If you read one book about writing every week for a year, what would you learn?
Thanks to the self-publishing revolution and events like National Novel Writing Month, the genre of writing craft books has exploded in recent years. Book editor Kristen Tate set out to read and review one writing advice book each week for a year, from classics like E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird to newer works like Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode and Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel.
What she discovered was a dizzying array of approaches to writing: plotters who know even the smallest details about characters before they write a word; pantsers who blithely dive right into a draft without a plan; anti-adverb crusaders and advocates for complex sentences; and, always, that the best way to learn is to read the kinds of books you want to write.
All the Words is also a meditation on the challenges and pleasures of starting and sustaining a weekly practice of reading, thinking, and writing. It’s an optimistic, encouraging book that will motivate you to keep reading and, most importantly, keep writing.
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Week One
Have a Plan—Hold It Lightly
It’s week one of a new year. I usually work in my home office, but I’m writing this at my kitchen table. It’s a windy, wintry day in San Francisco. Out the kitchen window, I can see that the seagulls have come inland from the ocean to wheel around the nearby park, which means we’re in for a gorgeous gusty rainstorm. I’m not quite ready to get back to work after my holiday break, and I’m not quite ready to categorize this writing as work. Perhaps it will become a weekly task to be crossed off a list, but right now it feels fresh—more like play than work.
I love the start of a new year and the excitement of new plans and projects. The project of this book is to embark on a year-long tour of writing craft books. Many of them are old favorites I will be rereading, and others are either new or new to me. In previous years, I’ve fit writing into little gaps in my schedule, which has resulted in sporadic bursts of blog posts but not much else. This year, I’ve scheduled big chunks of writing time into my week, and I’m excited to see what might emerge. By scheduling the time but not prescribing the outcome, I’m following the wise advice of Frank Ostaseski, the cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project:
Have a plan. Hold it lightly.
I recently came across a passage from Thoreau’s journal that also speaks to the power of making a start—any start:
Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited . . . . Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought.
As the writer and artist Austin Kleon points out in his riff on this passage, “a literal ‘nest egg’ is a real or fake egg that you put in a nest to encourage a bird or a hen to lay more eggs.” The nest egg doesn’t need to be a fancy one; it can be a weeks-old supermarket egg from a huge industrial farm. It doesn’t even need to be a real egg. You can go rummage around in your kid’s junk drawer and find a tawdry plastic Easter egg to throw into that writing coop. The only important thing is that you do it.
Back to Kleon: “What Thoreau is saying is that by simply writing down a thought, you encourage more thoughts to come. When you have enough thoughts pushed together in the same space—a collage of thoughts, juxtaposed—they often lead to something totally new. This is the magic of writing.”
This is the magic of writing. Simply make a start—any start—and see what happens. It’s week one. What do you want to start?