SO YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER?

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Karan Kapoor asked me to write about advice—advice I’ve been given, advice I give, advice that works and advice that doesn’t, the kind of wisdom that gets passed down in workshops and writing conferences and late-night conversations between writers who probably should know better. The problem with writing advice is that it’s almost always true and false simultaneously, helpful and useless, essential and completely beside the point. What follows is what I actually believe, stripped of the usual encouragement I’m professionally obligated to provide, when a student says they want to become a writer:

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1. DON’T DO IT

In 1959, the writer Flannery O'Connor wrote a letter to Betty Hester, a friend who—despite working a modest occupation as a file clerk in Atlanta—was one of her most intellectually rigorous correspondents. In the letter, O’Connor says, “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

I love this quote. The reason I love it is that I agree: aspiring writers aren’t discouraged enough. The hypocritical part of me is that I’ve spent most of my life pretending the opposite is true. Anyone can be a writer! With enough patience, work, luck, and timing!

What I never say? The world probably won’t care about what you make. Most wanna-be writers will never have anything they’ve written published in a magazine, much less a magazine of repute. By “repute” I simply mean: a magazine with an actual readership. Even fewer writers will publish books, to say nothing of the writers who will turn writing into a “career.” The number of writers I have taught in my 25-plus years in the classroom who now make a living solely from writing—I would estimate, and bet my life savings on—is exactly zero.

Here's the thing: writing won't make your life easier. It certainly won’t make you a better person. In fact, it might make you worse—more self-absorbed, more prone to turning every experience into material, more likely to choose the interesting phrase over the honest emotion, to value the well-crafted sentence over the genuine response. The best people I know are not writers. Some of the worst I’ve known? Definitely are.

I’m not engaging in reverse psychology. I’m not being coy or comical or tongue-in-cheek. I’m begging you. I’m just here to say: Please. Do the world a favor. Do not become a writer.

But if you insist…

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2. READ YOURSELF BLIND

In 2005, the writer Ben Marcus was auditioning for the role of MFA Director at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and meeting with a group of interested students, of which I was one. I don’t remember much of what he said, although I do remember admiring his unabashedly serious demeanor and that he implored us to “cultivate an appetite for various kinds of writing.” I was not, at the time, all that crazy about Marcus’ fiction—its encyclopedic coldness, all diagrams and definitions, like Borges run through a food processor set to obfuscate. (In fact, the story goes that Marilynne Robinson, who was on faculty at the time, despised Marcus’ writing so much she threatened to quit if he got the job). Still, I liked the idea of imagining literature as a kind of banquet table, and that you might learn as much from Elmore Leonard as you would Shakespeare. The irony, of course, is that Marcus himself would later abandon the avant-garde feast he’d been so loudly championing, and serve up straight-ahead realism at The New Yorker—a perfectly plated entrée from the very kitchen he once mocked. The point still stands, though: read. Read promiscuously. Read jealously. Read like you're lost in the woods and will eat anything that doesn’t kill you on the first bite. 

Read Clarice Lispector, that literary sorceress who could make a character’s relationship with an orange feel like a religious experience. Read The Mustache, by Emmanuel Carrère, in which a man is driven slowly insane after he shaves his mustache and nobody notices. Read Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis, told entirely in reverse, and which depicts a doctor taking a nail out of a trash can, pushing into the head of a patient, and sending him away screaming. Read Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, by Donald Antrim, where people build moats around their houses and draw and quarter criminals with their Toyotas. Read The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa, about a man whose memory lasts only ten minutes. Read Haruki Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase, where a postmodern detective story involves searching for a mysterious sheep and makes perfect sense in its own impossible logic. Read Amos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard, a Yoruba folktale that reads like the fever dream of oral tradition translated into English by someone who learned the language from spirits.

Read until you understand that every constraint is a doorway, every limitation a new form of freedom. Read books that shouldn’t exist but do anyway, that break rules you didn’t know were rules, that make you realize literature is not a museum but a laboratory where anything can happen if you’re brave enough to mix the ingredients of every motherfucking beaker.

Then maybe—possibly—sit your ass down and try to make something to honor that voracious consumption.

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3. STAY CURIOUS

About everything, even—especially—the things you take for granted. No matter where you live, you’re surrounded by unknowns that have become invisible through familiarity, mysteries masquerading as mundane facts. Do you know what really happens when you flush a toilet? Can you identify all the trees in your neighborhood? Do you know the name of the person who delivers your mail, the story of how your house came to be built, the geological history of the ground beneath your feet? Curiosity is the writer's most essential tool, more important than talent or training or natural facility with language; curiosity is what keeps you asking questions when everyone else has stopped looking.

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4. IMITATE YOUR HEROES—AND YOUR ENEMIES

Imitation may be the strongest form of flattery, but it can also serve as a wonderfully intentional brain-stretching exercise. We learn how writing works not only by doing it but also by studying what has come before, analyzing how it works, how particular narrative and poetic strategies/methods have been deployed. By consciously mirroring the moves we see other writers making—lyrical departures, figurative language, the use of negation and digression and direct address—we’re making intentional what we do subconsciously. Whether we think about it or not, we engage in pattern recognition every time we write a sentence or a line of verse.     

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5. “DO A LITTLE BIT OF WORK EVERY DAY” 

That’s what the writer Richard Bausch said, at a lunch in Iowa City in 2005 where he, like Ben Marcus, was auditioning for the role of MFA Director, and where he also leaned over to me and said, conspiratorially, “Do you know what I love about red wine?” I admitted that I didn’t. “Everything,” he said. And then he laughed. That might have been corny, but the advice about “a little bit of work every day” struck me as quietly profound. Most writers I know don’t even seem to do that. I tell my students, “Write a page a day, and in a year you’ve got 365. That seems like the least you could do.” How many do it? If I had to guess: very few.

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6. EMBRACE LIMITATIONS

As the artist David Hockney once said, “‘Limitations … are a stimulant. If you were told to make a drawing of a tulip using five lines, or one using a hundred, you’d have to be more inventive with the five. After all, drawing in itself is always a limitation.” I guess that means that writing is also a limitation. A story might unfold as a set of instructions. Or as a recipe. Or as a list of ingredients that never quite add up. The trick is to think of a way to constrict a story—and then to think of a way to break free from the cage you’ve built. That tension is where the form gets its charge. Build yourself a cage, then find the crack in it—that’s where the story lives.

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7. WRITE THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN WRITE

It’s a cliché, I know, but even clichés can be true, can carry wisdom that has been worn smooth by repetition but not worn away entirely. My favorite professor in graduate school, a white-haired, wide-eyed man in his forties who described the reading and discussing of poetry with fervent earnestness as the single most exciting activity that human beings could engage in, told me he was open to reading anything his students wrote, and so I gave him a story about a woman married to a former Cornhusker placekicker who was secretly dating a poet named Todd—and when I waltzed into his professor's office expecting to be showered with praise, he looked at me gravely and said, “This is okay, but there are four hundred other people in the country right now who could write this exact story. You need to write the story only you can write.”

Four hundred? I wasn't sure I believed the number, suspected it was symbolic rather than literal, but it planted a seed that grew into a question that has haunted and shaped me: if I wrote a story that only I could write, what would it look like? What experiences, what knowledge, what peculiar combination of obsessions and anxieties and cultural background could I bring to the page that no one else could? The answer, when it finally came, had something to do with growing up Seventh-day Adventist in rural North Carolina, something to do with the particular way faith and doubt can coexist in the same sentence, something to do with the experience of being raised as one of a “peculiar people” in a world that didn’t seem to know or care that you existed.

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8. STAY DETACHED—AND BE RESILIENT

In other words, don’t be overly precious about what you write. One of the worst things you can do is over-romanticize your ideas. Or even romanticize them. Imagine that your best ideas are yet to come. I’ve seen it often: a writer asks for feedback, then insists the real problem is that you don’t “get it”—as if the reader’s response is wrong and the author’s invisible intention is what truly matters. That’s what happens when you confuse your draft with yourself. You stop listening, you stop experimenting, you stop growing. I’ve published six books. But I also spent years writing two novels my agents loved, that went out to editors, and never got picked up. The replies weren’t silence, they were notes full of praise—“we love this, please send Vollmer’s next work”—as if I were some kind of tree fruiting novels on command. Next work? No problem. Let me just check my other branches. That’s where detachment matters: knowing you’ll write again, knowing the work you thought was everything is just one piece of what you can do. Cling to a draft and you strangle it. Let it fail, and it’ll teach you how to write.

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9. TRUST READERS—AND DON’T

Workshops can be toxic spaces because they’re so full of opinions. I was thirty when I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I was a husband and father of a toddler. I’d been in workshops at UNC-Chapel Hill for undergrad and N. C. State for grad school. But I’d never been in rooms with so many people from the Ivy League. They were superintelligent. Incredibly articulate. So they could make the points they were making sound exceptionally compelling, even if those points were hot garbage. I could leave a workshop knowing that my vision for my work was truer than anyone else’s, but I’d also be carrying around a headful of static.

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10. AIM FOR MEANING, SENSE, & CLARITY

These were the dictums of Frank Conroy, the famous MFA Director at Iowa. I never had him as a teacher and honestly never wanted to, especially after hearing that a friend of mine—whose writing I admired and still do—suffered a workshop during which Conroy said, in front of everyone, “This guy pisses all over his characters.” At the time, I distrusted “meaning, sense, clarity.” They felt like slogans for a smaller, safer art. But the older I get, the more I see that even the strangest, most experimental work depends on those things. Meaning doesn’t have to be simple. Sense doesn’t have to be linear. Clarity doesn’t have to flatten mystery. They’re not limits; they’re the very materials you bend if you want the work to endure.

11. TRUST YOUR OWN VOICE

Twenty years ago, I spent my days teaching first-year composition to barely literate college kids in central Massachusetts. Evenings, I sat in my office editing short stories full of fervent, earnest prose—summoning tight, muscular sentences that I hoped would be recognized as pristine and aerodynamic. I often sent drafts of these stories to my wife-to-be, who lived 691 miles away, who dutifully marked them up and returned them with insightful notes. One day, she posed a question that sank a metaphorical axe blade into my skull: “why can’t your stories read more like your emails?” What she meant: stop trying so hard. Embrace indeterminacy. Trust your improvisational skills. Be funny. Stay loose. Don’t be afraid to wander and wonder—to digress. In other words: learn how to be yourself on the page.

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12. “HONOR YOUR INTERESTS” 

That’s what poet and performance artist Douglas Kearney said during a recent visit to Virginia Tech. Near the end of his craft talk, someone asked how a young poet might find his voice. Kearney didn’t hesitate: “Honor your interests.” It felt immediately true. The best and most authentic writing doesn’t come from chasing trends or mimicking what the room wants—it crystallizes your own idiosyncratic weirdness, the obsessions only you can’t look away from. That’s the vein worth mining, the signal worth following.

13. WRITE A MANIFESTO
When I teach Form & Theory of Fiction—a graduate level course for MFAs at Virginia Tech—I always ask my students to write a manifesto that seeks to articulate their own particular and idiosyncratic approaches to the art of storytelling. I ask them to interrogate a variety of fictional texts or texts about fiction (essays, short stories, and novels; to acknowledge and appreciate a diversity of forms; to attempt to answer questions like: “what is fiction” and “of what use is it?” and “should I write it?” and “why?” and “how?”; and to produce a manifesto that showcases their own artistic inclinations and argues, whether implicitly or explicitly, what fiction is and why it matters. That’s because I believe that all writers should articulate what they think good writing should do—and why. Some of the best writing you might ever do is about what it means to write, why you do it, and where it came from.

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14. DON’T TRUST WRITERS TO GIVE YOU ADVICE

Once upon a time, I was working on a novel about a demon who was hiding out in a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school because he liked possessing young, guilt-ridden Christians. I submitted a couple chapters to a semi-famous writer who was known for his speculative literary fiction, and who trotted out this neat little equation: “Fiction should be 80% action, 20% summary.” I don’t know if I made a face when he said this, but I obviously should’ve. A story or novel’s success could be reduced to its ratio of how time was depicted? Did everyone really prefer 80% “action unfolding in real time” to montage?  Slow motion to fast forward? Couldn’t you really just do whatever you wanted—as long as you could get away with it? I liked to think so. I liked to think that writers like Gilbert Sorrentino thought so—I think of his story “The Moon in Its Flight” packed with rhapsodic litanies and bewildering interruptions and gobsmacked commentary like “Can all this have really taken place in America?”—and that Nicholson Baker thought so—his slim novel The Mezzanine, which takes place entirely on an escalator during the narrator’s lunch break, is buttressed by long, dense, and lyrical footnotes about school milk cartons and straws and shoelaces—and that Denis Johnson thought so—I think of Jesus’ Son and how it’s been described as a novel, short story collection, a novella, and poetry—and the gazillion other bedazzling books that writers have written that fail to conform to this ridiculous 80/20 formula. Bottom line: never listen to any writing advice with math in it.   

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15. FINALLY: SIT YOUR ASS DOWN AND DO IT—AND THEN KEEP DOING IT

It’s really that simple. You can talk as much as you want about what you wanna do or what you’re gonna do but there’s no substitute for just doing it. And yes, it’s harder than it sounds. I don't have to tell you that there’s a bazillion distractions literally one click away. Stop browsing and doomscrolling. Open a notebook. Blindfold yourself. Put in the hours. Eventually, you’ll know if you’re a “real” writer not by what you make or even what you publish, but by whether you can survive the terrible daily knowledge that you might be wasting your time, that you might have nothing to say, that you might be fooling yourself about having any talent whatsoever—and you keep writing anyway. 

The world doesn’t need more writers. But it might need the particular failure only you can become, the specific obsession only you can't shake, the strange story only you can ruin in exactly the right way.