From the Mouths of Writers 7: Any advice for upcoming writers?

by Jeana Conder

Several months ago I set out on the task of asking local writers to answer a series of eight questions I compiled.  The responses I received are now creating our series, “From the Mouth of Writers.”  We hope that this series allows upcoming writers to gain knowledge from others with the same passion. 

This month’s question:  Any advice for upcoming writers?

Allyson Loomis

(1) LIVE (2) READ (3) WRITE (4) THINK ABOUT WRITING (5) REPEAT UNTIL DEAD—the most important one is #5.  Writing is a practice.  Keep at it, and be patient with yourself.

Sandra Lindow

Unless you have been trained in technical writing, don’t quit your day job in order to write. Best sellers are hard to come by and you need to eat and pay your bills.  Developing as a writer is a very long process that requires discipline and cognitive development..  Poets rarely make much money unless they are already celebrities.  Spend time every day writing.  Try new forms. Go to workshops. Share work with other writers and take their critiques seriously.  Read, read, read, especially work that challenges such as nonfiction.

Bruce Taylor

I taught writing for 40 years so I have nothing but advice for upcoming writers. What it’s worth, if anything, is up to each individual writer. 

Learn to use Microsoft outline. Start there.

Early in the process stay away from sentences, paragraphs, any extended rhetorical construction for as long as you can.

Write or try to write what only you can, nobody else.

Pay attention. This is everything.  Pay attention.

Jon Loomis

Don’t wait for inspiration.  Inspiration is bullshit.  If you’re serious, put aside the things that distract you and start writing.   

Molly Patterson

Form the habit of writing. Don't wait for inspiration to hit; sit down and do the work with regularity. This might mean every day or it might mean three times a week, or it might mean every Saturday morning for one solid hour. But stick to it, and make sure it's a regular thing. If you write regularly, and with tenacity, you're a writer. Don't feel like you have to write from page one to page three hundred. Write bits and pieces, write specific moments, write half-scenes if need be, but keep getting words on the page. And don't be afraid to throw things out. Once a story starts taking shape, you'll probably find that a lot of what you wrote at first no longer fits. That's good: that means you're developing a discerning eye. Keep all those scraps somewhere in another document or another notebook, and know you can always use them if you want. Write, write, write: that's the best advice I can give.

Martha Qualey

Read out of your usual topic/genre/form zone and find or build a writing community. Watch out for those exclamation marks.

Brett Beach

Read. Read widely. Read curiously. Read books across genres. Look at what you’ve read and ask about authors who aren’t represented—writers of color, women, LGBTQ authors, foreign authors in translation. Read. Read. Read.

It’s old advice, but true. Some people say that if you read while you’re writing, you might be infected by the author’s voice, and write in an imitation. Well, good, I say: their books were published because they are good writers, most likely. There are worse things than mimicking someone you admire. I copied author’s voices when I started. I still do, probably. And then I revised, as I revise now, and other authors’ voices transformed into mine.

When Kao Kalia Yang visited UW-Eau Claire, she said, “Art inspires art.” I sometimes picture us, as writers, standing in a long line. We can look behind us at all the authors we love, who influence us, who mean the world to us, and their books are a record of what came before and how we used to live. We can look ahead at the uncertain future and try to guess what we might have to say. The two aren’t unconnected. Guiding us along, all the while, are the voices of our influences and our idols, singing in a chorus, melding together, coaxing us to put pen to paper, asking, Now what? Now what? Now what?

Jay Gilbertson

Try and shut me up! First off, finish. And you know exactly what I mean. Get it done. And read. Read your ass off. Go to workshops and take classes and meet other writers and join a few things, but not too many, and keep writing. And more than anything, don’t forget to have a life. How else can you write about it if you’re not in it kicking it around and falling once in a while? It’s the falls that make your story/poem/song/painting/life full of the passion we all need to know about. Now go and make you some art!

Nickolas Butler

Read, read, read, read, read.  That's it.  Telling me you want to be a writer, but that you don't read very much, or that you only read Harry Potter (I love the Harry Potter series and JK Rowling's exquisite universe) is sort of like telling me you want to be a carpenter but all you have in your toolbox is a few nails and maybe a pliers.  Good luck.  Take your time, read widely, live a full and interesting life, work strange jobs, take your education seriously, but mostly—read.

Cathy Sultan

Write about something you are passionate about. You will be spending long, lonely hours at your computer so love what you’re writing about. Patience and perseverance are also very important. You will write and re-write any number of times to “get it perfect” and then write it again and again so never let yourself get “down” and never say “I can’t do this.” Of course, you can, but you may need an extra dose of determination to get the job done. And I pass along what an author friend once told me: your book is never finished until it goes to press, so stick to it.

Sandra McKinney

Read good writing; pay attention; love the power of language and story

From the Mouths of Writers 6: How do you get out of a writing funk?

by Jeana Conder

Several months ago I set out on the task of asking local writers to answer a series of eight questions I compiled.  The responses I received are now creating our series, “From the Mouth of Writers.”  We hope that this series allows upcoming writers to gain knowledge from others with the same passion. 

This month’s question: How do you get out of a writing funk?

Allyson Loomis

The only cure for it is a hot shower, maybe a long walk.  Then I just have to sit right down again and stare at the glowing computer page until something occurs to me.   If I step away from a project for too long, it’s hard for me to reconnect with it.  I have to sit with it, persistently.  It’s a very boring process to watch.

Sandra Lindow

I don’t seem to have writing funks; although I sometimes go through periods of time when I don’t write much poetry, I can always write academic prose.  My critical book, Dancing the Tao:  Le Guin and Moral Development was published in 2012.  Right now I am writing about Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor.  With my poetry, I have recently turned toward modern sonnets and golden shovels for condensing my ideas.  A golden shovel takes a line from another poem or essay and those words in order become the first or the last word of each line.  Poet Ron Wallace has a book that uses haikus as golden shovels which recently inspired me to do this.  The result is a kind of conversation with the original writer over time.

Bruce Taylor

Write into it, write over it, around it, through it, just write. Get in motion, put something on the page, anything, put something else, then something else. When a writer says they can’t write, it usually means they can’t write anything that they think is “good enough.” The best advice I’ve ever heard was from William Stafford, “lower your standards.” There are, however, many different kinds of “funk” a writer can get into.

Jon Loomis

I sit down and write something.

Martha Qualey

I get out of the house.

Molly Patterson

I'm in a writing funk right now, unfortunately. I'm working on a new novel and putting words on the page, but they're terrible words and I know it, and I keep running up against dead ends. Generally, I just try to write through it. You have one bad day and the next might be better. But when it's bad upon bad for long enough, I'll take a break to work on something else. Lately, I've had edits to do on the novel that's coming out this summer, and that feels like easy work. Generating new material day after day, that's the hardest thing for me. There are no easy answers. You keep sitting down to do the work and you keep yourself from thinking that it requires magic to do it. Eventually, you'll have a good writing day—or even a good writing moment—and you'll start to come out of it.

Brett Beach

While in graduate school, I developed the habit of writing—which, if I had any wisdom to pass on, I would advise writers in a funk to do. It can be hard, I know, but I think one of the least appealing things I can do as a writer is complain to people about why I’m not writing. So I discovered that if I only wrote two days a week, say, and both days were the bad ones where the computer screen sat empty, the notebook page blank, or, worse, every line I wrote was insipid and uninspired, I’d have less reason to try again. It’s all bad, I’d think. I’ll never be a writer. I should quit.  

Instead I took a mathematical approach—probably the only time I’ve ever successfully used math. If I write five or six days a week, and three of those days are bad writing days, that’s roughly half, which is much better than one hundred percent. If one bad day is followed by a second, but I know that four more days of writing lie ahead, there’s an ease to the pain of the funk: maybe the third day won’t be so bad. Or, if it is, by sheer force of routine, I know I’ll still sit down to write on the fourth. The fifth might be good, or the sixth—and one tiny, good day is enough to make me try again the next day.

I’m also generous in what I consider a writing day: some days it is pen and paper, other times it is reading over old work. Sometimes I stare at the computer for an hour, and call it a day. Sometimes I read, and that feels worthwhile too—to remember why we do this.

Jay Gilbertson

Should this happen, and I suppose it has, I get the hell away from my desk and get thee outside! And, if it’s winter, which it is in these parts a great deal of the time, well, I can certainly find something to do. Writers are famous for finding ‘other’ things to do than write. Famous.

Nickolas Butler

I take a walk or go for a drive.

Cathy Sultan

I keep the problem in my head, mull it over and over until I have it figured out and then return to my computer.

Sandra McKinney

Sit with it; embrace it; love it and eat chocolate.

From the Mouths of Writers 5: What is your favorite book?

By Jeana Conder

Several months ago I set out on the task of asking local writers to answer a series of eight questions I compiled.  The responses I received are now creating our newest series, “From the Mouth of Writers.”  We hope that this series allows upcoming writers to gain knowledge from others with the same passion. 

This month’s question:  What is your favorite book?

Allyson Loomis

My favorite book of all time is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.  Part of my loving that book has to do with my having read it for the first time long ago with a very good English teacher, who I also loved, but I’ve gone back to it again and again, and I find it increasingly gorgeous and moving.  Also, I happen to be thinking about Woolf today.  If you had asked me the same question yesterday I might have said, Ragtime by E.L Doctorow.  If you had asked me the question last Sunday I might have said Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro.  I’ve got a lot of favorite books.  Have you got six or seven hours?

Sandra Lindow

That’s a terrible question.  To single out one book out of many is like having to make Sophie’s Choice.  William Kloefkorn’s Alvin Turner As Farmer and Dave Etter’s Alliance, Illinois were very influential in the 80s as I started publishing.  Later it was Ursula K. Le Guin’s poetry and prose, particularly Always Coming Home which combines poetry and fiction to tell a story about a post-apocalyptic Northern California.  Right now my favorite book is Mary Oliver’s book of short essays Blue Pastures, which is an intimate look at the writing process.

Bruce Taylor

Maybe, the next one I read.

Jon Loomis

I don’t think I could identify a favorite.  I have lots of favorites.  I’m currently reading a lot of ancient history—the silk roads, the Vikings, the Mongols, Rome.  Fascinating stuff.  Part of our national problem, I think, is how quickly we seem to forget everything.  We’re like a country of amnesiacs, wandering around without any landmarks.  No wonder we seem so lost.   

Molly Patterson

My favorite book, without question, is Middlemarch, by George Eliot. I've read it seven or eight times, at least, and every time I love it as much or more than ever before. It's a book that you can grow with; you'll relate to different characters at twenty-two than you do at thirty-two (and presumably forty-two, and fifty-two, and sixty-two, though I haven't gotten to those ages yet). Middlemarch is set in the 1830s, but the dilemmas the characters face, the compromises they make, the flaws they display, the contradictions they encompass—it's all as relevant to me, today, as any book set in the modern period. As a writer, I admire George Eliot's perspective and voice in the novel--it's a grand, nineteenth-century narrator, not afraid to soliloquize or make pronouncements or philosophize. As a reader, I feel like these characters are friends I'm always happy to meet again, every time I open the book. 

Marsha Qualey

The Translator by Ward Just.

Brett Beach

My favorite book is the novel The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, an Australian author who unfortunately passed away in December of 2016, not long after the Irish-living in-England author William Trevor. It was a rough time for me as a reader. Hazzard is my favorite writer, without comparison, and the novel my absolute ideal. The novel tells the story of sisters, Caro and Grace Bell, tracking their lives from their orphaning in childhood through the separate paths their adult lives take, while also tracking a number of people in their lives: a prisoner of war from the Second World War, a playwright and his troubled son, a member of the United Nations, an astronomer, and the sisters’ troubled, delightfully and accidentally villainous aunt. But it is also a novel so beautifully written, so intricately plotted, and so transcendently wise and engrossing that each time I return to the book, I learn something new about how to write, and how to read.  (Though for sheer repeat-ability, I would also include George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and White Teeth, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and all of Alice Munro’s work.)

Jay Gilbertson

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote. I read it nearly every spring. I have read all of his work. He is a master and very underappreciated. He saw humans and nature and love and hate and all the in-betweens with such clarity and openness and pain.

Nickolas Butler

There are too many favorites.  The Old Man and the Sea is a standby, for sure.  Also, East of Eden.  This is an impossible question to answer.

Sandra McKinney

Anything by Anne Lamott

Cathy Sultan

That’s a very hard question to answer because I have many but if I had to choose one it would be The Constant Gardner by John le Carré.

From the Mouths of Writers 4: Are there any local places that have helped inspire your creativity?

By Jeana Conder

Several months ago I set out on the task of asking local writers to answer a series of eight questions I compiled.  The responses I received are now creating our newest series, “From the Mouth of Writers.”  We hope that this series allows upcoming writers to gain knowledge from others with the same passion.  This month’s question: Are there any local places that have helped inspire your creativity? 

Allyson Loomis

I can’t really think of specific places, really, but Eau Claire and the Chippewa Valley, where I have lived for the past 13 years, are of course important to my writing.  Any place an author knows well is extremely valuable.  With few exceptions, a story needs a character, a place and a conflict.  Knowing a place, having watched it and noticed its details, is like having a patch of fertile ground out of which a story can rise.

Sandra Lindow

Menomonie has a connected system of walking trails that follow Lake Menominee and the Red Cedar River.  It is easy to find inspiration there.

Molly Patterson

I routinely write in coffee shops, most often Starbucks or EC/DC. I like a little noise and bustle around me when I write--a quiet room with no one else in it is harder; it feels too precious. I think this has to do with the fact that I treat writing as a job, not in the tedious sense, but in the sense of: "Sit down and do this thing four or five or six days a week, whether you feel like it or not." A coffee shop is the perfect space, then, because there are other people there doing their own work (homework, business work, etc.). It takes away the idea that you need magic to write. You don't. You need tenacity and time.

Bruce Taylor

I often write from, if not necessarily about, the place that I am. Where I’m living at the time. For a long time, it was Mt. Simon. Now it’s Lake Hallie. At one point I seemed to have a lot of poems about bars.  For almost 6 years on the way to work every day I went, weather permitting, to the same bench on Half Moon Lake with a thermos of coffee and my notebook. It became almost Pavlovian. Ring the bell? Salivate. Go to the bench? Write. I never finished anything there, that wasn’t the point. It was mostly all phrase, fragments, tentative lines, but I filled many journals, some of which, I still go back to from time to time.

Jon Loomis

There are a few poems in my recent book that are set in and around Eau Claire, and in the Hayward area.  

Sandra McKinney

Eau Claire parks; at Braun's Bay on Half Moon Lake in my kayak. CVWG writer's retreat

Jay Gilbertson

In the spring, summer & fall I can be found out by the pond or up in the spring moving rocks around or walking on our woods walk or sitting on the tractor pulling something across our fields to dig or cultivate or mow. Down the road a piece there’s an old cemetery I like to walk around in and marvel at all the history buried there and take in the peace and listen to the wind in the huge old white pine trees around the edge. Lunch on the front stoop is good too.

Nickolas Butler

I've written at Racy's and The Nucleus.  Those spaces helped me focus, and get the work done.  Maybe the food was inspirational, or the coffee.

Brett Beach

In a very practical way, my wife, who is a writer as well, and I both work and have worked in various coffee shops around Eau Claire: Starbucks, Caribou, Panera, and EC/DC. The last location aside, we find inspiration in the sterile familiarity of corporate chains. Lately, we’ve returned again and again to EC/DC for its generous seating, large windows looking out on downtown, and the politely disinterested staff who allow us to linger for hours. But the location that we long for the most, now that it is gone, is the small sitting area that was found in the front of the Mega on Hastings. Not only do we miss the grocery store, but the small tables and the fireplace where we spent many hours working, usually accompanied by the electric glow of the television mounted over the fire, on which Jeopardy! always seemed to be playing.

Cathy Sultan

No, not specifically.

From The Mouths Of Writers 3: Is there a personal item or a space that gives you inspiration to write?

By Jeana Conder

Several months ago I set out on the task of asking local writers to answer a series of eight questions I compiled.  The responses I received are now creating our newest series, “From the Mouth of Writers.”  We hope that this series allows upcoming writers to gain knowledge from others with the same passion.  This month’s question: Is there a personal item or a space that gives you inspiration to write? 

Allyson Loomis

Absolutely not.  My life is so busy with full-time work and full-time parenting and housekeeping, that if I get a stretch of free time to write, I just plop down wherever I am.  A lowered toilet lid in a quiet bathroom is a fine place to sit with a laptop and get a few sentences done.

Sandra Lindow

When I want to write something I usually go for a walk.  I sometimes take notes although I have found that some ballpoint pens don’t work in winter.  Now I know why poet Mary Oliver takes a pencil when she goes for a walk in the woods.  When I come home, I sit in my recliner and write on my laptop.  Our cat, Maisie, died last summer, but in the twenty years before that, Maisie added purrrpose to my writing by sitting on the arm of my chair.

Molly Patterson

I'm a strong believer in demystifying writing, so I don't have any talisman or any specific place that I need to write. I don't want to have to have a candle burning to inspire me, because what happens when I can't light that candle? For me, it's establishing the habit of writing that is important, not surrounding myself with objects that put me in the mood to write. The fact is, you're not always going to want to write. In fact, you'll probably very often feel like you'd better do anything else rather than write (I know I feel that way a lot), though usually, once you start writing you find that it's actually not so bad, after all. And then you get to feel glad that you have written today, which is much better than feeling guilty that you didn't write today, as you'd meant to do. If you're someone for whom an object or a space can be the thing that gets you to buckle down and open up that document, then that's great. For me, though, it's simply about a commitment: I will write most days, and I won't push it to the back burner as something to get to once I finish everything else. "Everything else" will never be done. You have to be selfish with your writing time.

Bruce Taylor

Inspiration is wonderful if and when it happens. But don’t rely on it. Inspiration is for amateurs.

Jon Loomis

Funny you should ask this, as I tell my advanced poetry classes to acquire a “mojo” item and keep it on hand while they’re working.  I’ve had a series of meaningful hats, and I seem to work pretty well these days at our cabin up north, although I don’t get up there as often as I’d like.  

Marsha Qualey

The main lecture hall we use at Hamline is known as GLC 100. So many times I have walked out of that lecture hall inspired by what I’ve heard, whether it’s about language or form or the writing life. My newest books, coming out later this year, are about Gracie LaRoo, a champion synchronized swimmer who happens to be a pig. They are a direct result of listening to other writers talk about writing in GLC 100.

Jay Gilbertson

Yes. I live on an 80-acre organic-certified farm in NW Wisconsin. I have an office that looks into the trees, up a hill and is filled with sky. I don’t buy into the muse deal and have never had writer’s block. Both rather odd excuses for not writing or writing poorly. When the flow is not there, we have wood to chop, chickens to chase and an unending chore list.

Nickolas Butler

Not really.  Personal spaces, totems, lucky-charms - all of those things seem like crutches to me, excuses.  I'm writing letters to a man right now in prison who wants to become a writer.  You think he's worried about such luxuries?

Sandra McKinney

Solitude & nature; finding segments of time without a schedule.

Brett Beach

The novel I am working on takes place in a fictionalized portion of Door County—where my wife and I honeymooned, and have returned to several times since. Sitting outside the Old Post Office Restaurant on a warm summer evening while eating the buttery, perfectly cooked plate from our fish boil, I looked out at the Peninsula Park Beech Forest State Natural Area, where the green hills rose above the softly moving waters of the bay, and I felt that magical moment in which the idea I had been toying with in my mind found a location in which to land.

Since my time as a Peace Corps volunteer in the country of Cape Verde, I have returned to those islands again and again in my fiction. I am also a Midwesterner by birth, and so Ohio and Wisconsin pop up in my stories. We write what we dream, I suppose, and my dreams are infused with the cornfield and suburbs and churches of my youth, of low dark clouds that signal tornados approaching and snow piled thick on the bird feeder outside my kitchen window, the deer in the backyard triggering the back porch light’s sensor, the unknowable blinking communication of lightening bugs in summer.

Cathy Sultan

I have two spaces that inspire me to write. One is my office which overlooks my gardens and the rolling hills beyond and Beirut a city full of untold stories, intrigue and skullduggery.

From the Mouths of Writers 2: Was there a specific book that led you to write?

Compiled by Jeana Conder

A couple of months ago I set out on the task of asking local writers to answer a series of eight questions I compiled.  The responses I received are now creating our newest series, “From the Mouth of Writers.”  We hope that this series allows upcoming writers to gain knowledge from others with the same passion.  This month’s question: Was there a specific book that led you to write?

Allyson Loomis

It will surprise you when I say that no, there wasn’t a specific book.  Honestly, my interest in writing evolved from a childhood obsession with song lyrics. I was a weirdo child of the 1970s who could not get enough of Cole Porter. This evolved into a love of theater and dramatic dialogue.  I first wrote plays.  I wrote many bad plays.  I wasn't really wasn’t electrified by fiction until quite late in the game, though I read fiction quite a bit.  

Sandra Lindow

I wanted to be a writer when I two and I saw my mother writing a letter.  I tried to copy her cursive but became frustrated because it didn’t look right, I loved the books and the idea of communicating ideas on paper.  By the time I was in second grade in a one room school house in Clark County, Wisconsin, I knew I wanted to be an English teacher and a writer.  Books that inspired me were primarily poetry like Dr. Seuss’s McElligot’s Pool, which I recognize now to be a Taoist classic about the connectedness of all things.

Molly Patterson

I'm not sure there was one book that led me into writing--I seem to remember from a very young age wanting to write stories. But I do know that I read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was in elementary school (not as a school assignment, of course! Probably not recommended reading for young children...) and it opened up a new world for me. I specifically remember reading a scene of the narrator as a young child wetting herself in her church clothes, and the mortification she felt was rendered so powerfully that I felt embarrassed for her. That sense of empathy between reader and character has stuck with me. It's still what I strive for. 

Bruce Taylor

It was reading more than any specific book. I read early, anything\everything I could get my hands on. I read fast but not very accurately, unless the situation requires it. Sometimes I think for a writer misreading can be as important as reading.

Jon Loomis

I don’t know about a single specific book, but I think it probably helped that my house was full of books when I was a kid.  I loved e.e. cummings and P.G. Wodehouse, for example.  So, guys with initials.  I still read Wodehouse, especially the Jeeves and Wooster stories.    

Marsha Qualey

A specific book that led me into writing young adult fiction, or more accurately, was a green light for me when I first considered writing YA: Homecoming, by Cynthia Voight. I had submitted a short story to Seventeen Magazine (it used to have a terrific fiction department; not sure about now) and it was rejected by an editor who encouraged me to turn the story into a young adult novel. I had no knowledge of YA novels at that time (late 80s) and the first one I then read was Homecoming. I knew right away I was in the right place.

Sandra McKinney

I loved reading biographies & auto-biographies as a child. I believe the power of "true story" was my inspiration for writing.

Jay Gilbertson

Yes. The really bad ones. The poorly written ones. YOU know the ones. Years ago, and I’ve been reading since electricity, I read one too many crappy published books and figured, dang, if this junk got published, what in the world have I got to worry about? Well, that started this whole crazy adventure and I haven’t stopped yet. And, hopefully, my writing has gotten better. Hopefully.

Nickolas Butler

I consider "Sometimes a Great Notion" by Ken Kesey to be my favorite literary masterpiece, but the work of Jim Harrison was very influential when I was first deciding to pursue writing as a craft, or vocation.  Also: Tony Earley's "Jim the Boy", Tom Franklin's "Poachers", and Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News".

Cathy Sultan

No, it was my personal experiences living in Beirut during its civil war that led me to start writing and to be more specific it was my son who asked me to write about our fifteen years in Lebanon from ’69 to ’84 that led me to learn to write.

Brett Beach

In college, I picked up Michael Byer’s short story collection The Coast of Good Intentions. Before, I had read short stories, probably the ones that everyone reads in high school: “A Rose For Miss Emily” and “Roman Fever” and “Hills Like White Elephants” and…well, others that didn’t stick. A thing that troubles me is the insistence that the “classics” must be appreciated, especially by seventeen year olds. I am a well-read, curious sort of fellow, and I promise, I just didn’t understand Faulkner or Welty or Wharton or Fitzgerald, and especially not Hemingway. Eventually, appreciation came, but at first?—nope.

Byer’s collection though, did what all good writing does: in each story, it was as if a hand were reaching out to guide me along. Here is the world, the book said. Here is a place. Do you see it? Do you smell it? Do you hear it?

In the collection’s first story, about a lonely, retired teacher slowly beginning a relationship with a woman he knew years before, Byer writes, “I was drunk but not drunk enough to say what I wanted, that we don’t live our lives so much as come to them, as different people and things collect around us.” The line struck me then, as it does now, as a perfect example of writing’s magic, which is to put into words the very thing I didn’t realize needed to be said.

Oh, I remember thinking as my heart broke, and I longed with impatience to know which people and which things would gather around me as I grew old: I want to do that.

From the Mouths of Writers 1: The Best Advice You Ever Received

by Jeana Conder

A couple of weeks ago I set out on the task of asking local writers to answer a series of eight questions I compiled.  The responses I received are now creating our newest series, “From the Mouth of Writers.”  We hope that this series allows upcoming writers to gain knowledge from others with the same passion. This week’s question:

What is the best advice you have received about writing?

Allyson Loomis

A poet once told me that all you have to do to be a writer is (1) LIVE (2) READ (3) WRITE (4) THINK ABOUT WRITING (5) REPEAT UNTIL DEAD.  I’ve always thought that was a sound checklist.  I routinely share it with my students.

Sandra Lindow

When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher said that I didn’t need to “try to be different”.  He believed that I was “different enough” to become a successful writer by just writing the truth about myself.

Molly Patterson

The best advice given to me as a writer was to try different techniques, to push myself outside of my comfort zone. I used to live in San Francisco and had been writing for some time when I took a class with the Writers Studio. Their model was based on reading a published writer's piece, breaking down the various techniques in terms of voice, point of view, style, and approach, and then using those techniques as guidelines for beginning a piece of your own. This method helped me become much smarter as a writer and reader: by forcing me to take on different styles and voices, I expanded my range. The surprise is that in the process, I developed my own voice as a writer. I would recommend this process to anyone.

Bruce Taylor

“A fool on a fool’s journey would be a fool to stop.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Jon Loomis

Read everything and write every day.  I don’t necessarily follow it, but it’s great advice.  

Marsha Qualey

I have been teaching for ten years in a low-residency MFA program. Twice a year the students and faculty meet on campus (Hamline University) and the writing talk flows. I have taken in so much great advice, but possibly the most eternally pertinent to my own writing comes from a faculty colleague, Claire Rudolf Murphy, who likes to pound the podium and urge “Cut the exclamation marks.” That caution is about much more than punctuation, of course. My writing leans toward the emotional and I need to monitor that aspect all the time. Looking for exclamation marks is a good approach.

Sandra McKinney

Write every day; in a journal or otherwise. Meditation.  

Jay Gilbertson

I have been given a ton. As any published writer who has been around will tell you. I suggest you attend workshops or take classes and read writing books (or any book, for that matter) and look over the acknowledgements to see what inspired that particular author. Don’t Stop Writing! Oh, and read and read and read and NOT just in your genre.

Nickolas Butler

Read, read, read.  There's no way you're going to become a great writer, without first becoming a great reader. 

Brett Beach

In an interview on the Longform podcast, Cheryl Strayed talked about the success of her memoir, Wild. Paraphrasing here, she notes that the success was one part luck—extraordinary luck of the kind that so rarely happens, it should not be a thing people wish for—but, more importantly, she had written the best book she could, so that when luck came, she was ready. In other words, she had worked hard. Really, she had worked her butt off.

I think about this all the time: that of all the things writers believe they can control, in truth the only thing we can do is work, and do the best work possible. I believe deeply in working hard. I take writing seriously, and do not romanticize it (no lit candles, no prayers to a muse, no special pen, no writer’s block). Nor do I treat writing an occasional hobby. The writers I know, and respect the most, have all found ways to make space in their lives for writing. Writers prioritize writing—are sometimes even selfish about it. (Ha! Ha! you laugh. Does he have kids yet?) The act of creation can be wonderful, and frustrating, and euphoric, but it is also a choice I make each day when I sit down: I am a writer. I am here to write. So I do the work.  

Cathy Sultan

Things: Always be honest. Your reader will know if you aren’t; Write about something you know and are passionate about.