Insights from an Aspiring Writer, with Guest Host Jesse Hawley

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. Episode 33. Today we've got our first guest hosted episode with writer Jesse Hawley. Get ready for some great insights into the challenges faced by aspiring writers and some practical and effective tools to overcome them. Welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast.

My name is Brad Reed, and I am thrilled that you're spending some time with me today on the Inside Creative Writing Podcast. A few weeks ago, I announced a new feature on the show, occasional guest hosts. Now, these are a little different than the interviews that I usually do, in that rather than me asking questions that I think our writing community would like to hear, a guest host instead puts together an entire segment of the show about a writing topic that they are especially passionate about.

Now, I couldn't be more pleased that our first guest host is writer Jesse Hawley. He's a longtime supporter of the show. He's a member of the Patreon team, and he has a lot of great, unique insights into what it means to be a writer.

Introduction of Guest Host

Now, Jesse says he's been writing for about two years and for his segment, he's looking back on the lesson that he's learned over those two years and the discoveries that he's made as a new writer. Now, I'm actually going to take exception to Jesse's claim that he's only been writing for two years, but you'll have to wait until the wise words segment after we hear from Jesse for my reasoning behind that claim. So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce guest host Jesse Hawley and his great, unique insights that are going to benefit writers of any experience level. I know they were beneficial and useful to me, and I'm sure that they will be for you too. Thanks, Brad, and thank you, listeners, for taking the chance to listen to my writing experience and perhaps, hopefully, a little bit of writing insights. Before we get on to the show and what I'll be talking about, I thought I'd give you an introduction of who I am.

My name's Jesse Hawley. I live in Sydney, Australia. It's a rainy day today outside. You might hear the cars whipping past. My background is in science. I actually did research for a little bit with flies and spiders on how their diet affects their lifespan, their longevity.

I've got a whole bunch of interests, but I found creative writing was the only true way to express myself wholly, and the most effective way of transmitting feelings is through prose. As you well know, studying the craft of creative writing is pretty overwhelming. It is a very complicated world. There's no rules, which means you can get lost pretty easily, but at the same time, if you look around, there is only rules, which you can get paralyzed by.

Of course, there are plenty of writing gurus and writing idols to look up to. But at the same time, conversely, there are also charlatans and emperors' new clothes, people espousing sort of pieces of suggestion or great pieces of writing with, once they're looked at properly, perhaps aren't as deep as, you know, they're claimed to be. Which, if you think about it, learning the craft of creative writing sounds about as messy, complicated, and confusing as the real world does. Or at least it does to me anyway.

Lessons from Early Writing Mistakes

So on that note, that's exactly what I'll be talking about this episode. I'll be talking about how growing the craft of writing, becoming a better writer, is actually like maturing almost as a person, developing your personality to be a strong writer. I would like to tell you about my most memorable mistakes, the ones that hurt the most and were thus most memorable, so you can be aware of them yourself. And finally, I'll be talking about what I think is the most important part of growth, which is seeking out and addressing your weaknesses and your blind spots, how to identify them and then how to address them. And, of course, if I get the time, I'll talk in a couple of bonus lessons that I've picked up recently that might be helpful for you. Well, here we go.

So I think as a young writer, I've been writing for two years, I should say, my biggest mistake by far, which is one that perhaps will be familiar with you, it'll be interesting to know that, actually, is not admitting my arrogance. If writing is maturing, well, then this is sort of a hallmark of adolescence, you know, thinking that you understand and you're equipped enough to just go out there and make a big splash. Anyone who attempts to say otherwise is trite and naive to what you can bring to the world. It's classic teenager thinking, and it's sort of the thinking that plagued my own writing and my own stunted writing growth in the first six months.

So this is the Inside Creative Writing podcast, so I thought I'd pass on a quick story in that vein. You've probably heard it. It's getting to be a bit of a platitude, but I'll say it anyway.

So the story goes that there was a professor traveling around Japan looking to learn the art of Zen, and he's been to every run, but didn't really find anything that interesting, and he was finally pointed towards this great Zen master. And he sat down, the Zen master sat him down, and the professor instantly launched into telling him all of his preconceptions and ideas about how Zen works and what he knows about it and his travels already and his disappointments. As he was talking, he saw the Zen master had finished pouring his cup of tea, and yet was still pouring. The tea was brimming over the cup and then began to cascade down the side and puddle up on the table. And the professor was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I really don't need that much tea. It's sort of like dripping on me at the moment.

And the Zen master said, yes, well, this cup is your mind, and the tea is your preconceptions and your ideas of Zen. How do you expect me to teach you anything and fill you up if it's already full? Before I can teach you anything, you have to empty your cup.

So the first six months of my writing, I sort of forgot that I didn't know anything, and I wrote prolifically. I was looking outwards at the distance, the idea of finishing a novel, but I certainly wasn't looking at others, and I doubly certainly wasn't looking inward at myself and my own weak points. I wrote a lot. I wrote 50,000, 60,000 words that amount to, I suppose, sort of teen poetry and the process of maturation caught on paper. And I'm reluctant to go and read it now for obvious reasons, just like we wouldn't want to see our teen diaries. Yes, well, that's the first lesson I learned, having to admit my own arrogance before I can proceed and grow honestly.

Continuing with the aging analogy, whoever feels like a complete adult, I know I certainly do not, and we're all sort of perpetual teenagers in a way. What needed to happen next was to identify those shortcomings and those weak spots that most needed addressing, most seriously in creative writing. So there's a quote by a playwright, Eugene O'Neill, that says, Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

But if that were the case, that would be sort of easy because you could see what's going on in the reflection and you could address it. You've got egg on your face or messy hair or whatever. But no, it's not that easy. Reflecting on our writing is difficult. We're obscured our view. Perhaps we're standing too close and can't actually get the perspective to know that you need help, let alone where that help is.

Identifying Weaknesses in Writing

So if that is the case, how do you go about addressing your blind spots? Well, I found one easy way is to seek help from others. What better way of seeing your shortcomings than through the eyes of somebody else and through earnest advice? A good way I've found of finding out your ignorance is to turn it inside out to avert yourself and throw yourself into the domain of judgment and advice. It's very difficult to get advice or answers when your questions are contained only in the vacuum of your mind with no access to outside help.

So academically, I'm pretty average, smack bang, actually. But I've grown a lot and managed to succeed at university through burying my ignorance time and time again publicly for better or for worse. Not happily, but I'll put my hand up to let people know what I don't know. And thus will be steered on the right path, red-faced, you know, heart thumping, but I'll have put myself out there to be corrected. You've got to be naked before you can be corrected, I think. And when it comes to the craft of creative writing, I don't think it's any different.

So the standard advice is don't show your first draft to anybody. And that is good advice. It's strong advice. People aren't used to seeing first drafts, and it, you know, it's probably a piece of shit. It probably is. And in some ways, it's difficult to fault that advice.

But I have faulted it time and time again in the last two years. And the lessons that have come from that have been the most memorable. So I've given excerpts of my first draft to friends, which is okay, and I've heard good advice. I've given it to co-workers and my boss. And embarrassingly, I've given my first draft to total strangers, two of them. They're not strangers now, of course.

They're Sally and Catherine. And I was in a cafe and I saw Sally, at least, reading outside a book. And I don't know what I was thinking. I was working on my story on my laptop. And I took a deep breath and I took my laptop outside. I was like, hey, how's it going?

techniques, feelings, emotions, thoughts, maturity. Reading is just sort of like a wormhole, jumping through personal growth and development, living others' lives and being in others' shoes. And through your writing, it's just inimitable. It's difficult to find those lessons elsewhere outside of literature. On the other end, seek out poor literature.

Learning from Poor Literature

So I recommended this on a recent episode of Inside Creative Writing, but not just to get inspiration by reading sort of shallow pieces of literature, but upon reading it, you might see reflections of yourself and something that you are doing and something that you have not that much respect for. And what greater kick in the butt to move on and develop your craft than seeing yourself in a piece of art that you don't really respect? That's a great way to self-diagnose. That is, outside of literature, one of the great ways that I've found to develop my writing skills has been through how to write books.

So as an example, my biggest weakness in writing in the first year or so was not using narrative summary. I wasn't summarising a thing. I was literally taking readers through each moment, moment-by-moment, scene-by-scene, in a gruelling, I don't know, first-person perspective style, like the Blair Witch Project or something, though even that's got cuts. And I wasn't even aware that narrative summary, or to summarise something, had a name, and I wasn't aware that I wasn't using it.

So by reading how-to writing books and books on craft, I was actually able to slap a label onto the symptom of my own sick writing. If you're interested, my three favourite books on the craft of writing are Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain. That's great for all the fundamentals, and that really got me going in the right direction, I think. Secondly, I'm a sucker for beautifully constructed sentences.

So my other favourite is Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon. And thirdly, Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. This is a wonderful book in many regards, not least for the appendix, which has actually got a list of great literature that you ought to catch up on if you're interested in having a whiz-bang journey through the history of great books. I really recommend that too. And if you're keen on getting that list of recommended reading, you can just go to the Wikipedia page of the book Reading Like a Writer, and it's got its own little subheading. I'd recommend that.

On that note, on advice and seeking advice from things like how-to-write books, another big mistake that I made was taking advice too literally. So imagine if there were a book, How to Be a Perfect Human Being. It's pretty clear that there is no such thing as a perfect human being in any regard. I regularly flout social etiquette and taboos, and I certainly wouldn't change that, which is probably what would be recommended. And I know those who know me wouldn't want my personality to be corrected, in inverted commas, by a book of rules either.

So these things should certainly not apply to you and your personality as a writer. That previous book that I recommended, Reading Like a Writer, the thesis of the whole thing is great works can come from flouting all of the rules, none of the rules. Genuine, honest expression and writing is where the beauty and grandeur comes. It's not by following rules or breaking rules. It's the honesty that transcends all of them. When I finally admitted my ignorance that I didn't know what was going on as a writer, the pendulum swung too far the other way, and it fell into that saying, don't have your mind so open that your brains fall out, because that's exactly what happened.

Maintaining Your Unique Voice

I took on the world of rules and recommendations and suggestions, these cliches and structures and formulae, and they were so overwhelming, they just sort of collapsed on top of me, and my writing became a victim of everyone's words at the same time, which is just such a bad idea. So my recommendation here to avoid making the same mistake is read widely, instructional books, listen widely, but keep the voice of yourself stronger than the voice of others throughout and incorporate and evolve, but don't concede and conform. Before we leave the topic of improving your writing through self-awareness and identifying your weak spots and growth there, I thought I'd talk about something that might be a little bit idiosyncratic or personal, but I think it's really important to know yourself, know what makes you special, know what makes you challenging, your strengths and your weaknesses, quite intimately, and how to work around those and incorporate them into your writing style.

So as a bit of an example of what I'm talking about, because it might sound a little bit strange, I'll tell you about myself, some of the things about me that make me challenging. I get caught up on details very easily, the minutiae of tasks, and I lose track of the forest for the trees. I'm very sentimental. I dwell on feelings and the emotion in events. I'm self-involved a little bit. I can often overvalue my own opinions and insights at the cost of others.

And I love fun a little bit too much. I drink quite a bit, stay out late, and that's challenging. So I know that that affects my craft because my obsession for details and my dwelling on feelings stunts the momentum of my novel writing and it has a tendency to make it melodramatic as opposed to having a movement, and I pretty easily forget storytelling at the cost of things that seem special to me. And of course, this incorporates me overvaluing my feelings and insights. Me loving fun too much a little bit is obviously depriving actually writing time.

So now that I'm aware of these four shortcomings or facets of my personality, I know how to work around them and incorporate them into writing. It's really important to identify these things about ourselves, I think, before we can actually start addressing them and making them work with our creative writing life, if that's what we've decided to do. Okay, so before we move on, I thought we'd regroup.

So far, we've spoken about the importance of admitting our ignorance and using others, both friends and family, and also writers, of course, and wonderful resources and people like Brad Reed to identify our weak points and how they're important in growing. But before I finish up and pass on some of the latest lessons I've learned, I thought I'd provide a little bit of writing self-help. Here's a quote from Thomas Mann. A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. As you well know, again, writing is difficult not just in the ocean of techniques and experience and work and time that it demands, but psychologically, writing is really easily defeating. It's confronting.

It's challenging. It's engulfing for your life, waking and dream world, or at least it is for me. And yeah, writing is difficult.

So I think the more we can be reminded of how difficult it is and that there are kindred spirits that are going through similar struggles, the easier the whole journey is to bear. So on that note, sorry to bring the show back to myself again, case in point. I've been living the craft of being a human for 27 years now. I'm 27 years old. I've been studying and introspecting and thinking and developing myself that whole time, I'd say. And I'm pretty competent in wielding my persona.

I know what actions do what consequences, which social mood calls for which conduct, et cetera. But like a human being, I vary on a day-by-day basis, hourly basis, based on biochemistry, mood, things that happen in my life. And I'm a fluctuating being. I know that, you know, a flat mood means I'll have lackluster ideas. If I make a mistake or embarrass myself, I'll know that I'll look around and challenge everything in my life and everything that I've ever created. And I'll reevaluate it colored by that past embarrassing experience.

And, you know, it's very easy to look at what you've done and be embarrassed by it. But I've been doing this for long enough now. And by doing this, I mean living that I know that this is exactly the human condition. We vary. We're not constant. We're not robots.

We're quite sensitive beings. And I know that these moods are transient and they come and they go like anything else. They don't affect me and make me think that I'm a poor craftsman at being a human being. I know that I'm a successful, mature person. And I don't let those varying moods, which are inevitable and uncontrollable, I don't let them affect my broader understanding of myself. And this is, this totally applies to your craft as a writer, I'd say, or it certainly does with me.

Some days I'll, I'll wake up and I'll be in a dreamy reverie and ideas will be pouring in and through my fingertips and I'll be writing and typing prose and movement and something that I know will be gold and I'll be proud of for a long while. And there'll be other days, 95% of the time in which I'm flat, my ideas are generic and cliche and they'll be written out and adapted and they won't be sufficient for what I want. I've had to grapple with and come to terms with how writing and our craft varies just like a mood and just like our sense of self.

Balancing Inspiration and Discipline

But don't let those shitty days of flat writing influence your view. You've got to rise above that moment and see yourself in the grander scheme of things as a writer. That's your identity and that's going to vary. Before I go, I thought I'd pass on the most recent techniques and insights that I've stumbled on on my own creative writing. And hopefully they'll be as useful for you as they certainly have been for me to keep in mind.

So the first one is about a bit of like a pyramid of hierarchy of why we read and why we engage with art. So I was listening to a podcast recently with Yuval This is a difficult one to explain because there seems to be split camp, honestly, which is, you often hear the advice, writing is a job, you know, you write, write, write, and that's the right way to go. You sit down, even if you don't feel like writing, the act of writing will make you feel like writing, et cetera. There are also these other ideas associated with it, you know, writer's block. It's got a whole culture of productivity. The question is, do you sit and wait until inspiration slaps you in the face and jump up to write?

Or do you just write like a drone or an office worker, 9-to-5, like a mad person, and then look back at what you've done and just hope, you know, that you can draft it and redraft enough times before you whip it into something that you can be proud of and it will be valuable? So that seems to be the two opposite ends of the spectrum. Sit and wait for inspiration or pursue it unerringly at a typewriter.

Of course, I've been writing for just two years. I'm a child in the scheme of things and will always be. But my latest thinking on this is, of course, with most things, some sort of in-between, lukewarm, Goldilocks porridge situation. I've done that Spartan sit-down, write a thousand words every day regardless of your internal and external circumstance, and I've done it and I'm not proud of it. And the amount of editing that I'd have to do to put that onto a course where pride might arise from, that you may as well start again and I have. And I've also done the other route of sitting and waiting for inspiration to strike me, and obviously that doesn't work either.

So let me talk about the world that I'm existing in at the moment that's between those two extremes. So there's a Simon and Garfunkel song called Cecilia, and she is the muse or the patron saint of music and inspiration, and she's depicted as this whimsical nymph-like character that sort of frolics with the singer and produces these orgies of great songs and great music, and everyone's very pleased. And then he turns around to go get a glass of orange juice or something and comes back to bed, and Cecilia has escaped and she's jumped into bed with some other writer and is creating some hit over there.

So the idea is that creative expression is almost an expression of passion, and with these sorts of drives, be it carnal or hunger or thirst, you'd be familiar that if you're full and not hungry, food doesn't taste so good, and yet if you deprive yourself of food for some time, your nose will pick up the sense of foods from so far off like a bear or something, and by the time you actually eat, it's a sensational experience. Of course, that type of heightened sensory experience and sensitivity happens with a lot of pleasures, and I'm finding creative writing, creative expression, to follow a similar route. So what I've been doing is writing only when my ideas have had a chance to mature and I've actually grown lust for wanting to write. I'm not forcing writing when I've got nothing to say. In fact, when I've got writing time, what I'll do is go for a walk, live my life, and let the ideas either actively, I'll be thinking about plot, I'll be thinking about my story and letting ideas cling together and cycle around and reiterate and grow, or at a subconscious level, this tends to happen anyway, so I'll just continue with my life, I'll think about the book and let ideas mature and get myself sort of riled up in a type of, I guess, creative foreplay, tinkering with ideas and, of course, reading, and let ideas really mature away from the keyboard. In fact, everything that I'm proud of that I've ever created in creative writing, be it themes, motifs, characters, a plot twist, a plot point, none of that has happened at the keys of a keyboard.

It's all happened living my life and thinking about writing without that light, the light of the computer, the light of the phone, whatever it is. It's almost like a light that a moth is butting itself, showering scales everywhere. It compels you to write, it compels you to make progress, but the ideas that you're putting on paper, how deep are they? You know, I think it's a really good idea to spend non-writing time developing and maturing ideas such that by the chance you actually get back to your keyboard, they've matured and you're brimming and got yourself into a bit of a lather. The ideas that will come out will have no choice but to be from a deep, rich, and creative point because you can't hold them in any longer. You need to express, you need to create, and I think that's where beautiful writing comes from.

So my recommendation is use your non-writing time creatively, constructively, such that when you finally get a chance to write, it'll be some powerful stuff that you'll be proud of from the get-go instead of relying on your future redrafting self to polish a turd, I suppose. And perhaps it goes without saying that it's definitely worth giving a thought for the types of influences that might stop you from using your spare time, your daydreaming time, from thinking and letting your ideas distill. For a lot of people, I suppose it will be social media and their smartphones.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

So it's just definitely something to keep in mind, how much of your time, how much of your psychological spirit and spotlight deserves to be spent on those platforms. Well, listeners, that's it for this guest episode. I hope it was constructive. I know it was a bit of a smattering, a mishmash, a lucky dip of content. I hope it was bound together in a sort of package that made sense for you and was helpful. Thank you so much, Brad, for giving me the opportunity to come on the show.

I'm so thankful for both you, your guidance, and, of course, the Inside Creative Writing. Wonderful show. I'm very thankful that it's been an influence in my writing life for these years. And thanks very much for giving me your attention again, listeners. I'm very thankful. If you'd like to get in touch, you can find me on Twitter at PenSapiens and ask me any questions or just chat about writing and reach out because it's a tough life we've all decided on.

Very tough. So, yeah, give me a message. Anyway, thanks again, everybody, and have a great rest of the day. Bye.

All right. Thank you, thank you, thank you to Jesse Holley for doing such a great job as our first guest host here on the Inside Creative Writing podcast. You know, I was especially taken with his metaphor when talking about building up the desire to sit down and write. I've never really approached my writing time like that, but I think there's real value and real wisdom in that. And I actually look forward to experiencing with it a little bit in my own writing life to see if it works for me as well.

So it actually also reminds me of something one of my early writing teachers used to say, and I'm going to use that as our wise word for today. So Alan Heathcock, who's been a guest on our show before, was one of my early writing professors when I was at Boise State University. Now, one of the things that he says that sticks with me still to this day is, you're never not a writer.

So writers, in a way, are always writing. We tend to see the world differently than non-writers do. We notice the details of life. We recognize the unusual turn of phrase that a friend might use, and we see story possibilities in the world all around us.

In other words, we're watchers of the world, and we're constantly mining that world for elements of story that we can use in our writing. Now, this is why I said at the beginning of the show that I think Jesse is selling himself a little bit short by saying he's only been writing for two years. Now, he may have only been intentional about getting stories put down on the page for two years, but I can tell he's been interacting with and exploring the world as a writer does for a lot longer than that.

Now, another thing I like about this concept that we are never not writers is that it helps us remember how much more there is to writing than just putting words down on paper. When we're staring blankly off into space, kind of letting our stories play in our minds as if on a movie screen, we are, in a very real sense, writing. When we're exploring the world and we're meeting new people and having new experiences, we are, in a very real sense, writing. When we're in the shower and that bolt of inspiration comes that unlocks that difficult scene problem that we've been plotting, we are, in a very real sense, writing.

Now, there's something beautiful about that concept, I think, but there's also something a little bit dangerous because it can result in a sort of pernicious procrastination too. Ultimately, it does take sitting down at a keyboard and putting one word after another on the page, but don't discount the ways in which you are a writer in all the other aspects of your life as well. Okay, so this week's weekly challenge is to do something you've never done before or go somewhere you've never been before.

So this week is all about getting out of your comfort zone and kind of waking yourself up to an aspect of the world that you've never experienced before. This, I think, is part of what it means to be a writer. And I don't necessarily mean finally doing something you've always wanted to do or finally going somewhere you've always wanted to go. I actually want you to scare yourself a little bit this week. I want you to do something that you never thought you'd do or that may be entirely out of character for you.

So when I give this challenge and make you a better writer of those things in your own world. So that's going to wrap it up for us this week. If you're enjoying the podcast, I'd love it if you'd tweet about it or mention it to some of your writer friends, and maybe even leave us a review over on iTunes or whatever app you use to listen to podcasts. Also, please consider joining the Patreon team. If you're interested in submitting a guest segment to the show like Jessie did, just head over to bradreedwrites. com and you'll find everything you need to know about how to do that over there.

So I'd love to get your voice on the air and share your insights and discoveries with our writing community like Jessie got to do today. So until next week, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do and I hope you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing podcast. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.