Six Rules for Becoming a Writer

Six Rules for Becoming a Writer

Rule #1

Study everything. Study literature, from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison, to immerse yourself in great writers. Study computer science to understand how it is to try and fail and try again until you succeed, a vital lesson for any writer. Study sociology to understand social causes and human behavior. Study history to understand the consequences of human behavior, that history is cyclical, that it repeats and repeats. Study psychology to understand the human mind. Study biology to understand how the heart works. Study creative writing to understand the heart.

Rule #2

Understand that becoming a writer is like embarking on a long journey on foot. There are days you will cover miles and miles under a sunny sky, other days where it’s cold and snowing and you walk in frustrated circles. Understand that it’s good to have company along the route. Understand that it’s especially good to have other writers for company, people who know what it’s like to run a marathon one day and limp for days after. People who will support you along the way, tell you you’re looking good even when you’re not.

Understand, too, that it’s also necessary to journey alone for miles and miles, if only to hear the bird sounds and the rustle of wind in the leaves, how it’s necessary to breathe in the world and then exhale by writing about it.

Rule #3

Understand that rejection is a process and not an event. It’s an editor declining to accept a story or agent passing on the novel manuscript that you worked on for years and you’ve finally put out on submission. Understand that they are saying no to that story or that novel, not no to you as a writer. Give yourself permission to write and keep writing. Learn to love the entire process, even the parts that are hard, like rejection.

Rule #4

Find a job that you like, one that sustains you both emotionally and financially, but one that doesn’t drain your soul. My favorite job was the one I had in Philadelphia where I was attending graduate school at Temple University. I made $7 an hour proofreading legal depositions, but the perks were great. I worked in a Center City high rise with floor to ceiling windows offering a view of both rivers, the Schuylkill and the Delaware, and beyond to New Jersey. My bosses—two women-- ordered in dinner and paid cab fare home if we worked late. When I punched out each day, I left the work there. I wrote an entire collection of short stories for my thesis in my off hours because work wasn’t renting space in my head.

Conversely, the toughest job I had was the three years when I was a visiting assistant professor, during which my creative writing was mostly limited to writing on student papers, lots and lots of student papers. But that, too, was valuable because in trying to understand a student’s vision for a poem or a story, I learned a great deal about my own revision process, how writing is like starting in a dark room and fumbling around the wall for a light switch. How a writer needs to keep fumbling.

Rule #5

Write. This goes without saying but you’d be surprised how many people who profess to be writers don’t write, but in fact write about writing on Substack or social media. My only writing practice is to write for at least fifteen minutes a day. That’s it. I adapted this method for working after attending a writer’s conference where the keynote speaker, a famous writer, was asked what advice she had for a beginning writer.

“Don’t get into too many habits,” she responded. Something that went against most of what all of us had always been told: sit down and write in the same place at the same time with the same pen every day. She went on to explain that habits were like going on a restrictive diet -- it’s fine for a few days and then you eat a piece of chocolate cake and say, what the hell, I’m done with this. You miss a set time on Friday because the kids are sick or work calls and come Monday, you might not get back to it. She pointed out that most of us don’t have time, but we can make time. She advised writers to make time to write at least fifteen minutes each day. At some point years ago, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to find time to write so I started making time and fifteen minutes was completely doable. “Write” means writing or

revising a paragraph or a page, or chasing some research, or even sending pieces out into the world. That fifteen minutes can occur at any time of the day, wherever I can fit it in. Most days I write much more, but you can get a heck of a lot done in fifteen uninterrupted minutes. Most of my book Sad Math was written that way, and each one since. Slow and steady.

Rule # 6

Understand that there are no rules in writing beyond “don’t deliberately confuse or trick your reader.” Make up the rules as you go along, your own rules for writing. And then write.