Advice from John Wray

At the Prague Writers’ Festival I asked American writer John Wray, author of Lowboy, The Right-Hand Of Sleep, and Canaan’s Tongue, what advice he could give to young up and coming writers venturing into the big bad world:

Well, the world is very big and very bad.

There are certain things that one has no control over, such as the amount of talent you were born with, one does has the control to the degree one develops the talent one has.  But one thing that I think that maybe is more important than talent for any writer to have is perseverance that borders on masochism.  You have to be willing to take your licks.

Writers tend to be more on the neurotic end of the spectrum, but there’s never a position you get that you are so secure that it doesn’t hurt when your taking a knock in a review or the lack of one.  It comes with the territory and over and over again I am reminded of that.  You really have to be able to take a licking on a daily basis.  Both in the active sense in saying that your books are crap and in the more insidious, more kind of meteorological sense of just people treating writing fiction as something marginal or not relevant in culture.  You are either getting it personally or as a whole group.  It’s hard to say which is more difficult to overcome.  But then you are surprised again.  For every hit you take hopefully there’s some positive good that may happen. 

To me it just pure perseverance and a waiting game.  A lot of my friends who are very successful writers now wrote first novels that were turned down by a few dozen publishers and never got published. 

Read a hell of a lot, and broadly.  Just because your writing a novel about the Internet doesn’t mean you can’t learn from F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Don’t mistake the content of a book for…as a writer you learn that the content, subject matter, plot is much less important than the way in which the story is told.  Even in subject matters that don’t interest you.  You can read a book about stockbrokers.  I couldn’t care less about stockbrokers but you can still read a well written book about stockbrokers and you learn a lot about the way the information is communicated, the structure and style.

Thank you very much.  I’m sure we’re all prepared to take our daily licking.

Your welcome.