We live in an era where it’s possible to receive instant gratification in many fields of endeavour, but except for a few notable individuals, it isn’t possible to decide to be a writer and find your inexperienced self on a dais having a Nobel Prize for Literature pinned to your instantly famous chest. Moreover, you can’t in good conscience … although many people do… write a mediocre plot, run ChatGPT’s electronic eye over it, throw it online and call yourself a professional writer.

I, ink-stained old drudge that I am, don’t see writing as an ‘if-you-build-it-they-will-come’ endeavour, but as a mindful, life-long learning and polishing experience; a fastidious craft. A good story or clear non-literary text is a joint construction of both a writer and the readers—the intended audience. You have to care about and cater to that audience and as such, you owe them a quality product.

 A talented writer is made, as much as born. As with any skillset, you must acquire the skills to discern the elements of a good book or text and to evaluate what you produce through this same lens. The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you don’t know what is interesting to readers and what isn’t. You have to be a practised reader—a discerning consumer of the products of other writers—to have confidence in how your marketplace, or target audience, will receive your writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your reader will surely feel that you care nothing about them.

They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — and, worse, they will stop being consumers of your writing (ie readers). You must learn to take constructive criticism on the chin; to trust editors’ opinions and to work with them. They’re representative of other readers after all.

What you learned to call and be proud of as ‘writing’ at school is fluff and poofledust. It’s not possible for your writing to be a marketable craft without further acquisition and practice; just as we don’t train people to be scientists, engineers or plumbers at school, you can’t think you learned anywhere near enough to be a dinkum writer from the high school ‘English’ curriculum.

However, you hopefully learned a modicum of critical literacy; that is, not just how to read and write and spell and ‘do good grammar and punctuation’ in a general sense. You should have taken away the higher-level skill of analysis—why and how all those antique ‘classics’ were magnificent for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say in the context of when and where and why they were written.

To this skill you must add that of synthesis—putting all the lower-order (grammar, spelling, structural) text-construction skills together to produce a new, unique and reader-focussed written text. Then, you must critically evaluate your work and make it better and better and better. You must learn to ‘kill your darlings’—delete the stuff which you initially thought would add to the impact of your text, but which on evaluation, detracts from the power of your writing to rivet a reader.

Specifically, what does a would-be writer aim to produce in the contemporary context? The obvious answer is to write about what you love, but not necessarily to limit yourself to that. Write what you’d like to read but also challenge yourself. Good ‘literary’ novels answer questions about and also articulate and process human experience.

Write with passion. Reading is how humans learn how to deal with life and they also seek escapism in reading when it gets them down. Thus, a story generally is carried by a well-structured, logical plot. To keep a reader’s interest, it should contain plenty of action, humour and levity to balance the hard-slog, gritty stuff.  You should lean in hard to a happy, hopeful or epic-lesson ending, even if it’s not all neatly tied up with a big red bow.

 Reading is also an important device through which humans develop empathy, so writing’s also about characters. My hope for my fiction-writing is that every reader will find a relatable and lovable character on the page, even if that character is someone unlike them. A good character writer makes at least someone among their readers feel seen, heard, understood and most of all, ‘out there’ in the world.

 Red-eyed wretches who write well reveal a lot about themselves and what they read to their own readers through how they write. Their writing carries their soul and their personality as well as their passions. We call these revelations ‘elements of style’.We attain these slowly, perhaps, at first, by mimicking and tweaking, but ultimately by doing. Reading mindfully and practice-writing across genres and subjects trains writers in learning how other readers compile information, articulate emotions and identify ideas and to bring your own neat twists to your own style.

 Psychologically, it keeps me happy to journal and to write travel memoirs and travel articles and to have several books from different genres on the reading pile. That way, I see myself as having been productive at the end of every week, even if it’s been just a week of proof-reading my own novel manuscript.

To be motivated to go through the process of writing a whole book, you must find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should or would care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. Shared experience strikes chords. I battle constantly to remember that eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in my head. 

A good plot has metaphors or myths or stuff the protagonist tells themselves which the reader comes to see is not true. To write metaphorically, you need to recognise the metaphors in what you read. That, of itself, takes practice. Voracious reading—daily reading— and mindfully analysing what you read for style and metaphors could be considered essential literary enlightenment.

Read across genres, subjects and themes if you want to be a writer. The idea is to cram your head with as much information as possible, from every field, so that the ideas bombard each other, in a million possibilities, to generate new, unique ideas. As you read and read, your mind will begin to pick up on the metaphors in the writing.  

For an introvert, some form of social interaction, no matter how that idea kicks, is essential to keep your writing real. I joined a book club to give me exposure to what other readers enjoy, and I admit that some of the books are not my thing. I learn from the discussions with other book-club members, not only about the books but about their preferences and experiences. I fear that without interaction, I would lose sight of the human-ness of my characters.

 There are two extremes of the writing-preparation spectrum—the plotter, who plans meticulously, and the ‘pantser’, who flies by the seat of their authorial pants. There are a lot of pantsers around at the moment, whose novels grow organically, but to produce anything deep enough to impress myself, I need to map it out, to know the ending and to reflect and analyse and shift scenes around for a long time before actually getting any words down.  Most writers are between the two extremes and I am not denigrating the pantsers. My ex-teacher baggage requires a curriculum—a vision, an end objective—so I’m very much a planner.

If my manuscript gets rejected when I finally determine it’s cooked, it’s not because I’m a bad writer, but because I haven’t read enough, tried to understand readers enough, analysed enough and, most of all, practised enough. Or, it could be because I haven’t marketed my story and myself strategically enough. Much as I hate that ‘selling’ requirement of modern authorhood, it is not going away.

My best take-out from the writing journey thus far is: be discriminating in what you read, write and sell. Do courses (essential!) to make sure the product you are putting out there lives up to the quality expectations of readers and publishers, and don’t give rave reviews to books which don’t meet your reading standards just because the author is an acquaintance who has asked for the favour.

Catch you on the journey.