How to Write_ A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic.pdf

7/25/2019 How to Write_ A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic.pdf

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19/12/13 How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini , and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic

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Conservatives,

Liberals, and

Polygamy

By Conor

Friedersdorf

Midwives for the

Dying

By Richard

Gunderman

I Am a Teacher

With Really Bad

Handwriting

By Andrew Simmons

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JOE FASSLER DEC 17 2013, 3:37 PM ET

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This year, I talked to nearly 50 different writers for the By Heartseries, a

weekly column about beloved quotes and cherished lines. Each author shared the

life-changing, values-shaping passages that have helped sustain creative practice

throughout his or her career. T heir contributions were eclectic and intensely

personal: Jim Crace, whose novelHarvestwas a finalist for the Man Booker prize

this year, shared a folk rhyme from his childhood, the investigativeNew Y ork

Timesjournalist Michael Moss (Salt, Sugar, Fat) close-read the Frito-Lay

slogan, and This American Life host Ira Glass eulogized a longtime friend and

collaborator. Though I began by asking each writer the same questionwhat line

is most important to y ou?their responses contained no formula.

There was also no specific requirement to talk about

craft. And yet writersbeing writersoffered agenerous bounty of practical writing advice. T hey

shared exercises. They discussed principles of

revision. Some presented ways to beat

procrastination, or fight back against wr iting-desk

ennui. And a great many shared their thoughts on

How to Write: AYear inAdvice fromFranzen,King, Hosseini, and MoreHighlights from 12 months of interviews with writers about their craft and the authors they love

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2/13



An AtlanticSpecial Report

Read More

Elena Seibert

the most crucial craft question of all: Why does

some writing feel dead on the page, while other

words thrum with life?

Taken together, these conversations were like attending an MFA programI

learned that much. Here are the best short pieces of writing advice I heard from

writers in 2013, a whole years worth of wisdom.

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite

Runnerand this yearsAnd the MountainsEchoed, reminded us that we can only

approximate the book we want to writethe

final product will never capture the

excitement of initial inspiration. His tribute to

Stephen King explained how he deals with that

familiar disappointment.

You write because y ou have an idea in your

mind that feels so genuine, so important, so

true. And yet, by the time this idea passes

through the different filters of your mind,

and into your hand, and onto the page orcomputer screenit becomes distorted, and

it's been diminished. The writing you end up with is an approximation, if

you're lucky, of whatever it was you really wanted to say.

When this happens, it's quite a sobering reminder of your limitations as a

writer. It can be extremely frustrating. When I'm writing, a thought will

occasionally pass unblemished, unperturbed, through my head onto the

screenclearly, like through a glass. It's an intoxicating, euphoric sensation

to feel that I've communicated something so real, and so true. But this

doesn't happen often. (I can only think that there are some writers who

write that way all the time. I think that's the difference between greatness

and just being good.)

Even my finished books are approximations of what I intended to do. I try to

narrow the gap, as much as I possibly can, between what I wanted to say

and what's actually on the page. But there's still a gap, there always is. It's

very, v ery difficult. And it's humbling.

But that's what art is forfor both reader and writer to overcome their

respective limitations and encounter something true. It seems miraculous,

doesn't it? That somebody can articulate something clearly and beautifully

that ex ists inside y ou, something shrouded in impenetrable fog. Great art

reaches through the fog, towards this secret heartand it shows it to you,

holds it before you. It's a rev elatory, incredibly moving experience when this

happens. You feel understood. You feel heard. That's why we come to artwe feel less alone. We are less alone. You see, through art, that others have

felt the way you haveand you feel better.

Jim Shepard, author ofLove and Hydrogen,

argued against the conventional literary

wisdom that has prevailed since Joyce: that

short stories should be structured around a

life-changing epiphany. In his reading of

Flannery O Connors classic story A Good

Man Is Hard to Find, suggests moments of

insight dont lastand knowing this is key to

crafting realistic characters.

O'Connor really believes that we can flood,

momentarily, with the kind of grace that

epiphany is supposed to represent. But I

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3/13



Random House

Tracy Chevalier

think she also believes that we're essentially

sinners. She's saying: Don't think for a

moment that because y ou've had a brief instant of illumination, and you

suddenly see y ourself with clarity, that y ou're not going to transgress two

days down the road.

I find this idea enormously useful in my own work. My characters are all

about gaining an understanding of the right thing to doand avoiding it

anyway. T hat sense that we can be in some ways geniuses of our own self-

destruction runs, in some ways, counter to the more traditional notion of the

epiphanywhich tells us that stories are all about providing information to

characters who badly need it. Epiphanies are, in some ways, staged and

underimportant.

Tracy Chevalier, author of The Girl With

the Pearl Earring, praised the minimalist

designer Mies van der Roheand his famous

mandate Less is more. She shared how she

trims the narrative fat, and why concision

matters.

Taking away concentrates what's left.Restraint is powerful. In Girl With a Pearl

Earring, the two main characters touch just

twicea hand, an earbut readers tell me

those are some of the most erotic moments

they've read. In my new novel, The Last

Runaway, the heroine is a Quaker and says

little, in keeping with the tradition of silence at Quaker meetings. Through

the drafts I kept cutting her lines, so that now when Honor Bright speaks,

you notice.

By using fewer words, I am also giving readers the chance to fill the gaps

with their own. "Less is more" encourages collaboration, which is what a

book should bea contract between writer and reader.

Chevalier also showed us this process at work:

1 I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside

the Justice System

2 When Minority Students Attend Elite Private

Schools

3 How to Write: A Year in Advice from

Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More

4 Anxiety About Certain Things Can Be

Hereditary

5 Experts Decisive Against Multivitamins:

'Stop Wasting Money'

6 The Strange Politics of Polygamy

7 NORAD Tracks Santa's Path on Christmas

Eve Because of a Typo

8 Why C.S. Lewis Never Goes Out of Style

9 This Chart Blows Up the Myth of the Welfare

Queen

10 The Great American Gender Debates of 2013

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4/13



Fay Weldon

Ed Kashi

Fay Weldon acknowledged that, on a day-

to-day level, writing can seem like pointless

drudgery. She describedhow Camuss

aphorism One must imagine Sisyphus happy

helps her fight back against unproductive

feelings of meaninglessness.

If we consider, like Camus, Sisyphus at the

foot of his mountain, we can see that he is

smiling. He is content in his task of defyingthe Gods, the journey more important than

the goal. To achieve a beginning, a middle,

an end, a meaning to the chaos of creationthat's more than any deity

seems to manage: But it's what writers do. So I tidy the desk, ev en polish it

up a bit, stick some flowers in a vase and start.

As I begin a novel I remind myself as ever of Camus's admonition that the

purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. And even

while thinking, well, fat chance! I find courage, reach for the heights, and if

the rock keeps rolling down again so it does. What the hell, start again.

Rewrite. Be of good cheer. Smile on, Sisyphus!

For Mohsin Hamid, author ofHow to Get

Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, physical exercise

helped break through writers block. Following

the counsel of literary ultra-marathoner

Haruki Murakami, Hamid foundthat long,

daily walks made him more creative.

I needed to get unstuck. And, nearing the

age of 40, I'd already used up many of the

usual tricks writers before me had

employed to shake things up when they

were in a rut: trav el chemically, break your

heart, change continents, get married, have

a child, quit your job, etc. I was desperate.

So I started to walk. Every morning. First thing, as soon as I got up, which as

a dad now meant 6 or 7 a.m. I walked for half an hour. Then I walked for an

hour. Then I walked for 90 minutes

Murakami's quote is about writing long novels. I write short novels. So it

made sense that while he has to run to get fit enough to do what he has to do,

I could manage with just walking. And, the significant speed difference

notwithstanding, a daily five-mile walk turned out to be exactly what I

needed. My head cleared. My energy soared. My neck pains diminished.

Sometimes I texted myself ideas, sentences, entire paragraphs as I walked.Other t imes I just floated along, arms at my sides, stewing and filtering and

looking.

Walking unlocked me. It 's like LSD. Or a library. It does things to you. I

finished my novel in only two more y ears (for a total of six), walking every

day. And I don't plan on stopping. If the choice is between extended periods

of abject writing failure and prescription orthotics, I know which side my

man Murakami and I are on.

Michael Pollan advocatedgett ing ones hands dirty. For him, the act of

starting a garden helped him develop the questions he never could have posed

abstractlythrough gardening and the work of Wendell Berry, he uncovered his

subject and approach.

I'd learned a set of values from Thoreau in the library, but it was only when

I tested themin the crucible of an actual garden with actual pests on an

actual patch of landthat I was able to form

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5/13



Alia Malley

Nina Subine

my values more fully.

It was in reading Wendell Berry that I came

across a particular line that formed a

template for much of my work: "eating is an

agricultural act." It 's a line that urges you to

connect the dots between two realmsthe

farm, and the platethat can seem very far

apart. We must link our eating, in other

words, to the way our food is grown. In a

way, all my writing about food has been

about connecting dots in the way Berry asks

of us. It's why, when I write about

something like the meat industry, I try to

trace the whole long chain: from your plate to the feedlot, and from there to

the corn field, and from there to the oil fields in the Middle East. Berry

reminds us that we're part of a food system, and we need to think about our

eating with this factand its implicationsin mind.

Ultimately, this revelation led to a change in my career. I was an editor at

Harper's, and I loved editing magazines. I didn't think it was ev er realistic

that I could make a living as a writer, but my editorial workhelping writers

with their prose, watching the process of revision, finding a narrative pathsthrough a complex subjectmade me increasingly curious to try it myself. I

didn't have a subject until I kind of hit on the garden by mistake. And by

engaging with my own agricultural struggle on a small scale, I became

reoriented: I learned a way of thinking and living that I didn't know before. I

wanted to write more and more about the agricultural and political realities I

am joined to by my eating.

Jessica Francis Kane has taken solace over

the y ears in the Stoic philosopher Marcus

Aurelius. His injunctionWhat is there in this

that is unbearable and bey ond

endurance?helps her rememberthat facing

the blank page is not so relatively painful, and

this helps her stop procrastinating.

Writing is hard, but is it unbearable? Who

would say that it is? Even asking the

question, I'm reminded of the one

exclamation in the passage: "You would be

ashamed to confess it!" His words helped me

navigate rejection, which is certainly no fun, but if you ask y ourself if it's

unbearable, you find yourself preparing the next self-addressed stamped

envelope pretty quickly. The words helped me survive the protracted sale of

my first novel, and they reminded me to start writing again after a long

hiatus after the birth of my first child. I wasn't sure how to make room for

writing with a baby. It is difficult, but beyond endurance? I got myself back

to the desk.

Stephen Kings classic craft memoir On Writingaddresses almost everything

the master storyteller knows. But one key topic is not covered in that book: how

to write a perfect opening sentence. King shared his thoughts, developed over

many y ears of writing, on how books should start and why beginnings matter.

A book won't stand or fall on the very first line of prose -- the story has got

to be there, and that's the real work. And yet a really good first line can do somuch to establish that crucial sense of voice -- it's the first thing that

acquaints you, that makes you eager, that starts to enlist y ou for the long

haul. So there's incredible power in it, when you say, come in here. You want

to know about this. And someone begins to listen.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/07/why-stephen-king-spends-months-and-even-years-writing-opening-sentences/278043/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/05/marcus-aureliuss-one-question-to-beat-procrastination-whining-and-struggle/276288/


6/13



Shane Leonard

Lauren Go ldenberg

Greg Martin

Paul Harding, author ofEnon, explained

how juxtaposition and contradiction underlie

great fictionand held up John Cheever as a

sterling example of this principle at work.

Contradiction is the essential move or

method for art. In music its counterpoint.

In landscape painting its the contrast

between the foreground, which is always

dark, and the background, which is light.And in writing, its death and life. The

imminent arrival of deathwhat greater

thing to set life in relief against? In Enon,

the whole thing is just a sonataits just one

voiceagainst the threat of utter darkness.

The darker it gets, when we arrives at just

one remaining pinpoint of light, that pinpoint

becomes all the more beautiful and

resplendent for its rarity and clarity against

the gloom. You put contradictory things

next to each other, and in the intermingling

of them you get something like the mysteryof human experience.

The same kind of principle works for

juxtapositionthe infinite with the

infinitesimal. This works in writing, when

you describe something on the scale of the

universe, and then describe something as

tiny as a grain of sand. So you could take a t iny, intimate domestic scene

someone drinking a cup of tea at a deskthat scalability, that intuitive

human truth that the great and the small, the good and the bad, the light and

the dark, are all intermingled.

The poles must be structured around the truly irreducible questions

mysteries you cant get to the bottom of. Otherwise, youre in danger of

explaining yourself away. Second-rate writing will tell you which pole to pick:

Be kind to strangers! T hen youre in the realm of propaganda or received

opinion or truisms. I think the definition of kitsch, or sentimentality, is

denying either pole in favor over the other. It goes back to what Cheevers

character, is attempting but failing, to dotrying to deny the dark part and

show only the light. But in the model, that conceptual model, no subject has

any meaning if its been separated from its opposite. I ts Einstein, its

relativity: Nothing has meaning without being relative to its opposite.

In the digital age, people are more seamlessly

connected than ever before. Jonathan

Franzen remindedus that fiction writers

must be singular. He ex plained why great

writing happens far from the cloud, the

crowd:

The I nternet is fabulous for a lot of things.

Its a fabulous research tool. Its great for

buying stuff, its great for bringing together

people to work on communal things, like

software, or people who share a passion or

are all suffering from the same disease and

want to find each other and communicate.

Its wonderful for that. But the Internet in

generaland social media in particular

fosters this notion that everything should be

shared, everything is communal. When it works, its great . But it specifically
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/jonathan-franzen-on-the-19th-century-writer-behind-his-internet-skepticism/280168/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/think-about-characters-like-a-sphere-how-john-cheever-wrote-inner-turmoil/279541/


7/13



Marion Ettlinger

doesnt work, I think, in the realm of cultural productionand particularly

literary production. Good novels arent written by committee. Good novels

arent collaborated on. Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily

isolate themselves, and go deep, and report from the depths on what they

find. They do put what they find in a form thats communally accessible,

communally shareable, but not at the production end. What makes a good

novel, apart from the skill of the writer, is how true it is to the individual

subjectivity. People talk about finding your v oice: Well, thats what it is.

Youre finding your own individual voice, not a group voice

And this is true, especially true, for anyone who aspires to write serious

fiction. When I first met Don DeLillo, he was making the case that if we ever

stop having fiction writers it will mean weve given up on the concept of the

individual person. We will only be a crowd. And so it seems to me that the

writers responsibility nowadays is very basic: to continue to try to be a

person, not merely a member of a crowd. (Of course, the place where the

crowd is forming now is largely electronic.) This is a primary assignment for

anyone setting up to be and remain a writer now. So even as I spend half my

day on the Internetdoing email, buying plane tickets, ordering stuff online,

looking at bird pictures, all of itI personally need to be careful to restrict

my access. I need to make sure I still have a private self. Because the private

self is where my writing comes from. The more Im pulled out of that, the

more I simply become another loudspeaker for what already exists. As a

writer, Im try ing to pay attention to the stuff the people arent paying

attention to. Im try ing to monitor my own soul as carefully as I can and find

ways to express what I find there.

Andre Dubus III made the case against

outlining. In his warning against

intellectualizing ones workDo not think,

dreamhe insistedthat fiction comes to life

when you stop trying to control it by working

towards an ending planned out in advance.

Were all born with an imagination.

Everybody gets one. And I really believe

this is just from years of daily writingthat

good fiction comes from the same place as

our dreams. I think the desire to step into

someone elses dream world, is a universal

impulse thats shared by us all. Thats what fiction is. As a writing teacher, if

I say nothing else to my students, its this.

I began to learn characters will come alive if you back the fuck off.

Heres the distinction. Theres a profound difference between making

something up and imagining it. Youre making something up when you thinkout a scene, when y oure being logical about it. You think, I need this to

happen so some other thing can happen. Theres an aspect of controlling the

material that I dont think is artful. I think it leads to contrived work,

frankly, no matter how beautifully written it might be. You can hear the false

note in this kind of writing.

This was my main problem when I was just starting out: I was trying to say

something. When I began to write, I was deeply self-conscious. I was writing

stories hoping they would say something thematic, or address something

that I was wrest ling with philosophically. I ve learned, for me at least, its a

dead road. Its writing from the outside in instead of the inside out.

But during my very early writing, certainly before Id published, I began to

learn characters will come alive if you back the fuck off. It was exciting, and

even a little terrifying. If you allow them to do what theyre going to do,

think and feel what they re going to think and feel, things start to happen on

their own. Its a beautiful and exciting alchemy. And all these years later,
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/the-case-for-writing-a-story-before-knowing-how-it-ends/280387/


8/13



Chase Jarvis

Aimee Bender

thats the thrill I write to get: to feel things start to happen on their own.

So Ive learned over the years to free-fall into whats happening. What

happens then is, you start writing something you dont even really want to

write about. Things start to happen under your pencil that you dont want to

happen, or dont understand. But thats when the work starts to have a

beating heart.

Sherman Alexie, author ofLone Ranger

and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, explained howwriters are kept captive by the things that

torment themin his case, it was his

upbringing on an Indian reservationbut in

our childhood prisons lie the seeds of

inspiration. He urged usto reclaim our

traumas and make great art.

We tend to revisit our prisons. And we

always go back. This is not only true for

reserv ation Indians, of course. I have white

friends who grew up very comfortably, but

who hate their families, and yet they goback everything Thanksgiving and Christmas. Every year, theyre ruined

until February. I m always telling them, You know, you dont have to go.

You can come to my house. Why are they addicted to being demeaned and

devalued by the people who are supposed to love them? So you can see the

broader applicability : Im in the suburb of my mind. Im in the farm town of

my mind. Im in the childhood bedroom of my mind.

I think ev ery writer stands in the doorway of their prison. Half in, half out.

The very act of storytelling is a return to the prison of what torments us and

keeps us captive, and writers are repeat offenders. You go through this

whole journey with your prison, revisiting it in your mind. Hopefully, you get

to a point when you realize there was beauty in your prison, too. Maybe,

when you get to that point, Im on the reserv ation of my mind can also be

a beautiful thing. Its on the rez, after all, where I learned to tell stories.

Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master,

saidthat the best writing is enigmaticshe

lets the music language guide her, rather than

traditional notions of plot, character, and

knowing where shes going.

The writing I tend to think of as good is

good because its mysterious. It tends to

happen when I get out of the way-when Ilet it go a little bit, I surprise myself. I feel

most pleased with my language when I dont

understand it completely. When it sustains

hope that theres more to write about, that

theres an open door for me to explore.

Thats when the writing gets really fun. I

feel like its all about waiting for a kind of discovery that takes place on the

sentence levelas opposed to having a light-bulb about a character. Thats

the thing that drives me from first sentence to last sentence.

I know my own writing is working when I feel like theres something

hovering beneath the v erbal, that my sterious emotional place.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built

out of language. If y ou write a page a day for 30 days, and you pick the parts

where the language is working, plot and character will start to emerge

organically. For me, plot and character emerge directly from the wordas
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/how-aimee-bender-feels-after-memorizing-a-poem-caffeinated/281861/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/the-poem-that-made-sherman-alexie-want-to-drop-everything-and-be-a-poet/280586/


9/13



Rick Smolan

opposed to having a light-bulb about a character or event. I just dont work

like that. Though I know some writers do, I cant. I ll think, oh I have an

insight about the character, and when I ll sit down to write, it feels

extremely imposed and last for two minutes. I find I can write for two lines

and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something

comes through the sentence level, and sticking with the sentences that give a

subtle feeling that theres something more to say. This means Ive hit on

something unconscious enough to write aboutsomething with enough

unknown in there to be brought out. On some level I can sense that, and it

keeps me going.

Some of those mysteries clarify, but theyre not all going to clarify. I think a

good poem will always stay a little mysterious. The best writing does. The

words that click into place, wrap around something mysterious. They create

a shape around which something livesand they give hints about what that

thing is, but do not reveal it fully. T hats the thing I want to do in my own

writing: present words that act as a vessel for something more mysterious. I

know its working when I feel like theres something hovering beneath it the

verbal, that myster ious emotional place.

Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club,

believesin the value of small details. She

shared a wr iting exercise involving family

photographsa practice that inspired her new

noveland explains why she likes to move

pixel by pixel.

I really admire the ACLU, and I value the

important work they do. But I said, You

look at things universally, telescopically,

macroscopically. Im microscopic. Im at

that tiny end where stories begin. I wouldnt

be able to sayit should always be this way,

for all people. Generalizations are just notpart of how I think. Stories begin with

microscopic-level detail, in the particularities that make up each individual

life. Thats my territory.

As I write a story, I have to be open to all the possibilities of what these

characters are thinking and doing and what might apply. For me, the best

way to do this is writing longhand, the way I wr ite the early drafts of a novel.

Writing by hand helps me remain open to all those particular circumstances,

all those little details that add up to the truth.

So much of my work through the beginningand especially through the

middleof writing a story is establishing what the characters believe as they

go on and face ever-changing situations and hardships. Whether they fall inlove, or have a death that occurs, or think that theyre dyinghow do they

respond, and what experiences shape the way they respond? I have to be

open to their beliefs, whatever framework they might come up with to

respond to the circumstances of their lives. As Whitman says, Perhaps it is

everywhere on water and on land: I dont try to confine myself to one

particular road, but instead allow myself wide-ranging exploration.

Theres so much chaos in my early drafts. As I try to open myself up to all

possibilities, anarchy tends to reign. So how do I know when Im moving in a

productive direction? If anything might happen in a characters life, how do I

determine which details will serve me well? I err on the side of going into too

much detail when I do research and write. I abandon 95 percent of it. But I

love it. Its part of my writing process. I never consider it a waste of time.

I try to see as much as possiblein microscopic detail. I have an exercise

that helps me with this, using old family photographs. Ill blow an image up

as much as I can, and work through it pixel by pixel. This isnt the way we
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/amy-tans-lonely-pixel-by-pixel-writing-method/282215/


10/13



Craig Nova

Elizabeth Gilbert

typically look at pictureswhere we take in the whole gestalt, eyes focusing

mostly on the central image. Ill start at, say , a corner, looking at ev ery detail.

And the strangest things happen: you end up noticing things you never

would have noticed. Sometimes, Iv e discovered crucial, overlooked details

that are important to my familys story. T his process is a metaphor for the

way I workits the same process of looking closely, looking carefully,

looking in the unexpected places, and being receptive to what y ou find there.

Craig Nova, author ofAll the Dead Yale

Men, offered advicefrom Robert Graves:There is no good writing, only rewriting. He

explained how making radical changes

changing genre, voice, narrator, and so on

helps him learn about his subject and move

towards a final draft.

Take point of view, for example. Let's say

you are writing a scene in which a man and a

woman are breaking up. They are doing this

while they are having breakfast in their

apartment. But the scene doesn't work. It is

dull and flat.

Applying the [notion] mentioned above, the solution would be to change

point of view. That is, if it is told from the man's point of view, change it to

the woman's, and if that doesn't work, tell it from the point of view of the

neighborhood, who is listening through the wall in the apartment next door,

and if that doesn't work have this neighbor tell the story of the break up, as

he hears it, to his girlfriend. And if that doesn't work tell it from the point of

view of a burglar who is in the apartment, and who hid in a closet in the

kitchen when the man and woman who are breaking up came in and started

arguing.

It seems to me that each time you add a new point of view and tell the story

again, you will discover something you didn't know before. And if this is true

for point of view, it should hold true for structure, language, and all the other

elements that go into a piece of fiction.

Finally,Elizabeth Gilbert disputedthe idea

that great art is rooted in suffering. For her,

maintaining stubborn gladness helps her

back away from self-hatredand become a

more productive, fulfilled art ist.

Writing can be a very dramatic pursuit, full

of catastrophes and disasters and emotionand attempts that fail. My path as a writer

became much more smooth when I learned

that, when things arent going well, to

regard my struggles as curious, not tragic.

So,How do we get through this puzzle?

Thats funny, I thought I could write this

book and I cant, instead of,I have to drink a bottle of gin before 11:00 to

numb myself at how horrifying this is. You could almost call it a spiritual

practice Ive cultivated over the years. I really worked to create that kind of

relationshipso that its not a chaotic fight. I dont go up against my writing

and come out bloody- knuckled. I dont wrestle with the muse. I dont argue.

I try to get away from self-hatred, and competition, all those things that

mark and mar so many writers careers and lives. I try to remain stubborn

in my gladness.

We have this very German, romantic idea that if youre not in pain, and if
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/the-stubborn-gladness-of-elizabeth-gilberts-favorite-poet/281158/http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-good-writing-craig-novas-radical-revising-process/276754/http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/http://www.craignova.com/


11/13

19/12/13 How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic


youre not causing pain by making your art, then youre not really doing it

right. Ive always questioned that I mean, listen to the language we use to

talk about creative process: Open up your v ein and bleed. Kill your

darlings. I always want to weep when people speak about a project and say:

I think I finally broke its back. That is a really fucked-up relationship you

have with your work! Youre trying to crack its spine? No wonder youre so

stressed out! Youve made this into battlefield! We should know enough

about the world to realize that anything that you fight fights you back.

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JOE FASSLER, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is a writer living in

Brooklyn. His fiction has appeared in The Boston Review, and he regularly speaks to authors

for The Lit Show. In 2011, his investigative reporting for TheAtlantic.com was a finalist for a

James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism.

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Documents

How to Write_ A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic.pdf