Steal Your Way to Better Writing

The Novelist by L.L. Barkat

Today’s guest post is by poet and editor L.L. Barkat. You may remember her from an earlier guest post, You Don’t Need a Degree to Find Your Voice.


“I can’t write poetry,” she said. And it was true.

This girl—who read Macbeth at age twelve and argued with the commentaries, who in the same season read all of Tolkien in less than a week and memorized a good deal of the embedded poems—could not write poetry. Everything she tried seemed shapeless and wan. This defied logic. At least mine.

I’d been an English teacher and a writer myself, and the formula I knew was fairly simple: excellent readers are usually excellent writers. This is why every editor will tell you that you must be a reader if you hope to become a better writer. No question. There’s a strong connection.

So I was puzzled, to say the least, when my own daughter could not pen a poem with any life in it. Not that anyone would care, since few people recognize that poetry is important and formative for other kinds of writing (including business writing). But I cared. And my daughter, watching her talented younger sister, cared.

Maybe this is one reason she stole my Norton Anthology of Poetry when it arrived in that trim Amazon box. Maybe that’s why she attempted what I’d never seen another pre-teen attempt with such vigor (or at all): sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, villanelles. And she was shockingly good for her age, sometimes writing a sonnet in ten minutes flat (and that with her mother bothering her to please take a phone call from Grandma).

Here’s the point I want you to take away: writers are opened by different approaches, sometimes radically different. To this day, my daughter pleads with me to read the how-to writing books. She challenges me to write poetry in form. I humor her a bit, but the truth is that these approaches do not help my writing the way they’ve helped hers. I need approaches that feel altogether more organic—Annie Dillard over On Writing Well.

And that is why I had to write The Novelist. As a writer with four books already to my name, I had no organic approach to my new genre of choice: fiction. The how-to books only paralyzed me; I’d been stalling on fiction for just about forever, with no hope in sight.

Where was the book I needed to teach me, and others like me, the secrets of this tantalizing genre? Where was the equivalent of my daughter’s Norton Anthology? As it turns out, it was inside me. I just needed to steal a series of 4 a.m. writing slots, to find that I could learn to write fiction from story itself. Never mind that I would have to be the one to actually write the story.

What kind of writer are you? Maybe you’ve been waiting to find the approach that will open you. Maybe if the how-to books have not taken you where you want to go, it’s time you learned to write through story itself.

Sure, I can recommend The Novelist. And remind you that anything that opens your inner writer is a real steal.

Additional suggested reading

Or, read a chapter of The Novelist

 

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Jodi Lobozzo Aman

I love “The Things They Carried.” and wonder where the connection is? Why is it on the suggested reading in this post?

L.L. Barkat

The Novelist plays with some of the concepts introduced in The Things They Carried. Story-truth versus life-truth, for instance. And the device of using oneself as a character in a fictional book. Like The Novelist, The Things They Carried can teach us about writing. 🙂 Thoughts?

Jodi Lobozzo Aman

I see what you mean. It’s just that I haven’t heard that book mentioned in forever and it had such an impact on me and my writing. Powerful.

L.L. Barkat

I’d love to hear how it impacted your writing. My example, on that count, is Kristin Lavransdatter 🙂

Ginger Moran

Such a great question–and good answers! As a writer and a fiction coach, I have experienced or witnessed just about every approach there is. For my book, The Algebra of Snow, I wanted to write a novel but was scared, so started spelunking in a short story I’d written and liked to see if there was any material under the surface. Turned out there was. I love the idea of stealing–we all do it all the time, so might as well own up and enjoy!

L.L. Barkat

So then, what kind of writer are you? 🙂 (maybe the just-do-it, get-into-the-cave kind?)

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[…] L. Barkat (@L.L. Barkat) guest posts on Jane Friedman’s blog with a not-really-so-unusual technique: Steal Your Way to Better Writing. Of course, she’s not referring to plagiarism, but learning via close reading of something that […]

TourdeFuquay-Varina

Boy do I relate. I get frustrated reading the how-to books and sometimes find conflicting information.

L.L. Barkat

The part I find frustrating (or maybe just annoyingly amusing) is that sometimes each how-to insists it is THE how-to. Well, logic would dictate that cannot be the case. 🙂

Karen

Thank you for this post. I crossed over into fiction during a writing sabbatical and am now full into birthing a YA novel, thinking “how the hell do I do this?” I do it by doing it. A few how-to books have helped, particularly “Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us” by Jessica Morrell. Otherwise, I just trust the reader/writer in me.

L.L. Barkat

“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”

—from “The Waking,” by Theodore Roethke 🙂

L.L. Barkat

oh, and it was your “I do by doing it” that made me think of this section of the Roethke poem 🙂

Alli Polin

I appreciate your emphasis on the fact that to be a better writer, you have to be a reader. My daughter loves writing yet her spelling is a mess and she clearly has no idea about any of the rules of grammar. Reading doesn’t come easily to her but she loves stories and her writing flows. On the flip side, her brother watches me write sometimes and I often suggest that he go “read a book”. My son then yells that I never read and he doesn’t want to read either. He’s wrong – I savor my books like candy and read late into the night. Maybe my daughter is the organic type and my son… maybe a Norton Anthology of his own will be in his future.

L.L. Barkat

How old is your son, Alli, if I might ask?

L.L. Barkat

Oh, and how old is your daughter? 🙂

Alli Polin

They are young 🙂 My son is seven and my daughter is nine.

L.L. Barkat

Perfect. 🙂

Spelling development takes time. There are clear patterns. 1st stage is all consonants, not necessarily correct ones, no vowels. If a word is multi-syllable, it will only display first and last consonants.

Example: kl

Translation: couple

And the stages advance from there. Beginning, middle and end consonants: kpl (translation still “couple”).

Then more correct consonants and a few vowels:

kapl

Anyway, you get the idea. There are five stages, and it takes time for people to advance through them. Solid spelling doesn’t emerge sometimes until tween years, and there’s a better chance if the child is an avid reader (though not guaranteed, as some people never get to be “good spellers”).

Your son wants to read. He just doesn’t know it. 🙂 My 13-y-o didn’t read her first chapter book until she was 12. Some difficulties seeing the lines. I never waited for her to want to read. I gave her everything on listening tape/CD. Her vocabulary is as good as her Tolkien-reading sister’s. And now that she finally reads, it has all fallen into place. You’re fine 🙂

L.L. Barkat

oops. Actually, first stage is usually one consonant.

k

translation: couple

So fun reading a kid’s writing. It makes more sense than we know. 🙂

Alli Polin

Thanks! I really appreciate your thoughtful response!

L.L. Barkat

You’re welcome 🙂

Reading and writing are one of those tricky things that are developmentally rather than intellectually driven. Early reading and early writing aren’t essential to high achievement later on. Whereas, early literacy is super important. But literacy can be found through storytelling, make-believe, block and lego play, listening CD’s, and conversation. It makes me very sad when I see parents pushed to push their children into reading and writing, and then children rebel and cry or claim boredom and get resentful.

Anyway. Think literacy, rather than early-readers/early-writers. 🙂

Claire

This was fascinating Laura. I really enjoyed reading and learning this.

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[…] learn more about The Novelist, read L.L. Barkat’s new feature article Steal Your Way to Better Writing at Jane Friedman’s […]

Claire Burge

I am a bit of a textbook girl, a bit of a life girl. I think age plays a role… the older I become the less meaning textbooks have and the more I trust the life I have been gifted to tell its own story.

Sara Sherrell

I agree that being open to different methods of learning is important. A writer tends to be her own worst critic and continually looks for ways to improve.

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[…] up and read that article at 99u and add some obstacles into your visualization. And then, read this guest post by L.L. Barkat at Jane Friedman’s blog. She’ll tell you that what works for one writer may not work for another. You might need to […]