Eric Olsen on How to Write

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From their egos and anxieties to the way they work, writers have more in common than we might think. The journalist and editor takes us inside the writing process and reveals who gives the best advice for aspiring authors

If someone were to read all of these books you’ve chosen, would they come out with a good idea of how to write? How did you select them?

I’ve been going through them the past couple of days, just refreshing my memory, and looking at them all in one big chunk. What a young or beginning writer is going to get out of all of them is how similar all writers are in many regards – when it comes to process, fear, neuroses, and the pleasures that are derived. These are books by well-known writers; they give examples of other well-known writers. They show how writers, at even the highest level, obsess about the same things that the rest of us obsess about.

I was going to ask if they contradict each other. But you’re saying they’re actually surprisingly similar in terms of advice?

When we did the interviews for our book We Wanted to Be Writers, several people talked about the pleasure in losing control as you write. The work begins to write itself. Ralph Keyes, in The Courage to Write, makes note of the fact that writers have huge egos, which is true. But what a lot of the writers that I spoke to said is that they try to reach a state where they’re not an ego any longer, the work takes over and the writing begins to write the writer, rather than the other way around. One of the points of difference that struck me is that in one of these books, The Faith of a Writer, Joyce Carol Oates talks about how the writer has to be in control. But other than that one point, everybody had the same basic things to say about what’s important in writing and what a writer faces on a daily basis. The Courage to Write by Keyes is different from the other four books in that it’s dealing specifically with fears, the others are more “how to” books. But otherwise they all get at the same points.

You’re a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, probably the most prestigious writing programme in the United States. Is writing something you can learn?

Boy, that is the question. On the workshop’s own website, the introductory paragraph says (and I paraphrase) or used to say: “We agree, in part, with the consensus that writing can’t be taught.” In one of the chapters in our book, We Wanted to Be Writers, we begin with that statement and discuss it. More recently, Samantha Chang, the workshop’s director, was interviewed on PBS and the moderator asked her, “Do you think writing can be taught?” Sam’s answer was something like, “Not really. If I just brought chicken soup to class every week the writers would get better.”

This is an ongoing debate, which has been going on since the workshop was first started 75 years ago. Among the people that we interviewed, the consensus was that there are a lot of aspects of writing that certainly can be taught. You can speed up the process of maturation of young writers, by talking about the mistakes you made in your career. As a teacher, you can speed up the process towards getting better. When I was an editor, the consensus was that a good editor could improve a piece by 15%. In the realm of teaching and learning writing, there’s a general consensus – among those who think it can be taught – that you can take a good writer, and make him or her a little better. There are always ways that you can help a writer along. You’re not going to take a mediocre writer and turn him or her into a great writer, and there are also some things that can’t be taught, like the basic desire to be a writer. That seems to be a given. You’re not going to make someone want to be a writer. Sometimes what goes on in a writing workshop is that you convince the writer that he doesn’t want to be a writer. That is a kind of teaching too…

Ron Carlson Writes a Story

By Ron Carlson

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Your first book is the Ron Carlson book, Ron Carlson Writes a Story. It’s very practical, isn’t it?

Yes, that’s what I love about it. This whole book is, “Look! Here’s how to be a better writer.” I love how he uses one story, The Governor’s Ball, and his own experience of writing that story, to talk about the process of writing. What I found fascinating too is that he does such a neat job of talking about letting the story write itself. Here’s a guy for whom each sentence that came next was a total surprise. It was an exploration – he was just following the story as it went along. When I’m doing my writing, this is what I long for – those moments when I don’t know what is going to come next, and the story tells me what comes next. I write novels, which I don’t think write themselves quite in the way a really short story, like the one Ron is writing about, might. But I just love his very clear and precise description of the way he puts the story together.

Including even mundane things, like how you name your characters…

Yes, that’s really interesting, as is his emphasis on the importance of detail, and the inventory that he talks about. This is a terrific book for any young writer or even a not-so-young writer. Even if you’ve been writing for years, it’s good to be reminded of these things now and then.

I like Carlson’s take on the rule about writing that we’re all taught in high school, that you should “write what you know”. In the book, he says that whenever he’s asked about this, he replies: “I write from personal experiences, whether I’ve had them or not.” He argues that teachers are trying to prevent students from writing a crazy science fiction story or some cliché they saw on television, but not, in fact, to completely restrict writing to events that have happened to you personally.

Ron talks about three sources of story idea. In describing how he wrote The Governor’s Ball, Ron talks about how he drew on his own experiences, the experience of others, and stuff he just made up. Some of the authors, like Joyce Carol Oates, are, I think, of the school that serious writing is done from your own personal neuroses and experiences and fears and torment. That’s where the serious stuff comes from, or so we’re told by serious, “literary” writers. The guys that write science fiction and mysteries, they just make everything up, and that’s not as important as the other kind of writing. I’m not sure I’d go along with that.

So they disagree with Carlson and say you really do need to stick to your personal experience to write well?

Yes, and when I was at Iowa as a young writer, in the mid-1970s, I didn’t want to write about myself, or my life. I got some crap for that in the workshops, because the real serious stuff was supposed to be people writing about their dysfunctional families. Because when you’re 22 years old and starting to write, what can you write about from personal experience except your own dysfunctional family? I didn’t want to write about my dysfunctional family. I wanted to write science fiction. But you couldn’t submit science fiction at Iowa (except Joe Haldeman, who’d already published). It was forbidden. So I would write other stuff, but it was never about me, or drawn from my own experience.