Advice from the Masters

"The reason advice is free is because it's worthless" - Michael Caine.


When I was just realising that writing was a career that I wanted to pursue, I decided to send letters to some writers that I admired for helpful tips and advice. Paul Haggis, the writer of feature films Crash and Million Dollar Baby, gave me two pieces of advice:


1) Write about questions that you can't answer and,
2) Write about things that make you angry.


At first, the advice seemed too specific. I thought that to write about things that made me angry was too much of a narrow field. I thought that unanswerable questions were impossible to make a story out of because most stories are resolved by answering the previously unanswerable question; if I couldn't answer the question posed in my own story, then who could?


But then I began to realise what both pieces of advice really meant. Things that make us angry engage us. As a writer, you can become enveloped in the story because you are writing about something that you really care about. It is not preachy to write about injustice. A man I didn't know threatened to kill me on the street today - there are some things that happen on a day-to-day basis that everyone can relate to and that (almost) everyone will create a collective consensus over.


Then, during my time at University, I read the complete letters of John Keats and Keats mentions a concept that he terms "negative capability". That is, the ability to write from a place of uncertainty. It describes how the artist can create something without the relevant knowledge of the subject that one would think necessary to do so. It was then that I understood Mr Haggis' first suggestion to me. The answer is never the important part of the story. Ever. The search for the answer is the part that engages an audience because it is that which everybody can relate to. In other words, it is not the artist's job to teach, but to communicate and to connect.


That's all for today, reader. Thank you for trawling through my (ironically) quite preachy writing yet again,


Much love to you,
Mike.xx