I remember being in school and working on a project for hours and hours. I’d hand it in. The teacher would read it or I’d present it in front of the class — and then… it’s done. What I had spent so many hours researching, producing, and polishing was essentially made for one person. And even then, that person who saw what I made was paid to be there. If my classmate saw it, well, they were forced to.
I think about that experience often when I do anything creative, because — unlike school — I know that the audience is not guaranteed and the work I put into it might not yield any returns.
Yet, today we focus so much on creating something that will be seen by hundreds and thousands and millions of people. Reaching a large audience is great! That is how we measure success, right? By the number of eyeballs and thumbs ups we get. However, this is a dangerous treadmill we’re running on if we constantly chase numbers.
This mentality stops us from sharing our work. We have an expectation. We worry that when other people do see it, and they notice the lack of views and engagement, they will think of it as unworthy. It’s like inviting the world to your party and it’s just you, your mom, and maybe a couple of people you knew from high school. It’s embarrassing, I get it. Why aren’t people watching it? Why aren’t people reading it? I put so much work in, why doesn’t anyone care?
Whenever I’m working on a project today, as an adult, I remember those horrible years in school, where I worked hours and hours on a project only to hand it in to the teacher — but now, instead of sitting back and waiting anxiously for the grades — I feel grateful that I’m not there anymore. When I’m working on my creative projects, it’s not an assignment and I’m not being evaluated. I’m creating something I want, and because I’m doing that, there is no guarantee that even one person will notice, because it’s for me first, and nobody is being paid or forced to see it. The people who will come and see my work are making that choice themselves. That makes what I’m doing now so much more important. A person who chooses to see your work is worth much more than a person who is forced to see your work.
Before you’ve built an audience, nobody cares what you’ve made. And that’s freeing. Be creative. Break rules. Try new things. There are no teachers stopping you! And when you’re ready, and when the time is right, people will start to care. Keep doing it and people will notice. Anybody can hand in an assignment to the teacher, but on their own, without self-discipline, not everyone can keep creating. It’s going to be pretty impressive when you do! So enjoy this period when nobody cares, because just like the classroom, it’s not going to last forever. You’re going to look back and be glad you went through it. But you gotta graduate first. Good luck!
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Kurt Vonnegut, author of SlaughterHouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Cat’s Cradle, is a master of using humor to make sense of this crazy world. He takes complex subject matters — that are often grim and hopeless — and interprets them in his writing with a style that is concise, conversational, and witty.
As writers navigating our own absurd world, there is a lot we can learn from Vonnegut. Here are 10 writing quotes from the author that had made us laugh at the bleakness of reality.
1. “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”
2. “When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
3. “Jokes are efficient things and they must be as carefully constructed as mouse traps. And so for me to write a page of a novel is a very slow business, because the whole thing has to be rigged in order to snap at the end. My books are essentially mosaics, thousands and thousands of tiny little chips all glued together, and each chip is this thing I learned to do—this thing I learned to make as a child—which is a little joke.”
4. “Novel writing doesn’t breed serenity. It is lying, you know, and the novelist has to spend a lot of time during the course of his writing worrying about whether he is going to get away with his lies. If he fails to, his novel isn’t going to work.”
5. “I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.”
6. “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they’re made of.”
7. “Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”
8. “I’m simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming. I’m startled that I became a writer.”
9. “I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”
10. “The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.”
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If you want to be a writer, you must read. But there are so many books! What should I read? Well, anything… but today, I want to share five books that I feel every writer — or creative person — should prioritize. These are non-fiction books that are more general to the craft of writing and the creative process as opposed to being books that are great stories, although some of these books do contain stories that certainly any writer can relate to such as writer’s block and the frustration of editing the first draft.
I recommended these books because writing is such a lonely, laborious task, and these five books do a good job sympathizing with that, but what they also do, is not let us get consumed by our excuses to not write, these books are from people who have accomplished the task many times before, and in it there are some wisdom for writers who are currently struggling.
Ryan Holiday is one of my favorite non-fiction writers, and Perennial Seller is one of my favorite books from him, because it concisely breaks down the missteps us writers often make when we set off on our journey to create works that last.
When we take a walk through a library, we see hundreds and thousands of books, books that we’ve never heard about, books that we’ll never pick up to read. How can we avoid having our hard work end up like one of those books? How do we create work that stands the test of time?
In Perennial Seller, Ryan Holiday warns us of the lure of a meteoric rise and then an equally quick fade into obscurity, and explains how the work of a writer is more than just creating quality work, it’s communicating that work to a group of people who will then share it and nurture it and develop a deeper relationship with it.
Therefore, he explains, that writing goes beyond writing, it requires research before you start and marketing when you finish. It’s not one marathon, it’s a marathon after a marathon after a marathon.
Perhaps my favorite book on the process of writing, the iconic memoir by Anne Lamott, is the one I pick up whenever I need a boost of inspiration when I feel like my story isn’t going anywhere, when I feel disappointed, tired, and hopeless.
Anne Lamott reminds us of the importance of taming the critic in our head, the traps of wanting to simply be published, and the power of putting one word after the next — bird by bird.
Not only that, Bird by Bird is such a funny, witty, comforting read that whenever I dip into it, I feel like I’m getting reacquainted with an old friend, and the old friend will ask me, “how’s the work going?” and I’ll answer, “it’s going…” If nothing more, Bird by Bird is a reminder to writers why they got into this lonely pursuit in the first place, and I love it for that.
The Dip is the sobering book that us creatives need whenever we reach the part in our process where we’re struggling, where we’re complacent, where we’re no longer excited about what we are working on.
Seth Godin encourages us to stop dreaming, and really confront the obstacle in our way — the dip — and offers us the option: “if you really want to quit, you should quit now, because if you’re going to quit a month from now, that’s a month wasted. So what’s it going to be?”
Quitting or continuing is not only about the overall pursuit of being a writer, it’s also about individual projects. When should we stop working on this and start working on something else? When do we eat our sunk cost and count it as a learning experience instead of having it be a self-inflicted life sentence?
The thesis of The Dip is that winners quit all the time, so don’t feel bad for quitting. The thing is, if you are going to quit, quit earlier than later. This book is a splash of reality that us creative writers need and it helps us reframe what we’re actually doing and decide whether it is worth pushing forward until the end.
There is nothing like hearing someone at the top of their game share stories and advice about something they are truly passionate in, and Stephen King couldn’t be more passionate about writing. I mean, think of all the books he’d written.
While On Writing does offer some tactical tips, such as King’s English “toolbox” and how to edit your first draft, what I love most about On Writing is how King goes into his own works and the lifestyle that most of us writers dream about, and understanding that real life still interferes even when we achieve that goal. Achieving our dreams still means we have to live in reality, unfortunately.
There is probably no writer more successful than Stephen King, but this memoir feels so down to earth. There is this belief that whatever King writes publishers will publish, but this book proves that he actually knows what he’s doing and that he’s more than a bankable brand.
King explains that writing could be the craft that brings us fortune and fame, but writing might also be the thing we live for — especially after his car accident. Writing can be the thing that pushes us to get better, to understand more, and even without all the success, it is still this beautiful thing we are lucky enough to do. And that’s pretty inspiring.
One area I think people make a mistake in whenever they pursue something big, like writing a novel, is that they often feel like they need to shut themselves off from the world, stop doing everything else, and write. But What Haurki Murakami talks about when he talks about running, is that being a writer is so much more than just writing, and that in order for us to actually acquire the stories worth sharing, we must live a life outside of our words on paper.
Writing is one of those activities where we bring who we are into, therefore, other things we do in our lives can be materials we add to our stories, like new ingredients for a meal. Writing becomes the intersection for all the different activities in our lives, it doesn’t have to be running, it could be cooking, it could be photography, it could be kite flying. Writing allows us to bring all of that into one place.
Find the passions in your life for those moments when you are not writing, you’ll discover that it’s in fact a healthier balance. You’ll also find that one activity can actually support the other, allowing you to improve gradually in both.
Those are five books that I really enjoyed and have inspired me when I was feeling stuck. If there are other books that you think writers — or creative types should read — please feel free to share it in the comments, I’m always looking for recommendations.
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Haruki Murakami is a best-selling Japanese writer known for his novels: Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore. Murakami’s stories are described as dream-like fantasies, where ordinary people face extraordinary scenarios, where magic and nostalgia blur the lines of reality.
In times of turmoil and political chaos, when confusion clouds our judgements, books that delve in surrealism offer peculiar comfort. For writers creating works during these strange times — uncertain how to make sense of the world around us — we can turn to Murakami for a bit of guidance.
Here are the top 10 quotes on writing from the author who shows us that enchantments are hiding in the everyday shadows.
1) It’s a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.
2) There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.
3) I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, ‘It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.’ I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.
4) When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen.
5) Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.
6) Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.
7) I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.
8) The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake. If it’s a real dream, you cannot control it. When writing the book, you are awake; you can choose the time, the length, everything. I write for four or five hours in the morning and when the time comes, I stop. I can continue the next day. If it’s a real dream, you can’t do that.
9) Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I’m made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
10) I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.
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Elliot Chan 