Don’t masturbate in public and other writing advice

Ten years ago today, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published my first book, a memoir about running and sobriety. Seeing the title displayed on bookstore shelves, tumble out of the mouths of interviewers, and briefly displace “Born To Run” in the running category on Amazon didn’t change my life the way I’d fantasized. “Running Ransom Road” wouldn’t crack the NYT bestseller list, no film rights were sold, and my high school which had kicked me out didn’t beg me to give the next commencement address. My freelance writing took off, but not enough to support my family. In short, life more or less went on as before.

A decade on, the book continues to sell, though in dribs and drabs. Messages still light up my in-box from readers in recovery or people struggling or their loved ones. That’s the part that means the most, the emails and letters I’ve received over the years, the connections I’ve made, the worlds that have opened. The transformational magic of words pulled out of the ether by pecking at a keyboard or pulling a pen across a page is pretty cool.

But I rarely crack open my book. I’m afraid I’ll cringe at the flashes of amateurism and aspirational prose, at the writer I used to be, the man I once was. But I take that discomfort as a sign of growth. If I was satisfied with the person and place I was ten years ago, that would be worrisome.

To mark the space between then and now, here are a few things I’ve learned about writing and the writing life since typing those first words on a blank page all those years ago.

• Victories are built on failure. Coming up a print writer, I had to learn how to live with the memorialization of my mistakes, and repeatedly forced to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Writing is an act of exploration in a poorly lit tunnel, littered with dead ends and false doors. The more I wrote, the better I could see in the dark.
• Simplicity is the surest path to precision.
• Make it count or leave it out. Writing is about decision-making. Make choices in accordance with your narrative theme and propulsion. There’s an art to deletion. Ask yourself, does this element serve a purpose? Witty or poetic or colorful aren’t reason enough. In other words, avoid masturbating in public. Even if you’re good at it. It’s unseemly.
• Deadlines are powerful creative engines. Join a writing group and get yourself accountable. Tie your piece to a fixed date, a book-publication anniversary for example.
• When my writing sounds like writing, it’s time for rewriting.
• For me, the joy and magic of writing happens during revision. But first, you need all the clay. The ego has a hard time living with a bunch of shapeless lumps of prose and tries to mold them as soon as they land on the page. Otherwise, we feel naked, shriveled, inadequate, and fake (“They’re all going to laugh at you!”). I often got hung up polishing the first five or six paragraphs (usually tweaking the magic right out of them). Meanwhile the rest of the story sat neglected, undeveloped, and sometimes withered because I’d lost the thread or my steam. Try and get through that first rough draft without stopping, and give yourself a sense of story and direction to revise against.
• When my heart picks up and my head swoons slightly, I know to keep typing.
• Read your stuff out loud. I’m still bad about this. When I recorded the audio book for Running Ransom Road, I was periodically horrified at my sluggish pacing or some overwrought metaphor. Of course, these were the moments the sadistic engineer decided he needed multiple takes. The difference between the voice in your head and how it sounds in the wild can be vast.
• Repetition is death.
• Whatever you do, don’t bore the reader and don’t interrupt the dream. Once you lose either, it’s nearly impossible to get them back. Which doesn’t mean car chases, violence, and sex at every turn. Just put yourselves in your reader’s shoes — slow down when they might need a break, delight them at the right moment, scare them when they’re getting complacent. They have a thousand reasons to put you down, don’t give them any more.
• Once I stopped taking my writing so seriously, my writing got better.
• Don’t be afraid to grind any writing advice under your boot heel. I won’t be offended. Rules are the opposite of freedom, and freedom is the fuel of creativity. Even though Charles Buksowski has fallen somewhat out of favor, I’ve tried to live by his super brief poem “Art:” “As the spirit wanes, the form appears.” In other words, too much structure kills the magic.

Happy, hungry writing!