How to Be a Great Writer

Before even taking a single step forward, you should consider the possibility that you just can't be a great writer. We live in a culture that believes in endless motivation and encouragement; if you believe in yourself and think positively enough, surely you can do anything? The truth is, no amount of motivation is going to get me outrunning Usain Bolt. That's just realistic. In this Culture of Motivation, to tell someone or even to admit to oneself, "Maybe you're just not capable" is somehow a crime. We all have different capabilities. We can't be expected to become masters of all of them.

Nor do we begin life as blank slates whose paths to mastery are totally open to us. For one, we don't all have the same level of intelligence. I first realized I have extraordinarily intelligence when I scored higher than my peers on a history test even though the other students all had study guides that I couldn't afford and even though I'd only taken a few hours of preparation. Nevertheless, I've met people in university, particularly some professors, who, I would speculate, are more intelligent than me in sheer intellectual power. Yet they show no indication of having anything like my creative powers. One particularly brilliant professor, in his long career, has never composed a truly original thought. The conclusion I draw from this is that not only intelligence is required, but also some sort of creative power, a way of organizing intelligence that is not within everyone's powers, a Spirit Muse.

But is it not within everyone's powers? I don't know. I do know, however, that one can do things that facilitate creativity and one can do things that hinder creativity. One can place onself in a disposition for the Spirit Muse's Inspiration. If creativity is, in fact, purely intelligence used one way or another, then you're in luck and these tips may just make you a great writer. If, however, creativity depends upon hitting the genetic jackpot and the workings of the Spirit Muse, then these tips could make you a better writer than you already are or they could merely confuse you.

Understanding what is meant by 'a great writer' is important. There are countless books on the subject of competent writing. Most of these tell you how to develop your characters, how to write a plot that centers upon conflict, how to create a great hook line/paragraph to catch the editor, and so forth. When I was a teenager, I read these. I read them for you: I can tell you now, don't waste your time or money. These books teach competence, not greatness. You will never be the next Dickens reading them. You won't even be the next Stephen King. You'll, at best, be the next Nora Roberts. Quaking? You should be. She's a dreadful writer. But she's a competent writer as well.

Competence is created out of rules and formalities. Whenever an art can be codified into rules, it is a dead art. Codification is an afterthought, a cold, mechanical study that occurs long after something has ceased to have its original vibrancy. We can understand the moon so much better than ourselves. "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." Inspiration never arises from formulaic rules and guidelines any more than rivers from deserts or peace from oppression.

I recall the last competent book I read. I had just completed my first year of undergraduate studies. I had just read Moby Dick for the first time. I then decided to give myself a break and read a science fiction novel. Still, reasonable man that I am, I wanted to read the best. I chose to read Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids. Not only is this book the Hugo Award-winner of its year, it is also written by a fellow Canadian. A normally slow reader, I found myself through the book in two days and very disappointed. Hominids left me with none of the spark and excitement Moby Dick had. Moby Dick has forever ruined my ability to read competent fiction again. Moby Dick is a great book and Melville is a great writer. Sawyer is a competent writer and Hominids, I suppose, was competent. Yes, it followed all the rules and is cold as a tomb.

If all you want to write is competent fiction, then it probably isn't necessary for you to read on. These tips could still be worth your while for stimulating creativity. However, they demand a certain drive to be the best that anyone satisfied with the bare minimum that is competence clearly does not have. There are, as I say, countless books on how to be a competent writer; they will serve you better. Though I should warn you: even popular writers go beyond competence. The most successful of popular writers do find their own voice, their own style, that often involves not bending but outright ignoring the little rules and tricks you will learn in those books of competence. Shall I make explicit what I've been hinting? Those books are books of mediocrity and they will teach you to be content in mediocrity. If you care to be better than mediocre, then read on.

The fundamental drive behind all greatness is the drive to do not just the best one can, but the best. That is to say, one must desire to be better than everyone else. Why set the bar low? You may never be better than Shakespeare, but you should certainly try. Shakespeare won't mind. He had the drive himself. Othello was a story he stole from Cinzio. Few people read Cinzio anymore, but we still read Shakespeare. This drive is shared by great athletes and great writers alike. Art and sports are both agonistic fields. To stand out, you must exceed others. The Spirit Muse loves her gladiators; you must compete to win her Inspiration.

The drive sparks obsession, or a willingness to become obsessed. I don't think it's possible to be a great writer unless you're able and willing to become obsessed. Competence is for the dilettantes, but greatness is for the obsessed. Do you want to know about obsession? Gustav Flaubert would spend entire nights working on a single sentence to make sure it was perfect. He would work in his countryhouse so he could yell the sentence as loud as he could just to make sure it had the ideal sound. Flaubert's prose is some of the finest ever written, needless to say. Then there's Georges Simenon. When he felt the urge to write a novel, he would isolate himself for a period of two weeks. In the first eleven days he would write the whole novel. He would rest a day. Then revise for the remaining three days. These periods were so taxing it began to affect his health and later in life he had to consult a doctor before embarking on writing a novel.

Of course, not every novelist went to the extremes Flaubert and Simenon did. All great novelists did, however, work with extreme focus. In Flaubert's letters he counsels a young Guy de Maupassant that if he is ever to succeed as a writer he must stop goofing off with his friends and become obsessed with his work. Maupassant, fortunately, took Flaubert's advice and we have his lovely contes as a result.

In what follows, the tips I give you are not so much tips for how to write, but tips for how to be obsessed. If you're able to become obsessed and to channel that obsession, you may just become a great writer.

The first step to obsession is to understand that what you're doing takes place within a very long history and to understand that history. The first work of literature with a known author is a collection of hymns called The Hymns to Inanna, written in Sumerian by a priestess, En-Hedu-Ana, sometime between 2285-2250 BCE. In between the Hymns and now there are all the classics of India, the Middle East, Greece, Rome, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, France, America and so forth. If you want to be a great writer, you have to know about those works and understand how that history twisted and turned through the centuries to the present. You must know what is a Metaphysical Poet, what distinguishes German Romanticism from French Symbolism, that J.-K. Huysmans is a Fin de Siecle Decadent, and that Thomas Pynchon shows the influence of Lawrence Stern. If you can read the books of these movements and authors, even better; but reading about them is a must.

What's peculiar about most popular fiction is how utterly unaware it seems of taking place within a history of Inspiration. These writers write as though writing has just been invented. To read these books, one wouldn't think Shakespeare, Flaubert, or Dickens had ever written a thing. They are utterly detached in style and content from what has been done and what has been done to death in the history of fiction. Frankenstein's Monsters, undead things, they lumber around with the semblence of life but no identifiable parentage. The best of popular writers, like H.P. Lovecraft, were, however, very aware of history. Lovecraft was a truly obsessed man. His time was divided entirely between his voluminous correspondence, his reading, and his writing. He wrote an essay on the history of supernatural fiction that is still worth reading today. And you can be sure Stephen King has read his Lovecraft and Poe, not to mention M.R. James, Blackwood, Beckford, Mathurin, Walpole, and Radcliff. After all, The Dark Tower novels are named from Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."

The obsessed immerse themselves, a baptism for the Spirit Muse. If you are going to write, you must read and read well. I don't mean generally, but also immediately. If you are to write in the evening, you should read in the morning. This focuses the mind and fills it with ideas as well as good precedent. You absolutely should not read in a scrutinizing way, looking for tricks you can adopt for yourself. You should read for the love of the reading. Pick up Virginia Woolf's Orlando and just enjoy it. The Spirit Muse will see your immersion and bless you; inspiration will come in spite of any inclination to imitation. If you want to write short stories, then read Poe, Flannery O'Connor, Maupassant, and The Dubliners. If you want to write poetry, then read Milton, Blake, Baudelaire, and Hart Crane. Being immersed in your tradition and form is key.

Immersion requires more than reading alone, however. Reading without understanding or memory is frightfully possible. I can quote word for word text I read but once years ago; this is not because I'm a master of memory, but because I read well. To read well, it is better to read slowly and savour what one is reading than to read as much as you can. Savouring with the mind is more commonly known as thinking. Thinking is something of a lost art. We all think we're thinking when we try to decide what to have for lunch, but I assure you that what you think is thinking at these times is not thinking, except by a limit of vocabulary that necessitates a barbaric equivocation. Thinking is allowing yourself to wander in your mind when something stimulates it, taking the time to understand and process what you read for all its signification and all it reveals to you.

I learned thinking from my monastic past. I'll share the lesson with you, as it may help. There is a tradition in monasticism called Lectio Divina. Lectio is a method of reading the Bible or other important spiritual texts, such as the works of St. Augustine, in a highly deliberate manner. Not unlike Flaubert's writing, it could take one an hour to read a single paragraph. The point is not to read a lot, but to read deeply. Every sentence is pondered for its significance on several grounds: literal, moral, and spiritual. Of course, the more potent the sentence, the more likely it will be of having many moral and spiritual connotations. From the significance of individual sentences, the significance of the whole paragraph, then the whole section, can be pondered. This manner of reading is highly meditative and frankly tedious. One wouldn't want to read fiction this way. However, occasionally when fiction stimulates the mind, one shouldn't be afraid to become meditative. In fact, meditation is encouraged from time to time, at the end of a chapter or whenever one is stimulated. These stimulations are the caresses of the Spirit Muse.

Equally important is reading criticism. This is alarming to some, who think criticism is inimical to creativity. Quite the opposite, the best writers were often critics themselves: Dryden, Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Wilde, Shaw, Woolf. Those that weren't practicing critics knew their critical literature and no doubt thought critically about the works they read. Criticism provides a guide to thought about fiction, a series of insights one might not have considered, and an expert's view on a work's position in history or on the history in broad. One should not, of course, merely agree with what the critic says; rather, in lieu of a partner with whom to discuss a work, criticism provides you someone to debate with about what the work meant to you. [Along the right I suggest a few critics whose works are particularly stimulating.]

(Another valuable activity is browsing bookstores. A wealth of Inspiration can be derived from simply discovering new books one wouldn't have known existed any other way and from reading the back covers. Even better is browsing online bookstores, where not only can one read the back cover blurb, but also the opinions of other, often quite highly-intelligent, readers.)

Virginia Woolf memorably demanded "a room of one's own" and she was right. Without isolation, solitude, there can be no true obsession. If you read Shakespeare in the morning, then spend the rest of the day texting to your Twitter account, you can't expect the Spirit Muse to be with you into the evening. If you can't make a burnt offering of your little activities, why should she deign to help you? Set aside an hour before bed to handle correspondence (Twitter, email, message boards, etc.); the rest of the time be alone with your reading and writing. If you can't be alone, you can't think; if you can't think, you're not immersed; if you're not immersed, the Spirit Muse doesn't want you.

One must be focused and one must keep focus. When one showers, one's mind must be filled with thoughts of what one has been reading and what one is writing; when one eats, one must be thinking of the same. Having to see about practical activities should seem a tedious distraction from the much more important activities of reading, thinking, and writing. Steinbeck used to set aside eight hours to write in his office. His wife would make sure all of his pencils were sharpened, then she'd leave him alone the rest of the day while he wrote. There is no excuse not to make the sacrifice.

What I have described is an accurate overview of what it takes to be truly creative. Obsession is a matter of disposition. Creative Inspiration pours down from the Spirit Muse in a mysterious way: sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. But if you're not in the disposition to receive the Inspiration, it won't happen at all. These tips for obsession are techniques for placing oneself in a disposition for inspiration. If these techniques seem too difficult, too tedious, too obsessive, then I am sorry to have wasted your time with this essay and recommend you read a book on competent writing; clearly the way of the Spirit Muse is not for you. No need to be ashamed: if greatness were for all, it wouldn't be greatness at all.