{"id":81,"date":"2026-05-20T11:36:38","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T11:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=81"},"modified":"2026-05-20T11:36:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T11:36:38","slug":"why-the-best-writing-advice-is-often-the-weirdest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=81","title":{"rendered":"Why the Best Writing Advice Is Often the Weirdest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In \u201cThirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits,\u201d an essay published in 2013, the writer and translator Lydia Davis offers a cardinal rule: \u201cwork on your character.\u201d (She happened on a variation of this maxim, by Stendhal, in her copy of the \u201cNew Basics Cookbook.\u201d) Davis is famously precise, and the way she uses \u201ccharacter\u201d has multiple dimensions: it could mean a writer\u2019s habitual gestures and ethical traits, their quirks and turns of phrase. Or it could mean, simply, the character in a story. This is advice that feels like a dare, if not a rebuke: your writing will become interesting only if you spend your days becoming witty and wise. It\u2019s not calculated to put anxious writers\u2019 minds at rest\u2014most of us already live in fear that our flimsy characters will be exposed through our work.<\/p>\n

Read more The Gaza Peace Plan Has Gone Nowhere<\/a><\/p>\n

Putting words on the page seems too low stakes to get worked up about, and yet the terror of saying something taboo\u2014or just being boring\u2014feels like a terrible fate to most writers. I see this every day as a writing coach, a job I\u2019ve done since 2019, first teaching online classes and now mostly working with students one-on-one over Zoom. My task is to read their unpublished, often unfinished writing\u2014less as a teacher or as an editor than as a cheerfully unlicensed therapist. I ask the writer to read their work aloud. They begin by delivering the words like an embarrassed waiter. About five minutes in, the writer\u2019s voice steadies. They might cry, moved by their own words. They hear the false notes but also the truth of what they\u2019re saying. It\u2019s not \u201cgood,\u201d not yet, but it\u2019s a start. I ask questions, look for the story behind the story, and review sentence-level decisions. I watch for moments when the author is having fun.<\/p>\n

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The work is as relational as it is technical: my students almost always solve their own problems by being heard, talking their way into an answer, and gaining the confidence to bat away my bad ideas. I\u2019ve found that coaching works best when the writer is willing to gradually stop relying on me as an authority. As Leslie Dick writes in her 2018 essay \u201cSoft Talk: Thoughts on Critique,\u201d we all wish for someone \u201cwho can guarantee and validate our identities and our practices\u201d but \u201cthe one who knows<\/em> doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d That\u2019s good news even as it feels like a loss. When writers stop performing for an imagined judge, the language loosens: the prose becomes more like riffing with a friend than giving a speech, and the unconscious pipes up with its desires and fantasies, some ugly, some dumb, some funny, some profound. All workable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In a talk on the \u201cart of rough drafting,\u201d George Saunders, the Phil Jackson of writing teachers, says he\u2019s learned, through writing and revision, that \u201cthere is a mind greater than the one I\u2019m talking to you with right now . . . and it\u2019s smarter than me.\u201d In my coaching sessions, I try to help a writer reach this smarter, intuitive mind. As much as I admire Davis\u2019s exhortations to work on one\u2019s character\u2014and I do return to them\u2014they point toward what an aspiring writer can become someday rather than the move they usually need to make in the moment.<\/p>\n

In an interview with the website Public Parking, the writer Lucy Ives describes ad-libbing a writing exercise to kill an awkward classroom silence. After leading her students through a couple of bluffed warmup prompts, she asked them to \u201cdescribe something that they\u2019d completely forgotten.\u201d As she explained, \u201cI wanted it to be impossible to do the exercise \u2018correctly.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Ives\u2019s new book, \u201cthree six five: prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing),\u201d is built around the premise that an exercise succeeds when there is no right answer. \u201cHow to walk backward\u201d begins: \u201cWrite a description of your bed after you have slept in it.\u201d Then, a chair you\u2019ve sat in, a room you\u2019ve left, a glass you\u2019ve drunk from, a person you no longer know, a belief you no longer hold; each instruction receding a little further until you\u2019re trying to see \u201csomething so far out of sight that it cannot be seen.\u201d I tried this prompt and snagged on my own incomprehension. Knowing Ives\u2019s work, I suspected this was the point. I can\u2019t say I enjoyed the feeling, but I did keep going. I wrote about the worn neck pillow on my unmade bed and my iced coffee in a Bonne Maman jar. It felt dutiful and boring. Then I stopped trying so hard, and the protagonist of my novel came into focus. The exercise concludes: \u201cTurn towards the now-invisible place from whence you came. Wave slowly.\u201d As someone who has tried more than my share of silly writing prompts, I\u2019m annoyed when this kind of thing succeeds\u2014and it did. I wrote a scene I\u2019d been avoiding.<\/p>\n

\u201cThree six five\u201d continues a project Ives has been pursuing for years. Within a sprawling \u0153uvre\u2014more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and essays\u2014the act of writing itself is often the main character. As she put it in a Granta<\/em> interview: \u201cnarratives are always tied to and emerging from other narratives.\u201d Her books resemble metafictional mises en abyme<\/em>, stories within stories within stories not unlike the mini-narratives that make \u201cthree six five\u201d appealing as both a guide and a work of literature in its own right. Since her 2009 d\u00e9but, the poetry chapbook \u201cMy Thousand Novel,\u201d she\u2019s taken on, among other things, fake Wikipedia entries, an abecedarian essay, and a #MeToo systems novel, \u201cLife Is Everywhere,\u201d in which the story detours through several texts in the main character\u2019s bag.<\/p>\n

Ives\u2019s 2019 novel, \u201cLoudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World,\u201d is set at the Seminars, a backbiting M.F.A. program that is a fictional version of the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop\u2014Ives\u2019s alma mater. The book follows Harry, an introverted poet, and Troy Augustus Loudermilk, a handsome blowhard who pretends in workshop that he wrote Harry\u2019s poems. The book is one of the funnier portrayals of a writing program. (A sample line: \u201cHarry is reawakened by the sensation of something stiff and damp prodding his face.\u201d It\u2019s a Sharpie.) But it\u2019s also an earnest inquiry into the social forces behind writing education and the romantic notion of \u201cgenius\u201d that sustains it. At one point, Marta Hillary, the Seminars\u2019 star faculty member, describes what writing is to Loudermilk, saying, \u201cWe\u2019re here to . . . confront the fact that, as humans, we are fated to make things, and we are, meanwhile, the subjects of history.\u201d We can\u2019t produce words without being subject to the hostile systems that produce us in turn. Loudermilk, of course, misses the point of this monologue.<\/p>\n

Read more In Plain Sight<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The image from Ives\u2019s body of work that best evokes the feeling of suffering through a draft is one from her 2021 story \u201cThe Care Bears Find and Kill God.\u201d The story begins with the narrator battling a fear of flying. She is in the air, listening to a recording of herself reading a PDF she found by Googling \u201cmeditation script fear flying.\u201d The script is bad at anticipating her eccentric panic: \u201cI visualized stripy colorless surrounds, wobbling with narrative instability\u2014my body\u2019s collision with the infinite.\u201d Still, she keeps listening. The manically therapeutic clich\u00e9s (\u201cPanic attacks cannot hurt you! You are free from panic attacks when flying!\u201d) offer scant protection. And yet the plane lands.<\/p>\n

Writers have a bevy of mantras\u2014\u201cshow don\u2019t tell,\u201d \u201ckill your darlings\u201d\u2014that mainly help by giving the writer a sense that there are rules. But the rules can\u2019t govern the place the work comes from. As Dick writes in \u201cSoft Talk,\u201d \u201cWhatever we intended to put out there is exceeded by our unconscious thoughts and wishes, as well as by our social construction as subjects within discourse.\u201d The unconscious doesn\u2019t take direction. I see this show up in coaching sessions as transference: writers project the role of parent, teacher, judge, and executioner onto me, asking for reassurance that their writing is not bad and that they aren\u2019t either. Writing guides wrestle with the contradiction of needing to be the \u201cone who knows\u201d while also tacitly admitting that they can\u2019t possibly make a writer\u2019s crucial decisions for them. The strictest guides\u2014classics like Strunk and White\u2019s \u201cThe Elements of Style\u201d or William Zinsser\u2019s \u201cOn Writing Well\u201d\u2014sidestep this contradiction by limiting their authority to questions of technique. But technique isn\u2019t where most writers get stuck. Anne Lamott\u2019s \u201cBird by Bird,\u201d a modern classic and a workshop staple, finds an elegant (possibly unconscious) solution: It appears to be a straight-shooting craft manual\u2014sections include \u201cGetting Started,\u201d \u201cPlot,\u201d \u201cFinding Your Voice\u201d\u2014but the useful tips keep getting swamped by Lamott\u2019s catalogues of writers\u2019 neuroses, including her own. Describing her jealousy when a less talented writer succeeded, Lamott writes, \u201cI was literally oozing unhappiness, like a sump.\u201d It\u2019s as if she is failing strategically so that the reader\u2019s growing disillusionment with her propels them toward self-sufficiency. Her most enduring concept, the idea of a \u201cshitty first draft,\u201d lets other writers know that they, too, can drop their pretensions.<\/p>\n

Where \u201cBird by Bird\u201d slyly undercuts the \u201cone who knows,\u201d books like Julia Cameron\u2019s appealingly woo-woo \u201cThe Artist\u2019s Way\u201d outsource it to \u201cthe Great Creator,\u201d \u201cHigher Power,\u201d \u201cthe universe,\u201d or, simply, \u201cGod.\u201d Cameron\u2019s 1992 mega-best-seller, a twelve-week recovery program for blocked artists, exemplifies a much-imitated, spiritually inclined self-help approach to the perils of creativity. Adherents range from Elizabeth Gilbert (\u201cwithout The Artist\u2019s Way<\/em> there would have been no Eat, Pray, Love<\/em>\u201d) to Tim Ferriss (\u201cthe most cost-effective therapy I\u2019ve ever found\u201d). Many otherwise cynical writers have a grudging allegiance to \u200bCameron\u2019s rituals: writing stream-of-consciousness \u201cmorning pages\u201d every day, combatting \u201cblurts\u201d (i.e., negative self-talk) with affirmations, and taking oneself out on \u201cartist\u2019s dates.\u201d \u201cEverything about the book is mortifying, and it totally set me free. Its ridiculousness is matched only by its effectiveness,\u201d Meaghan O\u2019Connell wrote in an article in The Cut<\/em> called \u201cThis Terrible Self-Help Book Is Actually Making Me a Better Artist\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThree six five\u201d falls into this lineage, even as it offers a more radical alternative. The book design signals that readers are in for something more expansive and less cringe than \u201cThe Artist\u2019s Way.\u201d With its gradient-colored cover\u2014a royal blue that shades into a bright green\u2014dyed page edges, ribbon place markers, and debossed lowercase text, the book resembles a devotional text or a mood ring. Inside, each of the three hundred and sixty-five exercises breathes on its own page. Spindly line drawings by Nick Mauss pop up periodically\u2014surreal figures like a lobster telephone\u2014though they don\u2019t illustrate the text so much as shimmy\u200b and dream alongside it. The prompts offer tasks ranging from reviewing \u201can imaginary book,\u201d to repeating a word until it stops making sense. (A punk friend gave Ives this mind-bending idea when she was sixteen.) They are gnomic (\u201ccreate a circular work\u201d) and ambitious (\u201cwrite a thirty-page sentence\u201d). If you can pull off that last one, Ives assures us, \u201cyou are ready for the big leagues!\u201d<\/p>\n

The publisher of \u201cthree six five,\u201d Siglio, was founded in 2008 to publish unclassifiable text-image hybrids like Ives\u2019s, which draw on the twentieth-century avant-garde. The book\u2019s clearest precursor is Yoko Ono\u2019s Fluxus-coded \u201cGrapefruit,\u201d from 1964, a compendium of conceptual art instructions that includes intentionally nonsensical prompts such as \u201cimagine one thousand suns in the sky at the same time.\u201d Ono\u2019s husband, John Lennon, later acknowledged \u201cGrapefruit\u201d as the inspiration for his song \u201cImagine,\u201d and said that Ono deserved a co-writing credit (in 2017, she got it). In a 1971 interview, he said, \u201cI think this is an important book to help people act out their madness. If you do some of the things in it, you stop going crazy in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Self-doubt and fear have always made writers feel crazy. The material conditions we work in have become more demoralizing, as authors have less time to reach a more distracted audience for little pay. And yet every day writers call me from conference rooms at their day jobs, or cramped kitchens with their children, or cars sitting in their driveways\u2014sometimes the only place quiet enough to think. Ives gets at what draws writers back to the craft when she observes that \u201cthe contemporary era is beset with forces who want to convince us that language can be lossless-ly quantified.\u201d The same forces are at work on the people who use the language. Figuring out what you really think is one way of remembering that you\u2019re human.<\/p>\n

In the last volume of \u201cIn Search of Lost Time,\u201d after more than three thousand pages of autobiographical excavation, Marcel Proust writes that literature is an optical instrument a reader turns on himself. Ives asks the writer to look through the wrong end of the telescope and recognize their own character. My favorite prompt from \u201cthree six five,\u201d \u201cweak spot,\u201d turns the turbulence of the writing life into something that, on a good day, feels like a joyride. Ives says to take one of your drafts that isn\u2019t working and \u201ctry to write even more intensely in its style.\u201d Failure is a reliable and infinitely renewable resource. Every day, we board the plane. \u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Life and Times of an American Tween<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David O\u2019Neill on \u201cthree six five,\u201d a new collection of writing exercises by the writer Lucy Ives, and the venerable tradition of goofy and esoteric creativity guides including Anne Lamott\u2019s \u201cBird by Bird\u201d and Julia Cameron\u2019s \u201cThe Artist\u2019s Way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":80,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-under-review"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy the Best Writing Advice Is Often the Weirdest - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=81\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why the Best Writing Advice Is Often the Weirdest - 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