I want to start this piece by noting that I am painfully aware of the paucity of my own published work (there’s the novella, a few short stories, most recently here, and an article, plus some other pseudonymous stuff a long time ago). While I am offering advice about writing here, and I stand by what I’m about to say, it’s worth taking it all with a good portion of your recommended daily value of salt. This is my approach, and it may or may not have anything of value for you, dear reader.

On that note, I do address most of this to a “you,” and it can be you specifically if you enjoy being exhorted, for some reason. I’d prefer to think of this more as me talking to myself by means of sock puppets on each hand, one the speaker and the other the addressee, the “you” here. It’s fun for me, is all.

Selling the Self

Who’s a writer when they’re at home? Popular culture conjures an image of a squirelly dirtbag, possibly intoxicated by their own success (or worse, their imagination of their own success), possibly glib enough to make up for being kinda weird looking, possibly just the most annoying person in the room. Personally, I’m three for four on there, and I know I’m not successful. But in real life, others have remarked that authors are increasingly pressured to act as their own publicists. Inevitably, then, we arrive at the writer on social media.

More than anything, social media excels at encouraging its users to create and perform a self. This applies to everyone: whether it’s a guy pressured to sign up for Instagram by his significant other who created an account dedicated to public toilets he has visited, the Mom (who also had a multi-level marketing moment, but we won’t hold it against her), or some more exotic terminally online hothouse flower, there are all kinds of personal brands to fall into, and fall into them we often do. There’s only so many Types of Guy on Facebook or Tumblr or any of the others, after all, and the whole system requires that you mutilate yourself to fit into its strictures.

The same is true for writers – but it was true for writers before social media. What was Jack Kerouac doing but performing a self? Wilde at least admitted it, flaunted it, even. Even without more or less flamboyant public appearances, what is that vaunted quarry of a thousand writing programs, “the voice,” but a performance of a commodified self, a self designed for display?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a performed self, a voice that grows from the singular experiences of a self. But it won’t get you far: voice is only one part, and not necessarily the most important part, of any writer’s repertoire. Fostering the voice, as an emanation of self, above all else brings the writer crashing into an important and uncomfortable fact: “the self,” sanded down and rock-tumbled into a commodity for public consumption, is a finite resource.

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Wait a second, you may say, that’s a bizarre thing to say: the self is surely only as finite as the life it’s attached to, and even then, isn’t part of the point of the writing to make it endure even beyond that?

I mean, sure. But the commoditized self – the personal brand – can only take you so far as a person. Eventually, the well runs dry, by which I mean that you have changed as a person beyond the ability of your brand or your rock-tumbled self to still be an arguably-authentic self.

An elegant example of working around that is offered by public commentator Sam Dylan Finch, who rose to prominence with his blog, Let’s Queer Things Up! Over the years, Finch wrote often and well about his experience of his nonbinary gender, as well as his long travails with his mental health as he sought out a correct diagnosis that would help him find treatment for what ailed him.

And then that wasn’t his life anymore. He had found treatment modalities that were helping him, his transition and his mental health were progressing in a stable way, his self had changed. He wrote again about this new kind of transition, and has moved from chronicling his own struggles, which were now more or less in hand, to advocacy and more informative writing.

As mentioned, I think he did this extremely well. Not everyone can: sometimes you’ve just got the one thing and you’re stuck with that self you made; sometimes you’re JT Leroy and that self was never real. Or sometimes, you just get bored with yourself. And that’s when you turn to the fine art of making shit up.

Practicing the Craft

I still can’t think about “the craft” without hearing it in Alan Rickman’s voice (of which I now, of course, cannot find a clip), but that’s neither here nor there. I also can’t speak for everyone in terms of what constitutes “useful advice” for writing: what works for me is going to be very different from what works for anyone else. But, that said –

Practicing writing is also practicing reading, and both, I think, happen in different ways than we expect them to. As mentioned elsewhere, losing the ability to fully immerse in someone else’s writing is a key part of the practice: you, the writer, need to be able to read critically but openly. To rephrase, when you read as a writer, you need to pay attention to how you feel about what you’re reading, but also look closely at the text and even sometimes at the book object to understand why you’re feeling that way. What is happening – on a sentence level, on a word-choice level, but also in your specific placement in the world as you read – to elicit the feelings you’re experiencing as you read? What are those feelings? And, most importantly, how can you use what you’re learning in this reading experience in your own work?

That approach may sound joyless and needlessly analytical, but this, like anything else worth doing, is a game. Will it make some things less fun? Sure – plenty of stuff doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny, and once you recognize copization, a lot of things are less entertaining – but it’ll make it a lot easier to find more things that you like, because you know what to look for. It’ll also make it easier to understand why you don’t like certain things, and help you work around that dislike, which is invaluable if you find that you want to have read stuff you don’t actually want to read. Reading widely is, after all, a major part of developing not only your abilities as a writer but also your self, that precious self that speaks in the precious voice.

And what about your own writing? Your own powers of invention and capacity to elicit feelings in a reader? Honestly, you just kind of have to keep doing it all the time in whatever way seems fun and cool to you at the time, and explore forms and techniques as the spirit moves you, or whenever you see something that makes you say, "I want to do that." Do it! No one can stop you but you! You never have to show anyone else if you do it and it sucks!

More than anything else, though, work with care and desperation and because you have to, because you want to. There’s no point in making art if you don’t want to – you won’t like it, and neither will anyone else – and this too is a game. It should be fun.

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In addition to being fun, of course, all that craft stuff also serves to create a structure from which the voice can be heard. In working your technique, in absorbing the tricks from the other writers that you read, you will create a foundation of ability and a way of thinking about your own and others’ work that can only make your own work better.

I’m not saying, of course, that you should just imitate other writers, or that your own voice, the self you perform for art purposes, must be like anyone else’s. On the contrary: you work on the craft and the technique and all that stuff precisely so that your voice can be singular. You build your own pedestal on which to display that voice – but you’ve got to build a pedestal because otherwise you’re just throwing stuff on the ground and wondering why no one’s looking at it.

Apotheosis, or, Subgenrification

So okay so you did all that work, you read all that stuff, you stopped worrying about your brand or your performed self – or you do, but not when it comes to your work. What’s the pay-off here? Other than, you know, being better at writing by sheer virtue of practice than through any other means?

For some very lucky writers, the answer is subgenrification. There are many personal essays, but then there’s David Sedaris personal essays, which follow particular beats and work in particular ways. There’s a lot of horror and thriller novels out there, but there’s also Stephen King novels, which are different. Sometimes other writers even do them better than King – but King has written so much, in such a particular way, that there’s almost no way for all of them to be winners.

Obviously, not everyone will get to that level of financial success and cultural penetration, but I don’t think that’s the goal. The goal is to write well and write like yourself – not the self you are on Instagram or wherever you do your doomscrolling, but the self you were when you said you wanted to be a writer, the self you build out of everything you read and everything you experience. I am not there yet, and I don’t know if I ever will be – but I hope that by sharing my approach, I’ve offered some food for thought.

The Voice and the Craft: Some Thoughts on Writing