Hi! This is Good Ideas, a newsletter about writing, creativity, and craft (and sometimes animals), with weekly prompts designed to help you make progress in your current writing project. If you’re not working on something already, the prompts will help you start.
Greetings, writers—
Exactly one year ago, I wrote about spending a week in Sonoma (our yearly spring break road trip), and the importance of rituals, and how one of the writer’s primary jobs, besides typing, is noticing (which I also wrote about here and here). And maybe last year’s Sonoma post was less about writing than it was about nostalgia for my children’s youth, but whatever, I’m back with another post-Sonoma post, this one with 100% less nostalgia and 80% more writing advice, in this case from the legendary Jack London.
By the way, I misquoted him ever so slightly in 4/5/23 previous post, but in my defense I took the words straight from this recycling bin at Jack London State Park.
In fact, London said, “Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.”
London certainly went after publication with a club. He describes the protracted process of making his way into print in a 1903 article, called “Getting Into Print,” for The Editor.
Let’s stop for a moment, and imagine a time when a person could reasonably (?) expect to improve his economic circumstances by writing for print publications.
Okay. Moving on. London writes:
I wrote everything—short stories, articles, anecdotes, jokes, essays, sonnets, ballads, vilanelles, triolets, songs, light plays in iambic tetrameter, and heavy tragedies in blank verse. These various creations I stuck into envelopes, enclosed return postage, and dropped into the mail. Oh, I was prolific. Day by day my manuscripts mounted up, till the problem of finding stamps for them became as great as that of making life livable for my widow landlady.
But it didn’t work.
All my manuscripts came back. They continued to come back. The process seemed like the working of soulless machine. I dropped the manuscript into the mail box. After the lapse of a certain approximate length of time, the manuscript was brought back to me by the postman. Accompanying it was a stereotyped rejection slip. A part of the machine, some cunning arrangement of cogs and cranks at the other end, (it could not have been a living, breathing man with blood in his veins), had transferred the manuscript to another envelope, taken the stamps from inside and pasted them outside, and added the rejection slip.
London thinks he’s going to have to go back to shoveling coal. But then he goes to the Yukon in 1897, and his stories start to get accepted.
In his Editor article, which you can find in the Harry Ransom Center’s digital archives, London talks about becoming a happy and efficient hack, although the paragraph is crossed out for some reason. But he goes on to offer all sorts of writer wisdom.
Don't quit your job in order to write unless there is none dependent upon you. Fiction pays best of all, and when it is of a fair quality more easily sold. A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration. Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible—if you care to see in print the things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say.)
(I do think one of the Reasons Lessons in Chemistry was such a huge bestseller is that you could smell the happy ending coming from hundreds of pages away.)
Don't dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a “stint,” and see that you do that “stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.
In fact, in the Writer article picture above, London suggests a “stint” of 1000 words a day.
“But they must be good words; the very best he has in him.” And then, “in ninety days he will have worked sixty and lazied thirty, and there will stand his volume complete.”
He makes it sound a lot easier than it is, doesn’t he? But he’s not wrong about setting yourself a stint.
And finally, as every teacher ever will tell you, you can’t be a great writer unless you’re a good reader.
Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it is done. Don’t wait for some good Samaritan to tell you, but dig it out for yourself.
There’s much more to say about Jack London—how he became a successful farmer, despite some wildly misguided ideas about feeding cows cacti and growing eucalyptus as a wood crop; how he designed a Pig Palace for his hogs (which should be called the Pig Panopticon, imo); how he built an insanely beautiful house in the woods that burned to the ground right before he and his wife, Charmian, were set to move into it—but I’ll stop for now. Because I’m probably going back to Jack London State Park next year, and I’ll need something to write about then.
Today, set yourself a stint: 200 words, 500 words, whatever. Stick with it for five days. See what happens.
And if you need an actual prompt to start off today, go visit A Poem a Day. Steal one line from a poem you like, and begin.
Happy writing—
Emily