I Can’t Teach You How To Write

And nobody else can either.

Hi, I’m Stace, and this is Magic & Ink, where I write about magic, fantasy writing, and creative living. I’ve updated my paid subscription options. Read to the bottom to learn more!

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When I was younger, I used to haunt the reference section of the bookstore, in particular the shelves that were dedicated to learning how to write. Not sentence composition, grammar, and punctuation, but the big things. How to Plot a Novel. How to Create Unforgettable Characters. How to Craft Stunning Prose.

How to Actually Write a Novel.

If I could just find THE BOOK, all my writing difficulties would be solved. I don’t know what secrets I expected THE BOOK would hold, I just knew that somewhere out there, there was a secret and I needed to find it.

I know I was not alone in thinking this — I’ve read similar confessions from other writers. It’s only natural: as writers of books, it makes sense that we’d go looking for answers in other books.

Later, the search for THE BOOK was supplanted by the search for THE WEBSITE. Marketing experts told all of us — we writers who wanted to promote books, editors with services to sell — to build websites. If you blog it, they will come. Of course, what is a a writer or editor going to blog about but what they know best? How to write. The result was an explosion of easily accessible advice on every imaginable writing and writing-adjacent topic. What is POV. How to Write Amazing Dialog. The Three Things Every Novelist Needs to Know About….Well, Everything. Who needed a bookstore when there were millions of words of how-to-write content available from the comfort of my sofa?

I never found that secret, though. Not in books, not on a blog, not in a workshop or in a video. I have picked up some useful techniques along the way, sure, but I also found a lot that was forgettable, repetitive, regurgitated, or otherwise unusable to me. Things that sounded smart and practical but never concretely helped me actually do the thing and write a book.

(I know you’re probably thinking, Stace, maybe you should have gone to the self-help aisle instead of the reference aisle,and you’re not wrong.)

If I learned one thing, in all those years of searching, it is that no one can teach you how to write.

This is not to say that there is no value to the many, many, many volumes of writing advice that have been published in print and online. There are a lot of things you can learn from other writers that will become essential to you as you practice your craft, such as:

• How to use conventional techniques (and sometimes unconventional ones)

• Best practices on and off the page

• New perspectives and insights into how fiction works

• Patterns, theories, and structures that can help you find your way through your manuscript

But writing a book is not like following a recipe. When you bake a cake, you follow the instructions step-by-step with the goal of creating the exact same cake your grandma used to make. Why mess with perfection?¹

There are no recipes for writers, though, because writing is innovation, not replication. We each have our own ideas, our own stories. Our own way of telling stories. You can’t tell your own story by following someone else’s set of directions.

Instead, what a writer has to do is sort through all those various rules and bits of advice and figure out how to put them all together for themselves. We much each synthesize our own, unique recipe for storytelling.

And this is the thing, the secret thing, that no one can teach you how to do.

I am not telling you this to make you give up hope. If anything, I want to save you the time and the frustration of looking for the secret of how to write in places where you’ll never find it.

There are really only two things that will teach you how to write well, and those two things only work when you turn your writing quest inward and look for the answers in yourself. I’m not talking about natural talent or some kind of muse. These two things aren’t bits of knowledge that someone else can impart, but habits that you have to cultivate for yourself.

The two things you need to do? You need to read good books carefully, and you must practice writing consciously.

Read Good Books Carefully

If you want to write, you have to read. I know this is not new advice. Most likely, every one of your favorite authors, when asked for advice for new writers, offers some variation of, “Read a lot of books.”

But in this age of fractured focus, it is a bit revolutionary to say “read more,” because it demands that you fight back against the algorithms that have captured your attention, stop the dopamine scrolling, and pick up a book. You’ll probably need to cut down the amount of streaming you do, too, because you can’t learn how to write a book by watching TV shows or movies.

Let me repeat that for the back of the room: You can’t learn how to write books by watching television or movies.

Shocking, I know. I understand why so many writing advice articles use movies or television programs as examples. It’s likely that more people will be familiar with a popular show or movie than with any given book. And it’s true that there are some Universal Properties of Story that are common across mediums.

But the way you use those universalities in movies are not the same way you use them in books. Visual storytelling has a a completely different set of tools than written storytelling, just like written storytelling has a different set of tools than oral storytelling. Writers who only study film are going to find themselves limited in what they can accomplish with prose.

“My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It also matters what you read. As the old adage says, “Garbage in, garbage out.” This is true for computers and for diets and also for reading and writing. I’ve got nothing against trashy romance novels, but if you subsist on a diet of them you are only ever going to be able to write trashy romance novels. Which is fine! If that’s what you want to write, you’ll be well prepared.

However, I’m going to guess that it wasn’t a trashy novel (in any genre) that inspired you to become a writer in the first place (especially if you’re here reading this article).

You want to be a writer because you were moved by something you read. It might have invoked laughter or tears or heartfelt compassion or a longing for adventure, or one of the scores of other emotions that reading can inspire. But at some point that you may not even consciously rememberer, you read a story that made you feel something so powerful that it transformed you, and it seeded in you a desire to be able to move others in the same way.

I can’t tell you what makes a book good. “Good” is a highly subjective term (as is “trashy”) and there’s no universal list of what makes something good. I know when I think of “good books” I think of books that make me think and make me feel. Books that astonish me with their use of language and metaphor or feature dialog that punches me right in the gut. Good books know all the “rules” but know how to break them, too. They do something unexpected with structure, or bend tropes into almost unrecognizable shapes. Good books tell stories that are simple and profoundly complex at the same time.

Your own list of what makes a good book will probably look different than mine, but I encourage you to make that list. Then make a second list of where you can find books that have those qualities. Myself, when I’m looking for books that inspire me, books to learn from, I generally find them in places like:

• my favorite authors’ favorite authors

• lists of award winners in my chosen genre

• trusted critics and reviewers

• classics that are still in print after 10 or 25 or 50 years

• books I’ve already read multiple times

Reader rankings and social media popularity aren’t usually part of the equation, for me. For you maybe they are.

Of course, it’s not enough to just read these good books, you must read them carefully. That means not reading a book only for the sake of entertainment or diversion, or to knock off an item on your annual reading challenge. It means that while you read, you must pay attention to how the author uses all the tools and tips and writerly advice you’ve learned about from your writerly education. Observe how writing in present tense affects the pace of the story. Notice the way word choice in metaphors affects how you feel about the person, place or thing being described. Track the shifts in narrative distance and what they accomplish.

It’s also OK to read books that don’t meet whatever your criteria is for “good.” You can learn a lot from reading books that are “fine” or “poor” too, and it can be fun to read a book that is arguably terrible. But you must train yourself to understand why it is terrible.

Reading carefully is much more than being able to report what happens or being able to say who was your favorite character or even having essayable thoughts about the theme of the book. Reading carefully, reading as a writer, means that you can figure out what tools the author used to make you have those thoughts and feelings and opinions.

More importantly, it means you are learning how you can create the thoughts and feelings and opinions you want your readers to experience when they read the stories that you are going to write.

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book."

Samuel Johnson

Write Consciously

Every story starts with an idea, or really a collection of ideas that have coalesced in the writer’s mind with enough cohesive power that the they start to think, “This would make a great story!”

After that, there are a variety of ways to proceed. One writer might dive into the first draft right off the bat, while another spends time working on outlines and character backgrounds. Someone else might just write the idea in an idea-gathering notebook to come back to later, or vet the idea with a group of friends or fellow writers, while a few will simply move on to the next thought and forget all about the story idea until, twenty years later, they recall, “Hey, I had that idea for a book…”

No matter how many steps the writer decides to take between the spark of an idea and being ready to actually write, eventually they are going to come face to face with the blank page. It’s at that point — when you are marching words across the page in formations of sentences and paragraphs and scenes and chapters — that you are really going to learn how to write.

Don’t take it for granted that you already know how to do this!

Whether you are someone who can very quickly produce a first draft or you find it slow and laborious work has nothing to do with how skilled you are as a writer. That’s just process. Process is not craft.

The real craft comes in looking at all those formations of words — sentences and paragraphs and scenes and chapters — and being able to tell if they are doing the work you want them to do.

That is what I mean by writing consciously.

To return to the metaphor of baking: I have baked chocolate chip cookies so many times that I can almost do it on autopilot, from getting out the bowls and measuring cups to stirring in the ingredients to knowing exactly how long to leave them in the oven. They are reliably great every time, too; everyone loves my cookies.

But, as I said, writing a novel should not be like baking cookies. You don’t want to do it on autopilot. A book that is just like every other book you’ve produced (or may yet produce), let alone every other book on the shelf, is not doing its job. Like a baker in a test kitchen, a writer needs to know how to manipulate their ingredients in order to create something with a unique flavor and texture that (hopefully) readers will enjoy.

Remember: writing is innovation, not replication. Your goal should be to tell your unique story in your unique way.

And just like a baker in test kitchen, someone whose job it is to come up with new recipes, you can’t know if a new idea will work until you actually get in there and mix it up. Since very few of us possess the genius to bring a perfectly executed idea to the page in a single pass, we have to start writing before we can tell if we’re doing it the right way or not. We have to experiment with the big things and the small things alike — POV, tense, character arcs, paragraph length, chapter breaks and whether the night sky is described as black or indigo.

Every word is a choice, and you have to be aware of the effect each of these choices have on how the story you’re telling will be received by the reader. How it will be interpreted. How it will be felt.

The more you practice the craft of writing, the more instinctive these choices will become, because you’ll know more and you’ll become more confident. But your awareness of the choices you’re making should never falter just because it’s gotten easier. (Though I’m not convinced it ever really gets easier — not if you really care about improving your craft.)

Writing is a lot more than simply transcribing a story that’s in your head. That’s why you hear so many writers complaining about the editing process, because it’s hard work — a lot harder than just putting the story on paper. Others rejoice in the editing process because that’s when they feel like they are really getting to do the work of writing. It’s probably why so many would-be writers never get past the first draft — because they didn’t realize when they started how much work, how much learning how to write, they were going to have to do in the next stage of the process. I get it. It’s a hurdle I struggle with all the time, too.

"You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it."

Octavia E. Butler

Learning to Write With Every Story

As a developmental editor, I don’t think it’s my job to teach you how to write. I could try — I have made my contributions to the vast online library of how-to-write content out there, even in this very newsletter. I will probably write and publish more in the future, too, when I feel so inspired.

But what I really do in my job is reflect back to you what you’ve created on the page, and help you figure out if it’s actually what you intended.

There are other people who can help you do this, too, including writing buddies, writing groups, beta readers and so on. And I encourage all my clients to utilize whatever avenues are available to them in order to get the reflection that they need to do their best work (to know if they are doing their best work). How will you know if the choices you made were the right ones if you don’t get feedback during the process?

But external feedback means nothing if you’re not self-reflective to begin with. If you’re not reading carefully. Not writing consciously. Not just when you’re a new writer, but when it’s starting to feel easy, too. Especially when it’s starting to feel easy.

Because learning how to write is not something you do just once — it’s something you have to do with every story that you want to tell.

Subscription Changes

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1. Check out this great essay from Chris Smith of Breakthroughs and Blocks for a great explanation of how writing and baking are different kinds of tasks that I came across while I was working on this essay.