Years ago when I was in graduate school, my head was filled with rules for fiction, edicts from professors or classmates, a few foolish notions I came up with myself. These rules were based on the anxieties of the time and place, 1988–1990, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Plenty of writing advice comes out of the anxieties of the time; in thirty years, at least some of today’s common advice will seem old-timey and wrong.
We were told, or told ourselves, a lot of things. For instance, we should strive to be timeless. No very specific historical markers, nothing that could be seen as only now. In this way our work wouldn’t become outdated. As though we could keep that from happening! I had classmates who said that fiction shouldn’t be political, who intoned at every opportunity, Show, don’t tell, or Write what you know, or Kill your darlings.
People said, Show, don’t tell, so often it had the valence of a mob threat, something everyone knew you should do because the made guys said so. Snitches get stitches. I still don’t know what it means exactly.
Write what you know. Subtext: Maybe you don’t know anything. Subtext: If your life hasn’t been interesting, you can’t be a writer.
Kill your darlings. If you love something, kill it. If it comes back to you, kill it again.
It’s true that such pieces of advice prove the power of language, because they sound plausible even though they’re devoid of meaning. I can still picture the faces of the people who said these things to me (as some of my classmates can surely picture my face, saying something ignorant) because it was so long ago. My grudges are fossilized, preserved in excellent, unmalleable detail.
I loved graduate school: I made dear friends at Iowa who are still dear to me, whether or not we’re still in touch. We took one another seriously. Nothing is better. That might be my number one piece of advice for young writers: Find the hardest-working writers you know; take one another seriously.
You should dismiss grudges when you can. If they stick around despite everything, they probably mean something. Use them.
People said, Show, don’t tell, so often it had the valence of a mob threat,
When I speak at writing programs and say with certainty that not every writer needs to write every day, that I myself don’t, without fail afterward one of the resident faculty will take me aside to say, “It’s so interesting that you don’t write every day! But I really think writers have to.”
Their eyes are bright and panicked. They have issued this proclamation to their students. Real writers write every day. Why won’t I just say so? I don’t believe it. I’ve never managed it. I haven’t been great at making anything a job in my life, including my actual jobs. I always do too much or too little; I overvolunteer or I goldbrick. I’ve never been a person of moderation, though I have tried. Sometimes I write every day for months, but never with a sense of proportion. Is it a matter of psychology or neurology? Laziness, I used to think, and vowed continually to start my new life of discipline. Tomorrow, I told myself. Monday, then. Okay, April. I did try. When I was young and struggled to write interesting fiction every day, each morning was anxious, another day I might fail to buckle down.
And yet I persist in believing that I’m a real writer. I’ve never doubted that I am. My work, yes, I have doubted. My work ethic, and my reputation. Not my identity. I write; I am a writer. My qualifications are that I say so.
I understand that this can seem simultaneously glib and daunting. You might think it’s a philosophical question. Am I a writer? A real writer, as the director of my graduate program specified long ago, scaring the bejesus out of all of us?
Am I a writer? is the sort of question (there are a lot of them) that seems deep but only wastes time. It’s a binary question and—To be or not to be aside—no binary question is all that interesting, at least until it’s answered.
If you call yourself a writer, whether you’ve written that day or month or year, you go into the world as a writer. Anything you see becomes more interesting because of your acquisitive writer’s soul. A middle school production of The Three Musketeers in which the cast wears expensive rented capes and cheap store-bought plumed hats and their own dress pants and leggings, their own black sneakers and ballerina flats. The young lifeguard whose dark manicure has grown out, like waxing moons. A man in the grocery store who says into his phone, in a voice of love, “You’re crazy. You’re crazy. You’re certifiably insane.” A colleague, now buttoned-up and dull, who reminisces about her time as a teenage huffer of paint. You don’t need to write any of this down. You could. You could have a little notebook; if you remember to carry it around, you’re better than me. To consider yourself a writer as you move about the world is—I am a true believer—a beautiful way to live, a form of openmindedness, even in terrible times. Here life is, going on all around. It is a form of writing itself; if you do it, you are a writer. It’s likely to lead to putting words down on a page, at least a few, but even if it doesn’t it can make you feel alive. Lucky. Luck you can make yourself.
So much of fiction is a trick of the mind. (Much of life, too, but my only expertise is in fiction.)
Find the hardest-working writers you know; take one another seriously.
Lots of people speak scornfully of pen-and-paper questions after literary readings, meaning generic mechanical questions: Can you tell me about your process? Do you write by hand or on a computer? What time of day? These are concrete questions about work instead of art: answerable, opposable. We writers believe that everyone else is doing it right while we bumble along in the gutter; we also believe that it’s the rest of the world who bumbles and only we know the True Way.
Ask yourself those pen-and-paper questions, as though you are both audience member and visiting writer.
Or think of yourself as a science experiment. Try out everything to see if it works: early rising, late night, nice pens, crappy pens, the notes app on your phone, voice memos. Listen to white noise or music. Some of these experiments will only show what doesn’t work. Make your space as amenable to work as possible. One year—one whole year of my life!—I wrote almost nothing because I lived alone in an apartment with plenty of room, a place I never had a single visitor, and I had crammed my desk in the corner of my bedroom next to a cast-iron radiator in such a way I had to clamber into the chair. This difficulty meant I almost never sat down at my desk to write. I certainly never sat down idly in my desk chair to read a book, an essential step in my process. When I moved house, away from the radiator, I immediately began writing. You might get away with moving the furniture.
Make process (and only process) a contest with your writing friends (and only your friends): how long you work, how hard. What weird complex note-taking system you have in place, the beauty and obsessiveness of your notebooks. Whiteboards, murder boards, charcuterie boards: whatever fuels the work. Trash-talk. Self-aggrandize. Challenge. I once told a friend that one day I worked so hard I scared myself, and I saw an answering fear in his eyes—I scared him, too—and this is one of my favorite writing memories.
Every-day writers have a clear answer to the question, How will you get work done? Me, I harness the power of my own self-loathing.
Self-loathing is a common commodity among writers. An uplifting craft book would tell you that you must forgive yourself before writing, that writing is hard, but I believe self-loathing has its uses, if you know how to angle it. Don’t think of days, but weeks or months, a period of time in which you want to get work done. Say it’s four months. You know that you have enough time in those four months to amass some pages, even if week to week you don’t know where you will find those hours or minutes. Decide what you’d like to accomplish. Make it wildly ambitious, more than you think is reasonable.
Think: How mad will I be if I don’t get this done? How much will I hate myself? Travel forward in time in your mind; make yourself really feel it. Put yourself into your body and take it on: the misery, the self-recrimination, the shame.
Travel back in time to the current moment. Realize that you can avoid these terrible feelings: All you have to do is work. Not every day. For you—for some people—the manageable units of time involved in daily writing aren’t useful. Remember what you want to avoid: the nauseating feeling of having wasted a block of time.
I persist in believing that I’m a real writer. I’ve never doubted that I am.
A whole stretch of the calendar allows you to be more grandiose. If your aim is unreasonable, and you fall short, you won’t feel too bad; if your aim is modest and you don’t meet it, you will be crushed.
This method is the only way I get work done.
In the past few years people have become fond of the phrase imposter syndrome. “I suffer from imposter syndrome,” a young writer might say, meaning they don’t deserve what they’ve achieved, or, in its worst form, are afraid to dare to try. As though this isn’t the human condition. Imposter syndrome sounds fantastic. It probably comes with a cape and a false nose and the ability to perform surgery without a medical license. What it means is: fear of failing. Calling it a syndrome instead of a feeling suggests that it can’t be tampered with. It’s not a problem to be solved, but something you will have forever.
It’s not that I’m unsympathetic. No, clearly I am: I have just said that I have never doubted that I am a real writer, which is true. I have only doubted and loathed my writing and excoriated myself for not working harder.
Don’t make a journey out of something that can be a decision. This is a corollary of no binary question is interesting. If you have received something—a place in a writing program, a compliment, an acceptance—do not wonder whether you deserve it. That is a question aimed at the past. You have it; the answer is yes. Turn your eyes to the future and put all your worry into your writing.
Am I good enough? is, on the other hand, an interesting question to write about. You could do worse than to take all your personal, worrisome flaws and put them into your characters. To feel ashamed about writing isn’t interesting, but writing about shame is fascinating. A jealous writer may get no work done; a jealous character can scheme and murder and say astonishing things. You might even discover that once you have removed your flaws to use them in fiction—like a splinter, a bee’s stinger—they no longer bother you.
From the book A LONG GAME by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth McCracken. Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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