Bonnie Hearn Hill’s essay “What I Wish I’d Known” offers aspiring authors lots of great tips gleaned from Hill’s long career of writing books. The essay won a contest sponsored by The Writer magazine. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Bonnie Hearn Hill Writing Advice”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the advice that I would give to young
Martha starting out as a writer. You know, the stuff that I wish that I’d known when I was first
Learning to try to sell my prose. And the reason I was thinking about this is because there was a
Wonderful essay in The Writer magazine by Bonnie Hearn Hill. She’s a novelist and she wrote what
What’s basically just a list of all the things that she wished that she had known when she started out.
She says, for example, I’m glad I figured out that there is no secret.
Writing is an art and a craft.
We’re born with a certain amount of one and we can learn everything we need to know about the other.
The best way to learn is on our own work.
And the other one I really like is she says,
I wish I’d known that if the story doesn’t take off until page 142, you better start it there.
Those are both so good.
The advice that there is no secret is true for everything, not just writing.
It’s absolutely everything.
Just show up.
I don’t care what you’re trying to do.
There’s no secret.
And so anytime I see ads or say the secret to blah, blah, blah, I’m like, that ad’s junk.
That ad’s junk.
That ad is junk.
Yep.
The more I thought about this, the more I thought that a couple of the things that I wish I’d known were about starting and stopping.
The starting is that I wish I had taught myself to start much earlier than I think I need to.
You mean earlier in the day or earlier in life?
Well, earlier in the process of writing a particular book or paper or article.
Because you need that time to just put it aside and let it sit.
Let it cool off.
Stick it in your drawer and come back the next day.
So further away from the deadline.
Yeah, yeah.
And then come back and look at it after it’s had a chance to cool.
Because I guess I became a pretty good editor because I can look at what I wrote yesterday and think,
Oh, that’s terrible, that’s terrible, that’s terrible, and fix it up really nicely.
And that’s one thing that I agree with in this essay, the idea that you should not be editing while you’re writing.
That can just be deadly.
And the other thing about stopping writing, you know, you get to the point where you’re overworking it.
And I literally now force myself to set an alarm and stop.
Oh, yeah.
Very good.
Because you can just get into it too far.
And there’s a rescue that comes with that alarm going off.
The relief of it.
No.
And you congratulate the alarm.
You thank the alarm.
But you said something a moment ago, which I don’t know if it’s on her list, but it would be on my list.
The ability to look at your own prose as if it’s someone else’s.
Oh, yeah.
That’s a good one, right?
To not feel too strongly about your own writing and to treat yourself fairly, to be kind of suspicious of your own writing.
You’re like, what was I thinking is the best sentence that you can say about your own writing.
What was I thinking?
What was I thinking?
And that is a real nice expression of not that that’s golden or that’s awesome.
Those are two terrible things to say about your own writing because you’re probably not being fair to yourself.
What was I thinking? It’s probably a better thing to say about everything you put down on paper.
I guess I start asking myself that question when I read my work aloud.
I’ve talked about that before, but I think there is no substitute for reading your work aloud.
And you start tripping over your own words and you think, what was I thinking?
And, you know, and there is a real linguistic explanation for that is because many, if not all people sub vocalize when they read,
Which is they actually have tiny micro movements of the voice box in their throat when they read.
They actually more or less speak when they read, only they don’t make the sounds.
Well, if you’re into writing and have ambitions of getting published,
This is a wonderful, wonderful essay in the current issue of The Writer Magazine by Bonnie Hearn Hill.
And we want to know your tips.
What are the things that keep you going as a writer?
Because we know we have a ton of writers out there.
What are the things that you would pass on to the new writers?
What are the tips that will make them the great novelists of the future?
Email words@waywordradio.org.
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