Roy Peter Clark - Help! For Writers: 210 Solutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces

Writing is not magic. Its a craft, a process, a set of steps. As with any process, things sometimes break down. Even in a good story, the writer runs into problems. So the act of writing always includes problem solving. At times, things get so bad, writers feel as if theyre drowning. Before going under, they reach for a lifeline.

This book offers that lifeline.

To hear some writers talk, you would think we have problems in the gajillions, from whether to use gajillion or gazillion, to whether that exclamation point after Help is necessary.

As Ive grown in my own craft, Ive listened to my brothers and sisters of the word and have developed a theory to focus this book. Here it is, my Theory of Writer Redemption: The big problems of writers are few in number and lend themselves to reliable solutions. I subscribe to the gospel of Donald Murray, one of Americas most influential writing teachers, that writersacross genres and disciplinesshare a similar process, a set of tactical steps. If you dig deep enough, you can discover that common method.

Surely, you wonder, the sonneteer must develop a different approach to the craft than the pamphleteer? How about the author of a 140-character message on Twitter? Is her process the same as the novelists? At the highest level of abstraction, my answer would be yes.

So what are those shared steps?

All writers need a kick start, a starters pistol, a spur to the flank, something that jolts them into action. This recurring need leads them to explore the world and their own experiences for writing ideas. Such curiosity turns them into hunters and gatherers who collect the raw materials that render their reports and stories interesting and significant.

A writer who goes exploring can bring home so many treasures that the writing space and the writers mind can become cluttered. Writers must be able to find what they need when they need it. At this stage, it is too early to know whether an author has what she needs to fill a novel or memoir or annual report with interesting and important ideas, facts, and language.

Each piece of writing benefits from a focus, a guiding idea, a scene, or an emotion that communicates to writer and reader what the work is really about. A telegram, Twitter post, or haiku needs a focus, but so does a short story, a love note, or a complaint about your plumber to the Better Business Bureau. Such a unifying notion helps the writer select the best collected materialthe best characters, the best details, the most important points, down to the best word and the best mark of punctuation. A focus will help the writer craft an opening sentence or paragraph; and sometimes writing that paragraph is required to find a focus. Its the yin/yang of the writing process.

The Old English poets were said to have a word hoard from which they could choose the best language to shape their poems. How great it would be to throw open a closet door and find just the right word for just the right writing task. Where do such words come from? They come from a life of reading and study of the craft, from the daily experience of language, from travel, from dictionaries, and from the research required to gather not just raw data but the ideas, images, and key words necessary to understand a group of people or a field of study.

It is never easy to know when its time to sit down at your keyboard to create a first draft. The writer often feels resistance at this stage, expressed as writers block or procrastination. The writing will begin to flow if the writer has attended to the earlier steps. W. H. Auden once described a poem as a verbal contraption with a person, a guiding intelligence, hiding inside. All texts are constructed, often from a blueprint or plan, erecting an architecture of meaning and purpose. The writer must decide on a sequencewhat goes first in a work and what goes last. A haiku has three lines, a legal brief builds an argument, Shakespeare wrote plays in five acts and sonnets in fourteen lines. Each part of the work carries a special power, magnified when the writer creates an effective structure for the whole.

When writers talk to teachers or editors, they often blurt blurry language to mask the one key question that concerns them: How am I doing? As a coach, my version of that question, as I approach a writer, is How is it going? Everyone wants a progress report, calibrated against different goals and criteria. The writer makes preliminary judgments about the current quality of the work and how much time and energy are left to improve it. The writer can reach conclusions on his own but often benefits from an intervention. When Donald Murray was asked how the days writing had gone, he had two reliable answers, both framed in the affirmative. He could respond by quantity: I produced ten pages before lunch. Or, if necessary, by quality: I wrote one really great sentence this morning.

Completing a draft of a text can be such hard work that the writer may be charmed by the illusion that the job is almost finished. But the process does not stop there. The final problem for the writer is how and what to revise, what to delete, what to insert. It is during revision that the writer will refine, polish, and perfect a work that can never be perfect but can grow and become good enough to fulfill the writers purpose. Key to a successful endgame is to leave time and energy for revision, the way a long-distance runner saves energy for a sprint to the finish line.

Get started

Get your act together

Find focus

Look for language

Build a draft

Assess your progress

Make it better

If those seven phrases represent the writers largest and most imposing tasks, the effort to complete them can be stymied by a set of pesky problems. Those problems have influenced the structure of Help! Each chapter begins with an explanation of one stage of the writing process, followed by questions for reflection. At each stage you will encounter three of the most persistent and difficult obstacles to completing that task, a total of twenty-one common writing problems. For each problem, I offer ten practical and proven solutions, drawn from the work and life stories of successful writers, living and dead. Do the math (even you English majors) and realize you own the 210 writing solutions promised on the cover, enough lifelines to survive a mudslide of deadlines.