🖋️ Greatest Writing Wisdom: Letters to a Young Writer Edition
This edition of the Greatest Writing Wisdom shines a light on the great Irish storyteller Colum McCann and his 2017 gem, "Letters to a Young Writer." This book is my personal favorite in the writers on writing genre.
In the book’s opening chapter, McCann offers young writers a list of practical, generous advice. Much of it applies just as powerfully to life as it does to writing.
What follows is my edited version of McCann's first chapter. Though I've distilled, slightly rearranged, and lightly reworded it in many places, this list is drawn directly from McCann’s original. His voice is unmistakable throughout.
This is a list worth keeping close.
I hope it serves you as well as it’s served me.
- Fail.
- Sing.
- Resist.
- Just GO.
- Just STOP.
- Denounce.
- Be earnest.
- Don't panic.
- Read aloud.
- Take pause.
- Be devoted.
- Risk yourself.
- Have wonder.
- Have stamina.
- Have courage.
- You must ACT.
- Enjoy difficulty.
- Fight for repair.
- Allow your fear.
- You must WAIT.
- Believe in detail.
- Share your rage.
- Begin with doubt.
- Embrace mystery.
- Never be satisfied.
- Dilate your nostrils.
- Have perseverance.
- Read promiscuously.
- Push yourself further.
- Write beyond despair.
- Permit yourself anger.
- Don't bullshit yourself.
- Unique your language.
- Put down the hammer.
- Be subversive of ease.
- Be vivified by collapse.
- Transcend the personal.
- Make justice from reality.
- Give yourself permission.
- Make the essential count.
- Make vision from the dark.
- Make the ordinary sublime.
- Fill your lungs with language.
- Find the universal in the local.
- Bear your portion of the world.
- Be ready to get ripped to pieces.
- Accept rejections and invitations.
- Do not allow your heart to harden.
- Do the things that do not compute.
- Make an argument for the imagined.
- Be bold in the face of the blank sheet.
- Restore what has been ridiculed by others.
- Imitate and copy, but become your own voice.
- Listen up, listen always and often and opened.
- Have trust in the staying power of what is good.
- The quiet lines matter as much as the noisy ones.
- Be a student not a teacher, even when you teach.
- Trust your blue pencil, but don't forget your red one.
- Hope and belief and faith will fail you often, but so what?
- Be suspicious of that which gives you too much consolation.
- The considered grief is so much better than the unconsidered.
- Don't be didactic. Nothing kills life quite so much as explanation.
- A story begins long before its first word. It ends long after its last.
- Be an explorer, not a tourist. Go somewhere nobody else has gone.
- Do not be afraid of sentiment even when others call it sentimentality.
- You have something to write about. Just because it's narrow doesn't mean it's not universal.
- Reveal a truth that isn't yet there. At the same time, entertain. Satisfy the appetite for seriousness and joy.
- Journal about what makes your heart bleed. Write about that which you want to know and toward that which you don't know.
- A lot can be taken from you, even your life, but not your stories about that life. So this, then, is a word, not without love and respect, to a young writer: WRITE.
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