Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I Have Learned About Writing From Reading Thousands of Manuscripts
Because I find it so generous when other writers and editors do this, I am wrapping up 2022 by sharing some thoughts on how we (yes, this applies to me, as well) can make our writing more appealing to editors and agents—and, just as importantly, how we can make our writing simply better, stronger, and more effective in general. Make it more artful and true, more startling, and precise—more fully articulated, you could say.
I offer these insights after having spent the last three months immersed in thirteen manuscripts for a week-long revision intensive that I led in Mexico. That experience and the preparation it required brought focus and clarity to some of the patterns I see and have seen in manuscripts over the long run (both manuscripts in progress and “finished,” and as applied to both short works and long-form works, as well as to book-length projects). These realizations stem not just from the revision intensive I just taught, but also from more than twenty years of editorial experience, including a decade of magazine editing, developmental editing, and book coaching, and another decade in various literary roles including writing teacher, juror for Millay Colony, nonfiction editor and contest reader for Orison books, and more.
Importantly, I find that I often teach what I myself most need to learn—meaning I do not claim to have somehow transcended all of these tendencies or pitfalls myself. The bullet points on this list are aims we aspire to over a lifetime of writing. But it’s never too soon or too often to bring our attention to these aspects of craft. Also, every rule has exceptions, truly, with the only real rule of art being: you can do it if you can do it. So, everything I am about to offer is generalized by necessity. Which is okay, because we must sometimes generalize in order to say anything useful about the mechanics of craft. In the end, all we can do with lists like this one is take what is useful and leave the rest.
With that, some observations.
Attention: The number one most helpful practice you can take up to improve your writing is to pay close attention to the world. If you do this consistently and record your observations meticulously, your writing will explode with a realness and a vividness you cannot achieve any other way. Mary Oliver wasn’t kidding when she implored us, in her “instructions for living a life” from her poem “Sometimes,” to pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it. Too much of the writing submitted to me relies on abstractions and internal reflection without earning its proclamations with clear-eyed, truthful observations of the world we all share. I need precise, concrete renderings—of the world, this world, the one you and I both live in, the one I recognize—for work to come fully alive.
Internal vs. External: Speaking of internal reflection—and by this, I mean the author’s thoughts, feelings, memories, ideas, explanations, predictions, and so forth—be careful of this reflective writing. Working out these ideas in our journals may have value for us as humans, yes, but sharing those same ideas in the same way in our creative writing can be ineffective at best and grating at worst. And almost always, doing so is less effective than using powerful external details to evoke a feeling from the reader. When strung together on purpose, precise exterior observations will often point to a deeper meaning that the reader can discover for herself without having it explained. Precise, exterior observations also create true metaphors, rather than constructed, overstretched ones. This, in the end, is what we really mean by the old adage, “show don’t tell.”
