Good Writing Requires an Apprenticeship

You'll begin with writing bad stuff in order to learn how to write the good.

I’m in the process of completing a novel and am in a reflective mood.

Bear with me.

My favorite definition of a writer is old and simple: a writer is a person who writes. Not someone who thinks about writing or dresses like a writer or talks about writing, but someone who actually writes.

Given that, the old “write a page a day” ground rule is sound guidance. Follow it for most of a year and you’ll have something resembling a book. It will require polishing, but that’s usually easier than filling up a blank page.

Since writing is a solitary job, it requires a sizable amount of self-discipline. If you think that Hunter S. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas while strung out on drugs and alcohol, then you’ve bought into the fantasy of writing; the idea that brilliance just flows without self-discipline and effort.

Linked with that is a good rule about grammar: Eat technique, i.e. absorb and digest the grammatical boundaries. Know the rules so thoroughly that you don’t need to look them up. Get to where you can glance at a page and know what works and what doesn’t.

The tricky point is where you have to apply experience and technique in a way that’s effective and in a territory where there’s a lot of question marks applied to the rules.

For example, creative writing students are told to “show, don’t tell” and yet there are plenty of stories where telling worked out just fine.

Mystery and thriller writers are encouraged to “give the third paragraph first.” In other works, drop the chronological approach and plunge the reader right into the story. As much as I like that, I can also find novels where some initial background set the mood and improved the flow.

Mention a collection of great writers such as Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Olivia Manning, Mark Twain, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Saul Bellow and you will find huge, Grand Canyon-sized gaps between their styles.

As William Faulkner once advised a young woman who asked him for advice on her novel: “It’s whatever works for you.”

But recognize that the best writing involves re-writing. The first draft is usually bad and it gets you into the process of polishing, cutting, and supplementing draft after draft and that’s crucial to creating something readable.

Only when you commit to that, and do it time after time, can you become a writer.

Writing is more of a craft than a profession. You learn by doing.

Before you are a Writer, you are a Re-Writer.