Top Strategies For Developing Creative Writing Skills
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Looking for strategies for developing your writing skills?
Today, I’m diving into my top tips.
Let’s get started!
1. Avoid feedback-based writing programs
When I was 18 years old, I signed up for my first college creative writing class, The Short Story.
The teacher was a North Carolina woman who'd published a collection of short stories—I didn't really read short stories except for the ones I'd had to in high school, and I had no idea what made a short story a short story. The only ones I could remember were Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (because holy *&^%, who doesn't remember that one) and Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", both of which I loved. Five years later I would read George Saunders' short story "CommComm" and have an experience I can only describe as religious, but even then, I wouldn't be able to articulate why.
I wanted to write them—that was all I knew.
I was bulimic at the time, rushing to the nearest campus bathroom after every meal to purge my food. I was also a public school kid from South Carolina certain that I was the least intelligent person at the university.
In the creative writing course, I wrote a couple of stories and got Bs on them. I don't remember what they were about—I'm pretty sure one was about a clown—but I do remember that, in the workshop-style setting in which the class provided feedback on each other's stories, my peers gnawed at them with such brilliance that it confirmed my inferiority.
Out of a desperation for an A (like Mark Twain, who said he could survive for two months on a good compliment, I've always been a glutton for affirmation, especially in the form of grades), I sat down and wrote a "short story" about a bulimic girl. It was entirely nonfiction, a litany of secrets I hadn't told a soul.
I got an A, to my relief, then promptly threw away the story so that no one would ever find it. I was sure that if, say, my roommate picked it up, or my mom during a visit, they'd recognize me as the girl.
What is the lesson here—to write what you know? To be vulnerable on the page?
I don't at all take those lessons from this experience. This memory is an icky one for me, an experience that feels closer to being bullied into a corner than liberated into finding my voice.
I didn't find my voice that semester—I didn't find anything. I felt so clobbered by the feedback-based classroom that I resorted to an uneasy self-exposure out of duress, a kind of exhibitionist maneuver, revealing my most tender place to strangers before I was even ready to reveal it to the people I loved and trusted.
Looking back, I now know that there is another way to deal with young and/or new writers, and it's radical: teach them to write fiction.
Imagine that.
Teach them to take the big questions in their hearts—in my case at 18, how to belong, how to live with fraud syndrome, how to feel like the world wants you here—and explore them through characters who aren't just like them. Because that's what fiction is. That's why fiction is—because it opens up reality and reaches beyond it. Fiction that's merely reality in a mask faces the same limitations that reality does. It isn't expansive for the writer, or for the world. It's just a foggy mirror that could use some Windex.
Here's a radical suggestion: When you're trying on a new kind of writing, stop taking classes in which feedback from peers is the heart of the course.
That’s my top strategy for developing your writing skills as an aspiring author.
I don't mean to be a jerk, but this is lazy teaching.
And I get why it's tempting for teachers—teaching writing is scary. It's scary because writing is mysterious, and ultimately no one is quite sure how it happens or happens well, and every writer, unless he is a sociopath, is plagued by self-doubts about his product and his process.
But for a teacher to deal with that insecurity by outsourcing the teaching to the students who are all new at this—which is what feedback-based teaching is—is destructive. It's toxic, wimpy, and lazy.
Imagine a flight school at which all the aspiring pilots get together and ty to figure out how to fly a plane while the only actual pilot in the room watches. Would you hop on that jet? I will drive, thank you.
So if you've felt discouraged by writing classes in which you've written your first ever thing (or your second ever thing, or your third ever thing)—a short story, a novel opening, a poem—only to be told by 11 other strangers everything that they didn't like about it, I'm sorry. Nothing is wrong with you. You just fell into a crappy system. And good news—now you get to crawl out.
You can rediscover your joy in writing and develop your writing skills, I promise. Seek out real advice from writers who've been at it a little while. George Saunders is an incredible teacher who just published an incredible book on writing. John Gardner's The Art of Fiction is fantastic.
Find others who are supportive and rooting for your success—join our book club for writers, in which we take popular novels and memoirs and take craft lessons from them (it's super fun!). If you're in a lighter mood, listen to my podcast.
Your creativity will come back, I promise. It's resilient that way. Just let it pick what parties it goes to from now on. It's an introvert, and it needs a little TLC that doesn't involve kegs.
2. Learn from trusted mentors through their books
When it comes to developing your creative writing skills, this strategy is worth mentioning.
I believe in learning from books, and not just any books, but books that you love.
What do you love to read?
What can’t you put down?
Analyze what’s working for that author. If you want to get really nerdy, chart it out by page:
On page 1, he does X
On page 3, he does Y
We learn best by emulating the people who are already doing well that which we want to do well.
If you’re thinking, “Uh, I don’t read enough,” or “I’m too embarrassed to admit this, but I haven’t actually read a book in years,” no worries. But it’s time to get back into it. Pick up some books. Order a few from a bookstore or the library.
Get reacquainted with what you like and what you don’t like.
Discovering (or resdicovering) your own taste and analyzing it is the first step to figuring out what you want to write.
3. Be bold, be brave—more than is logical to be
Recently I had the pleasure of hearing Ann Patchett interview Lily King about Lily's new collection of short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter.
Besides the fact that it was a total joy to be at an in-person book event (humans in a bookstore! Talking about books!), I've been thinking about that interview, because Ann said something that has stuck with me the last few days.
A little background: Ann Patchett is a very gracious person. Once, I was signing books next to her at an event. While, in my line, people were politely asking who I was and what my book was about, in her line, a woman began loudly weeping because meeting Ann was the peak moment of her life. Ann came around the table and hugged her.
So that's who we're talking about here—I've never known Ann to be elitist, or snooty about literary stuff, or anything like that at all. In fact, she's extremely down to earth and friendly to everyone who comes into her (fantastic) bookstore.
Ann said this: that in a given year, she probably reads 40 short stories that she thinks are just absolutely incredible, that she would "go to the mat for." But of the dozens of novels she reads—she's a bookstore owner and author who blurbs, so she's sent many, many novels—she only ever loves a handful.
Her hypothesis is that it's easier to be braver with a short story, to take more risks, and that leads to more impactful stories.
Lily King seemed to concur. She said when she's writing a novel, it feels like such an investment that she doesn't want to mess it up, especially once she's two-thirds or more into writing it (not her exact words, but close), while a short story feeling like a "dalliance." If it doesn't work out...oh, well.
Then Ann shared that once, she was chatting with a songwriter who'd come into her bookstore (we're in Nashville after all). This songwriter had said, "Wow, being a novelist must be very stressful. If you write a bad novel, that's years of your life you just spent on it."
Ann asked him how much time he wastes on a bad song.
"Hour and a half?" he said. (This made me laugh.)
But perhaps there's something in this for us—those of us who write, or plan to write, longer works.
How do we invest a great deal of time and still be brave? How do we remember that taking risks could be the best possible thing for our story, no matter how many hours, days, and weeks we've already spent on it?
It helps me to have a rule that I never throw anything out. If I decide to take my novel draft in a completely new direction, I make sure to save it as a new file, so that if I "ruin" it, I can just re-open the previous version and find the story's old direction there.
But I also find that that rarely happens. Because, like Ann suggested, when I take risks, they almost always make the story better.
But what counts as a risk, Mary? you may be thinking.
Anything that makes you think, "Oh, but I couldn't do that." It gives you a shiver. It puts your characters in a real bind...and thus puts you, as the author, in a real bind, too. Because how are you going to get them out of it?
But here's the beautiful thing: if you don't know how you're going to get them out of it, the reader picks up on that. And if the reader wonders, "How is he/she/they [this author] going to pull us out of this?"...well, that's just magic. You've done it.
I think that, as a writer, the hardest part isn't getting out of a strait jacket. It's getting into one—a real one, not a fake one—and bringing the reader along with you.
Once you're there, eventually you'll figure out your escape. It's like untangling a necklace. It'll happen eventually—you may just have to change your strategy a bit, undo the clasp, find a brighter light and maybe some tweezers.
I hope you found these strategies for developing your writing skills insightful!
