by Allen Drury
Store it away.
Bring it out.
Think about it.
Use it.
Your ways are not others’ ways, and theirs are not yours. But all are human. Accept them, understand them, use them.
Another thing might be: don’t be afraid to put your own feelings and your own opinions into your writing. Everybody does, either directly or indirectly. If you aren’t a vegetable, you’re aware that we live in rather interesting times, to put it mildly. If you aren’t a vegetable, you have opinions about them. Don’t be afraid to get in your licks. It is, to my mind, one of the legitimate duties of the responsible writer. It is also one of the legitimate pleasures.
You do have ideas, obviously, otherwise you wouldn’t be writing. You want to express them, and you should. You will find that this sometimes draws down the wrath of those who disagree, but in the long run, you will have the last word, as you should. Criticism comes and goes, but what you write remains. So don’t be afraid to speak up, if you have a particular slant on things. If you believe it sincerely it will be worth saying and it will command its own audience.
Another guideline might be: read copiously and in all areas when you first start to write, more selectively when you narrow your interests down to the particular areas you have marked out for your own. Certain elements of emphasis and style, certain ways of developing character and situation, you can acquire from other writers. What doesn’t come to you by conscious analysis may come be osmosis: reading helps—until, I find, one really decides what one wants to write about. At that point, I would suggest you continue to read for relaxation everything else, but skip other writers in your own area. You could be affected, even if not consciously, in some way that would not be good for you as a writer.
Finally, having observed, having studies, having experienced, having read, having discovered you have the urge to say something and having acquired the confidence that you know how to do it, the final piece of advice I think all professional writers would give you is, simply—write.
Sit down and get to it.
Have plenty of paper and plenty of pencils, or a typewriter if that’s your habit, as it is mine—and then set yourself a definite time—and sit down—and do it.
Don’t wait until inspiration comes: the initial inspiration is what sends you to the desk in the beginning. Once you have it, it becomes a matter of working it out from there. You can’t do it wandering around the house or talking to your friends on the telephone or relaxing over the newspaper with one more cup of coffee, or playing any of the other games the mind can devise with a devilish ingenuity for wasting time. You’ve got to get down to work. Nobody else is going to do it for you, and if you don’t, it just doesn’t get done.
You will find in most cases, I think, that the initial inspiration that sends you to the desk is productive of others as you go along. In a sense, the writing becomes a game with yourself that generates its own excitement and its own discipline. In a sense, you never know what’s going to come next. You get the basic inspiration and the others follow. If your characters have any hold upon you at all—and if they don’t you can be sure they won’t have any on the reader, and you’re licked before you start—but if you do, you can be sure they will provide plenty of inspirations as you go along.
Certain things will come to you just because it is logical for those people to do them. Certain twists and turns of plot will spring quite easily and naturally to your mind, if your relationship with your characters is natural and easy. And perhaps that is the greatest secret of all: certainly it is the greatest secret of novel writing—to find characters who are real to you, and who in turn become real to the writer. Long after one has forgotten the intricate details of a good novel, the characters will still be walking around in the reader’s mind. They will still be alive to him as they are to the writer. They will have moved off the page into life, from which they originally came.
So then: Set yourself a time—a definite time—and sit yourself down—and write. It doesn’t have to be a definite time to the very moment, but it does, I think, have to be a definite time in the day. With me, as with many, it’s morning, because most people are fresher then. Also, it’s nice to sit down at the desk at 8:30 or 9 and get up at 1 and know that, usually, you’re through for the day—at least, through with the physical writing, because while you’re on a book, it never really leaves you at any time until it’s done.
But to get a book done, you have to do this—not just from 8:30 to 1 on one day or two days or three days or four, but on one hundred or two hundred or three hundred or four. You have to acquire discipline, and one of the surest ways to acquire it is to get on some sort of internal time-clock so that you know that on most working mornings between now and your tentative date for completion, you’re going to be right there, pounding away.
One other suggestion before I close: if you run into a temporary block, don’t panic. Get up—go out—do something else—forget it. Let it rest for a day or two. You can trust your mind a lot more than you think you can, once you’ve got it conditioned to a book. Come back in a day or two and go at it again, and most times you’ll find that your sub-conscious has been working for you, and the problem is straightening itself out. But just remember—don’t panic, because that can be fatal. Just say to yourself calmly, “It will come to me”—and relax—and you will be surprised at how often it does.
There are, of course, other guidelines, other hints, other suggestions that will come to you from many sources in these four days.
Hopefully, professional writers, editors, publishers, agents can give you pointers and sound advice.
Hopefully, they can give you encouragement.
And hopefully you will also give it to one another, for that too is one of the things that can be gained from writers’ conferences—the nice, warm, comforting feeling that it isn’t so lonely, after all—that many others are working along, as you are, in the pursuit of some vision of life that they, like you, feel they must get down on paper—and that when you open the window on the darkness and call out, “Who’s there?” many more than you perhaps imagine are going to call back, “I am.”
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About the Author
Allen Drury is a master of political fiction, #1 New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner, best known for the landmark novel ADVISE AND CONSENT. A 1939 graduate of Stanford University, Allen Drury wrote for and became editor of two local California newspapers. While visiting Washington, DC, in 1943 he was hired by the United Press (UPI) and covered the Senate during the latter half of World War II. After the war he wrote for other prominent publications before joining the New York Times' Washington Bureau, where he worked through most of the 1950s. After the success of ADVISE AND CONSENT, he left journalism to write full time. He published twenty novels and five works of non-fiction, many of them best sellers. WordFire Press will be reissuing the majority of his works.
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