Spend some time
living before you start writing. What I find to be very bad advice is
the snappy little sentence, “Write what you know.” It is the most
tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write
simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility
for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and
explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter
into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what
interests one.
ANNIE PROULX
Learning to write
sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime.
The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing
available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make
use of this reading in one's own writing. The first step is to become a
slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with
the standing of literature. Writers perforce read differently from
everyone else.
Most people ask three questions of what they read:
(1)
What is being said?
(2) Does it interest me?
(3) Is it well constructed?
Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them:
(4)
How did the author achieve the effects he has?
And
(5) What can I steal,
properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for
my own writing?
This can slow things down a good bit.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
