Writing is often a quixotic task. Like the adventures of Don Quixote, one’s attempts to explore ideas in writing are frequently full of peril and self-deception, and they very rarely end as successfully as one had hoped. Perhaps that’s why a large body of “how-to” and “self-help” literature has sprouted up in the past two decades offering advice to aspiring or struggling writers. Of course, self-improvement literature has proliferated in American culture since the 1970s, and popular culture today is saturated with all kinds of books offering all sorts of advice about life, death, love, and parenting, as well as a host of much narrower topics. There is even a self-help guide to writing self-help books, Jean Marie Stine’s Writing Successful Self-Help and How-To Books. Still, as a graduate student about to embark on the writing of my own dissertation, I figured it would be a good idea to review some of the self-help books about writing to see if they had any worthwhile advice for academic writers like myself.

Andrea Joseph, "Sigmund Freud." http://andreajoseph24.blogspot.com/

Written in 1992, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is perhaps the most well-known and probably the best-selling self-help guide geared towards artists. Cameron, herself a recovering alcoholic, imagined her book as a kind of twelve-step program for struggling artists, complete with daily affirmations of one’s own artistic power and a belief that true creativity comes from God, the Divine, or whatever one might wish to call a higher spiritual power. While not geared specifically to writers, her techniques for recovering one’s creativity include “morning pages,” a daily exercise in which, immediately upon waking, the struggling artist writes down three pages of whatever comes into his or her mind, with no attempts at editing and no concern for the quality or content of the writing. This technique, often known as “free-writing,” is at the core of most self-help writers’ programs. Although the frequency and duration of free-writing exercises varied from book to book, all of the books I read during my research touted the benefits of free-writing. In fact, this kind of writing advice dates back at least as far as an 1823 essay by Ludwig Borne entitled “The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days,” which argued that a single three-day period of intense free-writing was the key to successfully accessing the hidden life of the mind. In a wonderfully circular piece of history, the article is said to have inspired Sigmund Freud’s ideas about free-association and the unconscious mind, while Freud’s ideas have in turn gone on to inspire the modern self-help movement.

Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, believes that timed free-writing exercises allow aspiring writers to access the “tremendous energy” of first thoughts without the usually toxic influence of ego. Goldberg’s zen-like free-writing exercises, while not producing much good writing at first, are intended to provide the compost of ideas and creativity from which good writing will eventually bloom. This sentiment is echoed by Bonnie Goldberg (no relation to Natalie) in Room to Write, a book of two-hundred short writing exercises designed to foster creativity and break down a writer’s inhibitions. Her book has four fundamental rules: “1. The most important action you can take is to show up on the page; 2. The more you can give up control over what you write, the more genuine your writing will be; 3. Making room in your life to write generates even more room for your writing; 4. The only true obstacle to writing creatively is a lack of faith that appears as fear and self-judgment” (xi-xii). These and other similar guides promote a daily, free-associative writing routine as the way around the kinds of self-criticism and doubt that, according to the authors, are the real causes of bad writing and writer’s block. These books promote the idea of mundane writing practices as the gateways to some transcendent, spiritual connection with one’s inner self.

Of course, these same books say very little about what actually constitutes good writing. For them, good writing seems, simply enough, to be the inevitable result of getting past one’s fears. While there are many well-regarded nuts and bolts guides to writing such as Strunk and White’s Elements of Style that deal with this subject outside the self-help paradigm, one book that straddles the line between the two is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Lamott is somewhat pessimistic about the chances that all of her students or readers will become happy and successful writers, but she believes that the simple act of writing truthfully is a difficult and worthwhile goal in and of itself. She, too, emphasizes that sitting down and writing at the same time every day is “how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively” (6). But rather than providing themed writing exercises or ways of managing free-association, Lamott tailors her advice to writers already working on their own projects. Lamott goes over her opinions on what constitutes good character development, how to decide on a plot, and how to know when you are finished writing, but most of the advice is similar to that found in other books: break your ideas down into short writing assignments; don’t be afraid to write what she calls “shitty first drafts;” avoid perfectionism, and so forth. What she does add, however, is at least a little discussion of the revision process in which she urges her readers to find others who will read their drafts and give honest critiques.

In any case, all of the guides that I read peppered their advice with personal anecdotes and a vaguely New Age spirituality. They all agreed on the importance of writing as practice, but framed this practice not simply as a means of inducing small, incremental improvements in one’s writing over time, but as a way to commune with a higher power, achieve greater self-awareness, or overcome fear and self-doubt. My own fear is that aspiring writers who read these guides and undertake their programs will either come away feeling disappointed at the lack of transcendent experience that results, despite the amount of time and effort they’ve put in, or will be goaded into a false sense of the quality and power of their own writing. After all, one could argue that the real heavy lifting in the writing process is not the initial writing itself, which these guides all focus on, but the process of editing and revision that is not only the titular inspiration of this magazine, but also the most consistently overlooked subject in these guides. It is difficult enough to write, but writing well requires one to develop a sense of one’s own voice, learn the stylistic conventions of particular genres of writing, and understand how to convey ideas not just truthfully, but effectively and efficiently as well. This often requires a healthy dose of the self-criticism and doubt that is universally bemoaned by self-improvement guides. What’s more, these skills come just as much from reading the writing of others, and tirelessly revising one’s own writing, as they do from sitting down at a desk each day and free-associating. In placing so much emphasis on the routine, mundane practice of writing, the authors of self-help writing guides seem to betray a lack of trust in their own notions of creativity. Natalie Goldberg argues that “writing is not a McDonald’s hamburger” (37); it is a long slow process. Yet, in urging aspiring writers to fill a notebook per month with free-writing and assuring them that this is the key to writing creatively, she is adopting an approach that puts quantity over quality, removes mystery for the sake of predictability, and routinizes what was formerly seen as a capricious aspect of artistic life. Sociology students should recognize this as an example of what George Ritzer calls the “McDonaldization of society.”

Still, there is valuable advice to be found in writers’ self-help guides. In academic writing, we are not necessarily looking to find our inner selves or commune with the Divine, but we are usually in need of more practice than most of us allow ourselves. Making time in one’s schedule to consistently work on one’s craft is good advice for every kind of creative activity, and writing is no exception. But writing well also requires the ability to look critically at one’s own work and figure out how to make it better. It is a delicate balancing act between self-pride and self-criticism that no one ever completely masters, and there is no secret formula or twelve-step program that can really teach it to you. Luckily, it does get easier with practice.

Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to High Creativity, Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher: 2002.

Flaherty, Alice. The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Goldberg, Bonnie. Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer’s Life. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1996.

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston: Shambhala, 1986.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.

See, Carolyn. Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers. New York: Random House, 2002.