14/365: writing advice

I hate writing advice. As soon as anyone says I should do anything, I want to do the exact opposite, the same way fancy hotels or quiet dining rooms immediately make me want to misbehave. It’s a problem. Sure, teach the mechanics of writing, figure out how to make something good, but all the hoopla that comes with it, the right candle or the fancy pencil or the best notebook or the cabin in the woods, you can keep that. Not the cabin the woods, I’ll have that. Mostly writing is work and hard work but as I was sitting today hating every stupid trite little sentence, struggling not to delete the whole thing, again, and wanting to cry at the same time, blame the work, blame the moon, the month, the cold, the stupid slow burnapocalypse,willyoujustgetitoverwithalready, I realised if I was to give writing advice - which is a disingenuous phrasing since clearly I’m about to, it would be this:

write the book that breaks your heart.

That’s it.

I wrote a memoir to stay close to my mother. I finish The Last Days by saying that for as long as I was writing it, I kept her with me. The day I wrote the final ending of many, I went to the Tate Modern, just to look at IKB ‘79. I wanted the blue of it to eat me up. To be disappeared by it. Writing her then leaving her, felt then, the hardest thing I’d done. Harder than her leaving me.

I didn’t expect writing Ava Anna Ada to break my heart. But fiction has a way of pulling your insides out through your nose. What is concealed, it will reveal. There is a chapter right in the middle of the book that I wrote in one sitting, 2 in the morning, heart broken with my heart breaking again as I wrote it. I did not edit it once. Every single sentence, the same as it was. This is deeply uncharacteristic of me.

It is not to say the story itself will break anyone else’s heart. It’s not making a bid for a love story or a grand tragedy - it’s the what the book does to you. Every book costs something, necessitates a certain sacrifice, or a deepening, and it will take what it needs to take.

I was in a love with a man once who told me if the writer doesn’t cry while they’re writing, how can the reader feel anything. He also warned me against sleeping with people I hated, that it was good to test my capabilities for a while, but after a time it would cause damage. If you know your Jenny Holzer, you’ll know he was a terrible plagiarist. I did not know Jenny Holzer’s work at the time, for this reason, I stayed in love with him for longer than I should’ve. I have since made it my mission to know as much about art as possible. I will not be tricked in this way twice. It’s likely his writing advice was also stolen, but whoever he stole it from, had a point.

Louise Bourgeois giggles to the camera as she sternly says, it’s not about what it means but what it makes you feel. I can’t help but feel she means you as the artist as much as any audience or reader - what you feel as you’re making it, that’s when you know you’re onto something. And it was Zadie Smith who said there’s the book you want to write and then the book you can write. Which I take here as meaning more the book you have to write, which for me, is usually the book I’m trying to avoid writing, and the earliest drafts screen stories to conceal the lurking biting depths, the places I don’t want to go or stay in for long.

It’s dark now. I wrote much of my last book in the dark, it was the only time it felt safe to. I will do the same with the this one, letting it do whatever it will.