Ta-Nehisi Coates on Finding Creative Breakthroughs in Writing
Coates’ timeless advice on the necessity of perseverance, and why more people don’t write
“I always consider the entire process about failure, and I think that’s the reason why more people don’t write.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
If you were asked to give one piece of advice to an aspiring writer — someone who wants to make a living as a writer — what would you tell them?
A lot of the writing I do here on Medium is about gathering all the creative, inspiring, educational, and hard-to-hear-but-important advice about the writing process.
And one piece of advice that keeps coming up, over and over again, whether it’s a poet, a novelist, or a science journalist is this: perseverance.
While the word ‘perseverance’ might not actually come up, the advice that writers I admire give is shot through with a basic idea: if you want to be a writer, you have to keep at it, especially in those moments when it’s hardest.
The science writer Rachel Carson (1907–1964), whose powerful book Silent Spring energized the environmental movement in the 1960s, says it like this:
“Given the initial talent … writing is largely a matter of application and hard work, of writing and rewriting endlessly, until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me, that usually means many, many revisions.”
And the novelist Jeanette Winterson, whose recent memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? offers a treasure-trove of advice for would-be writers, puts a writer’s perseverance like this:
“There are stories that you can write, and there are stories that you can’t write. And, in the end, you write the ones that you can, and that allows you to bear the ones that you can’t. There’s nothing, I think, particularly upsetting about that — it’s simply a strategy of survival”
For Winterson, the critical point to fuel perseverance is to have the self-awareness to know when to move on to the next thing. At least that’s how I take it.
For Ta-Nehisi Coates, a staff writer for the Atlantic, and author of many groundbreaking essays and books on race in America, the first advice he gives to new writers is to persevere.
Becoming a writer, he says, especially if you want to make a career of writing for magazines, is insanely difficult, and the competition is stiff. And there will be many times when you don’t think you can go on. How should you deal with those inevitable moments of pressure, stress, and self-doubt in the writing process?
“I was banging my head against the wall”
In an interview with the Atlantic (see below) about ‘breakthroughs’ in the writing process, Coates says, “[the writing process is] not really that mystical, it’s like repeated practice over and over and over again, and then suddenly you become something that you had no idea you could really be…or you quit the field and say, oh ‘I suck,’ I mean that could happen too.”
But the point is, says Coates, you need to put the pressure on yourself to even get to that point. That point where you have a writing breakthrough. Then you can make that decision to continue pursuing a writing career:
“When I came to the Atlantic it was a very frustrating period because I knew what kind of writer I wanted to be [but] I was not becoming that writer.”
In the interview, Coates remembers his first, miserable summer writing for the Atlantic. He was asked to write an 8,000-word article. He was on unemployment. He gained 30 pounds just from the stress of wondering whether he could do it. He really didn’t think he could, the words just wouldn't come out. But he had to try:
“I was looking for a breakthrough and I was not finding breakthroughs at all. I was banging my head against the wall and nothing was coming out.”
Then, finally, it happened. He got the piece done (not the masterpiece he envisioned in his head, but something that was acceptable). From this experience, he concludes:
“Breakthroughs come from putting an inordinate amount of pressure on yourself, seeing what you can take and hoping you can grow some new muscles.”
This reminded me of Isabele Allende’s succinct advice to writers:
“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about a similar process of how to reach a breakthrough, but he describes it as an act of courage:
“I believe that writing is an act of courage, it’s almost an act of physical courage.”
Maybe the deepest challenge, and the biggest threat to persevering as a writer, says Coates, is that the final piece you imagine in your head very rarely, if ever, makes it onto the page.
Coates uses the metaphor of composing music: you imagine this beautiful music in your head, but there is no direct channel from your brain to the page. There is only writing. So as a writer, you “try to go from really bad, to okay, to acceptable.” At best, you might get 70% of that original music onto the page. It’s depressing, Coates says, and that’s why the process is so discouraging for new writers.
Successful writers learn to accept this tragedy like the law of physics: as simply the nature of creative breakthroughs. Or as Coates puts it, “the entire process is about failure, and it’s very depressing in that way.”
This might not be the kind of inspirational advice that motivates you to write, but in my experience, Coates’ advice helps me get into the right mindset to persevere through the inevitable challenges of getting words on paper that aren’t bad.
Or as the writer and philosopher Susan Sontag (1933-2004) once put it in a journal entry dated ‘8/30/64’:
“Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.”
