Why the Best Writing Advice Is Often the Weirdest

A writing exercise collection continues a tradition of playful, esoteric guides for unlocking creativity. Lydia Davis’s rule emphasizes working on character, meaning both a writer’s habitual gestures and ethical traits and the character within a story. The advice functions as a challenge, implying that writing gains interest only when the writer becomes witty and wise. Many writers fear exposure of flimsy characters, and they also fear taboo speech or boredom. As a writing coach, the work begins with reading drafts aloud, which often steadies the voice and reveals both false notes and underlying truth. Feedback focuses on questions, the story behind the story, sentence-level choices, and moments when the author is having fun.

"Lydia Davis offers a cardinal rule: "work on your character." (She happened on a variation of this maxim, by Stendhal, in her copy of the "New Basics Cookbook.") Davis is famously precise, and the way she uses "character" has multiple dimensions: it could mean a writer's habitual gestures and ethical traits, their quirks and turns of phrase. Or it could mean, simply, the character in a story. This is advice that feels like a dare, if not a rebuke: your writing will become interesting only if you spend your days becoming witty and wise."

"Putting words on the page seems too low stakes to get worked up about, and yet the terror of saying something taboo-or just being boring-feels like a terrible fate to most writers. I see this every day as a writing coach, a job I've done since 2019, first teaching online classes and now mostly working with students one-on-one over Zoom. My task is to read their unpublished, often unfinished writing-less as a teacher or as an editor than as a cheerfully unlicensed therapist."

"I ask the writer to read their work aloud. They begin by delivering the words like an embarrassed waiter. About five minutes in, the writer's voice steadies. They might cry, moved by their own words. They hear the false notes but also the truth of what they're saying. It's not "good," not yet, but it's a start. I ask questions, look for the story behind the story, and review sentence-level decisions. I watch for moments when the author is having fun."

Read at The New Yorker