Permission for Writers

Story prompt: A successful fiction writer agrees to write a craft book. Their work is much admired for its grace, power, and clarity. For their insights, there is—to use a term they only read between their fingers—a market. Setting to work, they assemble examples of useful and/or lovely writing. (Not their own, of course! OK, maybe one or two.) They have thoughts about plot, characterization, setting—but so many examples contradict them. Would Proust have taken any of this advice? Lispector, Morrison? The book soon bogs down—why can’t they just say what they know for sure, which is that writing fiction involves making a mess that you see something in, then working up the nerve to improve it?

I don’t know if that is what’s gone on in the minds of fiction writers who’ve written books on writing. But over the years, I’ve read a shelf’s worth of them—by Annie Dillard, Matt Bell, James Wood, Lydia Davis, Stephen King, and many more—and that’s usually what their advice boils down to. Any book that guides you to that conclusion—make mess, fix mess—has done its job, I figure. But Elizabeth McCracken’s new book, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction, is among my favorites in the genre because it understands that motivation to do those two difficult things is the main necessity and that following most instructions about writing is like consulting a motorcycle repair manual when trying to fix a bicycle—maybe it’ll be helpful, maybe not. “A writing life, I’ve come to believe, is a yearslong process of casting away everything you once believed for sure,” she observes.

If credentials matter to you in a craft-book writer, McCracken has plenty: graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; author of four novels, three story collections, and a memoir; finalist for the National Book Award (and longlisted two other times); and a tenured professor of writing at the University of Texas at Austin. (I’m particularly fond of her 2019 novel, Bowlaway, a manic, bighearted family story.) But McCracken is no name-dropper herself—pointedly, she doesn’t quote from her own work in A Long Game, or anybody else’s—and for her, the failures are as meaningful as the successes. At various points, she considers work of hers that was unpublished, or unpublishable. That’s not for the sake of self-deprecation, though there’s a measure of that throughout. Her main point is that writing is work, and sometimes work doesn’t go well.

“Years after the end of any writing class or program, it isn’t the most promising writers who are still working, still publishing books, it’s the most bullheaded,” she points out. Still, she’s skeptical of anything resembling a work routine and has little patience for write-every-day prescriptivists. Indeed, almost all prescriptions are hard for her to endorse. Don’t use a thesaurus, they say? Roget away! Keep a notebook with you at all times? Good luck with that. (“I wrote some of this book on a flayed Pepto-Bismol box, the only thing I had in my purse.”) Don’t write in first/second/third person? Whatever: “Beware of any dispenser of writing advice who deems one sort of narrator better than another.” Write what you know? Feh: “If you already know it—if there’s no mystery—what’s the point in writing it?”

What McCracken offers in A Long Game is something better than advice: She gives permission. This is a canny approach if you’re peeking at the market: Every writer, from a high schooler with a notion to tell a story to a veteran novelist in the middle of a messy draft, needs a voice from somewhere telling them that they’re pursuing something difficult but possible. So A Long Game is fit for students of Comp 101 classes and MFA programs, but also weekend hobbyists. But it works because her brand of inspiration isn’t cheap uplift, just clear reports from the trenches about the sorts of things that can waylay a writer, both on the page and in life.

Those things can indeed be the mechanical stuff of plot, characterization, description, and word choice. She has some strongish opinions on those. Down with “explanatory conjunctions and adverbs.” Stop having people do things “quickly.” Be mindful of too much interiority: “Lower the bathysphere into the ocean so you can describe the ocean, not solely the inside of the bathysphere and its pilot.”

Relatively gentle proscriptions like these may grate on the writer who wants a firmer lifeline, who demands a stricter set of rules for getting through that first draft (Bell, King), or carefully curated examples demonstrating the finer points (Davis, Wood), or tough-love lectures about how a writer is like an inchworm that “wears out its days in a constant panic” (Dillard). But I suspect most readers can assemble such a book out of McCracken’s, which is not organized by theme but in short numbered sections that can be dipped into and rearranged depending on your needs. (I’m drawn to the funny segments, one of which notes that “like God, a third-person narrator is a gaseous invertebrate,” and her recollection, upon learning that a well-reviewed contemporary sold poorly, that “it was like seeing a picture of him in his underpants.”)

The hardest part of writing is crossing the finish line, and McCracken grasps that most writers don’t need well-marked lane lines so much as—well, I hate to use the cheap word encouragement, which reeks of pep talks. What she offers instead is an atmosphere, a sense of what achievement looks like, a reminder of the possible. “No process is wrong that leads to a first draft of a book,” she says. Take it from somebody who’s done it—and who also sometimes couldn’t.•