Five ways to practice being a good writer without really writing
Tags: Writing Matters, Writing Tips, Writing, Writing Material, Writers Life

But real talk, keep writing. These will only serve the real, very hard work of actually sitting down (or standing up, or sprawling on the floor, whatever) and working on your writing. You still have to get your hands dirty and keep your doctor for carpal tunnel syndrome in business.

Practice identifying and telling a good story

All writing — even non-fiction, journalism, poetry and academic writing (yes, I said it, come at me) is essentially a story and a story has to be told well. I come from a family of great story tellers so I’ve had a lucky start in the story listening department, and I’ve thought about this a lot so I’m about to tell you what a good story has. First, it knows where to start (do not begin too early or too late) and it self-edits ( we don’t need to hear every single detail, Joe). Second, it announces itself and it knows its’ context. In company, you can’t go wrong with a traditional start “So speaking of, guess what happened to me the other day,” or the old “This reminds me of something that happened to my sister,”. Context always gives a story a good backbone so start by being hyper aware of it all times. Don’t tell the story of your dog’s death at a birthday party, you know what I mean? You’d be surprised at how many people lack both the skill of announcing a story and being unaware of whether it’s the right time to tell that story. It is truly the worst kind of horrible when somebody starts a long winded tale out of the blue expecting everyone to cotton on half way through. Rude! Third, it exaggerates just enough detail for atmosphere. Of course, this only works for some kinds of stories. See context. I had a dear uncle that used to embellish tales like a professional. He was never heavy handed with it and his stories were legend. Everyone in my family used to warn newbies to “divide the story by two,” but it was more like he padded and trussed up a tiny fraction of the whole. There’s this one tale about him being chased up a tree by a blue bull (an Indian antelope or nil gai) while on a hunt. In the safety of the branches, with the angry animal pawing furiously at the ground below he thought it a good idea to yell “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” The way he told that story made it worthy of movie rights because you experienced it so vividly. Fourth, a good story has a great climax. A climax simply means that everyone listening can say definitively that the story has ended. The end doesn’t have to be funny or deep. It just has to convey that there is there is no more story left to tell. I once heard somebody say, “Wait hang on, I don’t get it… so are you pregnant or not?” What wasted potential! What a terrible shame! When you want to be a writer, you don’t have to be life of the party but you do have to be able to tell and identify a good story.

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

Practice being perceptive

This is a skill that can actually be learnt and my husband is living proof. When we started dating he had the subtext radar of an alcoholic goat. Now he is capable of uttering the glorious sentence, “Yes she laughed, but there was a touch of sadness in it and in her eyes,” which is a FEAT, my friends. Being perceptive means being able to notice that which might fly undetected. Did you catch the twinkle in the eye, was the giggle a little too high in pitch, was there the merest pause before a confident answer? For the truly perceptive, every human interaction, no matter how outwardly mundane, is a prime time tele novella.

Learn to listen

Listen more and listen often. It is the most underrated thing in life, not just story telling and the most powerful.

Practice playing a character

This is an uncommon and controversial one, because there is such a premium on being your true and authentic self at all times. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s okay to put your true and authentic self away sometimes and be somebody else, if the context is right. This is actually quite easy to do in a room full of strangers that you’re probably never going to meet again. (Examples: a sermon by a fire and brimstone preacher snuck in before a sit-down dinner for your neighbors birthday. The women’s bathroom at a gig. The line outside a public restroom.) Is there a version of yourself that wouldn’t roll your eyes when someone says that mercury is in retrograde? Would that version perhaps respond with a deeply felt “You’re not kidding. I found out I had lipstick on my tooth the entire meeting and then I came home and Tippy my neighbor had stolen my parking space.” Be that version of yourself. What I’ve observed is that strangers open up if they sense a kindred spirit and when people open up to you, you have more chances of learning their layers, giving them dimension and nuance, or really just shamelessly using them or something they said as future writing material. I’m not going to apologize for doing this. HOWEVER, you should definitely challenge bigotry, hatred or racism when you encounter it. I don’t want to hear about you saying or doing ignorant shit in character for Arts sake. The world needs all its good soldiers to fight the status quo, overthrow fascism, challenge power and eat the rich for breakfast. Use your intelligence and your growing knowledge of context to try this one out.

Don’t vilify gossip

First, the tedious caveat. This is not a clarion call to abandon the ethics ship and talk about something that can hurt or damage someone else. Don’t betray someone’s confidence or cause trouble between people because you’re bored and looking for new material. Don’t spread or believe rumors. Believe it or not you can be both a halfway decent human being and a good writer. When I say gossip, I mean the harmless chit chat that you have with people you trust completely and are a hundred percent comfortable with. To my mind, there is nothing really devious about say, leaning into a shared dislike of someone with a friend. How this helps a writer is that talking about a shared dislike of a person you know helps sharpen either that persons motivation for doing things, uncovers insecurities both in them and in you and assists in discovering contradictions and fissures in the personality shell they’ve formed around their selfhood. All of which is to say, you will become better at understanding people in a way that can perhaps be articulated or fleshed out on the page. The nature of gossip has all these negative connotations which if you think about it, are sexist and outdated. Gossip was characterized as women’s talk, dealing in the private, done over tea and knitting needles while the men discussed battle strategies, politics, the news or whatever boring dick-measuring hetero thing was the spice of the day. Yet, the English novel, (pioneered by women by the way) and peopled with ordinary characters who lived their fictional realities in the private sustained as an art form through centuries because it was built on a deep understanding of the human condition, which was fostered and sharpened by GOSSIP. Don’t feel guilty about gossiping, if you’re doing it smartly. A lot of good can come of it. By way of judging what gossip is good or bad, I’ll drop this old saying here.

When friendships ways you wisely seek, Five things observe with care: To whom you speak, Of whom you speak, and how, and when, and where.