“Even the Buddha is still working on himself.”
This saying captures a truth about all humans—and all writers. We are still working on ourselves. No matter how long we have lived, how accomplished we may be, how much we have achieved, we can still get better, as people and as artists.
As writers, it is essential that we continually learn, stretch, and grow. Throughout our writing lives, we must keep trying new techniques, using new practices, and moving ourselves into new places that challenge us to be better. We need to be like Pablo Cassals, one of the greatest cellists of all time, who was still practicing in his 90’s because, he said, he was making progress.
But how do we do this? How do we keep getting better through the days, months, and years of writing practice? In Chop Wood, Carry Water, the late editor and writer Rick Fields writes about how to keep learning. Here are some of his suggestions, adapted for writers:
1. Learn How to Unlearn
What have you been taught about writing? That you should write what you know? That you must write everyday? That you should read at least a year of back issues of every journal or magazine you submit to? I was taught never to write dialogue with more than three characters, not to have scenes take place in a car, and never use a space on a page to indicate a scene break.
And yet, every single one of those “rules” (often, merely the preference of the teacher who is teaching them) is successfully broken by talented authors. To learn, we must first challenge our assumptions. Don’t’ throw everything out, but weigh it, consider it. Be willing to unlearn what you’ve learned.
2. Don’t Be Afraid to Be Afraid
True learning incites fear because it pushes you out of the comfortable familiar place of what you already know. New insights are often jarring and terrifying.
I’ve said it before and here it is again: Fear is good. Feel the fear. Take a bath in it. Eat it for breakfast and let it digest. Let it glow inside you like a brilliant light. Use it.
3. Learn by Doing
Children don’t learn how to walk, speak, or eat by someone giving them lessons. They learn by putting one foot in front of the other, planting their little butts on the floor, then getting up and doing it again. By babbling until their babbling turns to words, then sentences, then narratives. Fumbling with that spoon until at least some of the food makes it into their mouths.
Don’t get me wrong: Teachers are important–even essential. But they are only guides who show you the way up the mountain, not porters who carry your stuff.
In other words, the only way to learn to write is to write.
4. Be Authentic
Fields uses the word “sincere,” but I think “authentic” captures it more. Be who you are. You’re not trying to become someone else. You’re not trying to be Toni Morrison or Stephen King or Emily Bronte. An essential part of writing well is learning to be yourself—in life and on the page.
5. Avoid Competition
Writers are not each other’s enemies. When another writer is successful, it is good for all writers. Rejoice at the success of your colleagues. And, if you can’t rejoice, at least don’t stew.
Few things stifle learning and growth more than jealousy. It is hell, and it’s pointless. If you want your growth as a writer to come to a screeching halt, spend your time comparing your skill or your success to someone else’s. If you want to keep learning and improving, focus on your own work and stop worrying about how everyone else is doing.
6. Don’t Be Afraid to Be a Fool
The fool is unafraid of how people view her. The fool isn’t worried about saying the wrong thing. The fool is simple and genuine. The fool admits what he does not know.
Learning forces you to be the fool—the person who doesn’t get it yet, who is still trying, who is stumbling, fumbling, and struggling.
Let go of trying to appear knowledgeable or sophisticated. Ask questions. Write with abandon. Try things even if you keep goofing up. Let yourself be the fool on the page.
7. Find Connecting Patterns
Learning to see configurations, repetitions, links, and connections is one of the core skills of any art, including writing. Learn what connects one part of a story to another, how each word relates to every other one, how scenes, paragraphs, and images interrelate.
And learn to look for a broader type of connection as well: For what places us in relationship with each other, with the Earth, with the Universe. “Stories remind us that we are not separate, isolated individuals afloat in the cosmos, but part of the universal stream of life” (Writing as a Sacred Path). Gradually discovering that connection is the essence of learning to write well.