The 3 Best Writing Tips I’ve Gotten From Masters, and the 4 Best Writing Tips I’ve Given
Naguib Mahfouz was a Nobel Prize winner for literature, and a marked man.
I met the nonagenarian author at a secret location when I was in Egypt researching a novel. Some years before, a fanatic had stabbed him in the neck for alleged blasphemy in a book that the assailant hadn’t bothered to read. Instead of spending the remainder of his life cowering in isolation, Mahfouz arranged to meet with friends at shifting locations around Cairo every week. His biographer Raymond Stock brought me to one of those meetings, in a back room of the Shepherd’s Hotel bar, and that was how I found myself talking to this frail, old man in dark glasses.
We spoke about a lot of things that night, with a guard keeping an eye on the door and a TV screen on the wall showing a woman in gold paint dancing languidly. A few months later, Mahfouz died. As I read his obituary back in America, one thing he’d said stayed with me.
“When I look back,” he said in a raspy, sardonic voice. “I realize that I’ve learned more from the near-great than I have from the great.”
That struck me as a very sensible piece of advice.
Of course, you can study Shakespeare until your eyes burn red or listen to Beethoven until you go deaf. But as a matter of practical craftsmanship, true geniuses don’t leave many footprints for mere mortals to follow. I’m not saying Herman Wouk is better than Tolstoy (Tolstoy rocks). But there are times when you can learn more about simple plot construction from Winds of War than War and Peace.
Putting it another way: Always read writers who are better than you, whether or not they’re superstars. Especially the ones who can show you how to reach another level.
I’ve been fortunate enough in my career to work with some wonderful writers. And some who merely thought they were wonderful. The genuine talents always had something valuable to say about writing. Here are some of the best tips I’ve heard.
The importance of details
Pete Hamill was a legendary New York newspaper columnist—back when writing for newspapers could make you a legend. If you haven’t read his memoir, A Drinking Life, you should do so right away. Pete was also one of my first bosses, hiring as a summer assistant when I was barely getting through college. The first day, he took me out to lunch at a place called Reuben’s and over a ham-and-egg sandwich told me something I’ve never forgotten.
He said, “If you have an experience—and you think there’s any chance you will ever write about that experience—stop whatever you’re doing and write down every detail you can think of within 24 hours. Because the detail that seems insignificant will later turn out to be the whole story.”
Four decades later, it’s still the best advice I ever got. That chintzy picture frame in the living room? Put it in your notes. It might turn out to be a family heirloom smuggled out of Nuremberg. That pork-pie hat that makes a probation officer look like a bookie? Bank it. The refrigerator that’s barren, except for a Dannon yogurt container and half bottle of pricey Chardonnay? Write it down somewhere. You’d be surprised how quickly you’ll forget it, and equally surprised how vivid it can be when you’re trying to describe the details of a neglected childhood.
Pete had a lot of other tips, which I’ve found helpful and you may, too. Draw pictures of your characters, so you know what they look like. Write down all their names on a list, so you don’t begin with the same first letter too often. And when you’re doing research, don’t be afraid to ask the uncomfortable question. In fact, if it makes you uncomfortable, you should ask the question. It might be the abrupt end of the conversation. Or it could be the beginning of a much more honest one.
How to create a scene
Soon after I worked with Pete, I was fortunate enough to work with another giant of New York journalism, Nicholas Pileggi. Nick is best-known as the co-screenwriter of the Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas. The film is based on Nick’s equally great nonfiction book Wiseguy, about the misadventures of mob associate-turned-informant Henry Hill.
Long before Hollywood called, Nick was firmly established as one of the most knowledgeable chroniclers of organized crime on the East Coast, but he was always generous and kind in dealing with newer writers. One day as I passed him at the New York magazine offices, I mentioned to him that I was thinking of trying my hand at a novel or a screenplay. He looked over his shoulder as he headed for the elevator and said “Get in as late as possible, get out as soon as you can.”
As usual, Nick was right. But it’s advice I’ve seen regularly abused by film and TV writers, who believe it means they can skip the pick-and-shovel work of understanding their characters and the details of their worlds.
I’ve taken it to mean the opposite. Get to know your people and their world well enough that it all becomes second-nature, and then distill them and leave out the boring parts.
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Shock vs suspense
Obviously, I never worked with Alfred Hitchcock, but he used to be such a ubiquitous presence in movies and on TV that you felt you knew him. His introductions to his anthology TV series were always funny, but as a talk show guest he could be extremely incisive—especially on the subject of storytelling.
One thing he talked about is the difference between suspense and surprise. “Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us,” he said. “Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!’
“In the first case, we have given the public 15 seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second, we have provided them with 15 minutes of suspense.” Here’s a video clip of him discussing this very idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0peWTSRtU4
This advice has stayed with me through many years and nine novels, as well as countless journalism pieces and screenplays. Nothing dates faster than “shock value,” and anticipation is always the storyteller’s friend—no matter the genre. Will the marriage last? Will Napoleon get to Russia? Will your heroine reach adulthood with an intact psyche?
And in that spirit of paying it forward, I offer four tips of my own that you might be able to adapt in your own work.
Try longhand
Just about everything in the 21st century is pushing you toward screens, keyboards, and limited attention spans. We email, we text, we TikTok, and we post the pictures to prove we exist. Close the laptop and pick up pen. It will change your mind.
You’ll think differently: more slowly and more deeply. You won’t be able to check the news, add to your feed, or dive down a rabbit hole on the Web. You’ll be stuck with your thoughts—exactly where you need to be to write well. When you cut off access to other people’s pictures and sounds on the screen, you’ll have no choice but to create pictures and sounds in your head.
That will either make you into a writer or a certifiable crazy person—or possibly both.
Read everything you write out loud
Jean Paul Sartre said hell is other people. But he was wrong! Hell is hearing your own mistakes: your typos, elisions, repetitions, and phony transitions. But you gotta do it. Your voice will find the errors that your eye deftly evades. When you hear your own words, it’s a preview of what everyone else will experience. So don’t kid yourself. Face the music.
An addendum: If you have trouble reading one of your own sentences aloud, the problem may not be just a single misplaced word. It may be that the whole underlying idea is half-baked and needs to go back in the oven.
Check out Peter Blauner’s The Intruder here:
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Never get married to anything—but be faithful
This is the book you were born to write. You’ve found your perfect story. You’ve fallen head over heels in love with your characters and the scenes that are going to thrill your readers and break their hearts. You dedicate yourself to the project for a year, maybe more. Maybe a lot more. Then you read it over and realize…it has as much life as herring spread on a stale cracker.
What were you thinking? What made you believe you could pull this off?
Now take this with a grain of salt because it’s coming from a guy who spent two decades working on a novel that got rejected by every publisher who saw it before he rewrote it from a completely different point of view during the pandemic and finally got it published last year.
So if you can’t let the book go, step back and stop banging your head against the brick wall. There may, in fact, be treasure on the other side, but ramming it over and over isn’t getting you to it.
In a calm state of mind, ask yourself if you have found the right way to tell your story. In my case, it took many years to realize that I hadn’t. My narrative, which eventually became a novel called Picture in the Sand, was about Cecil B. DeMille coming to Egypt to film The Ten Commandments in the midst of a political upheaval that prefigured the events of 9/11. In earlier versions, the main character point of view was that of a naïve American who happens to be around during the revolution. It didn’t work.
I had a secondary character named Ali Hassan, a freelance movie critic for the Muslim Brotherhood’s newspaper who falls in love with Hollywood films and becomes Cecil B. DeMille’s assistant. He was much closer to the heart of the historic events I wanted to write about, without being an historic figure himself. But I knew there would be multiple risks in making him the main point of view in the book. And it would be even more work to rewrite the whole narrative from his point of view—especially when I decided to add an epistolary element, in which Ali, as a much older man, relates the story through emails to a grandson who has just run off to join a militant terrorist group.
I was lucky that Picture in the Sand eventually found a home. But on the other hand, it’s easy to drive yourself to madness writing endless variations on the same material. Which leads to the last tip I can offer…
Get yourself some friends
Yes, I know you probably already have friends. Maybe even a spouse or a child. But they may not be your ideal readers, especially for an early draft. An overly harsh or myopic opinion can sink your whole ship at an early, fragile stage. It helps to build a circle of trusted readers who can not only spot the flaws in your structure, but also point you toward areas that you hadn’t even considered.
If you meet someone who can do this for you, hold onto them. Buy them a drink, buy them lunch, ask about the family. And, for the love of God, don’t make up some lame excuse if they ask you to read their stuff as well.
At the end of Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White says something about the spider that I’ve never forgotten: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”