My fourth bit of advice for aspiring writers was this:
“Stretch before your routines. If you want to write short stories, try to write Italian sonnets. If you want to write a novel, write a few essays. If you want to write opinion pieces for The Washington Post, then limber up with haiku.”
As with the others, this one can also be separated into seven things to think about.
1. This keeps content vibrant within the structure. If someone specializes in one form of writing only, the chances are good that he will master that structure, and the content he produces to fit within that structure will become pretty predictable. After that has been happening for a while, a school of thought will arise blaming the structure, and will demand freedom from such limitations and constrictions. But that is like noticing that your tap water to smell like sulphur, and therefore replacing your table pitcher.
When it comes to this, cross-pollination is good. Hybrids are good. Mutts are good. If, in order to be whatever it is you are writing, the structure has to be there, then the only thing that changes is the content. And when you have been a number of other places, the content of your conversation is more interesting. Who would you rather listen to, someone who has been around the world three times on a oil freighter, or someone who never came out of his basement — even if he had really sweet bandwidth down there? In this case, the world and the exotic locations are the forms of writing that you need to visit — whether or not you intend to live there.
2. If you are in a position to do so, which usually means that you are young enough, make sure to get a thorough and broad liberal arts education. I am astonished at how many young Christians want to be writers, and how few of them want to mess with all the prerequisites, which look suspiciously to them like work.
A good liberal arts education will acquaint you, like it or not, with a broad spectrum of writing genres, and as you are working through them, try your hand at writing your own. It also provides grist for the mill — you know enough to have something to say. If you took a a number of average 19-year-olds who want to be writers and said, “great, here’s a contract,” and then asked them what was on their mind, what they had to say, many of them would have to say that their sole insight is that “they want to be a writer.”
3. You may discover that what you thought was your wordsmithing gift had been centered in the wrong spot. You always had some facility with words, and so you thought you needed to write the kind of stuff that followed closely the forms you were taught when you first learned how to write. You are like a duckling out of the egg that bonds with the family dog. But if you spread out more, you might discover that you were not destined to become master of the English comp essay, but rather that you were born for the clerihew.
4. Trying your hand at different forms helps to keep you humble. Without this literary discipline, it is terribly easy to “want to write screenplays” and because there is a minor industry dedicated to flattering people who want to write screenplays, you are a potential sucker for every writers workshop pitch that comes down the road. They tell you in these workshops that you should write what you know, but it turns out that all you know are writers worshops.
People want different kinds of unrealistic things. Some unrealistic desires are flattered by society, and others are not at all. When little boys want to play in the NBA, they will find that the adults have built an impressive system that will enable them to have a run at it. But only one boy in 100,000 actually makes it. Playing other sports would help get him out of the realm of institutionalized flattery. It is the same with the keyboard sports, which is why you should really have a go at the Petrarchan sonnet. Nobody is gonna flatter you there.
5. The gift of language is one of the most versatile tools imaginable. Not exploring what it can do exhibits an incurious frame of mind, one not suited to the life of writing. A writer in any form needs to be constantly inviting the reader to see more, to open his eyes wider. But if the writer only uses two buttons on a remote with 150 buttons, if he uses a Swiss army knife for cutting bits of string, and only for cutting bits of string, and if his sense of culinary exploration is limited to brown gravy or no brown gravy, then he is not excited enough about life to be exciting to anyone else when he writes about it.
6. Allusion is lovely, and experience with other forms brings the ability to use that device pervasively. This in turn sets high expections for the reader — in that you are expecting him to pick up on it — and this is a way of respecting your readers. And when you respect your readers, they will come to respect you.
7. I have long said that good teaching is to love the subject you are teaching in the presence of students whom you also love. They have not yet met for some reason, so you are introducing two good friends of yours to one another, and in such a way that your affection for both is apparent to the other. In the case of writers, the students would be your readers, but what would be your subject? The subject really needs to be words, and words wherever you might be able to find them. Lesser loves may then be disciplined and ordered in accordance with this overarching love. Ultimately for Christians this means that our love begins with the Word. We are people of the Word, and therefore we are people of words. Because we are people of words, we may, later on, be people of essays, poems, blog posts, screenplays, and novels.