Anna Staniszewski

It’s time for another installment of the “Letter to Myself” series in which authors write letters to their younger writer selves giving advice, encouragement, or words of warning. I have to say that as I’ve been collecting these letters, it’s been fascinating to see how different everyone’s publishing journeys have been. I’m excited to keep sharing them with you guys! Today’s letter comes from young adult author Brian Yansky.

TO MY YOUNGER WRITER SELF:

Like anyone looking back there are a lot of things I’d like to say to my younger self about writing and everything else. Drink more water, drink less alcohol, don’t waste so much time, write more and talk less about writing etc.  but I’ll try to focus.

Dear Younger Writer Self,

SIT UP STRAIGHT.

It is a well-known fact that writers don’t pay attention to posture. We get too involved in our stories.  This will cause various problems later. So SIT UP STAIGHT and Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention. To everything.

Also, BE MORE YOU.

I could have saved a lot of time if I could say that to my younger self and if my younger self could actually hear it though there’s a good chance my younger self would tell me to F-off. “I am being me,” he would likely say. Have said? (This talking to a younger self is kind of like time traveling, and time traveling’s biggest problem, according to Douglas Adams, is the difficulties it causes in the use of grammar).

Listen, younger self, here’s what I mean. You are trying to write literature with a capital L, serious literature. I mean in the very beginning you’re posing a lot. You’re writing about Spain and drinking wine from goatskins and wounded heroes who say things like, “That’s a damn terrible thing. War is a damn terrible thing.” In short, you’re writing about things you don’t know anything about in a way that isn’t you. Don’t do that.

AND SIT UP STRAIGHT.

But once you get beyond this posing, you’ll still be writing “serious” because you think that serious means literature with a capital L. So you’ll write a couple of novels and several short stories that attempt to tackle big issues and themes in a serious way. These will be realistic novels because, again, you think realism serious capital L literature is serious. All of these mistaken ideas will slow you down because you aren’t writing in a way that is YOU. Not really. BE MORE YOU.

You’ll find that while you love to read all kinds of writing what really gets you going, as a writer, is seriously funny literature with a dark edge to it. This writing will not be realistic. It will be speculative and a bit, let’s admit it, strange, but once you start writing this way you will feel at home and you will feel like this is the real Writer YOU-finally. If you had admitted all of this earlier, you would have written better sooner.

So that’s my advice: BE MORE YOU and SIT UP STRAIGHT.

Brian Yanksy lives in Austin, Texas. His latest novel, ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES, will be published by Candlewick in October. He sits up straight when he writes.