Colum McCann on Facing the Terror of the Blank Page
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, George Saunders, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.
Good stories find a way to keep telling themselves, says the novelist Colum McCann, even after the original teller is long gone. In our conversation for this series, he discussed Wendell Berry’s poem “A Meeting,” exploring the way the narrator’s vivid dream of a dead friend serves as a metaphor for the role literature plays in culture. We discussed how the poem helped him cope with loss, the immortality of the human voice, and how a writer’s best reader is not a confidant, but a stranger—yourself, 20 years later.
It would be a disservice to call McCann’s latest, Letters to a Young Writer, a book of writing advice. But that’s exactly, unabashedly, what it is. In a sequence of short directives delivered in “how-to” second person—do this, not that—McCann guides the young writer through topics from inspiration to publication, and everything in between. There are chapters on nuts-and-bolts fundamentals like character and structure and rhythm, as well as professional concerns like finding an agent, but the offerings vary extensively in length and tone. One presents a tip to stay motivated: During each writing session, imagine being smacked by a bus with your novel still unfinished. Another is titled, simply, “Don’t Be a Dick.”
How does McCann manage to be so prescriptive without sounding pedantic? Maybe it’s because he embraces his own subjectivity, acknowledging the limits of what he can tell.. The book begins with a quote from the poet Rilke, whose teacher-student correspondence helped inspire this volume: “Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.” It’s that posture of humility that allows McCann to counsel without restraint, and frees him to write a book as poetic, strange, surprising, and ultimately helpful as this one.
