How is it 'Self-help' When Someone Else is Telling You How to Do it?

Can you learn any other way?

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash

I stopped reading self-help books more than 30 years ago, when we left the city and moved to an island so remote the nearest McDonalds was a ferry ride and 60 miles away. We faced a beautiful bay and behind us was a mini forest of scented pines. From the moment I landed there the idea of needing any kind of help to live my life felt out of place. I was content. So content I didn’t try to publish anything for 15 entire years.

Oh, I was writing, and I have two unfinished novels to prove it. One is a coming-of-age novel with parts I can still laugh out loud at, and the other is a historical novel about a copper strike that nearly broke the men who lived it. I know for a fact that neither one of them will ever be finished but I love too many parts of each of them to just throw them out. And they are proof that I didn’t quit writing. That feels important, now that I can admit I spent 15 years away from the publishing world.

But then, 15 years in, I figured out how to blog and that became my new thing. I was tiptoeing back into writing but I still felt no need to look outside myself for rules to follow or insight to seek. Blogging, I found, didn’t need it.

A blog in those early days was strictly a first-person diary. Something anyone could do in public, with the idea that someone else might chance upon it and read it. They might in turn tell someone else about it and you might get a small following. Enough to keep you going. And that’s what I did.

My blog was called “Cabin and Camp”. I lived in a cabin on an island and it seemed unique enough to try and describe what that meant—what it felt like to be that remote after living in the city or so long, why it was okay to make do without a dishwasher or a clothes dryer or a second car, how the forest and the water and the incredibly dark skies made it more than enough.

But it lacked something. It lacked me. I was describing life on that remote island without any introspection, without any feeling coming from an inhabitant, no deep thoughts about my own growth as I became that person so far removed from the novice I’d been when I’d arrived so many years before.

What happened is I became bored with what I had to offer. I thought I’d said every clever, funny thing about living there but I’d really only touched the surface. Once the newness wore off I couldn’t see the uniqueness anymore. And other people were doing it better. So I quit that, too.

Still, I wanted to write. And more important, I wanted to be read.

I could have turned to the many dozens of self-help books available even then, but I still didn’t feel I needed that kind of help. (And isn’t ‘self-help’ an oxymoron when the authors of those books are telling me—the self—how to do it according to them?)

I had been there many years before, when I first had thoughts of becoming a writer but the very thought was too scary to act upon. Instead, I spent years reading books on how to do it. I read so many they began to contradict each other.

Don’t think I didn’t notice. I did. And the whole thing confused me even more.

Write what you know. Write about things you know nothing about but want to. You don’t have to know everything about it. You do have to know everything about it. For God’s sake, learn grammar! Learn just enough grammar to cleverly abuse it. Write fast. Take your time. Don’t write for your audience. Your audience is everything. Never write a passive sentence. An entire piece with active sentences makes it jittery. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It does have to be perfect.

Don’t give up…

And there they all agree: Don’t give up. No matter how obvious it might be that writing might not be for you, you are never allowed to give up. Because if you do, they’ll be out of business.

So how do you learn to be a writer? First you have to accept that you really want to be a writer. Then you have to decide you really want to put the work into it. Because it is work. And finally, you have to be willing to get comfortable with rejection. It comes with the territory. Not everyone is going to appreciate what you’re trying to do, no matter how much you have to sweat doing it.

Your writing has to grow into the kind of art people will want to read, not once but often. That takes time. It takes talent. It takes hard work. So be prepared. No self-help book can help you with any of that. But reading other writers will. Find your inspiration in those wicked good writers who have been there before you and can, by example, show you some dead ends to avoid, some hazards to bypass, some roads leading to the answers you were hoping to find.

Immerse yourself in the writing. Writers write. It’s who we are. It’s all we do. We write. In the process we learn how writing works for us, we learn what makes us unique. Everything else is a byproduct.

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