A letter to young writers from Joyce Maynard:

I love to write, and I love to teach. My favorite people to work with are young ones, and the ones who offer the most profound joy, often, are the ones who don’t think they can write.

Here’s what I always tell them. (And by the way, it applies pretty well for the ones who love to write already, too. I remind myself of all these things, every day):

Every single person has a story to tell. You are the world’s number one authority on that story, and nobody -- never mind that person’s age, power, fame or talent -- can tell your story better than you can.

Learn grammar, learn to spell, find out the wonderful mysteries of punctuation; enrich your life with new words and new forms of sentences to put them in. But first, before anything else, write the story you simply long to tell, and let no one tell you it’s not the right one.

Tell the truth. (And it is possible to do this, even if you’re writing wild, futuristic science fiction, by the way.) Write as if your life depended on it. Write what you most want someone to know. Write what you are most afraid of saying, and what you believe in your heart’s core to be true.

Write as if you were inventing language -- as if every word you set down was carved into a tree. Mean it. Write in your own voice. Write about what you care about most deeply -- what makes you cry, or rage, or laugh. Write what you love.

Trust your true voice. It does not lie. Write about what has moved you deeply, what has shaped the person you are, and you cannot go wrong. Do not write to please. Nothing is so deeply pleasing as an honest voice.

Use real words -- the kind you choose, when you speak with your friends or family. Don’t be afraid of simple, concrete sentences, if they are clear and authentic, but ask yourself, when you write a sentence, if it brings a picture to mind, if you are helping the reader to see and experience what you have, or simply telling the reader what you have concluded. Let your reader experience what it feels like to be you, how the world looks and sounds through your eyes and ears. (And every time you find a cliché slipping in, to do the work for you, try building the phrase by hand, instead of running off to Home Depot to buy it ready-made.)

Resist the impulse of tying up your essay with the kind of neat conclusion life seldom presents. Remember: you don’t have to possess all the answers. Only the desire to locate them.

Your task may seem huge, but in another way it‘s very simple. Let your reader know, like and care about you. Since, from my observation, young people are easy to like and care about, you need only to show your authentic self.

I urge you to be brave -- fearless even. The same courage you show, when you go for a skateboarding jump, or sing a solo at church, or protest an action of your government that you question -- or let your parents know a hard truth that may not make them happy, as every teenager must sometimes do -- is the courage you can draw upon, when you sit down to tell your story. One of the bravest things a person can do is to write.

Do it. But give yourself time not only to write, but (this part is underrated) to not write, first. To think. To shape your ideas in your head. To be still a while. Then take your big jump, and don’t look back once you do.

Good writing doesn’t come easily, and shouldn’t. It’s not comfortable, and may be downright excruciating. But here is the great secret, and never forget it: The moment when you take your pen in hand, or place your hands on the keyboard, and begin to type, may be the only time -- the only place on this earth -- where you will know total and absolute freedom to go anywhere, be anyone, say anything, let anything happen, with no greater boundaries than your own imagination or vocabulary. Young as you may be -- without job, or car, or bank account, or the ability to stay out past eleven on a Saturday night -- there is one place where you control the universe, and it is on the pages you’ve created, and on the ones still waiting to be written.

Joyce Maynard

A letter to young writers from Joyce Maynard

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