27 bits of advice I give to young writers

My hapless students have these lines coming out of their ears, and faithful Penman readers should have memorized these by now, but here, in summary, is what I’ve been telling young writers every chance I get all these years I’ve been teaching writing. For the full month, see my book The Knowing Is in the Writing: Notes on the Practice of Fiction (UP Press, 2006).

 1. To write well, read well.

2. Raise the stakes, push the narrative, and bring us somewhere we’ve never been.

3. Get a life, and get a notebook. “Gathering material” is the writer’s best excuse for anything.

4. Write the story that only you can write (with many thanks to Franz Arcellana for that one).

5. Given a choice, choose the less obvious.

6. If it’s obvious to you, it’s obvious to somebody else.

7. Write for the intelligent and difficult reader.

8. The intelligent reader is at least as smart as you are.

9. Better to start a story with an image (like “A yellow umbrella”) than a theme; you’ll hardly find the words “justice” and “freedom” in the best stories about justice and freedom.

10. Everything submitted to my class is a draft, and all drafts are negotiable, no matter how perfect they may look like to you in the morning.

11. Don’t revise the day after the workshop; wait a while and revise with a cool head — ruthlessly. As Nick Joaquin put it, “Kill your babies.”

12. Don’t overplot at the beginning; let the plot develop organically, and be open to all possibilities.

13. Characters are most interesting when they go out of character.

14. Find the extraordinary in the ordinary; write a fantasy that takes place in a Jollibee in Cubao, not in Galaxy X.

15. Poetry is the hardest thing to write well and the easiest thing to write badly.

16. Workshops are part boot camp, and part support group.

17. Workshops are as much about learning to read as learning to write.

18. This is all about one thing: the book with your name on the spine.

19. Nobody owes you a reading or a living; lose the attitude and get to work.

20. Art is made by an elite, but it doesn’t have to be just for that elite.

21. An artist who’s out of touch with society isn’t just politically but also aesthetically compromised.

22. Nick Joaquin drank a lot, but just drinking a lot won’t make you a Nick Joaquin.

22. In writing, nothing is ever wasted; even bad work can lead to good.

23. Think visually; look into the corners of the frame for interesting details.

24. Characters best reveal themselves when taken out of their natural element; put a professor on a Ferris wheel, and bring a nun to a girlie bar.

25. Trust the story, not the language.

26. Wit is easy, wisdom harder to achieve in a story.

27. You only think you know what you’re writing about, because the knowing is in the writing.