Hope and Action: A Book Review of Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools
“If you want to write, here’s a secret: the writer’s struggle is…a con game, a cognitive distortion, a self-fulfilling prophecy.” – Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools
A monument to the Camino de Santiago in Mansilla de las Mulas, Spain.
In early 2019 I was alarmed by how desperate I felt.
My larger world was steering into a skid of alienation, despair, and hatred, my family seemed eager to go on that ride, and I felt myself careening right off the cliff with them. Two things magnified my scrabbling urge to escape.
The first was the casual hopelessness which greased the common asphalt. I perceived an ironic unity of vision in my society on this matter and this matter only: we all indulged the assumption that problems were insoluble except through destruction. Shouting and shaking fists and wishing ill in every direction was the best any of us could expect from being trapped in our lives as well as stuck with one another. I felt grieved by the thought that this might be (and remains today) the best that most of us wanted. I mourned our capitulation to a nightmare. Were we not a nation of dreamers?
The second factor which poked a tack in my butt, and the one more responsible for goading me to clamber out the window of the out-of-control vehicle, was the fragile sense of agency I had discovered just two years earlier. My awareness of hope, of positive choices in life, was still in its infancy. After a happy layoff from a decade-long job, I had embarked on a journey of joy, curiosity, and openness to life. I wasn’t ready in 2019 for that to be over. So I got out of the dysfunctional accord and took flight to Spain, to walk.
As I reflect on Writing Tools, by Roy Peter Clark, parallels between my story and the way he speaks about the craft of writing tug at my sleeves like unruly children who have not yet learned the bad ways society wants them to behave. Centrally, the author wants to remedy the paralyzing (and counterproductive) attitudes our world has about writing.
He feels that people treat writing both with too much reverence and also too lightly, and that this produces decay not just in writing quality but in the quality of the systems and society which depend upon good written communication.
Clark has no patience with the abuse of writing as a meritocratic wand which casts spells of division. Putting it in my own words, I think he is dismissing the conventional wisdom that writing is a Potter-esque rune carved into the foreheads of a select few by stingy gods or mischievous demons who have decided that some people are special…but not you. On the contrary, says Clark: “If you feel left behind, this book invites you to imagine the act of writing less as a special talent and more as a purposeful craft.”
Clark also mourns how low the bar for writing has sunk. There is irony here, in light of the hedge of privilege which surrounds the major points of entry for a writer into the public eye.* But he quickly asserts that this decay in quality doesn’t have to exist, either.
He then unveils, for any reader who yearns to put their dreams to paper or to put them down better, one short, sweet, practical tool after another for fulfilling that wish. After the introduction the invitation is always beneath the surface. “Take one more step,” he seems to whisper. “Make your journey of discovery and connection happen. You can do this.”
In 2019, in defiance of my culture of doom, I embarked on an exodus which landed me in Spain on the Camino de Santiago. It is a 500-mile long ancient pilgrimage route. In most cases people walk that path. I did, too. Some say the route is a ley-line. People infuse it with Christian, pagan, historical, and recreational meanings. Whatever is the provenance of the healing force, and whatever is the positive intent which steers a person there, I found redemption and fresh love for living tracing that geographical, cultural, and communal thread.
Writing Tools is infected by a similar happy contagion. The book almost jumped up and down in my hands, so eager the pages were to empower me to create and to help that creation stride confidently on its way.
Clark offers fifty-five tools to help people traverse the terrain of written self-expression. This abundance of riches can be paralyzing in its own way, so Clark also cautions readers not to try to wield every tool at once. As a Camino pilgrim might say, “Poco a poco.” Being myself a recovering perfectionist/completionist, I appreciate that reminder.
The tools are divided into five sections. These generally progress from close-in on the page to the big picture (the fifth section was interesting, but it also felt redundant at times; it shows that it was tacked on for the tenth anniversary edition). One might say that the book progresses from basic to advanced advice, but I have been writing all my life and I encountered useful surprises in every section.
Like most books of its kind, Writing Tools offers examples from existing good writing, which on top of illustrating the points builds for the reader a list of other authors to learn from. And there are helpful prompts at the end of each tool; homework assignments for digging in.
In the first part, Clark offers tips on the smallest unit of composition, the sentence. This is powerful advice and the sort of thing that is easy to take for granted, until Clark demonstrates that things like subject-verb placement and punctuation contain enormous power when wielded well. The second part zooms out a bit, exploring matters like how to select the best details and how to arrange narrative information in a compelling manner. In parts three and four, Clark offers strategies for how to shape a piece of writing (outlines, deciding what form/s to use, pacing, and so on), then for how to nurture the writing habit. Speaking again as a long-term writer, I got the most juice out of these parts of the book. Sculpting the big picture and cultivating a writing routine have always been my biggest challenges, so I hope to employ some of Clark’s advice.
Over and over, Writing Tools stokes a fire of inspiration inside the reader who yet shelters, somewhere in a dark corner of their imagination, that precious spark of creative longing.
And as the book demonstrates how to build that spark into a fire, it dares the reader to imagine what they could create when fueled and illuminated by that flame.
While walking the Camino de Santiago, I ran into doubt and discouragement but I also enjoyed constant happy collisions with hope and constructive motivation. The journey freed my body and my spirit from society’s Radiohead-esque cycle of fatal pile-ups and macabre resurrections (just to speed into the next crash). People on the Camino waved and said hi. Offered tissues and athletic tape. Lent phones to the phoneless. Invited strangers to join them for dinner. Made one another dinner. Gave free nursing advice. The most-repeated phrases were exhortations: “Buen Camino!”, “Ultreia et suseia!”, “Poco a poco!” (Have a great walk; onward and upward; little by little).
With both the Camino and Writing Tools, I feasted on hope. I was guided by modest wisdom, usually embodied in simple acts: slow down, change your socks, eat a full meal; here’s where you put the action verb to greatest effect, show don’t tell (advice that never gets old), speak to your audience instead of over them.
So it is that Clark shows the reader how to cross the proverbial mountain range, to persevere through the snow and driving rain and beating winds and clutching mud of the technicalities of writing, to stand up straight under the weight of a twenty-pound backpack full of inner doubts and external dismissals of one’s project, and even to limp when necessary, all until one reaches the destination. I learned to believe and act on that belief on the Camino, and readers of Writing Tools may similarly learn to actively wield their creative power and potential.
The book is not comprehensive, but it is specific and motivating. If you feel down about your writing, or if you buried that dream long ago (but some part of you has never sat well with the decision), then pick this book up. Let it be your guide. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Don’t let you get you down. You can do it. Clark and I believe in you. Buen camino.
*It would not have been suited to this book’s purposes, but an investigation of how these two facts correlate—the gatekeeping of “good” writing and the simultaneous degeneration of writing in general—could have been interesting. I theorize that bad writing is sometimes a matter of what Clark calls “a self-fulfilling prophecy”—the belief that good writing is out of reach for someone like me, which leads to self-limitation and/or settling for less—sometimes a matter of societally-fulfilled prophecy—the aforementioned gatekeeping as well as other structural methods, intended or accidental, by which some are deprived of opportunities to improve—and finally, bad writing is sometimes a form of rebellion against the hegemony. But whatever the diagnosis, I agree with Clark that bad writing is ultimately one ingredient in a recipe of disaster for interpersonal communication and society in general.