My 2021 interview with Authority magazine asked, “Based on your experience, what are five thing you need to know to become a great author? Please share a story or example for each.”

But one needn’t be a writer to benefit from these five things. While my advice was directed at writers, it can apply to many things from parenting to career development to any creative process. There’s a level of self-awareness to be had in these five things that’s bound to result in more expansive thought regardless of your aspirations.

And if I were to add a sixth, overarching guideline, it would be that one shouldn’t allow anyone but oneself to define “great” for themselves. As the celebrated American writer Eudora Welty reminds us, a quiet life “can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

Here are five things you need to know, as a thinker, a writer, and beyond:

  1. Listen at least as much as you write. To be read by others, there must be a degree of emotional provocation and engagement with what we write. Writing without listening to the world around you, its people and elements and sensations, is preaching. I listen to my world constantly; the spoken and written words of others are part, but nowhere near all of it. I listen with all my senses and sensibilities. I find I don’t learn much when I’m doing all the talking.
  1. Don’t get bogged down with rules or guidelines that may apply to others but you. There’s no magic number of words or minutes you must write per day, no standard length a chapter or a book should be, no words you should never use. Learn to trust your rhythms and instincts, honing them as you grow in your writing. I avoid absolutes like must, always, or never. They weary me. When I’m bombarded with must-read, must-have, must-watch, etc., my reaction is, must take nap!
  1. Reject sabotaging language. The lexicon of writing and publishing is fraught with negatives like rejection, writer’s block, false start, aspiring writers. Reframe these energy drainers as tools. Rejection is a favor from a publisher who wasn’t going to do right by your work — a bullet dodged. Writer’s block is an invitation to take time to refill your creative well, consider directions previously unexplored. There’s no such thing as a false start, but there are warm-ups, practice, creative experimentation, freewriting. As for the difference between “aspiring writer” and “writer,” it’s so tiny. If you write, you’re a writer, and you have left “aspiring” behind. I frequently remind myself to not be my own biggest obstacle. Lead, follow or get out of the way. All have their place in a writer’s life.
  1. Dream in stages. Too many aspiring writers (i.e., they haven’t written anything yet) tell me that they have a story, they want to write it, get published, win a Pulitzer. Within mere months they stall out, drowning in self-doubt, listening to naysayers telling them they can’t do it and “no one will read your book.” That’s statistically impossible, of course, if you publish in any manner. But so much of the angst can be avoided by embracing the generative writing process at each step. All writing starts with a sentence. The sentences become paragraphs, the paragraphs form scenes, the scenes make up chapters, and the totality of the chapters renders a book. This process enthralls me. To miss the joy of creating beautiful sentences that then flow into paragraphs, and on to scenes, etc. is, to me, to miss the point of writing at all.
  1. Don’t compartmentalize your writing. The writing advice to which I return again and again came when I was awarded a residency where I began work on The River by Starlight. The Welcome information included this: “Expand your definition of what it means ‘to be writing’ if your definition doesn’t include daydreaming, false starts, walks in the woods, reading or watching a bird. You can be ‘working on a piece’ in many different ways.”

 

Read the full interview here.

 

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Image by Yerson Retamal from Pixabay