When Words Call You

I am breaking the Charles Finch rule of good writing again, but it's intentional

I am breaking the Charles Finch rule—again. Have you heard of him?

Charles Finch writes old-timey detective novels that feel like he shares atoms with Agatha Christie or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His debut novel was named one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2007.

A decade later, he won the National Book Critics’ Circle award in 2017. He’s also a book critic for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today and writes for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and more. I won’t list all his achievements because good grief, I’ll sound like the guy’s mother.

When people ask him for writing advice, here’s what he says…

“To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.

Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It’s definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.

For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There’s no page of prose in existence that its author can’t improve after it’s been in a drawer for a week.

The same is true on the macro level — every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I’m amazed I ever struggled with them.

Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling — you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever.

But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them?”

I read a post where a man shared fifteen different openings to his book. Trying over and over to get the feel right. To match what’s in his heart when he thinks of his father and what he meant to him and how he felt when he lost him.

It darn near brought me to my knees because I know how that feels.

The struggle to find the right words. To edit over and over and stare at a dozen versions of the same paragraph patched together like Mary Shelley’s monster.

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I’m not writing a novel. Maybe one day, but I do know when I have more patience, the words are better. The concept of letting it sit applies to essays, too.

Two years ago, there was a piece I was trying to get right and I kept closing it and coming back. Three, four months. It wasn’t that I worked at it a ton. Mostly I let it sit. Because the longer it sat, the easier the weak parts were to see and fix.

When I finally published it on Medium, it grew wings. Almost two hundred thousand views so far and still trickling. That one piece paid me two months worth of writing ad copy for clients. I can't tell you how wonderful that feels unless you've experienced it.

So you know, that’s not bragging, it’s wonder. Sheer utter wonder at what words can do for both the reader and the writer when they land right. You know?

When I first started writing, I was mailing essays in brown envelopes.

Oh, my mama was so mad at me when I quit my day job. Because I’d had a good job, with my name on the door and staff that replied to me. And I made company bulletins for the highest profit increases and for being the youngest manager to hit those markers. But oh, that job ate my soul. Consumed my brain every waking moment.

So I quit. Said I need to do work that lets me write. That was not an easy decision.

Here’s some crazy stuff I’ve done. I’ve waited tables and rang cash registers. I’ve sat in a chair wearing a suit to change watch batteries. No one brings in a ten dollar watch to have a lady in a suit change the battery. They do that when the watch is so expensive they are afraid to pop open the back. It paid okay and let me write.

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Here’s why I’m talking about this, okay?

Because we don’t live in a vacuum and it’s so easy to be affected by everything we hear and everything that happens. It’s so easy to look at our top piece and see all the views, or money, or likes, or whatever — and be influenced by that. Do it more because we want that result again. That’s just human nature.

Don’t we all want to be good?

And don’t we often let other people define what good means?

I wrote a beautiful piece on Medium that was from so deep in my heart it made me weep to write it. When Roman was editing it he said if my heart had a heart, that’s where it came from. And then it was declined for boost and earned $4.

Broke my heart a little bit. How do you do that again? It’s not easy.

But also? We all need to eat. So there’s a juggle right there. Write from the heart or write what pays the bills? Which is why I spend a chunk of my day writing commercial copy and blog posts that get my clients ranked in google. Because I’m still at home tapping the keyboard and it lets me write what I want outside of that.

I don’t follow the Charles Finch rule here on Hello Writer, but that’s intentional. Once in a while I do. But mostly? I see this as a place for conversation with other writers. So I just come here and spill my thoughts and we always have the most wonderful conversations in the comments and your thoughts feed me.

I have learned so much from my readers. And when you feel the same way I do, it makes me stronger and I hope it does the same for you. I am starting another Substack this summer. It’s called Lit AF and I hope you love it once I start.

But mostly? I wanted to talk about intention in writing. About writers showing up the way we need to, not the way the world wants us to. Because intention is how we build the foundation under our castle of dreams, you know? Love to know what you think.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. ~Henry David Thoreau.