Tips from Delany and Didion: let your nonconscious mind make you a better writer
In my classes and with clients, I teach the conscious development of craft, with an eye toward making the processes of reading and writing more explicit. However, there is an additional route - and that is to read as much as possible of the genres you enjoy, so that nonconsciously you absorb the forms and expectations and pleasures of these genres as if through the pores of your skin. After which writing in those genres becomes not so much easier as more natural.
In line with this, here are a few excerpts from an essay by the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, titled “Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student.” By “creative writing” Delany means fiction, yet what he says here also applies to much of nonfiction.
As far as l can see, talent has two sides. The first side is the absorption of a series of complex models—models for the sentence, models for narrative scenes, and models for various larger literary structures. This is entirely a matter of reading and criticism . . .
The sign that the writer has internalized a model deeply enough to use it in writing is when he or she has encountered it enough times so that she or he no longer remembers it in terms of a specific example or a particular text, but experiences it, rather, as a force in the body, a pull on the back of the tongue, an urge in the fingers to shape language in one particular way and avoid another . . .
Though models are rarely referred to directly by either writers or their critics, it is the deep sense of the model that tells the writer what criticism is useful and what is not.
Another practice that can help in internalizing a model is to move your hands and fingers as if you were the writer, recreating the words as if they were your own. This is from a 1978 interview with Joan Didion in Paris Review:
Q: Did any writer influence you more than others?
A: I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. They’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.
Isn’t the word “typing” lovely? To me it is, because I used to type. When you were having trouble finding words the keypads resisted being pushed and the keys themselves were prone to tangle, forcing you to stop and get your fingers inky in freeing them. Slow, painful. But once you got going there was nothing more voluptuous than to punctuate each headlong line with a yank on the carriage return lever, a long rhythmic pull like in sculling. By contrast what I am doing at this moment is called not “typing” but “keyboarding” . . . a less physical and therefore less enjoyable activity altogether. But I imagine you can get Hemingway’s sentences into your nonconscious brain pretty well by keyboarding, too.
Suggested exercise: Type out in full a few pages of writing by an author you admire and whose style you think you’d benefit from understanding.
What do you think?