The writing advice I didn't know I needed.

The obvious was never so obvious.

“Show, don’t tell” was the first piece of writing advice I received. It was simple, yet illuminating. It seems obvious now, but it shocked me that people could write better through practice. I always thought that good writers were good because they were gifted. Unlearning this was both scary and liberating. On one hand, I no longer have an excuse to fall back on when I am feeling lazy, but I’m also comforted by the fact that maybe, one day, I can write better if I’m willing to put in the work.

With a glimpse of hope, I sought out books on writings, written by seasoned and accomplished writers. The books are well-written (surprise!) and offer writing advice that I know I will cherish for as long as I write.

Practice, practice, and practice.

Writing was something I did when I had time, an afterthought. During my summer writing class, we were all asked to respond to 2-3 writing prompts every week. It was hard every time I opened my laptop trying to put my thoughts together. Sometimes, it got better two or three paragraphs later, and good stories started to flow. Sometimes, I had to toss the initial 500 words I wrote with all my energy, but the first 500 words had to happen before the better paragraphs showed up. The tossed-out words were never a waste.

I want to be practical now: how are you going to accomplish this? The answer is simple: keep a journal. It amazes me how often people call themselves writers and yet fail to write. Runners run everyday, and they know that not every run is a race. Musicians play music perpetually, but not every time they pick up the guitar is a concert. Writers, meanwhile, like to wait around for inspiration to strike. Don’t wait; write! Describe, describe, describe, and find the pleasure in pinning the right words to life’s incessant stream of sensations.

— Teju Cole, Eight Letters to a Young Writer

In Letters to a Young Writer, Colum McCann expresses something similar in the chapter titled “The Terror of the White Page” that feels like he was speaking directly to me:

You have to show up for work. You have to sit in the chair and fight the blankness. Don’t leave your desk. Don’t abandon the room. Don’t go off to pay the bills. Don’t wash the dishes. Don’t check the sports pages. Don’t open the mail. Don’t distract yourself in any way until you feel you have fought and tried.

As I’m writing this, I checked my WhatsApp messages three times and opened Instagram twice to watch the new reels my housemate just sent me.

Restraint

Patrick Barry, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, emphasizes the importance of writing succinctly in Good with Words.

Nothing loses your reader faster—whether she be a judge, a teacher, or a colleague—than an overabundance of details. “The secret to being a bore,” Voltaire wrote back in 1737, “is to tell everything.”

Zaide Smith, whom I had to start reading because her name appeared in almost all of the books about writing, calls writing a controlling experience in her short essay collection, Intimations. I love the tulip analogy and how much wisdom her words contain.

Writing is routinely described as “creative”—this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I’ve never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance.

Read, read, and read.

Growing up in China, I remember hearing my mother say this over and over again. “Reading will help you write better essays [in your Chinese literature class],” she’d explain. Although the motivation was very goal-oriented, it was good advice.

My mother regretted taking up reading too late in her life, only after I’d started middle school. I only started reading as a habit when she became an avid reader. Thanks to her, I didn’t waste all my free time watching TV, which I did quite often back then.

When I started writing in English in my twenties, I was so focused on getting the grammar right and it never occurred to me that the same rule applies to writing English, and all languages. The obvious was never that obvious.

Ben Yagolda’s writing advice reaffirms the obvious in How to Not Write Bad.

"Trying to be a not-bad writer without having read your share of others' work is like trying to come up with a new theory in physics without having paid attention to the scientists that came before you, or writing a symphony without having listened to a lot of music. How much reading will do the trick? The writer Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the notion that, in order to become an outstanding practitioner in any discipline, you need to devote to it roughly 10,000 hours of practice. I'll accept that in terms of reading."

Okay, okay. I will read more.

The Last Sentence

I spent a large part of my teenage years learning English as a second language. I was always told that the last sentence or last paragraph of an essay or a paper should reiterate the thesis and summarize the key points of the essay. I felt being lied to when I learned that it’s the worst advice for creative writing. Right, you’re supposed to be creative. So obvious, but I didn’t know.

Allow your reader to walk out from your last line and into her own imagination. Find some last-line grace. This is the true gift of writing. It is not yours anymore. It belongs in the elsewhere. It is the place you have created.

—Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer

This is where I’m supposed to leave you with a last sentence that seems nonchalant yet deliberate, but I need to do a lot more writing and reading before I can come up with a wise one.