‘Lately, All My Stories Fall Short.’

Hi Yanyi. I’m at a standstill where writing fiction is concerned. I’ve been writing consistently for a few years and I’ve been lucky to have a writing community to support me and give me feedback. Lately, every time I finish a story, I feel like I’m aware of how the story falls short and my limitations as a writer. I’ve been struggling to improve my understanding of my craft and how to make it better. I’m also a little frustrated at how long it takes me to finish a story. Any advice?

Karachi

Dear ___,

I so, so sympathize with how long it takes to write, and to learn how to write. In your letter, you share that you’ve done the legwork to build a writing life with both a routine and a community, which is great. Perhaps you have completed and even published some stories already.

Before I go any further, I have to make some conjectures from your letter, as you don’t say how your work is falling short. Where is the compass, exactly? The craft advice you’re reading and the published work you’re reading? Or some intuitive, inchoate sense within you that the stories just don’t work? I will try my best to answer your question with both of these separate possibilities, but just a heads up that I’ll lean in the direction of the latter.

Your frustration with your latest work sounds like peering into a bricked-up window. No matter how much you can visualize the image of the parlor beyond, you don’t yet have the tools to chip that wall away. That frustration, however, is also an indicator of a good thing: you’ve outgrown the stories you’ve been writing. You’ve read enough fiction to recognize what’s good, but you can’t bridge the gap between what you want and what you can do.

If you’re feeling that your work is inadequate because it doesn’t seem to match what’s out there right now, remember that craft is a retroactive amalgamation of other writers’ processes and creations. It reflects what’s past, not what’s yet to come. You are the one who tries for what’s coming. Attempting the unknown is how an artist grows.

While I strongly believe that every person’s writing journey is different, I do believe we all have our own stages in learning to write—stages I differentiate by symptoms and feelings more than career markers. These stages aren’t linear. They cycle in and out and I often experience them all at once. And each of these learning stages has a catch: you must confront one of your flaws to grow, a flaw that only you can discover. You need your own honest judgment to do that.

Experience has given me an advantage not because I’m innately better at what I do, but because I’ve gone through this dance already. I know what to expect from myself, including the tendencies I have to gum up my own process.

My flaw as a beginner is that I don’t finish things. At first, this is good, because finishing is not the point: I shush my internal critics enough to fully experiment, discover, and fail. I delight myself when I make something I do like. It’s safer not to finish things—unfinished work can’t be judged. It’s not for public consumption. It’s a kind of protection. Eventually, though, I’m sitting on a big pile of beginnings with no endings. Eventually, growth means I have to complete the work I started.

Then there’s the intermediate stage, a phase that’s for me most beset by blocks and frustration. Here, I’ve usually found one way of writing that I’m very good at. It’s a comfortable place, but narrow. I mistake that circumscribed style as the whole of my potential.

That is, I believe I’m good, but only in one way. Perhaps a workshop instructor said a kind thing once, or only certain pieces I write are getting accepted. It’s harder to learn at this time because your work is more public. Even if it’s just within a private writing group, you start to be “known” for something—and it feels good to have that niche!

Yet, the more I write in only one way, the less I make of it, in all senses of the phrase. I will labor over one poem over the span of six months or avoid writing until inspiration strikes. When I force myself to write, I repeat myself with the same images, rhythms, or epiphanies, and they begin to lose their color. It doesn’t matter if they are called good or even genius. Eventually I lose interest in my own work. Inspiration strikes fewer and further between.

“What’s missing in me?” is the unconscious question I’m asking when I spring for yet another how-to guide, as though I haven’t read most of them already. I treat my writing like I treat myself—something to be formed into the perfect specimen.

At a certain point, you have to flip the script from “What’s missing in me?” to “What I am I missing from writing?” To be clear, this is not about what’s missing in your writing. You can’t improve your writing unless it’s genuinely moving—you are the compass for that. Writing is experienced and, in order to grow, you must treat it as your experience.

Think back to why you first started writing. Was there a feeling you got from books that changed your life? Where did your love of writing first come from? Does it still hold up, or have things changed? Why or why not?

Feeling limited isn’t necessarily about the stories you’re writing right now—it can be coming from how you’re limiting yourself from enjoying your own writing. In your attempts to improve, your critical faculties might be going full-blast, and they’re telling you not to go here or there; they’re instructing you to follow this or that. At a certain point, you’re boxed into the tiny overlap of a hundred other writers’ Venn diagrams.

If you are not feeling discovery, joy, or experiment in your work, if you aren’t giving yourself a reason not only to begin but also to continue, your work will stagnate. It will reach for foregone conclusions which, no matter how good they are the first time, become clichés by the fifth.

Practically speaking, there’s a lot you can do. The key thing to remember is that you’re not tired of writing—you’re tired of some structural aspect of your writing. Perhaps it’s the style of your narrators across stories, which seem to flow together into one blob. Perhaps your plots have a formulaic stench to them, ending with epiphanies, morals, or twists you’re tired of dishing out. Or perhaps you’re feeling bogged down by the requirements of stories themselves: having to create settings, characters, and plots when you want to reach some pinnacle of experience earlier.

Do an honest inventory of your work up until this point and find out what you keep repeating to yourself. It may well be that your previous work was exactly what you once aimed for. But times have changed, and so have you. I’m not saying that you have to throw away everything you’ve accomplished up until now, but it’s helped me to admit when it’s time to break things down and begin again.

Ask yourself where in your writing you feel like an expert and where you clutch with the tightest grip and try the opposite. I’ve found prompts to be useful for this, so here are a few.

If you’re a literary writer, write a sci-fi mystery. If you’re verbose, try a story in under a thousand words. A sparse poet? Give a go to a sixty-line poem in one continuous sentence. An oblique, abstract writer? Rewrite one of your pieces in the simplest, most direct language you can muster—no hiding! A fan of quiet, ambiguous endings? End a story with an outrageous, definitive outcome you would never, in your old practice, dare to write. Immersed in the serious and intellectual? I dare you to write a bubbly, funny children’s story.

All you need to remember is that your writing can be anything. Pay attention more to all that isn’t language, and soon you’ll find these prompts and nudges everywhere. Give yourself the luxury of rabbit holes and looking glasses, dive deep into your alternate lives and careers. Whatever you do, free yourself from any singular idea of art. Let yourself open from within. Be excited for what’s to come through.