On Writing

A cavalcade of writing stars: Tom Wolfe, Peter De Vries, John Updike, Anne Lamott, Stephen King, Mary Karr and more!, plus Steve and Justin Townes Earle, plus bluebird porn

Editor’s Note:  Do you know where you’re going to? Do you like the things that life is showing you?  If not, ask yourself some hard questions. If you have easier questions, Ask Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com

Dear Matt,

We all know you're a fantastic writer. Truth be told, we're here for your writing, not your content (enough about fly fishing already, will ya!). In your estimation, what three tips do you have for good writing? (They can be either organizational or stylistic, or both.)

Thanks,
Brandon

Whoa, Brandon. I imagine your head is probably swollen from having people tell you “Let’s go” all the time. But let’s not go. Let’s stop you right there. First, a lot of readers don’t come here for the writing at all. They come for the world-weariness, disillusionment, and moral uncertainty.  Second, my many fly fishing readers now detest you.

But you’re okay by me!  I was going to edit out your generous compliment, but figured it would be selfish to not share your praise with a wider audience. (I’m a giver.) To answer your question, I’m not one for providing neat’n’clean three-point programmatic instruction – that feels too much like a TedTalk, or Axios’s Smart Brevity® (which I’m forbidden to use since they’ve trademarked it), or a PowerPoint presentation.  If I were any good at those, I’d probably be off in the wilds of corporate America making more money, instead of playing dancing monkey on the page as I have been my entire adult life.

But if there’s just one thing you need to know about writing…….

The truth is, there’s not just one or three things you need to know about writing. Writing is as vast as life itself.  It presents infinite choices, and nearly all of them must be decided on a case-by-case basis.  Because of such complexity, many try to bury themselves in simplistic books on writing, like Strunk & White’s classic, The Elements of Style.  I own it. It’s around here somewhere. But it’s a book I only reach for if I’m all out of fatwood and need more kindling.

I like E.B. White otherwise. I’m not a savage. (His essay “Once More To The Lake,” collected in One Man’s Meat, is one of my all-time favorite essays on aging.)  And he and his partner-in-crime’s dictatorial little instruction book is good, I suppose, for stamping the basics into beginners’ heads. You should know the rules before breaking them. Otherwise, I find it oppressive, prim, and fussy: “Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic.”

Yeah, whatever. 

So I’ve never spent much time reading books on writing. The ones I have, I could count on one hand. I’m not at all a Stephen King fan – nothing against him, he’s just not my bag. And yet in 2000, he published a book on writing that goes down like a crisp lager - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. King wrote it while recovering after getting hit by a minivan while on a walk. The accident yielded everything from a collapsed lung to a broken hip to a leg that was so shattered that doctors considered amputating it. (He had five surgeries in ten days.)  But it also seems to have yielded this book. So to me, his pain was completely worth it.  (All selfish readers –are there any other kind? –  forever ask the question, “How does it affect me?”)  A taste:

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.

Then we have  Anne Lamott, who, in 1994, wrote Bird by Bird: Some Instructions On Writing and Life. Which, weirdly enough, contains some good instructions on writing and life, so……truth in advertising.  I haven’t read any of her novels, and have no immediate plans to. But here’s a small quote-taste of an infinitely quotable book:

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

And then there’s Mary Karr, who has made her bones as a poet, a memoirist, the object of David Foster Wallace’s sweaty, bandana’ed obsession (poor girl), and even as a songwriter (having collaborated with the likes of Rodney Crowell).  In 2015, she published The Art of Memoir, in which she offered plenty of good advice, such as that there is no such thing as universally applicable writing advice:  Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, “I really want to have sex, where do I start?” What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another.

But I read these books not because they were good books on writing. But because they were good books. A good writer makes you care about whatever they write about it.  I, for one, don’t give a toss about golf.  I don’t watch it, and I don’t play it. It would take far too much time away from more important pointless pursuits, like fishing. (Though I have fished golf-course water hazards.)  But I will happily read John Updike on golf, as I know he’ll make it dance in my imagination: “The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.”  Or: “As all souls are equal before their Maker, a two inch putt counts the same as a 250 yard drive. There is a comedy in this and a certain unfairness even, which makes golf an even apter mirror of reality.”  I have no use for golf, and yet, I could read that all day.

But you didn’t ask for other people’s writing advice, even if I just spent hundreds of words giving it to you.  So here’s mine. A mishmash and a disorganized grab bag.  Please forgive the stream-of-consciousness approach:

Read more than you write.  I once had a sickeningly prolific friend say that he now writes more than he reads. This made me never want to read him again.  It’s your duty, as a writer – any kind of writer – to always keep filling your tank. And you can’t just do that by huffing your own fumes. You have to always be on the hunt for things that inspire, that amuse, that somehow open up the world to your readers.  If nothing can capture your imagination, how are you supposed to capture the imagination of others? There’s no surer way to do this than to make a habit of reading writers who are better than you.  In my case, that gives me a large pool to choose from.  The more good words you pour into your funnel from others, the more good words are likely to come out the other end.  If you’re a writer, you’re forever a student – you don’t get to graduate.  So keep reading.

If you want to get excited about writing, read people who excite you. Once, many years ago, I ran into Tom Wolfe at a dinner.  I’d read pretty much everything he’d ever written. He was a journalism hero, and not half-bad in the fiction department, besides. I knew he would be there, and I’d promised myself if I ran into him, I wouldn’t slobber all over him, embarrassing us both. But when  the moment arrived, and I finally smacked into him – in his white Good Humor Man suit, complete with spats – I couldn’t help myself. (Also, it was late in the evening, and I was a bit in my cups, which didn’t help.)

I said something like, “Mr. Wolfe, I need you to know, whenever I have trouble getting it up, writing-wise, I just read something you wrote, like  ‘The Last American Hero,’  your story about {the stock-car racer/moonshiner}   Junior Johnson, and it’s like an adrenaline shot to the ‘nads.” Yeah, I know.  I’m wincing, too. But he didn’t.  He just smiled his courtly Virginia-gentleman smile, and conspiratorially offered,  “You know, I do the same thing when I’m in that spot. But I read Henry Miller.”  Which to me both at that time, and now, makes all the sense in the world.

Also, read widely.  Don’t get stuck in your rut. If you read nothing but politics, you’ll become a political boor. No writer ever went to their death bed, saying, “I really wish I sounded more like David Broder.”  I’m not a poet, but I read plenty of poetry.  Good poets teach us how to say more with less. I have zero desire to write fiction. Though some of my nonfiction subjects would probably beg to differ. But I read plenty of literary fiction. Because a good novelist can air out the world in such a way that makes his or her fabrications feel like the truth.  And truth, of one sort or another, is what we’re all after when putting  words to paper. Otherwise, what’s the point?   If you’re not after that, I encourage you to stop writing, now. The world is full of badly-told lies – it doesn’t need any more contributions from you.

Be confident, but not cocky. All writing is an act of vanity. Which is why so many writers are insufferable jackasses.  Because writing requires you to essentially say to the world, which is constantly in motion: “I have something to say, you need to sit still and listen.”  It’s getting harder to get anyone to sit still for long, with all our distractions. So even if you’re a vainglorious prick, it shouldn’t be too hard to stay humble. Remember that even if you’re an old hand, and have been doing this for a while, every writing outing is a new chance to fail.

But if you’re a newbie? It’s better to write than to think too much about writing, or to hang out with those who talk it to death. Nothing can kill creativity faster than comparing notes with others.  If you want to hear your own voice – assuming it’s a voice that warrants being heard – you need to still the voice of others.  Because their voices, echoing around your head, can come to sound a lot like self-doubt.  If you want to be a great hitter, you can read about Ty Cobb and Ted Williams all you want. But ultimately, you have to get in the batting cage, and take a lot of cuts, to work the kinks out of your stroke.  When I was a young magazine writer, I’d frequently discuss with others pieces that  I was about to write. But after one too many queries of “why would you write that?” (a caution that usually didn’t pan out), I learned to stop. And to just get writing. It’s harder for your friends/passive-aggressive acquaintances to quibble with finished work, or work in progress, than work you haven’t started.  So just get going, and see where it goes.

Don’t write drunk, or even buzzed,  if you can help it. And if you do – in an attempt to unleash the muse - give yourself plenty of time to ruthlessly edit while sober. “Write drunk, edit sober,” of course, is a shopworn cliché for a reason. It’s frequently attributed to Hemingway, who was drunk plenty, but who never actually said it.  Quote investigators often attribute the closest incarnation of it to the brilliant comic writer Peter De Vries (who I’d rather read over Hemingway, any day.) A near approximation turned up in De Vries’s 1964 novel, Reuben, Reuben, which contained the character Gowan McGland, modeled after the poet Dylan Thomas, who drank like he was getting paid by the dying liver cell.  The De Vries/McGland quote, if less pithy and absolute, also contains much more insight and deeper wisdom:

He remembered something he had told a New York journalist in an interview about his “working habits,” a dull subject about which people remained curiously interested in the case of writers and artists. “Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober,” he had said, “and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

Similarly, when you spend so much time alone, living in your own head, be aware of your physical body as well. The two are inextricably connected.  Not only should you take your body outside for regular walks or other more strenuous exertions, but try to never write on a full stomach.  You want your body to be just a little like your mind while writing – hungry.  And on the physical end of things, I also find it helpful, after writing, to print your work out, and pace while reading it aloud.  The pacing helps give physicality to your writing.  Plenty of writers I like write to music. As much as I love music, I tend not to, unless I need mood music to make something come alive for me. Otherwise, it can be a distraction, and make you think your writing sounds better than it does.  But either way, all writing should feel like music.  A good song puts everything in its rightful place. And reading things aloud helps us hear the rhythms of whatever it is we’re trying to set down.  It’s all about beats, and determining whether your sentences need an extra beat, or have one too many. The ear often knows what the mind doesn’t. So don’t just edit or read your pieces. Listen to them.

Don’t take yourself too seriously, but take your work very seriously. Care about the things you write about, even if they’re trifles. Because if you don’t, nobody else will.

Next-to-lastly, if my advice doesn’t work for you, feel free to ignore it all. Writing is such an idiosyncratic endeavor, that it works differently for everybody.  I’m just telling you how it works on my end.

And lastly, I’ll leave you with the words of Stephen King. Even if I’m no fan of his, they are words I like, and words you don’t often hear from other writers, who tend to be tortured, Gloomy Gusses as a breed:

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”

Bonus track:  Mother’s Day is upon us, so here is one of my very favorite mother songs. By the late Justin Townes Earle, “Mama’s Eyes.”  Justin was a beautiful man who died too soon. You might recognize his middle name, because his dad, Steve Earle, named him after the singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt, of whom Earle once said, “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”  Justin Townes Earle was no slouch himself.

Double Bonus Track: I know this is a Mother’s Day downer – apologies. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t include it here, because it fits. For everyone who has experienced real loss out there – I know from personal conversation there are many of you – you might be interested. Justin Townes Earle died of an accidental cocaine/fentanyl-laced overdose in 2020, at the age of 38. He struggled with addiction for many years– he went to rehab no fewer than nine times. But it took him in the end. Here’s his dad’s tribute to him. They didn’t always have the easiest of relationships, as Justin’s above-song hints. But ultimately, they were on the same team. Which is how families should go, when they go even dysfunctionally right. Steve Earle wrote this song two days after his son’s death. Warning: it’s a crusher:

Bluebird porn: In happier news, the circle of life keeps circling. Around Easter, I shared with you the eggs of Bluebird Brood #11:

And then when they hatched:

And here they are now, two weeks later, ready to fledge in about a day or so. I shouldn’t have even taken this picture. It’s considered a bluebird-nerd crime to open the box this late in their game, since they might leap out and hurt themselves. But I took a peek before opening, to make sure they were asleep, so nobody would make a run for it. Which is why it looks like a big sleepy dogpile of blue feathers. You can see here they’re pretty far advanced, growth-wise. And they’ve gone full Led Zep in their bluebird box – smearing the walls in feces. They’ve trashed the hotel room like the rock stars that they are. I will have to clean that up before the next brood, but still, I love these little blue bastards, and even though they haven’t been around long, I will miss them when they’re gone. Happy Mother’s Day.  If you doubt motherhood is wondrous, just look for yourselves: