Blog
The Best Writing Advice We've Received
by Writing Workshops Staff
5 months ago
A truth that runs through all writing advice is that success is a lagging indicator, and it certainly holds true for your writing practice.
In Discipline is Destiny, Ryan Holiday writes, "Writing is a byproduct of hours and hours of reading, researching, thinking, making my notecards. When a day’s writing goes well, it’s got little to do with that day at all. It’s actually a lagging indicator of hours and hours spent researching and thinking. Every passage and page has a prologue titled preparation."
In our Meet the Teaching Artist blog series, our instructors often tell us the best writing advice they've received, and we've included a few of them below to help inspire you as you face the blank page heading into another new year with goals, dreams, and obsessions on your mind:
"Maggie Nelson, a mentor of mine, said to follow your obsessions. I've never forgotten that advice." -Amanda Mondei, teaching Beyond Memoir
"Just do a little. This is a fundamental truth of the writing craft. It's very easy to get daunted for a variety of reasons, and often, the best way to keep going is just to agree to work on something for ten minutes--motivation follows action, and once you start, suddenly you find you've been at it for half an hour, an hour, two hours." -Emma Brodie, teaching The Art of the Query
"You could be writing when you go for a walk, talk to a neighbor, or do the dishes. This taught me to pay attention and to take in the rich world ceaselessly unfolding around me." -Pingmei Lan, teaching Writing the Magical, Cultural and Mythical
"In a workshop once, the poet Matthew Dickman told the class that art should involve wrestling with an idea or experience. If you're feeling like you can't make progress with something you're working on, ask yourself if you still have something to learn from it. If you've learned what you need to learn, it might be time to move on to something new. I think this has stuck with me because it has helped me put my writing life into perspective. Not everything we write is for somebody else. Sometimes the work we're doing is simply to take us from one place to the next." -Sarah Carson, teaching Write 30 Poems in 30 Days
"Write for yourself. When I am concerned with audience or what my family might think of me for writing something, the most essential part of writing often gets lost--what do I need to say? What does the poem most need me to do for it? I wrote all of my books this way, not concerning myself too much with whether they would ever be published. You may always consider audience in the revision stages if you choose." -Joan Kwon Glass, teaching Writing Poems on Grief, Loss & Recovery
"Definitely Toni Morrison's classic advice: 'If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.' Without exaggeration, this idea has guided all my current projects, perhaps because it illuminates the intimate relationship between being a writer and being a reader. Beyond an unbridled quest for originality, Morrison invites us to seek out an audience that may share our interest in a certain type of literature, a type of literature either neglected today or yet to come. Even if that audience turns out to be small, that's enough for me." -Eraldo Souza dos Santos, teaching Experiments with Autobiographical Writing
"When I was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Frank Conroy, author of the groundbreaking memoir Stop-Time, used to always tell us not to be afraid of writing badly, because it's the bad writing that leads to the good writing. I try to remember this every time I sit down at the desk: bad writing is the seed of good writing. All writing leads us forward." -Robert Anthony Siegel, leading The Storytelling Lab
"I may be a writer, but I'm not a romantic. In fact, my approach to writing is so practical it's essentially gritty, and I believe James Baldwin was on point when he said, 'Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.' This advice stuck with me because, in my experience, it's the only verifiable truth about this whole thing. I grew up in a conservative family in an obscure town in India, with no books in our house except my textbooks and the Hindu scriptures. I went to college for engineering. I write slowly. I have infinite self-doubt. And although I never thought I'd get anywhere as a writer, I never stopped writing either." -Kritika Pandey, teaching Writing the Dark, the Funny, and the Darkly Funny
"During my 2020 Tin House Winter Workshop with Ted Chiang, (I’m paraphrasing what he said, apologies for my ineloquence!), he talked about having patience and taking the time to polish your writing because “How long do you want to spend on creating something that will last forever?” What do you win when you publish first—and in what context will you ever be first? Having undergone health issues over the past two years, I realized that writing to me is breathing. I can’t stop thinking about it when I’m not writing or doing it when I’m supposed to concentrate on something else. It makes me happy. In tandem to that quote, RM, the leader of the Korean boy band, BTS, once said in concert, “Happiness is not something that you have to achieve. You can still be happy in the process of achieving something.” I think both these nuggets have strengthened my commitment to craft and my process. I’ll publish when I publish. I have no control over how it's received. What I do have control over is how to be my best creative self." -Ploi Pirapokin, teaching Writing Fantastical Characters
"When I was in graduate school, I had a professor, Brenda Wineapple, who encouraged us to take the material we had and put it in a narrative structure that we usually looked down upon. I took my material and put it into a collage of short snippets. Prior to this, I had always thought the collage-snippet structure was annoying/pretentious. But that exercise led to a huge breakthrough in my writing, and allowed me to find the right structure for my first book." -Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, teaching Writing About Work
"I'm obsessed with the 2016 "Haunted Elevator" sketch from SNL (fans will know it as the birth of David S. Pumpkins). You've got Kenan Thompson playing an elevator operator in a building that advertises "100 floors of frights," and the elevator passengers clearly aren't super impressed with the frights. At one point he's like, "It's 100 floors of frights—they're not all gonna be winners." I think about that all the time. To drill down into one good idea, you might have to navigate 100 floors of mediocre ideas first. Better get going!" -Lillian Stone, teaching Creativity When Life Gets in the Way
"Louis L’Amour said, “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” This is so true! It's really hard to get into that chair and get started, but nothing will happen until you do. I often set a timer for an hour and promise myself I can stop after that if the writing is not coming, and that gets me into the chair. And once I am there, it starts to flow." -Kathy MacMillan, Mentoring Picture Book Writers
"Write what you know. Write in your voice. There’s only one of you. Everyone else is taken! Your best writing will come when you let yourself be you. Readers want authenticity. Once you stop trying to write the way you think you’re supposed to and let yourself write what you know, you’ll find that writing just might even become easier." -Julia Spiro, teaching Book to Film Adaptation
"I don't think I've ever been explicitly told this but it's something I learned as a student and through cultivating my own practice and that is to attack the page. Write as much as you can, expecting that 90% is not going to be used but that you have to write it to get to your best thoughts. This concept makes up the bulk of my writing practice. I learned this through getting rung out as a graduate student and by being honest with myself as a writer, and learning to be my own critic while embracing a wildness in my writing practice." -Leslie Contreras Schwartz, teaching Using Lyrical Language
"Try as hard as you can not to compare yourself with other writers and their success. We are all on our own journeys, and I believe in supporting one another. Any distraction is time away from writing and focusing on your goals. The longer I'm in this writing world, the more the same lessons come back to slap me in the face. Your words and your writing are unique to you. The world will always have room for you." -Hillary Leftwich, teaching A Ritual in Writing Resilience
"Two things: 1) write as if you are talking with a close friend, and 2) write toward the difficulty. For the first, I find if I imagine myself on a walk with a buddy, it becomes very easy to pour out a first draft. Sometimes, I'll even go so far as to draft a piece as if it were a letter to someone I think would be interested. For the second, I find writing toward the difficulty useful for pushing through difficult places without over-simplifying or shying away. To write toward the difficulty I try to explain why I'm feeling stuck, and what questions I have about what comes next. Sometimes these attempts to write toward the difficulty get erased in subsequent drafts. Sometimes they open out into important passages that up the stakes of whatever I'm writing. If I do these two things it's almost impossible to have writer's block. This advice sticks with me because I practice it myself, and I say it over and over again to my students." -Jack Christian, teaching Writing Flash Nonfiction
"A writing professor once told me that “a novel is just a series of scenes.” That always helped me to not be so intimidated by starting (and inevitably finishing) writing a novel or longer work. You can think about most books like a movie storyboard: each chapter/section/scene is visible and engaging and flows into the next. You want readers to be able “watch” what’s happening on the page, and as a writer, you have to think about how each scene interacts with the others. Oh god, writing is so fun and so awful and daunting and wonderful all at the same time." -Michelle Kicherer, teaching Writing Humor, Gross Stuff & Weird Things That Are Meaningful
