*A rare, but needed disclaimer. I love to write, I love teaching students to write, and I always want to be better at both. These 5 tips are really not a “How to write like me”, but are instead things I’ve learned, either through practice or wisdom learned from those better than me, and are good reminders for all of us that love stories and words.*

A few quick things I’m reminding myself of every time I write

1) Tell the truth, but don’t list the facts.
This is the breath of life of every story, and it applies to fiction and non-fiction alike. We’ve all (hopefully) been so consumed by an imagined story we quit thinking of it as anything but the truth. Holden Caulfield did spend three days walking around New York City, drunk and alone, comparing his life to Eskimos. Didn’t he? It’s just as believable as Frank McCourt’s tale of growing up poor in Ireland. Telling the truth is about writing what you know. Whether you decide to describe that truth through non-fiction or a story about talking dogs living on the moon is entirely up to you. I write a lot about the disparity between what I believe and how I feel about what I believe, and the tension that creates in the way I view the world and those around me. It comes naturally to me, because it’s true to me. I’ve described that tension in a true story (that really happened) about an evening I spent in a coffee shop with a homeless friend, and in a true story (imagined) about a six-year-old sitting on a couch in a living room while his grandfather was dying and the rest of his family was having a meltdown.

Which brings me to the distinction between telling the truth and listing the facts.

A list of facts is boring.
Nothing is more boring than a story that starts out “This is a story about” and continues to tell everything that happened during the day.. It’s true when writing fiction, and good god is it ever true for non-fiction as well. After we’ve spent a semester working with fifth graders on their communication skills, I’m happy to read stories that have a good first sentence. If they can do it, we can too.

I have this friend, Ben, who isn’t a writer, but a photographer. Everybody looks beautiful in every picture he takes, and I’m convinced it’s because Ben really does think everyone is beautiful. You can tell it in the way he talks to strangers, in the way he smiles at people in the post office, and by the sheer number of times someone will say “You know Ben? I know him, too,” and then stand there silently with a big goofy grin on their face. He takes pictures of what he believes, and he makes others believe it, too. And really, writing is just taking a photograph, or painting a picture with syllables. If you have any talent at all, and you write what you know, and what you believe, it’s at least not going to suck.

2) Describe, but not too much.
My friend and writing mentor Amy said once that if we don’t describe enough, we fail to set the stage, but if we spend too much  time setting the stage, we disconnect from our readers’ imaginations.

When she said that, we were sitting in a bar and she was helping me get through a pretty dry spell of believing I’d forgotten how to tell a story. She was wearing a brown shirt and jeans. There were dollar bills stapled to the wall. I had a little grease under my thumbnail from where I had changed the oil on my bike the day before. Amy is nice.

Most of those details don’t matter.

3) Writing to learn is more interesting than writing for therapy.
A common misconception: Writing about – and letting others read about – our issues is therapeutic. When I first began writing seriously, I thought of it as a type of therapy. It didn’t take long until that became boring. Maybe even a little pretentious. And to be honest, it hurt like hell. There’s nothing fun about staring at something painful, looking at it from every angle, touching it and tasting it and breathing it in and then spending a day explaining it to someone else.  But when I transitioned from using a page as a platform of venting and began viewing a page as a platform to learn, new worlds opened in front of me. The best part was I didn’t have to have answers, or even suggest any. I only needed questions, and a willingness to learn. I had the chance to discover, along with the reader. This is something I’ve learned from good journalists, and tried to blend into my own rituals of writing. Why give answers when questions are a lot more fun? Questions let us dream, think on our own, and grow.

4) Try as hard as you can to not be Flaubert
If you remember from that one class in college, Gustave Flaubert was adamant about finding the perfect word for every thought. He wrote painstakingly slow – it took years to finish a single work – and because of that commitment to perfection, he’s considered one of the best. I’m not Flaubert, and neither are you. Even so, I’m a perfectionist, and for this reason I don’t put my stuff out there enough. This is not an excuse to flood the world with work, but rather a challenge to put something out there, at least semi-regularly. Musicians rarely write songs they sing just to themselves, artists don’t paint pictures they hope nobody stares at, and writers don’t write just so people won’t read. These days I’m forcing myself to write (as Ann Lammott celebrates) a really shitty first draft, then add some color, and then let it be read.

And another confession: I’ve consistently been guilty of not writing anything some days because there wasn’t enough time, or the light wasn’t right, or my head hurt, or whatever whatever whatever. (See, even just now, I practiced number 3. I admitted to myself that sometimes I make crappy excuses to not do the work, and I hate that,  so tomorrow I’ll be writing even if my computer dies and I lose my favorite pen and I have to pick up a stick and carve something into the earth.)

5) Above all else, read.
I once read an interview with an accomplished author (if I could remember who I would tell you) and he said that if given the choice between only having the time or ability to read, or the time and ability to write he would choose reading. At first, it didn’t sound quite right to me. Rainer Rilke said that if you’re a writer, you have to write, you have no choice, and if that’s not true of you then perhaps you’re not really a writer. It was hard for me to make those two statements mesh. But now I think I understand that reading a lot is just as much a part of writing as moving a pen or pressing a key. Reading is why we write.

My theory: If you don’t love the way words look on a page, then you can’t be a writer. And that’s ok. Really. But if you are a writer, then you do love it. When I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel, Everything is Illuminated, I stared at sentences the way some of my friends look at a painting, mesmerized, lost, in love. Maybe you would, too. There are plenty of other writers who make me feel that way as well. Toni Morrison jumps to mind. But even as beautiful as the sentences are, it’s the being carried on a journey that I can’t get enough of; the worlds others invent and describe and force me to live in that make me lose sleep just so I can find out where the last 100 pages take me.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I know a lot of good writers, a lot better than me, and I can’t think of one of them that spends more time writing than they do reading. Maybe you could be the first, but why would you want to?