Writing Advice I Have Been Thinking About

 I am trying to get ready for "Chasing Ashes'. It looks like a long, slow ascent. I have not had much energy these past few days. Now my neck is getting stiff. Still, I am trying to back to my writing, so I still need advice.

 Kōbō Abe's Best Writing Advice Revealed (YouTube) - I have read one of Ave's novels, and he is very good, if a bit obscured by Haruki Murakmi. This video has got me thinking in overdrive about my own writing. Do I worry about form more than its emotions?

 “Who Made These Rules?”: Claire Messud on What’s Distracting from Good Writing (Public Books) touches lightly on the place of rules in writing, but more on writing within society. That is interesting in itself, but besides my interest in this post.

SH: That seems a good place to zoom in, because if it’s not coming from the literary community, it would seem then to be coming from some sort of publishing apparatus. I read your novel—which by the industry’s purview would be considered “long,” as if 428 pages or approximately 145,000 words is some sort of lengthy, old-school epic—in under a week while teaching five classes at the university where I work, and I don’t see that as some sort of feat. I know plenty of educated working people in various realms who read long books, not all of them literary fiction of course, but I distrust this insistence that we all live in TikTokLand now, whether we like it or not, and we need our meat cut up into tiny little pieces for us.

In This Strange Eventful History, I see perhaps an author trying to return something to American literature, a more worldly sort of saga, a mode that you haven’t inhabited since The Emperor’s Children (2006), and expanding quite a bit even on what you were attempting in that book. Was there a conscious effort? Did you see or hear people in publishing saying “write shorter, write shorter, give them tiny little books” because that’s what some imagined desired demographic wants? Or would you just speak to the idea of the publishing empire and your choices in making this text your most recent endeavor?

 

CM: You raise such important questions! I do feel as though I have been so lucky, so fortunate, and I have a wonderful publishing house with Norton, which I think is quite different in atmosphere from many other houses. And I have a wonderful editor, Jill Bialosky, who is herself a writer of fiction, poetry, and memoir, so I feel like I’m spoiled in the sense that nobody has said to me, “You should write shorter.”

But I’ve been struck with it when teaching in summer programs and there are very wonderful writers working on novels and they have been attending conferences and AWP and having all sorts of publishing-related conversations. They will say things about being told, “It can’t be more than X length” or “You can’t have a flashback in the first fifty or seventy-five pages,” and I think: Who made these rules?

So—I say this with only anecdotal evidence and without any actual knowledge about the broader publishing world—I think one of the things that’s happening, or maybe already has happened, is that more and more people are writing and trying to publish. And that could be a wonderful thing! But it becomes increasingly competitive simply to have your work read. That becomes the first and biggest hurdle: just to have somebody who could in any way publish or promote your work. To just get those people to read it is really tough, and I think that has generated a whole host of advisors who make statements like, “You know, well, this is how long your book should be, this will improve its chances, if it’s too long somebody won’t read it, but if it did this they would read it.” It’s making up rules that are artificial.

If you are as becalmed as I am, I hope this will help you get moving.

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