Welcome back to the Writers Secret Weapon, where I help writers like you learn how to write better without rehashing all the boring listicles and dull advice you’ll find everywhere else from social media.
I’m John, and it’s my pleasure to help you write better. So let’s talk about writing better today. Or at least get you thinking about how you can write better.
Everything and everyone is a teacher
My father taught me a lot of things but most of all he taught me how to hide. He didn’t instruct me in how to do it, he didn’t coach me through a game of hide and seek, he taught me that privacy was a lie, and that you need to have absolute total awareness and control over your environment at all times otherwise you were neither a man nor a good christian, disappointing god because you didn’t know everything and didn’t demonstrate superiority at every opportunity.
My father exerted control over the lives of me, my mother, and my brother for years. He determined when we’d eat. He allowed appointments to happen on his schedule. Nobody spontaneously did anything, lest they receive a lecture or worse, the silent treatment for days because you went and got lunch on a day he thought you shouldn’t leave the house. He monitored everything, asking every invasive question possible (“What are you doing?” “Who are you talking to?” “Are you a spy?” “Are you planning to kill me in my sleep?”), you know, normal parent stuff. There was no privacy. Doors, all doors, had to be left open, unless you were taking a shit, but all other times all doors were open in case he needed to check on you or talk to you or demand with a literal snap of his fingers that you stop what you’re doing immediately and help him. No, it didn’t matter if you were in a towel and just out of the shower, go stand over there and hold this up so he can measure something. No, it didn’t matter if you were trying to study for a test in school, when he said you had to see him in his office, you had to stand in front of his desk and answer whatever questions he had, even when they were about why you were such a bad student for getting a 92 not a 98 on a test.
So he taught me to hide. Hide my activities in what he called my “spy game.” Hide my feelings. Hide my depression. Hide my growing inability to hide my tics and mental health decline. Hide that I was talking to a girl. Hide that I was reading Dostoyevsky. Hide that I was thinking about being a writer or a lawyer. Hide my life and live it in my bedroom, mapping out everything in my head and waiting until he’d stand at the foot of the stairs and yell across the house for me to “Come down here,” and dance to his tune.
If you’ve never been subject to someone being absolutely controlling like that, you’re lucky, and I hope you never encounter anyone like that. For all the destruction and havoc it puts into your life, you learn 4 things:
a. You must be alert and aware of as much as possible. Hypervigilance and hyperawareness is how you’ll make it through each day.
b. Everything other people do is probably something you’ll never be allowed to do until way later. Get used to feeling behind.
c. Don’t share anything. No plans. No hopes. No ideas. You can have them, they’re your ticket out of where you’re at, but if you reveal them, you’ll get crushed and actively prevented from pursuing them. So keep it all for yourself.
d. Everyone you meet needs to be scrutinized and measured, checking to see how soon or through what method they’ll betray or disappoint you. Everyone lies, everyone is selfish, the world is full of people who will hurt you and stop you from being happy, so keep everyone at arm’s distance and accept that you’ll be constantly learning from other people while maybe never being truly happy.
Always learning. Learning, because it’s how you have any kind of value, stupid people are after all worthless and worthy only of your contempt my father will tell you, so it’s up to the smart people to be in charge. Not just the ones with knowledge, the ones who know how to use that knowledge to move the gears and machinery of situations. Everything’s an opportunity to learn so you can survive.
Which makes everyone a teacher whether they realize it or not. Your girlfriend is going to teach you what a broken heart is like. Your high school bully taught you that you’d never be cool. That look you’re pretty sure the cashier at the store gave you (doesn’t matter if there was or wasn’t a look, of course there was, are you too stupid to see it?) taught you that you shouldn’t go into a store or want anything so that you didn’t get that look again.
Sometimes this is really useful, because paying attention in school and being a sponge for the things that interest you is fantastic. (The interesting ideas part, not the school part) And sometimes this whole pursuit and awareness of people is great for when you’re writing and you need to translate how you see the world into made-up characters.
Yes professor, I was trying to make the guy in my one-act play a little paranoid because he’s pretty sure his neighbor is going to come into the room and yell at him for even thinking about having a soda. No professor, I have no idea where that idea came from, I just made it up.
Like anything else, it has good uses and less good uses.
Learning without application is keeping you stuck
I have learned a lot from a lot of people. Some of them are only important to me and they’re not household names. Krueger. Lunger. Hirsch. Betz. Seibert. Koes. Some of them are names you know if you roamed certain circles. Woll. Cohen. Cohen. Marshall. Kinnell. Some of the people who taught me something taught me by their impact and then absence from the world. Cobain. Van Gogh. Bechet. Cooke. Williams. Spinoza.
What I’ve taken away more from all these men and women was not just that they knew their crafts and had a passion for sharing them, but that they valued using what they knew to impact and affect others. You don’t just hoard knowledge to have it to prove you’re smart, you learn something so you can do something with it.
It’s a stark contrast to what I learned as a kid. It doesn’t initially sound like it, because my old man wanted you to learn stuff so you could get ahead and survive a system that he perceived was always out to try and stop everyone (though he never did get around to questioning why not just change the system. For an allegedly smart guy, he never really thinks his thoughts through, we could learn something there too), but all these other teachers, professors, co-conspirators in creativity, they wanted me to learn from them and then go share it with others. It was about being a vessel and conduit more than a reservoir.
In my mid-20s I dated a woman who introduced me to some really metaphysical concepts. Energy, vibration, relationships between things in reality, but not like a physics class. More woo than wow. I never took to it entirely. It seemed like she was always manufacturing some magical reason to explain something after the fact because the reality was too plain or uninteresting. I mention her not because I’m particularly proud of that relationship (it wasn’t good for either of us and I was particularly shit) she took this vessel-conduit concept to its other extreme - more a vessel and seldom if ever a reservoir. It felt out of balance to me, it felt fraudulent, and most of the time I just tried to answer with whatever words would move the conversation along or get me into bed. Like I said, shit.
You can spend a whole life picking up things from other people. Not all of it is going to be good stuff, the kind of virtuous stuff to score you karmic victories, and I don’t think it should be. Life isn’t always and only good stuff, just like it isn’t always a waiting avalanche of failures. You’ll face plenty of both and you have to be willing to end up covered in a little dirt from time to time. Nobody gets out of life alive, after all.
But with all this learning, all this time protected in a bubble where you maybe just tell yourself that you’re equipping yourself, you’re researching, you’re practicing, you’re making ready, you’re whatever-ing, you’re not really learning. Not really.
Without application, without trial and error and doing something with what you just found out, you won’t learn, you’ll just know. I watch so many writers every week (and surprisingly it seems to be the same writers over and over, fancy that) make plenty of excuses as to why they’re not writing or why they’re not finishing or why the sky is falling and they’re thinking about giving up. Same shit over and over, same excuses. I never know what they’re waiting for, I guess maybe some kind of magical sudden change where they won’t have to do anything, but it’ll be done for them. Like the words will just magic themselves to the page or all of a sudden people will just discover them and all their dreams will come immediately true without them doing anything. It’s frustrating. I’m hoping this newsletter gives them something to think about and flips a switch for them.
If you don’t do something with what you know, if you don’t turn it into words on pages, scenes done, sides written, minutes filmed, photos snapped, posts made, conversations had, you’re wasting your time. I’m not your parent or your spouse, so my getting on your case about how you’re either going to apply what you know or you’re going to kvetch until the sun explodes can only go so far.
Learn something, do something with it.
You’re writing, stop thinking about being “a writer”
I want everyone to chase down their dreams and wrestle them into submission. I want to see people set goals and achieve them en route to setting bigger goals because they’re confident and they know they’re capable and supported.
And I think you can do it. Yeah you, the person who hasn’t written in a while and who gets all up in their head about writing because something-they-don’t-know-what isn’t right and they haven’t asked for help with it out of fear or embarrassment. You, you can write. You can get back to it. You can make it a habit again.
Stop trying to make it look pretty from the start. Stop trying so hard to do whatever you think other people are doing. It doesn’t matter if other people (whoever they are) are writing lengthy scenes where elves shoot Uzis or they’re trying yet again to write a love scene, you keep your eyes on your own page and fill it with your vision, to the best of your ability.
Over the last few weeks I’ve people asking more and more about what “a writer” does in X or Y situation. As if it’s some alien making first contact or if we’re slipping through the looking glass to some alternate dimension. What does a writer do to market? What does a writer do to get a beta reader? Things like that.
The answers are not different from what anyone would do - you talk to people. You write words down in places. You have conversations. You’re a person, so you be a person. I’m sorry if that’s not very complicated or glamorous, but being a writer isn’t some profound Zen koan you can only come to understand after 100 days of meditating by a waterfall or something. A writer writes. A writer is a person who writes. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. If you’re wanting to write but you’re not, you’re probably still a writer, but you’ll feel better about yourself if you start writing. No koans here. No riddles from the sphinx either, sorry.
Anything and anyone can provide for us a lesson that we can apply to our lives and to our work. The cranky professor. The abusive parent. The kind lover. The neighbor who says hello every morning. The text message telling you that a package you didn’t order has arrived at a warehouse you’ve never heard of so give some stranger your banking information to make sure they can rob you. The cat asleep on your lap. The garbage truck that barrels down your street while you’re brushing your teeth so that yet again some of your recyclables don’t make it out.
Your best writing is ahead of you, and it’s going to be made possible by you looking look for teachers and lessons and doing something about them when you find them. I suggest taking notes and asking questions, that’s a great starting point.
Go be a writer. Do your best. Love you. Talk soon.