On Writing

Thoughts on the process

The method for how you write is not that important. What’s important is having a point of view and doing the work.

I sit down every day, whether I’m feeling it or not, and write something down.

I see people talk about the apps they use to track their notes, methods for organization, strategies for productivity, tracking their habits and so on.  

But my writing process is haphazard and scattered.

I have a cork board with a bunch of index cards full of scribblings and bullet points.

When I’m on the go and ideas come to mind, I’ll tap them or dictate them onto a simple note-taking app.

---

Sometimes inspiration strikes me at random, and I will sit down and begin writing.

This is rare.

My typical schedule is that I block off some time for writing. I often begin with some vague idea of what I’ll write. Other times I have no idea at all.

I’ll scan my index cards and notes to see if anything strikes me. Often I’ll see that I wrote something stupid and cross it off the list. Sometimes none of my ideas seem interesting. But typically one idea will jump out at me.

Then I begin typing. In the process, other concepts spring to mind. I’ll remember a study I read about the topic, and a book excerpt about something related. Maybe an example will come to mind from my life and I’ll figure out where to include it.

Which reminds me of a paper on creativity.

The authors describe two routes to creativity.

• Insight; the effortless and unexpected production of creative ideas

• Persistence, which involves effortful brainstorming for creative ideas

People have an insight bias. We tend to associate creativity with insight, and underestimate the role of persistence in generating creative ideas.

In general, the creative process is way too romanticized. We hear about Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Orwell sipping coffee, puffing on their their tobacco pipe while writing in Paris or whatever. You never hear about someone wearing gym shorts in their crappy apartment in Van Nuys drafting a bunch of bad ideas and coming up with the occasional good one. I also dislike when writers (it’s usually writers but sometimes musicians or other creatives) say things like, “This is the only thing I’ve ever been good at.” It perpetuates the view that writing is a gift rather than something that must be worked at constantly. Yes, you need some bare minimum level of ability to be a good writer, but not as much as you might think. It also implies that the writer can only do things he or she is “good at.” Most people aren’t working jobs which demand some unique talent. Yes, you are fortunate to make a living writing. But if you couldn’t, it’s not as if you’d be forever jobless. You’d figure it out and wait tables or paint parking lots or file documents like everyone else. You’re not that special.

Occasionally I’ll have writer’s block.

I’ve dealt with it in a couple of different ways. One is to read a few pages from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. When I was working on my book, I relied a lot on Pressfield’s book for motivation.

Another way is to assume nobody was going to read what I write anyway. Which is true. Nobody reads my first drafts except me.

I adhere to Stephen King’s principle from his book On Writing.

First, write with the door closed. Which means this draft is just for me. After the draft is done I’ll edit with the door open. Which means to be kind to the reader, and amend the writing to convey the ideas as clearly and concisely as possible.

The novelist Jennifer Egan says, “You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly. You can’t write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”

After I get my first draft down, I’ll wait a day or so and read it again. And again.

Ernest Hemingway: “You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit…Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it.”

I’ll make a few edits, change a few things, and write a bit more. Sometimes I’ll send the draft to my girlfriend who proofreads it. It’s probably obvious when I skip this part. Inevitably there are more typos and grammatical errors on those weeks. Letting go of the fear of judgment and assuming nobody is going to read it anyway. That helped me a lot.

---

Here are a few good articles and quotes on writing that I have found useful.

The Last Psychiatrist:

“Every creative idea is a dialogue between you and yourself (masturbation); every creative act is a dialogue between you and reality (sex)… It's evident I am not a writer; but each post takes me hours to write, over days.  I revise constantly, and still the result is-- well, this.    However, at some point I have to overcome my strong wish to revise again (and again and again) and hit submit.  First, even though every revision takes the same amount of time, the improvement from subsequent revisions quickly plateaus.  Second, unless I hit submit, none of the revisions do anyone any good at all. I have to decide that it's finished.  Read again: it isn't actually finished, I have to decide it's finished. Creative acts require a decision to terminate.”

A good draft is finished. A great draft is published. A perfect draft is neither.

Done beats perfect.

James Baldwin:

“Writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway...Rewriting is very painful...You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book you get.”

Before I began, I anticipated writing my book would be hard. But it was even more difficult than I expected. In fact, if I’d known in advance what it was going to be like, I don’t think I would have done it. So in a way, I’m glad I didn’t have that knowledge in advance.

Ann Packer:

“Forget about being a Writer. Follow the impulse to write. Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb).”

Apparently, there is a trope about anxiety surrounding the identity of being a “writer.” I never had this. Maybe because I grew up far removed from literary culture and spent my formative years visiting libraries and choosing for myself what to read rather than being told what is supposedly good or bad.

Freddie deBoer:

“You are attempting to enter a market at a time when there has never, ever been more conformity and less breadth of ideas…it’s not hard to see why many writers can’t get off the landing pad: they’re all saying the exact same things.”

Power laws rule creative domains. But this is even more true now. If a bunch of people all parrot the same opinions, then of course those with larger followings or occupy perches at legacy media outlets are going to get more attention. One obvious solution is to say what’s on your mind rather than what’s on everyone else’s mind.

Scott Adams:

“Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, ‘He was very happy’ when you can write ‘He was happy.’ You think the word ‘very’ adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.”

Adams also has a useful video with more tips about how to write well here. Relatedly, back when I first began writing for a general audience, I used the Hemingway App to help with clarity.

Relatedly, Francine Prose:

“I have never heard a student use, in conversation, the words attire, surmise, and deem...It's remarkable how rapidly students’ writing improves when they feel liberated from the burden of forcing their ideas through the narrow channel of ‘thus we see.’”

I assume you are smart, busy, tired, distracted, and have a million other things competing for your attention. So I try to communicate my thoughts in a way that can be understood without you having to read a sentence multiple times to understand its meaning.

I’m not trying to impress readers with fancy language. In fact, I’d prefer if you didn’t notice you were reading at all.

George Orwell:

“I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.”

If selfishness is what made George Orwell write Animal Farm (which I re-read every 3 years or so), then I’m okay with that. 

Relatedly, Scott Alexander suggested that most memoirists are narcissists, and he’s probably not entirely wrong:

Still, I promise you won't find any passages resembling this stuff about sunbathing and trips to Whole Foods in my book. Maybe thoughts about generic Walmart-brand cookies and varieties of Pop-Tarts, but that's about it.

Another Orwell quote I dwelled on a lot when I was writing my book:

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

Similarly, the economist and memoirist Glenn Loury has stated:

“How does the [memoirist] earn the readers’ trust when the writer is reporting on himself? The only way is by disclosing discrediting information. The writer’s got to put blood on it. You have to say things that are ugly about yourself for the reader to take you seriously.”

This idea plagued me. In the end, my basic rule was that any memory from my life that made me look good had to be seriously examined; I’d only keep it in if it was related to a point I was trying to make. If a story made me look bad, though, I would err on the side of retaining it. One example: I tell a story in the book where I nearly drowned in one of the foster homes because I didn’t know how to swim. I relay another memory where I pulled a drowning girl (my sister’s friend) out of a swimming pool a couple years later. There was no reason to keep that in, other than to pat myself on the back (though I did add that the reason I could tell, in the distance, that she was drowning was because I’d drowned and recognized that type of treading water bodily movement). So I left it on the cutting room floor. Memoir largely involves cramming your reality into the vocabulary you know. There are ways to integrate those two things into something gripping, something that grabs the reader. One of the many core challenges of the genre.

Adam Phillips:

“Of course, I had no idea how to write a book…I thought, what you do is, you do all the research, which I did, and then you take a month off and you write the book. So I took a month off work, and for literally three and a half weeks, I did nothing…it was exactly like the way writers talk about writing—which is a feeling that I really wanted to do something and had a lot to say and I was a blank. It was as though there was nothing inside me…at a certain point, something literally got me to the typewriter, and I started typing. It just never stopped. It had a grip on me.”

I signed my book contract and then for three months I didn’t write a single word. The task was too daunting—how the fuck am I going to write 80,000 words about my life. I’m 30 years old. Then I finally sat down. Opened a blank document. Words began pouring out of me.

It was not unlike what David Chase said about his experience writing “The Sopranos”:

“Invariably what would happen is I would get up, go off by myself…just put my story hat on. And this is not a natural thing for me. I don’t like math. I don’t like puzzles. At all. Story work to me is like that: it’s figuring out this puzzle…I would just sort of like suddenly—this idea, that idea…This goes like this, like that, like this…I don’t know how it works, but it would happen.”

I am not a storytelling genius like Chase so the process for me took a lot longer. I’d write a bunch of vignettes from my life. It was rough. It was scattered and chaotic. Sometimes I’d wake up at 3am because a long-dormant memory would resurface. I’d dash to my computer and start typing before it faded away. Gradually, I structured the chapters and beats in a way that I was happy with. Or at least not unhappy with. The book was always on my mind, even when I wasn’t consciously aware of it.

The same goes for this newsletter.

I read a lot of biographies and memoirs when I was a kid, and, though I was unaware of it at the time, they did help sustain me. A quote from C.S. Lewis, at the end of the last book he wrote:

“Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own. They may be beautiful, terrible, awe-inspiring, exhilarating, pathetic, comic, or merely piquant. Literature gives the entree to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life, seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense, but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. My own eyes are not enough for me. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me ... Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog... . In reading good literature, I become a thousand men, and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in a Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

I would never call my book literature, but naturally, I hope it has the same expansive effect on other people that books have had on me.

There are writers I like in part because of what I know about their background and how it informs their perspective. My ideas and the way I express them have been shaped by my experiences. Which I suppose is one reason why people read my stuff. When I was a forsaken kid living in foster homes trying to teach myself how to read a book, I never would have guessed someday I’d write one.

Please preorder my forthcoming book, out on February 20.

It’s out next week, but as an author, pre-orders can make or break a book. Preorders are how the booksellers, reviewers, and publishers judge interest in a title. If you’re sure you want to get it, please don’t wait! Thank you.

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors