, was even demonised. She notes that the most successful women writers in the British canon wrote either anonymously (such as Jane Austen) or under a male pseudonym (such as George Eliot), and argues that the problem is therefore not with women's writing, but rather with external prejudice. For all our progress, we can still see this today, with many successful women writers adopting sexless pseudonyms such as JK Rowling, NK Jemisin, or Robin Hobb, in order to hide their woman-ness without completely erasing it. The title 'A Room of One's Own' references the fact that, in Woolf's time, a man could leave his house or retreat to his study and indulge his creative genius. A woman however, no matter her talent, was often forced into permanent motherhood, and expected to be constantly in company. This lack of privacy stopped many women writing, when they may have written something even greater than her male counterparts. Again, things have certainly improved, but there is long way to go before women's writing no longer has to negotiate a masculine artistic culture. 

MARGARET ATWOOD - NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEAD

Nobody hates writers more than writers do. The most vicious and contemptuous portraits of writers, both as individuals and as types, appear in books written by writers themselves. Nobody loves them more either. Megalomania and paranoia share the writer's mirror.  

I love Atwood's writing. I've read seven of her books, putting her second only to Terry Pratchett in my most-read authors. Negotiating with the Dead is a series of short essays in which Atwood explores the history of the 'writer', and considers how writers negotiate the endless complexities of their role as an individual, but also as a collective. Writers are inherently of their time, and yet they are products of history. They are at once great entertainers, but must also step in with grave words of foreboding. Technically contributing nothing 'useful' to a society, yet prized and coveted as 'belonging' to a certain country or culture. Atwood uses her incredible grasp of imagery and metaphor to pick apart texts occurring through history, and watching the ways in which motifs, such as doubled characters and mirrors, evolve in writing over time, and how this tracks the ways in which writers see themselves in a social role. Atwood also picks apart a lot of the romance and glamour that surrounds writing, and asks how we have built such a strong culture and mythos around the practise of putting words on a page to make a story. Atwood's writing is wonderfully entertaining, and it is so clear that even while she casts a sceptical eye over the idea of the romantic genius, and pokes fun at the writer's endless self-pathologising, she loves the craft and has a great affection for those who take to it. 

All three of these texts are great reads, and I highly recommend them to anybody curious about, or committed to, the practice of story telling.

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