Apropos of the wet snow

Occasionally, people reach out to ask me how to become a good writer. I’m hit by a wave of panic each time: do I shrug my shoulders and playfully suggest they go ask a good writer, or do I break their hearts and tell them the truth?

How does a human get good at anything? You have to suck at it for a long time. Longer than is sane. Past the point where you’ve abandoned hope.

How do you become a good writer? First, you have to read. Compulsively. You have to read everything. The classics, up from Homer to Dante, from Shakespeare to his contemporary Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. The Makars, Gawain, Montaigne, Cervantes, Milton (and I loathe John Milton and his Protestant hell), de Sade and Voltaire. Everything you can get your hands on. Comic books and cereal boxes. Marx and von Mises. Dostoevsky and Ayn Rand (really, I’m so sorry on the latter).

You have to read these books again and again. Did you know Moby-Dick is hilarious? And not about a whale? You have to read until you begin to feel the decisions beneath the sentences. Why certain stories require a first-person narrator and others refuse any chronological telling. Did you know that the darkest works are often the funniest? And that Catch-22 is dead serious?

Sound like a lot? Good. More bad news: there’s no shortcut here. Back when I was a kid, the “shortcut” was Cliff’s Notes. Now, you’d pop into ChatGPT: “What are the themes of Gatsby?” You can get surface-level recaps of the plot of books, and perhaps some skillfully identified themes. You might even get a sensible summary of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil if you so desire. But all of that misses the point: Nietzsche is an artist, and his books are art as much as philosophy. You can only understand the work if you experience it. Claude might “know” everything, but it will explain Camus’s trap in The Fall without ever springing it. Only reading the book from front to back gives you the sinking sensation that you’ve been the mark the entire time. You must live with the books, let them reshape the way you see and understand the world around you. They can change your life if you let them.

But this reading, this joyful toil? That’s just your primary school education. Eventually, you have to put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard. You get to pick your kink.

After enough reading, you build up a little confidence. You can do this! You love books, and you have all the best words. You know what good writing looks like, and that’s what it takes.

Imagine your dismay when you begin writing and, if you’re honest with yourself, those words are not…what good writing looks like. Quelle catastrophe! Everything you’ve learned to recognize turns out to be harder to create. The gap between the taste that your primary education gave you and your ability stops you like a blood clot.

This is the most dangerous moment. You will likely still have some confidence, even if your writing isn’t where it needs to be. Just a first draft! Somebody you love will step in and tell you that you’re a talented writer. They mean well. Might even mean it. If you listen, it can ruin you. I suspect this is what most people who reach out to me are looking for.

There’s an old saw: if you want to insult an artist, tell her how talented she is. That’s the simple version of all of this, the standard kvetching that artists do behind the scenes. If everybody knew how much damn work all of this was… It’s true, as far as it goes, but the glorification of work has its own, less scrutinized blind spot.

Of course—of course—the thing to do at this point is to buy paper by the ream and write and write. Mimic the writers you love. Mimic writers you can’t stand, to feel what it’s like to write like that. Down bad. Write until you begin to sound a bit like yourself. You might not get there, but you certainly won’t get there if you don’t make a break for it.

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All of this is standard fare. It’s where the standard account ties up neatly, and it misses a critical point. At some point you have to stop working and put the thing out to be judged. The work will become a comfortable hiding place. You cannot wait for the work to be “ready” if ready means there’s no possible improvement to be made. Master Frenhofer and La Belle Noiseuse are warning enough. The point is this: there is no world where the writing feels good enough. Ever.

Talent is what we attribute to a writer when we don’t want to judge the work itself. Before a work is complete, talent is a promise; afterward, explanation. Other people invoke it to excuse themselves from the work: if you possess some gift they don’t, their failure to do the work costs them nothing. Writers cling to it to excuse themselves from scrutiny. Unfinished work cannot fail, for it is always just one revision away from fulfilling its promise. Talent doesn’t survive scrutiny. The work might, though. If you’re lucky.