In answer to a question from that bright-light Iranian journalist in Tehran, Asadollah Amraee, editor at Golstaneh, off the top of my head this morning I wrote these ten writing tips (which surely need their revision):
1. Know that your consciousness is both singular and universal. What does this mean? No one else has your subjectivity: you were formed by many influences and have a birthright and particular way of seeing the world. Hence, you can offer a distinctive story of the world to others. That said, your consciousness also partakes of the universal: the more specifically you articulate your stories, the more you help to articulate the inarticulable. In this way, you are giving a gift to others who crave such articulation.
2. Read widely, deeply, promiscuously. Read so as to remind yourself of all the stories already flowing through you. Read intelligently, questioning, performing close reading, taking real or invisible notes. Look at character, sensibility, structure, plot, word choice, beginnings and endings, milieu, description, point of view, style, sudden seams and ruptures, moments in which a text conforms to your ideas of the world and moments in which it surprises.
3. Some writers are Apollonian and some are Dionysian; some like to plot far ahead and some like to get lost in the woods. Try embracing your inner Dionysian; surprise yourself as you write so that your reader is surprised.
4. Revise and revise again. Keep the flame of your original inspiration if you wish, but revise ferociously. Read your work aloud. See your work.
5. Be like a devoted workman: show up to your work at the same time every day, ideally in the morning before the day’s currency of words comes to deplete your own dream-state stock. If you show up, the muse will show up. The discipline creates the vessel and your inspiration fills it.
6. See if you can get out of your own way. Write first, let yourself be fully that writer! Only later be the editor, coming in as your own critic. If you begin as the critic, you will never get anything down on paper. Write first, let your writing cool off on the shelf for a week or month, work on other things, and then revisit your writing as the critic.
7. Anything you do for at least half an hour every day becomes part of you.
8. Sometimes it is good to trick your superego by giving yourself a word quota: say, that you write 200, or 500, or 1000 words a day. Do this first thing in the morning and you have no guilt or concern the rest of the day. You have shown up at your work. The next day, revise those 200 or 500 or 1000 with, primarily, the aim of writing another new 200 or 500 or 1000.
8. Consider the path of least resistance: whatever comes most easily to you is your gift. As water moves downstream, your creativity also has its own natural flow and interest. If you find it boring or difficult to move characters, for example, from one locale to another, then no need to put in the movements, the elaborate choreography. Your patience and impatience are part of the trance which you are trying to induce in your reader.
9. Induce a trance. Induct us into your way of seeing.
10. Imagine an ideal reader who will help magnetize your aesthetic.
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