Writing Resources
Some of the things that have helped me become a better writer, they might help you, too.
Good Advice
Strunk & White
The original, 1918 edition of The Elements of Style is in the public domain and it’s definitely worth reading, but I urge you to seek out the edition revised by E.B. White and published in 1959. (Here is a bootleg copy.) It is not perfect but it was foundational to my own journey as a writer and its most notorious guideline — “Omit needless words” — sits at the forefront of my brain, even when I disobey it.
Active vs. passive voice
You will likely hear me invoke Strunk & White’s second-most influential dictum — “Use the active voice” — quite a bit. The passive voice is how we usually talk. That sentence was a passive-voice construction! The more active construction: We usually use the passive voice. It’s a tough habit to break. We often struggle to break the habit.
Here’s a brief guide to what the passive voice is and some examples of acceptable use.
Here are some examples of how the passive voice can be abused by people in power.
“The art of memoir”
Full disclosure: If you read this slim book by Mary Karr and take it fully to heart, you’ll already have absorbed at least half of what I try to teach in the workshop. (You will still get a lot out of the workshop!)
Karr’s book fills in some blanks in her own life that were still somehow left despite her own two existing memoirs. I loved the section about her decision to convert to Catholicism. Mostly, though, she outlines a practical approach to literally writing the thing: How to start, when to worry about telling people they’re in it, and whether you should worry about trusting your memory.
A very boiled-down list of tips is here.
Robert Boice’s “Rules of the Road”
1. Pace yourself. Work in brief, regular sessions, 10-50 minutes in length, no more than 3-4 hours a day, 5 days a week. Use a timer to help yourself keep the sessions brief, and take breaks between each.
2. Pause while writing to check for comfort. Watch for signs of impatience and rushing, particularly thoughts about needing to finish in any one session.
3. Stop when you get to the end of your time limit, preferably in the middle of something (a sentence, paragraph, argument).
4. Spend as much time pre-writing (noticing, collecting materials, taking notes, planning, outlining, making drafts) and rewriting as you do writing.
5. Spend as much time socializing around writing (talking with other writers about what you are writing) as you do writing (and spend only moderate amounts of time at either).
6. Make writing a modest, daily priority, something done routinely but not at the expense of living. Take regular breaks and avoid working when you are tired or in large, undisrupted blocks of time.
7. Pay attention to your emotions as you are writing so as not to get caught in reactive self-talk. Watch particularly for thoughts about what you "should," "ought," or "must" be doing as a writer and recognize them as the irrationalities that they are.
8. Watch, above all, for the temptation to binge out of impatience to get something done. Remind yourself that bingeing leads to overreaction leads to depression.
9. When you share your writing with someone, listen calmly and patiently to what he or she has to say. Find something in their reaction to your work with which you can honestly agree and ask for clarification about anything that they say that you don't understand. But don't expect everyone to like what you write or to read as carefully as you would like them to.
10. Check again for any irrational thoughts about what your writing or the experience of writing "should" or "ought" to be like and dispute them. Remind yourself again of the link between strong emotions, hypomania, fatigue, and depression.
11. If you find yourself worried about not being busy/smart/productive enough, stop and do something else (like sleep) until you feel rested again.
12. Start before you feel ready. Stop before you feel done.
--Paraphrased by Rachel Fulton Brown from Robert Boice, How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure (Westport: Praeger, 1994).
david carr
There are too many tragedies about my friend David Carr’s untimely death to list here but one of them is that he died before he could put all of his wisdom about the craft of writing into a book. His focus was journalism but the truth of his words applies to almost any kind of creative endeavor.
Here’s his commencement speech to the 2014 graduating class at UC Berkeley School of Journalism. (Highlights: “Don’t do [meaning: write] anything you couldn’t explain to your ma,” and “Journalism [writing] is like housekeeping. It’s a series of small, discrete acts performed over and over.”
Here’s the syllabus for a journalism class he taught at Boston University.
And here’s some killer quotes. Words I still live by: “Keep typing until it turns into writing.”
Annie Lamott’s “Shitty First draft”
An instructive essay about the most useful and most used hacks in the world of literature.
A favorite bit:
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow… Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning -- sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.
“On Writing”
Stephen King remains one of my favorite writers; if the criteria for favorite was merely often I read a writer’s work, he is my favorite writer by a factor of ten or more. Public perception of the quality of his writing has changed a lot since I had a such heated debate about it with my seventh-grade language arts teacher (she was not a fan) that she made me go sit in the hall. You can probably trace that shift in perception to this serious yet ecstatic exploration of his craft. Also, he began appearing in the New Yorker.
I quibble with some of his advice (he’s a big fan of writing every day no matter what, I think that pressure can be a trap for the neurodiverse especially). Still, it’s both a clear and enthusiastic guide to the nuts and bolts of writing and a celebration of why writing is good for the soul. (He’s right about adverbs.)
Bootleg edition here. (He doesn’t need the money.)
join the workshop
“I’ve taken music classes from good musicians who don’t know how to teach, and I’ve taken computer programming classes from computer programmers who have no idea how to teach. This is not that. This is a course by a very gifted writer who knows exactly what she’s doing. ”
“One of the most beautiful things that happened in this course is our search for truth — in everything, in the way that we speak about our day, in the way that we are supposed to write, how we are showing up.”
“I’ve definitely never really been in a learning environment where anything that you could do was just gravy. Really, all you had to do was show up. And that was actually true and honest and not a trap. ”
