Don’t Try to Be a Better Writer, Try to Be a Better Lover
By: Andre Sevenius Nilsen
Tags: Writing Tips, Writing, Perspective, Learning, Writers Block

Don’t Try to Be a Better Writer, Try to Be a Better Lover

Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash

How can I become a better writer? It’s a frequent question that has spawned book-length treatises, entire forums, journals, and careers. Yet, it seems to boil down to one answer:

Sit down at a typewriter and bleed. - Hemingway

As far as advice goes, it makes perfect sense. How to be a better writer? Write. A lot.

But if the answer is so simple, how come the question gets asked over and over and over?

Writing more is the right answer to the wrong question.

Reading a lot gives you material to draw from and examples of what works (or not). Writing a lot builds discipline, skill, and hopefully a bestselling novel.

Yet, for many a writer (me included), writing can feel like a chore. It can feel like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a never-ending mountain.

It’s easy enough to say that you should sit down and torture yourself on a rusty typewriter, but why become a better writer just so you can bleed prettier sentences? That doesn’t sound like something I want to do.

So why do I write? Why does anyone write?

“I’ve written as long as I can remember.”

“Too many thoughts; must express!”

“I just wanted to fix Lord of the Rings you know?”

I suspect there’s an underlying reason, a common denominator: a love of stories, whatever shape they may take form.

I love a good story. My mind constantly conjures up simple and complex narratives from the ether, and I want to breathe life into them so I can experience them in all their depth and color. To do justice to the stories in my mind, I need to be a good writer. And a good writer is one who reads and writes a lot.

The problem is the impetus of “doing justice”. Or put another way, I focus too much on the quality of my stories. Through that lens, I’ll never be good enough. I’ll never read or write enough. I’ll constantly feel inferior to Tolstoy or Twain, and I might as well quit writing and just read the great works of greater minds than mine.

And so “making better stories” is weighing me down. In my head, a story can be a wonderful beast that is deeper and grander and more vivid than any book I’ve ever read, but when the words come pouring out, they look like shit. No wonder it can be so hard to write.

That’s why “how can I become a better writer” is the wrong question; it’ll bleed you dry.

The right question

Let’s backtrack to my reason for writing in the first place: my love of stories.

Nowhere in that reason is there anything about being a good writer. It only leads to one simple question that is hard to answer (which makes it the right question).

How can I be a better lover of stories?

Transference

While you may already know the answer, you might not know why it’s the right answer.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. — Ira Glass

While good taste sounds like some mysterious muse-like property that you have to be blessed with, it’s more an awareness of what you like and why. The thing about taste is that its plastic.

It’s simple. As your expertise grows, so does your enjoyment. Suddenly you’ll hear the complexities hidden behind the growling and double bass line. You’ll notice the details that make a song unique, the arpeggio that shouldn’t create a smooth transition between major and minor, yet still does (don’t worry, I don’t understand it either).

It’s like the ancient painters who broke all the rules of painting and ushered in new epochs of art. Common to all of them is that they knew the rules well enough to break them.

But when I look at Mona Lisa or a cow sawn in two by some British dude, I cannot for the life of me see the beauty or magic or whatever art critics see. I enjoy it at some level, but nowhere near that orgasmic feeling that other people seem to get out of a good painting. It’s because I don’t know the rules, the techniques, the difficulty, the genius.

As with music and painting, so with writing.

Write to get better at reading, not the other way around

To put it in a logical format:

If you got into writing because you love stories, then practicing writing will make you enjoy stories more!

In other words, the answer to “how can I be a better lover of stories” (the right question) is “read and write more” (the right answer).

Or slightly more quotable: Write to enjoy reading, not to get better at writing.

It’s a subtle change in perspective but with profound ramifications: it transforms the inner critic from a judge to a teacher, it keeps the playfulness and experimentalist spirit alive and kicking, and most important of all it removes the need to write well.

Incidentally, we’ve answered the wrong question as well. Writing to enjoy reading will also make you a better writer because if you enjoy something you’ll do it more, and you’ll be less afraid to experiment.

I could stop here, but I feel there are loose threads that need tying up.

Transference between modalities

If I only write to enjoy reading more, why would I ever complete a project, go through the hurdles of publishing, editing, and all that?

Because knowing the massive amount of work it takes to complete a book, even a blog post, will give a new understanding of how much the author believed in the words now in front of you. Next time you read 1984, just think about George Orwell’s fear of totalitarian nationalistic superstates.

So, read more, write more, and learn about the works you enjoy. Anything else?

It’s not only writing that will make you enjoy stories more. Imagine learning physics, and suddenly you’ll see a discussion of quantum mechanics in Alice in Wonderland! Or learn psychology to appreciate the sheer craziness of American Psycho and how well Easton Ellis pulled it off.

This transference between modalities is expertly described in the book “Göedel, Escher, Bach”, where Hofstadter writes extensively about the mathematical structures of music which fuels his passion for classical composers such as Bach, and he even writes stories centered around logic and maths.

The point is, you will enjoy Hemingway’s prose even more when you’ve seen how hard it is to emulate his style, and when you’ve tried to write a fantasy epic, you’ll feel honored merely to hold a copy of Lord of the Rings.

TL;DR

The more you learn, the more you practice, the more you write, the more you’ll love the stories that got you into writing in the first place. And it’ll make you a better writer too!