A few weeks ago, I posted some tips for writers that garnered a bit of attention. Writers like this kind of stuff, it appears.
The first tip was to get out more. A writer should have some kind of real life ballast. Here are seven tips that will help explain that first tip. And, weather permitting, we may do the same thing with the other six as well.
1. Real life duties are far to be preferred over real life tourism. Taking care of your preschoolers, or being deployed with the Seventh Fleet, is far to be preferred over purchasing a backpack in order to head off to “find America,” or worse, yourself.
2. Authenticity in writing will only arise from authenticity in living. Ideas that occur to you in the course of your life should be jotted down in your notebook, but only so long as you remember that the world does not exist to provide raw material for your notebook. The world you are observing has every right to continue on just as it was even if you never get published.
3. If there is any way to avoid it, while out there in the field, don’t identify yourself as “a writer.” There is a variation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle here. If you step into a situation with that tag, you affect and skew the situation you are stepping into — especially if you are published. If you are not published, then you are just striking a pose, which is a nuisance in another way.
4. Use your conversations to hone your writing voice, and not the other way around. Your native voice in writing is probably closer to the way you most naturally choose to speak than anything else. So you want to use this opportunity to import reality into your writing, instead of importing your writing into your reality.
5. When you are out and about, you are watching the gaudy show called life and are trying to learn from it. This is harder to do if you are busy being the star of the show. As Yogi Berra said, you can observe a lot by just watching.
6. Live an actual life out there. Don’t go slumming in order to garner a few observations. A two-week camping trip doesn’t make you a mountain man, and a three-week job does not consitute the kind of life experience platform that will bear the weight of a lifetime of writing. If you want to say a lot you need to have a lot to say.
7. Enjoy yourself. If you enjoy what you are living, you will enjoy writing about it. And if you enjoy writing it, the chances are greatly increased that the readers will enjoy reading it. Angst, anguish, and lots of despair is the kind of thing that whiners buy, and the problem with having whiners as your reading constituency is that whiners are not known for their loyalty to anything. That would include your next book, remember.