There Is No Handbook for Being a Writer
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"What do you do?"
"Oh, I'm a writer"
"Should one _ever_ begin a sentence with 'but'?"
"No, you should _never_ do that. I'm a prig!"
All that finger-waggingly-said, some great books recommended. Thank you for that!
By comparison, there are many schools which teach (or claim to teach) programming, but few which cover the details of being a programmer: addressing employment contracts, valuing stock or equity options, non-competes, project management, vendor management, operating as an independent contractor, client (or boss) management, etc., etc.
There are similar observations made of the medical profession, law, engineering (particularly where independent / small firm work is common), etc. The nuts-and-bolts of the business.
Much of what's discussed (in the context of startups) on HN, for example.
That said: there are some guides, several mentioned below. The Writers' Handbook is the long-time classic. I'm looking at a few of these now based on their mentions here.
This is partially because writing, like coding, is an open profession. Unlike medicine for a example. Degrees may be helpful, but they are not mandatory. So there is no clear symbolic threshold separating the hobbyists from whoever deserves to be called a writer. There is no officially accepted imprimatur, no government-certified club that doles out memberships.
But there is a clear practical threshold, and that is money. If you make a living writing, then you are a writer as long as you do that.
There are also other good indicators, which may involve less (social) currency: If you spend a lot of time writing or thinking about writing, until it becomes your daily and predominant activity, then you are a writer.
Being a writer does not mean someone is a good writer. Personally, I don't think Stephen King is a good writer, and I wouldn't read him for advice -- but he is indisputably a writer, regardless of that subjective judgment.
I've had acquaintances with a musical background and eventually they went to do something else, including IT. From what an old buddy told me once, most graduates of a musical school learn to hate music and quit that vocation past graduation.
In the opposite fashion, I've never had a literary education and I'm feeling more and more drawn to this line of work. I'm not sure if I want to make a complete switch though, software engineering and startups are just too exciting to give it all up. Somehow it feels I can accomplish more and make a better contribution to the society with my honed programming skills than with words, but I might be wrong about it. For now, I'm just writing essays every now and then, publishing them on my blog and that seems to be enough.
One word of advice in relation to all of this. Don't shy away from reading foreign literature. I know that for many native English speakers other languages simply don't exist in their world, but you're missing out on an incredible body of thoughts and ideas that might expand your vision borders. Don't be stuck in your English silo, learn some foreign language and go exploring. And no, a translation is not the same, it's devoid of the original energy. That's why people are often unimpressed by what before a translation was a profound piece of work. You can't translation energy.
As you suggest, the ideal path is majoring in something that will get you a job that pays decent to handsomely; and minor in something that will feed your soul. It sounds trite, but it is the best option and one few take from the people I've encountered.
I don't mean to burst your bubble but you might be romanticising a liberal arts education. It saddens me to say but I know UC Berkeley lit grads who still write like high-schoolers.
Literature doesn't teach you to write. Creative writing doesn't teach you to think. Forget about journalism. University writing style guides don't keep up with modern society. You have to tailor your liberal arts experience. Classical education taught the trivium to students at an early age so they can get a head start on teaching them how to think.
Luckily computer science teaches logic indirectly, but philosophically, it is only one type of logic. Writing involves many types of logic. But logic alone is not good writing. That depends on your audience and purpose. Good writing sometimes requires writing grammatically incorrect sentences. Good writing mirrors the natural flow of your reader's language, including phraseology, diction, and cause and effect. It has to jibe with them. But again, there are different purposes for a given writing composition.
When I got my first writing job, I was naively proud to say I was a writer. Now I'm embarrassed by it and just say what field or department I work in.
Have to disagree here. Yes there is a lot of good stuff especially written in the past but looking at today I see high caliber English writers and books in every category I do not see in that quality and quantity in any other language. Ok I do not know how it's about Chinese but that's my perception regarding other in particular European languages.
Always when I look for something, literature, fiction or non-fiction I switcch after seconds to Amazon.com from my local Amazon and find way better and more stuff. Frankly, the local selection feels like written by amateurs comapred to the US, I know this might sound bold and is probably too generalizing but the general perception is that you do not miss out anything if you stick to English based literate, rather the opposite. Of course therr are exception and genious writes not from the US like Unberto Eco and others but still nothing to the vast majority English based literature offers. Heck, even my Kindle account is US only.
If one country produces excellent media it's the US.
But what concerns me the most is that you dismiss the world literature without even knowing it and without being able to learn it. It's so arrogant that I can't seem to find the words to express my sorrow. All I can say is that the loss is yours. Nobody in the world has ever produced literature, songs and music like the French and Russian masters have. I am able to enjoy them in their natural form, as well as the English... let's call it "content". I can directly compare them and I'm telling you it would have been a loss of a monumental scale if I had been born in an English-speaking country and would have never been able to make acquaintance with those pieces.
That's not to mention that foreign languages are often less constrained and more expressive than English which on itself allows for more profound thoughts to be born and more naturally and creatively expressed. But that's not something that English-only speakers will ever find out.
I might try to persuade you to change your opinion but I won't. There's nothing in your position to brag about. In a way, I'm luckier than you and to that end I can only express my deepest regrets to you.
Tastes may vary but to dismiss foreign literature outright betrays a lack of experience as a reader. This is where I complain, as an old guy, about the poor state of liberal arts education.
Do yourself a favor and pick up some Dostoevsky. Or Gunter Grass. Or Murakami. Or Knut Hamsen. Or oh hell, there are far too many to list, those just come to the forefront in my head.
After all, college is just a place to pay for a degree, right? Might as well pay for something that will get you past HR.
Now that I have had several years of experience in 'real-world', I'm glad I chose the path that I did. Biology might not be a 'hard-science' as many people define one, but it is every bit as rigorous as chemistry or physics. I actually feel like biology gave me a leg up on people in a similar role, because experimental design and rigorous analysis is vital to getting good data in biology, since your area of study is affected by so many variables, many of which are stochastic.
If there was one thing I would change, I would have taken many more electives outside of the sciences. I branched out my senior year after I capped the number of credits I could take in the biology department, and scheduling issues wouldn't let me complete my CS minor. I enrolled in classes in Russian Literature, Studio Art, Art History, Philosophy, and Film Theory. I've constantly been surprised by how often the limited exposure I had to those fields has been helpful, especially Art and Philosophy.
It's important to remember that programming is only a method of solving a problem, you need to be able to understand the problem to put it to use. Low level courses often focus on teach the language you need to communicate in a given field, which is incredibly valuable as a developer.
Which for a sad number of professions (lots of them in tech) is pretty much all your degree is good for-at least it feels that way-provided you have enough drive to take on and have the ability to show side projects and "portfolio" type work to the person who will actually end up hiring you.
This is a good point...a good translation depends heavily on preserving the writer's "voice", which is unique to each writer...
Masterful translations are among the most underrated examples of human linguistic skill that I'm aware of...
I can only speak for myself, but I have a MA in literature (creative writing and poetry specifically) and am now a developer. The career path for that type of degree is often teaching and I wanted to be creative. Developing allows me to remain creative day to day. So while it may seem like I've moved away from my original field, I actually feel much closer to it compared to when I was teaching.
Finally, after years, I'm finally able to enjoy literature and writing. I had similar experiences with math.
Because no writer has the patience to sit through a grammar class...and no reader wants to read wordy, confusing writing no matter what the topic.
/shameless plug
Beautiful article though. I've met a couple recently-turned full-time authors and have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for the author/artist life. It's such a lifestyle sacrifice that their love for the craft must be incredibly deep.
It repeatedly returns: “Your response seems incomplete, so we set your score to the length of the original sentence. If we're mistaken, please drop us a line with a screenshot of this screen”, without any indication of how to fix the solution to be acceptable. I suppose it’s fishing for some specific keywords?
It doesn’t seem to have any full natural language model or conceptual model of the idea of the paragraph, so it can’t point out awkward or confusing phrases.
The proposed “par” and “record” sentences are not especially clear or elegant prose, or even especially short for conveying the ideas in the paragraph, and the metric (fewest characters used) is in general a weak heuristic for clear writing. The prompts don’t offer any list of essential vs. superfluous information, or even an explanation of the paragraph’s context and audience, so a proofreader/rewriter has to guess precisely what the author needed to say, and what the appropriate tone/style is.
I ultimately don’t understand how this game teaches writing any better than just trying to rewrite random sentences found in a book. Or for that matter, just having an email conversation with a friend about some random topic.
You're right that it's crude, lame even. That's why I dragged my feet on releasing it for weeks. But if you're getting the incomplete message, chances are your response is actually incomplete. We've had over 7,000 submissions and only 2 issues so far. Feel free to send me an example at steve at writeonpar dot com...I'm curious why you keep seeing that.
Writing is subjective. Your idea of elegant prose is different from mine, especially when context isn't specified.
I'll concede the game is more of a tool to practice good grammar & clarity than a way to teach it, but I don't agree that it's no different from rewriting random sentences in a book.
The par/record sentences are helpful for a lot of people. The timer is a simplistic but effective way to create mental pressure. And when we add videos explaining the journey from lousy to concise, players will actually learn the reasons for lousiness and techniques for clarity.
And, consistent practice trumps everything. Strange as it is, I've tried to pick examples that make the game less boring than any class/book/lecture you'll find anywhere. The result: this tool helps a number of people consistently practice writing better...something that wasn't otherwise happening.
Yes, the context being the important thing.
Creative writing is somewhat subjective, but other fields have more established conventions. The style Joyce uses for the Ulysses' final chapter would not be appropriate in an instruction manual. Even if we don't deal in absolute rights and wrongs, we certainly have established conventions for things that are right and wrong in defined contexts.
I taught an English 150 course, Technical Writing for Engineers, and can testify that the conventions can be taught and learned. Also, some students can understand and execute the principles better than others!
Yup. I began with the goal of helping business writers (mainly marketers). Even that's subjective, but we're doing what we can.
Creative writing is a totally different beast.
This tool allows a player to see a colon being used, wonder why, learn why (explanatory videos coming soon), and then use the colon in practice.
Learning by doing is much more effective than learning theory, in my opinion.
Regarding Bukowski, you should check out his Wikipedia page. I'll snip some highlights, and draw some conclusions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski
> poet, novelist, and short story writer
> Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over 60 books
You don't write thousands of poems without understanding language. He may not have had a complete collegiate education, but you can be sure he ended up studying language on his own.
[0]: I exclude the compulsory educational curriculum of childhood here. I've never personally known a writer who bothered to study grammar, particularly in such a manner as would have ever been a burden.
The best advice on being a writer is mostly reading how others did it and then avoiding their mistakes. Thus, I hope I don't end up kicking a can up a lonely road in Idaho or showing up drunk for an interview by Buckley or marrying my too-young cousin or winning any kind of prize.
Edit: I forgot to say what I came here to say: "Being a writer" is socially awkward and a little embarrassing, especially in this society. I've had feelings similar to the author's and had to learn to deal with them. Almost no one talks about that part of writing.
* Writers who make a living writing
* Writers who don't (yet)
* Fiction writers: Novelists and short-story writers
* Poets
* Journalists: reporters, war correspondents, editors
* Bloggers
* Corporate: Technical writers, Marketing copy writers, etc.
* Academics all stripes
These categories aren't mutually exclusive, but they each represent a different type of writing, which itself requires a different practice, approach or method.
There are, in fact, many handbooks for being a writer, and almost all of them are written to serve a particular type of writer and not others.
The creative writing departments of America have produced piles of writing about writing (about writing -- gaah ... self-referential recursion! No one escapes a medium describing itself.).
Some of the classics are:
* The Elements of Style - Strunk and White
* Politics and the English Language - Orwell https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
* Hemingway on Writing https://www.scribd.com/doc/156100470/Ernest-Hemingway-on-Wri...
* Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style - Erasmus (the opposite of Strunk...)
* And so on...
The best handbook of all, though is simply the study of great writers whose work you love, as the author points out. Anyone serious about fiction or prose should dive into the 19th-century Russian and French novelists, Virginia Woolf, an annotated Shakespeare, etc. It's all there just waiting for us. In that sense, every piece of good writing is a handbook on writing.
(Fwiw, I made a living as a reporter and editor for about 10 years.)
* Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Joseph Bizup
* The Chicago Manual of Style (depending on what kind of writer you are, a different guide may suit you better)
* Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
* On Writing, Stephen King
...in On Writing, Stephen King writes: "There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. (Of course, its short; at eighty-five pages it's much shorter than this one.) I'll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composition is "Omit needless words." I will try to do that here".
> The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules ... It's sad.
> aging zombie of a book ... a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice
I'm not saying that this book is terrible, just that it is mediocre, spits out good advice but not couched in good practice, is a bit old-fashioned, et cetera. There are better books out there. Stephen King's book On Writing is better in spite of the fact that Stephen King recommends Strunk and White.
I think that the reason people like the book is because it says things that you would agree with. "Omit needless words." How can you dislike a book that says such good things? But it doesn't surround the advice with solid examples the way Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace does, and it doesn't go into depth the way a proper style guide like Chicago does, and it doesn't have the more down-to-earth "how to be a writer" advice like King's or Lamott's works do.
So I don't recommend it.
(It's also quite curious that you quoted a tertiary source such as Wikipedia rather than King.)
That is definitely the way to approach things. If you come into writing by choice then it's because you've been drawn to it. Which in its turn means you have read works of others and have been inspired by them. Use those as your handbooks then, learn from the great, imitate them and eventually discover your own path.
It's not like you've never read anything of consequence in your life and all of a sudden you decide you're going to turn into a writer. Doesn't work that way. There are no "Writing for dummies" or "Learning writing in 20 days" manuals. You just start writing because you can, when you become ready for it.
https://books.google.com/books/about/If_You_Want_to_Write.ht...
Another nice one is Stein on Writing
https://books.google.com/books/about/Stein_On_Writing.html?i...
Of course, what most writers will advise is that you just write a lot, and get good writers to critique your work. Writing, like most arts, takes years and years.
Today, there are various web sites that will "crowd-source" critiques of your writing, in exchange for your critiquing other people's work (also good practice). I've used critters.org quite a bit but there are several other big ones these days.
You could translate this to another field. I've read lots of books on programming, but very few on "how to be a programmer". Mostly a few short blog posts with contradictory information.
And I'd also recommend "On Writing" by Stephen King.
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/04/book-review-war-of-...
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/06/nobody-wants-to-rea...
Long-form seems to be very popular online these days. Anyone can hammer out a 500-word essay, but a it takes a 5,000 word one to stand out. Long-form may be the best approach right now for writers hoping to gain visibility.
Also, I think IQ plays a role, too. You need to be smart to make a career at writing (assuming you're not a celebrity), and few are sufficiently smart enough, sorry to say.
Anyone want to post a tldr?
as a paid author, given the title, i was hoping for an article that touched on drinking, lallygagging, and partying --- then getting all your work done in one day at the end of the month.
For example, this successful author (David Wilcock) who failed to make a documentary, and wrote about it and turned it into a NYTimes bestseller. It's sub-par book with silly claims but he has an audience and it provided a story structure with interesting ideas and alleged facts. Eat Love Pray is another example.
And I suppose if you can write about outrageous things you do, it probably makes people all the more motivated to read you.
Great point.
Searching for sentences that include "I", "Me", etc. in your writing is an excellent exercise.
> And I suppose if you can write about outrageous things you do, it probably makes people all the more motivated to read you.
Personally, I think this is just human nature. That is, most people are fascinated (and likely, long to do so themselves) with living an "outrageous" lifestyles
My background is in software and I still freelance to pay the bills. I have been writing on and off since I was old enough to hold a pen. Little fits and starts here and there, but by the time I was in my early twenties I focused on making a living instead of learning how to write. I dreamed of one day making enough money to retire and maybe write a few books.
Three years ago I realized that was crazy. I wanted to write, putting it off until the end of my life not only increases the chance I'd never get to do it, but also means that I'd miss out on years and years of practice. I decided to do with writing what I did with programming—set aside nearly half my time to learn how to do it, then keep doing it until I could make a living.
I'm not making a living anytime soon, but after three years I've written a couple novel manuscripts, published a short story collection, and am due to publish a novel at the end of the year. But I'm still hesitant to answer, "I'm a writer" when someone at a cocktail party asks what I do.
It's basically the same as being a programmer except programmers tend to self publish their work rather quickly. I feel like writers should generally do the same (and solicit feedback).
What I don't understand is did the author think that most people new to writing expected it to be more straightforward? Because I would have thought people like writing because the career is what you make of it, where you hustle and for what.
You never here someone say I am a basketball player just because they play basketball as a hobby. Doing something that pays your bills is totally different than it being a hobby or even being great at it.
Very true. I hold the same liberal view as to what people truly are.
An interesting idea just struck me. If a seasoned software developer quits his full-time job to work on a startup of his dream, while taking a part time job at a bar to be able to pay his bills, who is he then? Is he no longer a professional software engineer? Is he now a bar tender? An entrepreneur? What is he truly then during this period?
By the same token, if say an economist has been getting frustrated at his job and starts learning web programming, building simple personal sites for himself and friends, is it insufficient to call him a programmer, even if we would all agree he is only a junior one?
Where do we draw a line?
If someone is serious about a new vocation and invests a lot of time and energy into mastering it, then by all rights he's already in part what he aspires to become.
But if it is just about writing for living / journalism and similar stuff, then yes, handbooks exists and do work.
ps: worked as journalist and studied literature, but don't feel like i could write books that come close to what i like to read.
""Keep related words together" is further explained in these terms: "The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning." That is a negative passive, containing an adjective, with the subject separated from the principal verb by a phrase ("as a rule") that could easily have been transferred to the beginning."
Yes. That's the joke, dear Geoffrey. They are showing the violation to demonstrate its effect on a sentence. You have to be truly humorless if not willfully obtuse to read this as Strunk & White having no idea what they're talking about.
Strunk & White is self-critiquing, which is part of what makes it great—it's not nearly so prescriptive as the author seems to think.