i often get asked how to become a better writer. i wish i could give a useful answer to this question, because it seems to me that a lot of advice is so apparent as to go unsaid. of course you need to read a lot if you want to write a lot, and you need to read the kinds of things you intend to write, and you need to know all the rules of a language you’d like to break and rearrange. the scarier thing, i think, is to recommend a course of action which goes unmentioned by a lot of tentative writers, but which is maybe the best kind of advice you could give. at least—in my opinion—but i’m going to take a guess and say if you are reading my substack you probably think my opinion has at least a little value, and if you don’t you aren’t going to get to the end of this paragraph anyway.
there’s a stereotype that the best type of writer is a hermitic observer of the human condition, and like a lot of advice about writing i think it’s more or less true. if you’re a good people watcher at some point you’ll end up with something serious to say about them, but i couldn’t tell you, because none of my good writing is inspired by any attempts to be a hermit. this is because i think being a person who’s cut off from the world is not a useful way to begin writing about the world, whatever your nihilistic literature friends who have missed the point of dostoyevsky would like to believe. i think if you want to be a writer, you have to want to live: to stumble down drunken city streets and stare into the recesses of puddles that look like oceans, to watch the sun rise out the window of the train to work every morning, to trust the wrong person and say the wrong thing and kiss the wrong guy and go home and squirrel away anything you can think of to say about it.
then edit it, and edit it again, and edit it until it no longer resembles the original thing you wrote but rather something new and eminently clever that nevertheless encapsulates what you felt originally, which after all is the first and best impetus to write.
your version of living might not look the same as mine. in fact, i hope it doesn’t look exactly the same as mine, because then we’d start rambling on about the same thing and hopefully we could do it in different enough ways that people would bother with reading us both, but i’d rather not be in competition with you, i’d rather you live your life in a way that feels right for you and i’ll carry on with this one, which has grown to treat me better than i could have imagined. yes i’ve been grief-stricken and bed-ridden and a lot of those experiences that make for great poetry haven’t exactly made for great living, but i’ve gotten up and i’ve gone on and i’ve written about it. you live and then you write about it and then you do more living so you can do more writing and you live a little harder and you write to cope with the toll the living has taken on you and… oh, bother, where was i going with this?
ah, yes. i was wondering what the hell anyone ever got out of writing except the means and method by which to continue living. i was wondering whether, even without the poetry, whether i would have chosen to do all those wrong things. and i guess that’s the undercurrent of poison this advice carries on its back, like what if you start living and then you realize it wasn’t worth the metaphors you got out of it? and to that i say, to your wonderings and mine, that even if you don’t get anything good out of it it’s worth it to be an active participant in the world and not just a traveller passing through. it’s good to feel like you have a stake in your own life.
and it doesn’t necessarily have to go wrong for you to write well about it. i think when i’m feeling particularly enamoured with the world that the love of my life is going to be the person i can dash off endless poems about even while i’m not in the throes of grief, which is what youth and the misappropriated story of vincent van gogh has taught me makes good art.
i think a lot of things and i hope that, one day, i’ll only occasionally remember to write them down.