Thank you to Kate Belew for asking me to offer some writing advice to the young writers she is teaching at Interlochen this summer. Kate’s own writing advice often nudges me out of a rut. Her book Word Witch is a fantastic writer’s companion that I have turned to often since it came out!
Writing Advice for Young Writers
The best writing advice is to read. Read as much as possible. And read omnivorously. Literature. Mystery. Paperbacks. Substacks. Fan fiction. Romantic fantasy. Non-fiction. Memoirs. Biography. Scientific papers. Manga. Self-help. Follow your curiosities. Flip to the back of a book and read the acknowledgements and bibliography and find breadcrumbs to follow to your next author, your next book. Becoming a writer is learning slowly what, for you, constitutes good writing. When I say good I do not mean some highly polished and well applauded spare piece of literary fiction. What narratives compel you? What is good is what is delicious, what you want to eat. What you want to keep ordering off the menu. What sentences halt your breath, stain phosphines into your retina that remain long after you have read the final page? What stays with you? Like learning a sport or a physical craft, much of learning how to write is mystical and sub-perceptual: a slowly strengthened muscle memory and sonic intuition for that hard to define confluence of rhythmicity, texture, and theme that creates the roaring current of a propulsive book. Or the spiderweb strung with dew indefinable scaffolding of an effective poem.
Then, when you have read widely, you must also imitate and symbiotically fuse genres and styles. You must make mistakes. It is through this messy interplay of reading and writing in response to other authors that we can begin to pick out one voice among the polyphony: our own voice. It may arise from mentors and favorite poets and musicians. It may be tinged and inflected with birdsong and the echoes that live in limestone-sculpted landscapes. But it will be yours because when you close all the books at the end of a day of reading, it will be the one still singing.
As I continue my series Confessions of a Romantic Animist, I’m offering a Part II of my Reading List for paid subscribers! Upcoming essays will feature Trojan Horses, Troubadours, Love Potions, Romeo and Juliet, writing the character of Yeshua in The Madonna Secret, and the Song of Songs.
Romantic Animist Reading List Part 2
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