Dear Literary Ladies,
How do I go about developing a distinctive writing style—one that will blow editors away, and that readers everywhere will recognize as my unique voice?
I simply don’t believe in style. The style is you. Oh, you can cultivate a style, I suppose, if you like. But I should say it remains a cultivated style. It remains artificial and imposed, and I don’t think it deceives anyone. A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everyone knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself—or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. . . You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is emanation from your own being.
—Katherine Anne Porter, from Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1963
How can I develop a distinctive writing style?
How does a writer face failure gracefully?
Dear Literary Ladies,
So many creative people are afraid to share their work with the world because they can't risk failing. What words of wisdom can you offer to those of us who are willing to take that risk, and to bear inevitable failures with as much grace as possible?
In the working-day life of a professional writer success or failure is very likely to sum up much the same at the end. I don’t mean that failure is as pleasant as success. I’ve known both. Success stimulates the glands, revivifies the spirits, feeds the ego, fills the purse. Failure is a depressing thing to face. The critics rip your play to ribbons, audiences refuse to come to it; reviewers say your book is dull, or trite, readers will not buy it. You read these things, you hear them, you face them as you would face any misfortune, with as good grace as you can summon.
Success or failure, you go on to the next piece of work at hand. There may be a day of brooding or sulking or self-pity or resentment. But next morning there’s coffee and the newspaper and your typewriter, and the world. What’s done is done. Win or lose, success or failure, all’s to do again. If a lawyer or a doctor or a merchant or an engineer fails at a task it is, usually, a matter of private concern. But the failure of a playwright, an actor, a novelist, a musician, is publicly and scathingly announced and broadcast and published over an entire continent and frequently the whole civilized world. Often the terms of that announcement are cruel, personal, or even malicious, though this last is rare. Yet next day or next week, there he is, writing, acting, singing, or playing again. That’s being a craftsman.
—Edna Ferber, from A Peculiar Treasure, 1939
How do you develop the discipline to write?
Dear Literary Ladies,
Some days, I just can’t find the resolve to work. I could blame all sorts of distractions and interruptions, but maybe it’s the discipline I lack. If words don’t flow right away, I’ll get up and find some fine excuse not to stick with it. How did you develop the discipline to sit down and just write?
Ultimately, you have to sit down and start to write. And even if all you do is type out “I can’t write this morning; I can’t write this morning; oh, bother, I can’t write this morning,” that will sometimes prime the pump and get it started. It is a matter of discipline. It is particularly a matter of discipline for a woman who has children or another job.
I think my years in the English boarding school where I had to create my own privacy were also a way of learning to create my own discipline. Now there are mornings when I joyfully sit down at the typewriter. But there are mornings when it is anything but a joy. There are evenings when I go to the piano and the music comes pouring from my fingers. There are evenings when I’m all thumbs and I have to make myself sit there and go over scales and finger exercises before I can play anything. The same thing is true with writing.
—Madeleine L’Engle, from Madeleine L’Engle Herself, 2001
How can I tell if what I'm writing is any good?
Dear Literary Ladies,
How can you guage, in the midst of writing, if your work is any good? It’s so hard to be objective, and see the forest from the trees. Should I compare my writing with that of other writers I admire?
Since we must and do write each in our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another’s work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to and to ask: Is it valid?
—Eudora Welty, from the essay “Words into Fiction,” 1965
What goes through you're mind when you feel blocked?
Dear Literary Ladies,
You seem like such a prolific bunch, but like the rest of us who live by our pen, you likely feel blocked from time to time. How does this funky, uncomfortable, and sometimes scary feeling play out in your mind?
The dark times that came to me as a writer, those sterile periods when it seemed that not only the inkwell but the wells within had dried, were suffered alone. There doubtless have been and are creative writers who have not encountered this dark experience. The sense of aridity, the mind a desert, that usually follows the completion of a book. That sudden panic when every theme or plot your brain has cradled no longer so much as stirs.
No matter how recurring these panics, or how false their alarms, you forget they have ever happened before. They strike new terror with each visitation. This is it! There will be no next book.
But to travel about without the impulse to write is akin to carrying about a secret illness. The divertissements of new scenes and peoples anesthetize for a while, but there is always that low-ebb hour when despair will not be detoured. Where am I running? Why?
You question writers, read autobiographies, scan the spacing between the books of the masters. There is the book-a-year, the one-every-two-years, the one-every-five group, the incredibly prolific Elizabethan writers, the one-book authors, the two-a-year serial operators. All put together, they tell you very little. . .
But this form of author malady has its cure. The relief that comes is as specific as easing the nerve of a throbbing tooth. That hour when the pen begins to vibrate, the ink to rise in the well . . .
—Fannie Hurst (1889-1968), Anatomy of Me, 1980
A note from Nava: Fanny Hurst's name and legacy may have faded, but she was one of the most prolific and financially successful writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps her best known novel (which became a famed film) is Imitaition of Life. F. Scott Fitzgerald was somewhat correct when described her as one of several authors "not producing among 'em one story or novel that will last 10 years." Hurst herself bemoaned her popular success, fearing that her work would be taken less seriously. Still, she enjoyed her fame, fortune, and adventures during the course of her life. Though her star faded, she left some touching thoughts on the writing life in her autobiography and other first-person writings.
How does it feel to achieve a breakaway success?
Dear Literary Ladies,
I dream of the day when all my efforts might come to a completely successful culmination. Like many writers, I've had some modest coups, but who doesn't long for that big breakthrough, a work that shines in the national spotlight, or climbs the bestseller lists? How does it feel when you first realize that your work has achieved this kind of dreamed-about success?
My strongest feeling seems to be incredulity. I can’t believe that such a simple little tale, writing in and of a simple P.E.I. [Prince Edward Island] farming settlement, with a juvenile audience in view, can really have scored out in the busy world. I have had so many nice letters about it and no end of reviews. Most of them were very flattering. Three or four had a rather contemptuous tone and three were really nasty.
One of the reviews says “the book radiates happiness and optimism.” When I think of the conditions of worry and gloom and care under which it was written I wonder at this. Thank God, I can keep the shadows of my life out of my work. I would not wish to darken any other life—I want instead to be a messenger of optimism and sunshine.
. . . It is a joy to feel that my long years of struggle and unaided effort have been crowned with success. But that success has also evoked much petty malice, spite, and jealousy. It does not hurt me, because none of my real friends have been guilty of it. But at times it has given me a sort of nausea with human nature.
— L.M. Montgomery, from The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 1, 1908
Should I write for an audience, or to please myself?
Dear Literary Ladies,
These days, publishers want to know how authors plan to find the audience for their book well before the final draft is submitted. It’s all about marketing and platform, which can be awfully daunting, as well as distracting. Do you think writers should focus on the audience or market as a work is being developed, or does that ultimately make for a less desirable outcome?
Those critics or well-wishers who think that I could have written better than I have are flattering me. Always I have written at the top of my bent at that particular time. It may be that this or that, written five years later or one year earlier, or under different circumstances, might have been better for it. But one writes as the opportunity and the material and the inclination shape themselves. This is certain: I never have written a line except to please myself. I never have written with an eye to what is called the public or the market or the trend or the editor or the reviewer. Good or bad, popular or unpopular, lasting or ephemeral, the words I have put down on paper were the best words I could summon at the time to express the thing I wanted more than anything else to say.
—Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, 1939
Can I produce good writing with serious time constraints?
A reprise from the early days of the Literary Ladies blog:
Dear Literary Ladies,
I always thought that one needed great swathes of time to get any writing done. Now I hear that some esteemed authors worked in short bursts and still produced an enormous amount of brilliant work. I want to hear from one of you. How did you do it, and what did you do with the rest of your time?
I work from two and a half to three hours a day. I don't hold myself to longer hours; if I did, I wouldn't gain by it. The only reason I write is because it interests me more than any other activity I've ever found. I like riding, going to operas and concerts, travel in the west; but on the whole writing interests me more than anything else. If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die. I make it an adventure every day. I get more entertainment from it than any I could buy, except the privilege of hearing a few great musicians and singers. To listen to them interests me as much as a good morning's work.
For me, the morning is the best time to write. During the other hours of the day I attend to my housekeeping, take walks in Central Park, go to concerts, and see something of my friends. I try to keep myself fit, fresh: one has to be in as good form to write as to sing. When not working, I shut work from my mind.
— Willa Cather, from a 1921 interview
Any quick tips for plot and character development?
Dear Literary Ladies.
It's always fascinating to discover how those of you who succeeded so brilliantly went about the basics of the practice of writing. Can you share some quick insights on how you developed plots and characters?
My methods of work are very simple & soon told. My head is my study, & there I keep the various plans of stories for years some times, letting them grow as they will till I am ready to put them on paper. Then it is quick work, as chapters go down word for word as they stand in my mind . . . I never copy, since I find by experience that the work I spend the least time upon is best liked by critics & readers.
While a story is under way I lie in it, see the people, more plainly than the real ones, round me, hear them talk, & am much interested, surprised, or provoked at their actions, for I seem to have no power to rule them, & can simply record their experiences & performances.
— Louisa May Alcott, from a letter, 1887
Help! I need to hear a good rejection story!
Dear Literary Ladies,
A book that I've toiled on and believe in with all my heart has been rejected by more than a dozen publishers. Am I delusional? Maybe it's no good after all. I need to hear a great story of a book that was rejected over and over but then became a smash success. Who among you has such a story for me today?
A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can’t name a major publisher who didn’t reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I’d read to them at night what I’d written during the day, and they’d say, “Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!” A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn’t done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don’t find, or didn’t at that time, in children’s books. When we’d run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That’s how it happened.
— Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007)
[A note from Nava: A Wrinkle in Time went on to sell millions of copies, and has won numerous awards. It also has the distinction of being one of the most banned books of all time. Madeleine L'Engle likely paved the way for authors of juvenile and young adult literature to be able to deal with darker themes—the Harry Potter series being just one example.]
Are women authors held to different standards than men?
Dear Literary Ladies,
Not one of the top ten books of 2009 according to Publishers Weekly was by a female writer, and only about a third of the books on their extended best book lists were by women. Do you think women writers are (or should be) judged by different standards than men?
To value praise or stand in awe of blame we must respect the source whence the praise and blame proceed, and I do not respect an inconsistent critic. He says, “if Jane Eyre be the production of a woman, she must be a woman unsexed.’
In that case the book is an unredeemed error and should be unreservedly condemned. Jane Eyre is a woman’s autobiography, by a woman it is professedly written. If it is written as no woman would write, condemn it with spirit and decision—say it is bad, but do not eulogise and then detract. I am reminded of The Economist. The literary critic of that paper praised the book if written by a man, and pronounced it ‘odious’ if the work of a woman.
To such critics I would say, ‘To you I am neither man nor woman—I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.’
—Charlotte Brönte, from a letter, August 16, 1849
How can I develop good writing habits?
Dear Literary Ladies,
With a full-time job and a thousand other things on my plate, my writing time is catch as catch can. Is it important to have regular writing times, so that writing becomes habitual?
I’m a full-time believer in writing habits…You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away…Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.
—Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), from a letter
