advice to young writers

Beautiful Child Typewriter Stock Photo 219763774 | Shutterstock

Somewhere in my family album is a picture of me, eight years old, sitting at my aunts’ typewriter. I think what it says is that writers are born to tell stories.

Our friend Amalia would like to know what kind of training you need to have, to become a writer. I’m here to tell you this: Mostly you have to train yourself.

I know, I know, there are all sorts of writing courses out there. I’ve never taken one. But if I were to teach one (I have some experience, teaching “writing” in an adult night school), I would say there are only two things the aspiring writer really needs to do and will get nowhere, fast, if he or she doesn’t do them:

Read, read, and read some more!

Write, write, and keep on writing.

Again, we now have self-publishing, which we didn’t have when I finally sold my first novel in 1986, and that takes away a lot of the frustration and the heartache. Even so, I can’t help feeling my work is nothing, really, unless someone out there is willing to pay to publish it. Not so many years ago, you would hardly believe how difficult that was to achieve!

I have known wannabe novelists who hardly ever read novels. They have no idea what a story looks like, let alone how to create one and tell it. They create characters who are thinly-veiled wishful-thinking avatars of themselves, and it’s a rare reader who won’t see through it.

Anyhow, it’s really pretty simple. If you want to be a writer, you have to read and write a lot. An awful lot.

You won’t be able to help getting better at it.

Bell Mountain by Lee Duigon - Picture 1 of 1

[Part I of II–I don’t want to be long-winded]

I have received an e-letter from “Someone” (WordPress didn’t give me his name) asking me how to become a writer who writes Christian novels (you can read it in yesterday’s comments). I don’t know about other writers, but I always want to hear from readers. So I’ll do the best I can to answer Someone’s questions.

*There is no college course that I ever heard of in how to write a novel. There are college courses which you may find illuminating and make them part of your worldview. I’ll probably never forget my Persian Empire course, taught by Prof. Maksoudian. No one wanted to miss his lectures! It never put a penny in my pocket, though.

**By far the most important, useful, and valuable thing a writer-in-training can do is… read! Find authors you like and devour their work. We learn by imitation–we grow out of it–in fact, it’s very necessary to outgrow it–but all the same, it’s a door through which any aspiring author must pass. Funny: the most telling lesson I learned from C.S. Lewis was to stop trying to imitate C.S. Lewis. But in the meantime I had added to my understanding of how to tell a fantasy story.

I went through periods of imitating Stephen King and J.R.R. Tolkien. What I learned from trying to write like they wrote was more about how I should write. I had to find my own voice. You do that by trying on other voices, one after another. All the time, whether you’re aware of it our not, you’re learning. And eventually you get there.

***Also critically important: Never give up! Never! This is a sore temptation.

When I was young there was no self-publishing, unless you were fabulously wealthy. You were in competition with thousands and thousands, if not millions, of other aspiring writers. And it was acutely depressing when you came across pure dreck that somehow got published when your work didn’t.

It might take you several decades to break into print. Meanwhile, never give up. Never, never, never. You will often feel demoralized. Fight your way through it.

Finally, you can indeed get help and encouragement from established writers who remember their own hard times and can easily sympathize with you. So thank you, T.E.D. Klein, Robert Jordan, Charles Grant, Gary Brandner, and Ramsay Campbell.

[Part II to come]