THE SIMPLEST FORMULA FOR WRITING FICTION BEAUTIFULLY

WHEREIN I PROPOSE FOUR COMMANDMENTS

Revolutionary, 1972 Wadsworth Jarrell

A member of our community asked me for the simplest formula for successful creative writing. A personal formula, naturally, with extra emphasis on simple: under ten words.

I cannot make it simpler than creative writing = reading + craft + propulsion + emotional regulation.

Reading, craft, propulsion, emotional regulation: my personal four commandments.

READING

For me, all creative writing begins and ends with reading. Reading brought me to literature because it was in reading that I first experienced the transport and transformation that literature makes possible. At a practical level the more I’ve read the better I’ve written, and the deeper I’ve understood what literature is and what literature does. Plus, no better way to widen your repertoires than through reading. Seeing someone do something on the page magnificently encourages you to adapt said technique for your own work.

CRAFT

This describes all the techniques, strategies, and artistry you extract and develop from the stories you’ve read. If reading is your muscles, then craft is your muscles in action. If reading reveals your tastes, craft reveals your style. (And what reveals your heart? The stories themselves in their human impact.) To put it thaumatically, what you read are other people’s spells. What you write are your spells. But your craft is your ability to cast spells.

PROPULSION

The motivations that keep you on the page — that allow you to pursue this lonely, often thankless art. My propulsion is love — specifically my love of reading (and one other love that cannot be described briefly). Reading saved me, really saved me, and I hope through my stories to thank all those books and writers who didn’t know me from fulano by saving someone else I will never meet, and whose gratitude I will never know. Other people might have other motivations in different blends: fame, self-worth, compulsion, even fear. Important note: one can’t only have propulsion. One must understand their propulsion and in certain instances, forgive it, and oneself for it.

EMOTIONAL REGULATION

Whether you’re writing a dissertation or a short story, a poem or a farewell speech, regulating all the demotivational thinking and feeling-memories that the process of writing elicits often spells the difference between completion and failure. Enhancing your capacity for emotional regulation, and your tolerance for frustration, understanding the relationship between your core self and your wounded parts, exploring the power of your critical self, pursuing therapy or some force of habit or practice of mindfulness that allows you to work through emotional storms cannot be recommended enough. After all, it is emotional regulation that permits your reading, your craft and your propulsion to prosper. You might even believe you lack craft and propulsion simply because your negative ideation has obscured your talents. Emotional regulation is the gentle sword, the vigilant angel that keeps the garden of your gifts safe.

As with any art there are, of course, deeper mysteries that elude explication — and that of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.