Five Things You Don’t Have To Do To Write

I HEAR A LOT OF EXCUSES. And I should. I am a writing coach and a memoir editor – not to mention a mother and wife, occupations that also come with fielding heaps of explanations – but it’s in those first two roles that I hear most about why people cannot do what they most want to do. And I’m sympathetic. Kind of. Sort of. Actually, not really all that much. I mean, I teach people how to write memoir, and while there are myriad reasons why writing is hard, there are very few good reasons not to write.

But then there is the stuff of pure nonsense, those beliefs that many writers hold that simply make writing harder than it needs to be. And it’s hard enough, yes?

So let’s explode those reasons not to write

Here are the five things you do not have to do to become a writer.

1. You do not have to build your dream house
2. You do not have to go broke and drive your family into debt
3. You do not have to have read everything
4. You do not have to know everything
5. You do not have to understand everything

See that house in the photo above? Lovely, right? Crazy beautiful, in fact, especially in early evening winter light. It is Olana, among the many masterpieces of Frederic Church, best known for his Hudson River School paintings. I love visiting the homes of artists, and do so regularly, making a regular circuit of Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton and Edna St. Vincent Millay, despite having been to all three numerous times. I consider it my E-triangle of inspiration. But those women would have all written in a boxcar if that is all that was available to them, and proved it by writing through some almost unimaginable life stressors. So, too, with Church, I think, who was well into his painting when he constructed this perfect place in which to create.

Did his painting get better after he housed himself and his family in Olana? It did. Was it because of the house? How would I know? Would he not have painted had he not built the house? I think the man would have painted in friend’s basement.

I hear from writers all the time that they are working on their space, looking for an office, just a few items short of a perfect sanctuary. Okay, I always say, but what are you writing? These are two different things, people, and one of them is mere decorating. Get a place you can write. And write. You want to spruce it up? Great. But not in lieu of writing.

Yes, but do I have to be a starving artist to write well? 

You do not have to go broke and drive your family into debt.

“I have to quit my job,” a friend said to me the other day.

“No,” I replied. “You don’t.”

And we both held firm for a good long, silent time on the phone.

He has a book that is a burr in his proverbial saddle. He simply must write it or life may not go on for him. I get it. I’ve been there. But you are not allowed to toss off your income to write. Here is the phrase to live by: You must earn the right to write. Every day. You must first meet life’s basic minimum for living. Then you can write. There is a lot more to writing than shivering, starving and being hung over. In fact, I would argue that not one of these three will do your writing one damn bit of good.

But I must read everything before I actually write, right? 

You do not have to have read everything. I tell memoir coaching clients all the time to stop reading what they are reading. They are frequently reading yet another memoir and have an exhaustive list of all the memoirs they need to read before they write.

Don’t do that. Instead, read over your head. Read The New Yorker, the interviews with working writers in The Paris Review. Read the novels The New York Times Book Review says are great. No one has read everything. Get to the work, read while you write, and write.

You do have to know your material, but…

You do not have to know everything. This is my favorite. But for some wild accident of upbringing, I was born to be a research librarian. I have an addictive bent for looking it up, shooting off in another direction, reading all about that, and on and on. And I have trained myself not to do that.

The general rule of thumb is that books are one third research, one third writing, and one third rewriting. Who made that up? I have no idea, but it has always worked for me.

While they call it “writing what you know,” limit your scope

You do not have to understand everything. This is my second favorite. Particularly when writing personal essays, consider that instead of knowing it all, you test some new thoughts on us. Yes, test your material: First, see what you think about something and then see what the readers think. Test out an argument on your blog, in an op-ed in your local or national newspaper, or in a radio essay. This is a great way to test an argument that you might later expand into a book. See what your readers think, how they respond, what they agree and disagree with, how they heighten and add to your argument, and more.

Five things. Write them down, slap them on your (soon-to-be-repainted) wall, and write.

Want to know more about how to write memoir? Come take one of my online memoir classes.