Better: On the Delusions of Writing Advice
—Alice Allan
I’m the kind of poet who has occasional bouts of competence. This makes me the kind of poet who drifts, whenever I’m in a bookstore, over to the shelf that should be labeled “Imagine if These Books Worked”. Here, I pick up yet another title promising to explain the mechanism that produces great writing. “I can fix you,” these books seem to purr. “I can make your poems better. I can make you better.”
Having fallen for this many times over, I’ve accumulated a small library of advice-givers: Annie Lamott (Bird by Bird), Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones), Twyla Tharp (The Creative Habit), Stephen King (On Writing), Haruki Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running), Annie Dillard (The Writing Life), and my newest, Eileen Myles (For Now).
Lamott wants us to be brave enough to write the “shitty first draft”. Goldberg wants our honesty. Tharp wants us to stick to a routine at all costs. King wants to tell us about all that cocaine. Murakami wants us to think he’s talking about writing when he talks about running, but it turns out he is actually talking about running. Dillard wants to brag about the time she went flying with a stunt pilot. Myles wants to talk about New York.
Myles’ For Now, sold as “a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists,” is probably the most honest of the collection in that it’s focused not on how to write, but on the conditions that support the act of writing. Short, strange, and occasionally brilliant, it’s essentially a record of the real estate complications Myles faces while attempting to hold onto a rent-controlled apartment on the Lower East Side, despite spending much of the year at a half-renovated property in Marfa. I’ve always wanted to emulate that laconic Myles tone—funny, faintly jaundiced, shruggingly confessional. Having read For Now, I understand what I actually need: right place, right time, right personality, right economic environment. Basically, I need New York City circa 1975.
I’ve also collected a few instruction manuals. In a Tasmanian vintage shop, I dug up the once-famous Australian poet James McAuley’s monograph A Primer of English Versification. Getting through it requires navigating sentences like this: “Stress in this discussion is the natural degree of speech emphasis; accent is a metrical value assigned to one and only one syllable in a foot.” McAuley isn’t the friendliest instructor. Still, this happens to be one of the few books recommended by Timothy Steele, whose All The Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification remains one of the only modern books on craft worth owning. It’s great to learn the rules. Still, the rules won’t make me great.
It’s not that I’ve learned nothing. I can get a shitty first draft together with minimal thrashing about, and I’m excellent at meta-fiddling with my routine in place of actually putting down words. But above all, what I’ve learned is this: every piece of writing advice is helplessly idiosyncratic. To pull together a book on how to write, a writer gathers up her limited experience, personal preferences, weird habits, brutal work-arounds, and wisest-sounding stories, then presents all this as broadly applicable. The result both distracts and soothes, much like the miasma of a scented candle.
Even when these books offer something useful, you and I both know that the most delicious thing to do with advice, especially good advice, is to ignore it. Horace knew this, which is why his “Ars Poetica”—the original advice listicle—ends with a vitriolic tantrum. He knows his genius can’t be taught. He also knows that if it could, no one would listen to his teachings. So, he compares us all to leeches.
I keep the advice of a slightly gentler poet above my desk. This quote from Jane Kenyon has been staring down at me for over a decade:
Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time.
Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read
good books, have good sentences in your ears.
Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the
phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
Having rolled out of bed for a 6am Zoom meeting that leads into three hours of email-and-scroll, I will sometimes glance at this, just to feel the familiar sting of having failed. Occasionally, I will remember that Kenyon is giving herself advice, probably because her days were disorganized and she spent too much time on the phone to her friends.
If you think asking individual writers for their advice produces better results, I have bad news. When I interview poets for my podcast, I’ve found the quickest way to kill the conversation is to ask guests how they wrote certain of their poems. They get cagey, as if I’m asking about the accuracy of their income tax deductions or how often they have sex. 130-plus interviews in, I’ve come to believe most poets don’t really know how they write. It seems most of us mash on our keyboards until something sounds good, then try not to mess with that part.
I have had good teachers. Patient, attentive poets who covered my drafts in thoughtful, thought-provoking notes. They taught me how to revise, refine, and discard. But as every teacher post-Horace has realized, no one can take an intermittently competent poet and give her greatness. My best teachers admitted this. They simply said—to paraphrase poet and fellow podcaster Matthew Buckley Smith—“here are some things you could try.”
Write what you know. Find your voice. Ignore your inner critic. Kill your darlings. If advice was all we needed, my library would’ve made me brilliant, a single wedding speech would keep a couple married forever, and life coaches would’ve coached themselves out of existence. Mostly, advice is an ego-trip for the giver, and a pacifier for the receiver. But imagine—imagine if any of it actually worked.
