Lorrie Moore’s Collected Stories includes How to Be a Writer which comes from a 1985 collection. Without getting all retrospective on New Year’s Eve, I thought I’d imitate again as a way of celebrating the first 21,000 words. Fun fact, 21,000 words works out to roughly 90 pages double-spaced.
Start early, with illustrated Star Trek stories in marble notebooks, or something like that. When you figure out that you can hold people’s attention just through the alchemy of words, decide that you will write more often. Do it in secret. Make sure that no one reads your words and cover journals with “KEEP OUT,” and ask for notebooks with locks on them for Christmas. Hide the keys in your desk, where no one will find them. Write about zombies and about caves. Write fantastical imagined landscapes with huge mountains and grasses that sweep to the end of the world. Read your words to yourself and escape.
In high school, write love poems to girls that you’re too shy to talk to. Talk about their hair and their eyes. Surely girls like that kind of thing. Read Blake and Shakespeare, and wonder how you could ever do something like that with lyrics, with rhymes, with the paced rhythms of syllables that seem to melt and crash and entangle. Make stabs and first attempts at narcissistic self-portraits. Write about yourself until you’re bored with it. Then start writing about other people again.
Take a creative writing class with Dr. Feldman. Notice how sad he seems, how alone. Watch how he drinks his tea and leans back in class when he listens to stories. Decide that loneliness is the only real emotion that counts. Write dark. Write mysterious moody prose in long sentences and epic paragraphs. Submit some of your poems that aren’t about hair that smells like roses to the high school literary magazine. Gape when you see your words in print—that is, in print that doesn’t come off of your family’s printer.
When you take creative writing classes in college, wear scarves in discussion. This, you will assume, makes you look writerly. Bring a mug with some warm drink. Occasionally, spike it with bourbon. Writers drink, you will likely think.
Take summer jobs at country clubs and at financial firms. Describe the length of the women’s dresses. Record every fascinating tic of the bond trader’s left eye and shoulder. In unison. All these things mean something, but you have to figure out what.
Take another writing seminar. Try to avoid rolling your eyes at the softcore vampire porn of your fellow students. Nod when they make comments, and squeeze back the rage at their ignorance. They just don’t get you. Your thoughts have matured and deepened. They just haven’t caught up. “There’s something too theoretical about your writing,” they say. “You need something else to drive us forward” and “Why are we supposed to care about these characters?”
Idiots, all!
Write a column for the University newspaper thinking that you’ll get noticed. That girls like writers. That you can be funny and meaningful. Pretend to be shy when people recognize you from your picture. Pretend not to be embarrassed or disappointed when they have no idea who you are. Write everything at the last minute in your underwear. Develop bags under your eyes and don’t sleep until everything is finished. Eat honey wheat pretzels and drink frappaccinos to stay awake until sunup. Sleep till noon and wake to a despairing call from your editor.
Always feel important and superior when you say, “I still need to round something out. Can I have until 3?”
Travel and write notes about foreign places. Smoke in Parisian cafes and forget to write because you’re thinking of how great the thing that you’re going to write will be. People won’t even know what’s coming. It will be transformative. It will change the world, your writing will. Think about who earns the first dedication and what you will buy with your advance. Think of the Esquire photo shoot and the words that reviewers will use to describe your work. Transcendent will come to mind.
Pay the check and smoke another cigarette and leave without writing more than a page. Feel foolish and woozy and dehydrated roughly five minutes later.
Leave a notebook behind in the Louvre after hours. Remember it and sprint back, with a pit in your stomach. Realize what it means to lose the few words that you’ve written and realize that you need to write much more. Find it in the lost and found. Double over in the middle of the main atrium and laugh like a freak. Don’t pay attention to the Frenchies watching you.
Take fewer classes and write late at night. When you hear crickets, write about them. In the dead of winter with the fire popping next to you, write about the fire and about silence. Everyone thinks silence is cool, right? Write about failed love affairs, failed aspirations, failed attempts. Or, in the euphoria after a cup of coffee or a glass of something, about future love affairs, new aspirations, successes. Write because soon you won’t have nearly enough time.
You’ll have to take a job that you don’t really like in a city that you always said you would avoid.
Do the job and live there anyway.
Generate miles and miles, pages and pages of material. Write drunk and angry. Write free-form in the style of the modernists. Write about concepts that you know nothing about, and still keep everything to yourself. No one can see. You are a secret agent. A silent recorder of the unseen details of everyday life. Take notes assiduously. Write in black notebooks and duck into corners to record details. Write mostly on trains and airplanes. During meetings, take notes about the people in the room. Pretend to be interested in sales pitches and client details. Instead write notes about noses and gestures, about secret desires for kinky sex and receding hairlines, mortgage bills, forgotten dreams.
Write about loneliness and about silly sentiments of postgraduates. Write about the impossibility of figuring out how to do anything worthwhile when you’re stuck in a cubical all day. Go to parties with the same group of people and find an undertone of flailing desperation. Write about the flailing desperation and feel bad that you write about it.
Lose a notebook that you have been writing in for a year. Weep as though you have lost a child. Weep like an infant. Realize that weeping means that you need to keep writing.
Move to another new city and escape the drudgery. Realize that the drudgery provided the best material you ever had. Look in the mirror and feel the weight of the words you haven’t written. They keep you awake at night. Tell new people that you want to write.
“How nice,” they’ll say. “I want to study transgendered polar bears.” Or something else.
Relish cold weather. Write about the cold and about snow. Or about heat. Or about memory. Start a blog and force yourself to write every single day. Set goals and panic when you don’t meet them. Feel relieved momentarily when you do and keep feeling nervous that your goals aren’t good enough. You’re crafting an aesthetic now. You’re finding your voice. You’re getting words into the world of a few people every day. You’re losing hair but typing furiously, with more stake in sentences and more panic too.
But panic fuels productivity. Forces attention to detales. Or so you think.
