Writers’ rules and how to break them

My father, a playwright, says that his choice of profession can be parsed as humbly as considering the impulse of a child to showboat on a bicycle screaming, “Look at me!” towards a distracted mother. He could have said that this was the driving impulse of all writers, not only his own. My father is fond of making elegant statements that he will then amiably rework or withdraw depending on what he is reading and who he is talking to.

In this, he is like the short story writer and novelist Elizabeth McCracken, whose new book, A Long Game, is subtitled How to Write Fiction. Such an instructive mission is at least superficially repellent to me, so I was glad early on to find McCracken shares my wariness. “I distrust both rules and optimism,” she says of her avoidance of books about the writer’s “craft”, and “I have never encountered a rule for fiction I believed in, at least in the long run, apart from: Don’t use a gothic font to make your work feel spooky.”

What, then, is A Long Game? For one, it’s a welcome chance to spend time with McCracken’s mind, which you can feel stretching with pleasure throughout. She has written some of the funniest and most sensitively observed books I’ve ever read. I often think of her relating, in her autobiographical novel The Hero of This Book, an anecdote about her father pulling a train’s emergency brakes to rescue her mother, stranded on a platform: “‘And was that a lifelong dream of yours, to pull the cord for a good reason?’ I asked when my father told me the story. ‘Yes,’ he said, quietly, moved to be so understood.”

In A Long Game, the joy McCracken takes in being a writer is met by her love of teaching, which she has been doing for 35 years. What results is less a technical manual and more a deconstruction of the received wisdom most writers will have absorbed or had thrust on them. McCracken’s book pulls off the difficult task of acknowledging the futile nature of generic advice without rendering itself useless. She reiterates how each writer is on a distinct journey: “I hope to provoke my students into thinking the most interesting thoughts that they can, so they can teach themselves to write.” There are, though, a handful of specific reflections on technique that may be the first I’ve ever actually found useful. I will leave you to find these yourself: suffice to say my use of the words “but” and “because” may never be so careless again.

The book is written in 280 tiny chapters and it is perfectly possible to skim the sections that are not applicable to your own practice. Having never been on an MFA creative writing programme, I had less interest in her negotiation of that specific landscape (McCracken is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), and yet even those parts of the book that I had no personal investment in, I lingered over, enjoying her characteristically surprising and curious tone.

Most welcome for me was the comprehensive takedown of the rule that to be a writer you must write every day. This one is still bandied about with mysterious confidence, despite not being true for any more than a third of the working fiction authors I know. As McCracken says, if it works for you, wonderful, and if it doesn’t, wonderful – what matters is to find a way of writing that suits you. And as she also says, ending her lovely and energising book: “The writer has a mantra, and it’s the same one for everybody: I am a genius with much to learn.”

She tells her students that if they are writing a book, “you better make it a book of your heart… something that will menace you if you don’t get it down on the page”. Here, there is a pleasing echo of Lydia Davis’s Into the Weeds, which is based on a lecture delivered at Yale University in 2024. Why does she write? If McCracken needs to be menaced, Davis – a translator and the author of short stories that are often very short indeed – requires bothering. “Here is the very concise and truthful answer: the reason I write a particular story may be because something – which I call ‘material’, as in ‘raw material’ – bothers me until I ‘do something’ about it,” she says.

Although Davis is tasked with the why, she decides to get there by way of considering the how. Her own hows, at times – but those of a great many others too, including John Ashbery, Knut Hamsun, Karl Ove Knausgård, Kate Briggs and James Baldwin.

Like A Long Game, Into the Weeds is partly about what the writing life is not. “I don’t write to convey a message, and I don’t write stories to achieve any particular purpose, I don’t write stories to persuade a reader of something I believe, though I have many, many beliefs.” Davis also says that her work is not for a particular audience, a notion that recurs in a fascinating discussion of a book called The Wheelwright’s Shop by George Sturt, which goes into granular detail about the processes and mechanisms involved with making each part of a wagon. Davis concedes that despite a clear and lively writing style, Sturt’s title is hardly compelling for a general audience. So why did he write it? Among other things, Davis concludes that he valued the skill he had given his life to, and did not want to die without imparting his knowledge. Therefore, a book came to be.

Davis writes also of the propensity we have as writers and readers to absorb a text and then misremember it – or is it that we are repurposing it for our needs? She recalls a Raymond Carver story that had affected her on first reading and which she knew as The Birthday Cake, but which upon revisiting turned out to be titled A Small, Good Thing and whose ending she had also changed in her mind. The real resolution didn’t ring true to her on a second read. This struck me as allegorical of the writer’s dichotomous efforts; to observe lived reality with a greater than usual attention and insight, and also to digest reality and derive from it an “unreal” but profound truth.

The admirable multiplicity of Davis’s interests – her material – is evident in Into the Weeds, as is her remarkable, intimidating intellect. Some of the most striking passages are so simple I had to read them a few times to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Approvingly, she quotes a friend who made a guess about how she writes her stories: “Some of your stories are thought journeys that probably occurred in seconds in your brain but which you then had to stop and write down, possibly adding additional thoughts as you went.”

This seemed obvious – that a story begins with a thought that grows as you transcribe it: writing has always felt to me a form of thought. But what pleased me most about Davis and McCracken’s books was the exposition of writing habits or beliefs that were alien to me – or, conversely, the revelation that things that seem to me clearly necessary to any writing are not, in fact, universal.

That a novelist may have no real idea about what their character looks like, for instance, is all but impossible for me to imagine – as incomprehensible as learning that some people can’t form mental images. And then I recall that a part of allowing myself to start writing fiction was to imagine I was watching a film of my characters and simply transcribing the action I could see in my head. We all have our own beginnings, and alight on our own wonky little methods.

Both these books, in their different ways, convey not just something specific about the careers of these two masters, but also some of the luck there is in being a writer – the self-fulfilling magic of creating that existence. This has nothing to do with whatever success is found – and in A Long Game, those writers prone to envy and ego crisis will find comfort in McCracken’s decidedly non-linear career trajectory, littered with unpublished work and fallow seasons.

Instead, it’s to do with the gift of attention. On learning to write dialogue by listening to other people, Davis writes: “And of course character is often nakedly revealed by what people say, especially when they are unaware that anyone is listening.” As the ability to pay attention is increasingly rarefied, that skill – to closely and selectively observe what is around us – will become more powerful.

How to convey that to be a writer – to live a writer’s life – is a wonderfully achievable feat without implying it is also easy? McCracken discredits numerous tropes (the “show, don’t tell” police get called out), but she doesn’t mention one that I particularly hate. If you are a young person who wants to write, somebody will at some point tell you that if you don’t have to write, then don’t (they say this about other creative professions too). They mean, if you can in any conceivable sense stand to do anything else, then don’t be a writer, with all its attendant miseries. These two heartening books will, I hope, convince you otherwise.

A Long Game: How to Write Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99); order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49. 

Into the Weeds: Why I Write by Lydia Davis is published by Yale University Press (£12.99); order from The Observer Shop for £11.69. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Christopher Lane for The Observer; Theo Cote