Letters to a Young Writer

  Copyright © 2017 by Colum McCann

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780399590801

  Ebook ISBN 9780399590818

  randomhousebooks.com

  Title-page photograph by Kalin Ivanov

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Kelly Blair

  Cover art: Matteo Pericoli

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Letter to a Young Writer

  There Are No Rules

  Your First Line

  Don’t Write What You Know

  The Terror of the White Page

  No Ideas Without Music

  A Hero of Consciousness

  Out from the Dust: Creating Characters

  Shaping the Truth

  Carry a Notebook

  Be a Camera

  Fuhgeddaboudit: Writing Dialogue

  Read Aloud

  Who What Where When How and Why

  Seeking Structure

  What Matters: Language and Plot

  Punctuation: It’s Not Just a Throwaway Thing (Comma)

  Research: Google Isn’t Deep Enough

  No Rust on Your Sentences Please

  The Habit of Hoping

  There Are No Literary Olympics

  How Old Is the Young Writer?

  Don’t Be a Dick

  Then Again, Don’t Be Too Nice (in Your Fiction Anyway)

  Fail, Fail, Fail

  Read, Read, Read

  Rejoyce

  Writing Is Entertainment

  Take a Break

  Who’s Your Ideal Reader?

  How to Get an Agent

  What If I Don’t Get an Agent?

  Finding the Right Editor

  Bringing (Your Own) Fresh Eyes to Your Stories

  Throw It All Away

  Allow the Reader’s Intelligence

  Success

  If You’re Done, You’ve Only Just Begun

  Blurbs (or the Art of Literary Porn)

  A Secret Hearing

  Where Should I Write?

  To MFA or Not to MFA?

  Should I Read While I’m Writing?

  Smash That Mirror

  The Dark Dogs of the Mind

  Write Yourself a Credo

  The Bus Theory

  Why Tell Stories?

  Embrace the Critics

  Be Exhausted When You Finish

  Your Last Line

  Letter to a Young Writer, Redux

  Dedication

  By Colum McCann

  About the Author

  “Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” said Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet over a century ago. “There is only one way. Go into yourself.”

  Rilke, of course, was right—nobody but yourself can help. In the end it all comes down to the strike of the word upon the page, not to mention the strike thereafter, and the strike after that. But Rilke was taken by the request from the young writer, and he corresponded with Franz Xaver Kappus in ten letters over the course of six years. Rilke’s was advice on matters of religion, love, feminism, sex, art, solitude, and patience, but it was also keyed in to the life of the poet and how these things might shape the words upon the page.

  “This most of all,” he says. “Ask yourself in the most silent hour of night: Must I write?”

  Everybody who has ever felt the need to write knows the silent hour. I have come upon many such people—and indeed many such hours—during my writing and teaching life. Each year my first class in the Hunter College MFA program begins with the statement that I won’t be able to teach the students anything at all. This comes as a bit of a shock to the twelve young men and women who have decided to devote themselves to the crafty, sullen art. These are among the smartest young writers in America, six first years, six second years, who have been chosen from a pool of many hundreds. I don’t mean my opening statement to them every semester as an act of discouragement: it is, I hope, the exact opposite. I can teach you nothing. Now that you know this, go learn. In the end I’m guiding them toward the fire in the hope that they will recognize the places where they will, most certainly, be burned. But the advice is also given in the hope that they learn how to handle, and pass along, the fire.

  One of the best places for young writers to be is facing the burning wall, with only the virtues of stamina, desire, and perseverance to propel them across to the other side. And breach the wall they do: some tunnel, some climb, some bulldoze. Not with my help, but by going properly inside themselves, à la Rilke. I’ve been teaching now for the best part of twenty years. That’s a lot of chalk and a lot of red pencil. I haven’t loved every minute of it, but I’ve loved most, and I wouldn’t swap the experience for the world. There’s been a National Book Award for one student. A Booker Prize for another. Guggenheims. Pushcarts. Mentorships. Friendships. But let’s be honest, there has been burnout too. There’s been weeping and gnashing of teeth. There have been walkouts. Collapses. Regret.

  The fact of the matter is that I’m only there as a foil. Practice and time do not necessarily bestow seniority. A student might—at the very beginning—know so much more than I know. Still, the only hope is that I might say one or two things over the course of a couple of semesters that might save them a little time and heartbreak.

  All of those students, bar none, are looking, in Rilke’s words, “to say ecstasies that are unsayable.” The unsayable indeed. The job is theirs. The ability to trust in the difficult. The tenacity to understand that it takes time and patience to succeed.

  Not so long ago I was asked by StoryPrize.org to write a short piece about the writing life. I mashed together some of my ideas, mixed it with a little credo and whatever wisdom I might be able to wring out of the dishtowel of teaching days. I called it “Letter to a Young Writer,” and it is the first entry in this book. Other entries followed over the course of a year. They were there, at times, for instruction. At other times they were clarion calls. This, then, is not a Writer’s Manual. Nor is it, I hope, a rant. It’s more a whisper while out walking in the park, something else I like to do with my students at times. I imagined it as a word in the ear of a young writer, though it could, I suppose, be a series of letters to any writer, not least myself.

  I’m reminded, of course, of Cyril Connolly’s line: “How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?” I understand that it could be folly to try to dissect what is essentially a mysterious process, but in spite of that, here it is, with the full knowledge that opening up the magic box might doom its readers to disappointment. Still, the truth is that I genuinely enjoy watching young writers begin to put a shape on the contents of their world. I push my students hard. Sometimes they push back. In fact one of my opening workshop tenets is that blood will inevitably seep out the door during the course of a semester, and invariably some of that blood is my own.

  In putting together these words, I have, I admit, failed miserably—which is, as you will see, a bit of a back-slap for myself. I covet failure. I have done it here. This advice comes up short of any I would want to receive myself. I deliver it, I hope, with a humble bow and a desire to get out of its way.

  A word of warning. Once, when writing a novel called Dancer, a fictionalization of the life of Rudolf Nureyev, I sent the manuscript to a hero of mine. This was a writer whose every word I absolutely coveted. He was inordinately kind an
d sent me back six handwritten pages of notes. I took virtually every single suggestion, but I was disturbed about one. He said that I should cut the opening war soliloquy that begins “Four winters…” I had spent close to six months on this section and it was among my favorite parts of the book. He made a good argument against keeping it, but I was still upset. For days on end I walked around with his voice in my head. Cut it, cut it, cut it. How could I go against the advice of one of the world’s greatest writers?

  In the end I didn’t take his counsel. I stepped inside and listened to myself. When the book finally came out, he wrote to tell me that I had made the correct choice and he had been humbly wrong. It is one of the most beautiful letters I have ever received. John Berger. I name him because he was my teacher, not in a literal sense but in a textural way and in the manner of a friend. I have had several other teachers too: Jim Kells; Pat O’Connell; Brother Gerard Kelly; my father, Sean McCann; Benedict Kiely; Jim Harrison; Frank McCourt; Edna O’Brien; Peter Carey; along with virtually every writer I have ever read. I am indebted also to Dana Czapnik, Cindy Wu, Ellis Maxwell, and my son John Michael for help with this book. The voice we get is not just one voice. We receive ours from a series of elsewheres. This is the spark.

  I hope there is something here for any young writer—or any older writer, for that matter—who happens to be looking for a teacher to come along, a teacher who, in the end, can really teach nothing at all but fire.

  I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Do the things that do not compute. Be earnest. Be devoted. Be subversive of ease. Read aloud. Risk yourself. Do not be afraid of sentiment even when others call it sentimentality. Be ready to get ripped to pieces: it happens. Permit yourself anger. Fail. Take pause. Accept the rejections. Be vivified by collapse. Practice resuscitation. Have wonder. Bear your portion of the world. Find a reader you trust. They must trust you back. Be a student, not a teacher, even when you teach. Don’t B.S. yourself. If you believe the good reviews, you must believe the bad. Still, don’t hammer yourself down. Do not allow your heart to harden. Face it, the cynics have better one-liners than we do. Take heart: they can never finish their stories. Enjoy difficulty. Embrace mystery. Find the universal in the local. Put your faith in language—character will follow and plot, too, will eventually emerge. Push yourself further. Do not tread water. It is possible to survive that way, but impossible to write. Never be satisfied. Transcend the personal. Have trust in the staying power of what is good. We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice. Write about that which you want to know. Better still, write toward that which you don’t know. The best work comes from outside yourself. Only then will it reach within. Be bold in the face of the blank sheet. Restore what has been ridiculed by others. Write beyond despair. Make justice from reality. Sing. Make vision from the dark. The considered grief is so much better than the unconsidered. Be suspicious of that which gives you too much consolation. Hope and belief and faith will fail you often, but so what? Share your rage. Resist. Denounce. Have stamina. Have courage. Have perseverance. The quiet lines matter as much as the noisy ones. Trust your blue pencil, but don’t forget the red one. Make the essential count. Allow your fear. Give yourself permission. You have something to write about. Just because it’s narrow doesn’t mean it’s not universal. Don’t be didactic—nothing kills life quite so much as explanation. Make an argument for the imagined. Begin with doubt. Be an explorer, not a tourist. Go somewhere nobody else has gone. Fight for repair. Believe in detail. Unique your language. A story begins long before its first word. It ends long after its last. Make the ordinary sublime. Don’t panic. Reveal a truth that isn’t yet there. At the same time, entertain. Satisfy the appetite for seriousness and joy. Dilate your nostrils. Fill your lungs with language. A lot can be taken from you—even your life—but not your stories about that life. So this, then, is a word, not without love and respect, to a young writer: write.

  There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

  —W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  There are no rules. Or if there are any rules, they are only there to be broken. Embrace these contradictions. You must be prepared to hold two or more opposing ideas in the palms of your hands at the exact same time.

  To hell with grammar, but only if you know the grammar first. To hell with formality, but only if you have learned what it means to be formal. To hell with plot, but you better at some stage make something happen. To hell with structure, but only if you have thought it through so thoroughly that you can safely walk through your work with your eyes closed.

  The great ones break the rules on purpose. They do it in order to remake the language. They say it like nobody has ever said it before. And then they unsay it, and they keep unsaying it, breaking their own rules over and over again.

  So be adventurous in breaking—or maybe even making—the rules.

  The first sentence of every novel should be: “Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.”

  —MICHAEL ONDAATJE

  A first line should open up your rib cage. It should reach in and twist your heart backward. It should suggest that the world will never be the same again.

  The opening salvo should be active. It should plunge your reader into something urgent, interesting, informative. It should move your story, your poem, your play, forward. It should whisper in your reader’s ear that everything is about to change.

  So much of what then follows is based on the tone of the opening cue. Assure us that the world is not static. Give us something concrete to hang on to. Let us know that we’re going somewhere. But take it easy too. Don’t stuff the world into your first page. Achieve a balance. Let the story unfold. Think of it as a doorway. Once you get your readers over the threshold, you can show them around the rest of the house. At the same time, don’t panic if you don’t get it right first time around. Often the opening line won’t be found until you’re halfway through your first draft. You hit page 157 and you suddenly realize, Ah, that’s where I should have begun.

  So you go back and begin again.

  Open elegantly. Open fiercely. Open delicately. Open with surprise. Open with everything at stake. This, of course, is a bit like being told to walk a tightrope. Go ahead, then, walk the tightrope! Relax yourself into the tension of the wire. The first line, like the first step, is only the first of many, yet it sets the shape of what is to come. Try walking a foot off the ground, then two feet, then three. Eventually you might go a quarter mile in the sky.

  Then again, you might stumble and fall. No matter. It is, after all, a work of the imagination. You won’t die trying.

  At least not yet.

  The inexecutable is all I’m interested in.

  —NATHAN ENGLANDER

  Don’t write what you know, write toward what you want to know.

  Step out of your skin. Risk yourself. This opens up the world. Go to another place. Investigate what lies beyond your curtains, beyond the wall, beyond the corner, beyond your town, beyond the edges of your own known country.

  A writer is an explorer. She knows she wants to get somewhere, but she doesn’t know if the somewhere even exists yet. It is still to be created. A Galápagos of the imagination. A whole new theory of who we are.

  Don’t sit around looking inward. That’s boring. In the end your navel contains only lint. You have to propel yourself outward, young writer. Think about others, think about elsewhere, think about a distance that will bring you, eventually, back home.

  The only true way to expand your world is to inhabit an otherness beyond ourselves. There is one simple word for this: empathy. Don’t let them fool you. Empathy is violent. Empathy is tough. Empathy can rip you open. Once you go there, you can be changed. Get ready: they will label you sentimental. But the truth is that the cynics are the sentimental ones. They
live in a cloud of their own limited nostalgia. They have no muscularity at all. They remain in one place. They have one idea and it sparks nothing else. Remember, the world is so much more than one story. We find in others the ongoing of ourselves.

  So, leave the cynics be. Out-cynic them. Step into that elsewhere. Believe that your story is bigger than yourself.

  In the end, of course, your first-grade teacher was correct: we can, indeed, only write what we know. It is logically and philosophically impossible to do otherwise. But if we write toward what we don’t supposedly know, we will find out what we knew but weren’t yet entirely aware of. We will have made a shotgun leap in our consciousness. We will not be stuck in the permanent backspin of me, me, me.

  As Vonnegut says, we should be continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

  The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion.

  —MAGGIE NELSON

  Don’t let the terror of the white page shrink-wrap your mind. The excuse that you have writer’s block is far too easy. You have to show up for work. You have to sit in the chair and fight the blankness. Don’t leave your desk. Don’t abandon the room. Don’t go off to pay the bills. Don’t wash the dishes. Don’t check the sports pages. Don’t open the mail. Don’t distract yourself in any way until you feel you have fought and tried.