So hit up your local used bookstore and head to the classics section, grab a stack of cheap paperbacks for like $20, and actually read the introductions to make sure you’re absorbing everything. But only if you’re genuinely interested in the book in question. It’s what I did.
Would you please tell us a little about your writing process?
If an idea has story potential, it’ll take root in my mind, and I’ll keep turning it over and developing it in my thoughts. This doesn’t really feel like I’m making anything up. Rather, it feels like remembering a story from childhood, where you’re fuzzy on the details, and need to deduce part of what happened when your memory doesn’t quite make sense, e.g.: “No, he can’t have been there, he was too young, it must’ve been so-and-so,” and so on. The picture shifts under my feet, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve altered a thing. Once I’ve stopped turning it over in my head (if I do ever decide to stop), I write it all down as I remember it, jumping up and down in the document as certain details come to me. At this stage, it still feels like writing nonfiction. It’s only once the whole story has been transcribed to the page, and revision starts, that what I’m writing starts to feel made up. Only in revision do I have the power to change anything. I start big picture, clarifying thematic statements and narrative arcs, and narrow my scope gradually until I get to line edits, which I keep working on until I’m happy with them or, more often, out of time. At this point, I usually hand the story over to my lovely girlfriend, who is always my first reader, and knows my writing better than anyone. I ask for her impressions, what she liked and didn’t, if anything confused her, etc. Generally speaking, if she’s confused as to what I’m trying to do, there’s no chance of anyone else getting it, so back to revision it goes. We do this two or three times (usually stopping once I’ve exhausted her patience) and then the story is mostly done. I collect feedback from whatever sucker I can get to read it, make whatever changes I see fit, and then send it out into the world. That is, if I don’t decide to shelve it forever.
How do you believe a writer improves? Practice? Mentors? Reading everything? Attending festivals?
All of those things, yes, but also something more. You cannot be a good writer without being a good reader, and you will not become either without practice. But there is something else that you need, and that is experiences. Stories. Raw sense data you can turn into narrative. You can’t just rely on what other people have written before you, or what your mentors or teachers tell you resonates or sells. You have to go out and gather some stories of your own.
Now, I’m not suggesting that any aspiring writers go out there and try to be social butterflies. Most of us are, and always have been, weirdo shut-ins. It’s in our natures. But once in a while, we need to step outside of what we know to experience what’s strange and unfamiliar. Because that’s where life is, on the periphery of comfort. And we need to know life to write it. It’s like learning to paint; you have to draw from life.
What motivated / motivates you to write?
Obsession. I could not be happy if I couldn’t write, or at least express myself creatively. Now, why that is? I have no idea. Ever since I was a kid, there has been this creative energy in me that needed to get out somehow. Whether it was writing stories, or playing music, or making videos, there was always a creative impulse in me I needed to indulge or I felt would explode. It’s only fairly recently that I’ve learned to channel it into short form writing instead of ping ponging from one project to another without finishing. And what keeps me on track, what prevents me from giving up and moving on to “the next thing,” is keeping the scope in check. It’s much easier to commit to finishing a short story or a personal essay than it is to continue work on chapter 2 of book 1 of a planned 6,500+ page pentalogy, because the end point for one is much closer than the other. It’s always easier to sprint towards the finish line when you can actually see it. And that feeling of accomplishment when I finish writing something can’t be beat by anything.
What is the best piece of advice you have received? Or, what is the best piece of advice you would offer an aspiring writer?
Before I came to Canada, I attended a music school in Greece (publicly funded high schools that offer music instruction in addition to a regular high school curriculum). The place was brimming with angsty teenage aspiring musicians, many of whom were quite anxious for approval, or some indication that they had a future in such a competitive field. To try and reassure us (or maybe just to try to get us to shut up) one of our teachers shared the story of a young fiddler that had been a shoemaker’s apprentice. One day, he said, a great violinist had come to the apprentice’s village from the city, and while he was there, the young man had pulled him aside and asked him if he wouldn’t mind listening to some of his fiddling. He wanted the opinion of an expert, he said, to decide whether he had a future as a musician. The violinist quickly accepted. After the young man had finished his playing, the violinist told him that while his playing was not inadequate, he did not have what it took to make it in an orchestra, and that he really should focus on the shoemaking from now on. And so he did. Years later, when the master violist passed through that same village, the same man, now a master shoemaker, with a wife, children, and his own shop, pulled the musician aside again. He thanked him for his sage advice all those years ago, said how he realized he hadn’t been cut out for the violin after all, and asked him how he had been able to tell all those years ago. “Oh, I have no idea who will make it and who won’t,” the master violinist had said, “but I tell every young fiddler who asks my advice that they aren’t cut out for the orchestra. The ones that are never listen.”
So my advice is that you should quit.
Which books is it most important for an aspiring writer to read?
First and foremost, whichever ones they’re actually interested in, for the simple reason that, if they try to force themselves to read books they have no interest in, they’ll quickly quit trying to read at all. There’s no substitute for genuine curiosity.
That said, I do think there is value in reading the writers that have stood the test of time, your Homers and your Kafkas and the like. We all like reading some trash once in a while, but if all you read is trash, all you write will be trash too. So before they can tell the good books from the bad, a good way to make sure newbies are reading quality stuff is reading the books that are so good people keep coming back to them over and over again.
So hit up your local used bookstore and head to the classics section, grab a stack of cheap paperbacks for like $20, and actually read the introductions to make sure you’re absorbing everything. But only if you’re genuinely interested in the book in question. It’s what I did.
Also, Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style is pretty helpful, as long as you don’t treat it as gospel.
Are there any downsides to being a writer?
Absolutely there are. The profession is financially unstable, precarious, solitary (though this can be a good thing depending on your disposition), and isolating. Writing human beings well requires watching them closely, paying particular attention to all their little peculiarities, the things about them worth paying attention to, and not what they want you to pay attention to. It leaves people with the feeling that you’ve been looking somehow through them and straight into the dusty attic of their souls. But this isolation from other people cannot really be counter-balanced with an active social life, as making any real progress on your writing requires a massive time investment of sitting in a small room, quietly, alone, typing away. And no matter how supportive the people in your life try to be, the fact is that your writing is your writing, and so none of them will ever care about it as much as you do. You are hopelessly engrossed in something that may not even exist yet, and when it does, no one in the world will ever care about as much as you. It’s an inexorably lonely vocation.
Nikos Alexakos is a student at the University of Toronto, where he studies English, creative writing, and studio art. Born to a Greek father and Canadian mother, he has lived in Canada since he was 14 years old. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, and sometimes illustrates his stories.