-: Especially early in the career for young people,
read everything.
Read the classics.
Read the old dead white European guys, yes,
'cause they're good.
Read them.
Then read other culture, the literature of other cultures.
Read the newspaper.
See the difference between how someone writes a news report
and see how someone writes a personal essay.
Hear the various voices of every writer
you can get your hands on
because that's how you'll know what you want.
Just the fact that there's a student who says,
"I love to write.
"I love to read and I would like to be a better writer,"
come into my classroom, absolutely,
and I will teach you to be a better writer.
There are all kinds of things
that yes of course can be taught.
Does that mean you're gonna be the next Charles Dickens
or Stephen King?
Maybe, who knows?
But everyone who writes can be taught
to be more precise, to be more careful,
to think about what they've put down,
to think about the beauty of words,
the complexity of words,
each choice that you make when you craft a sentence
changes the story that you're going to tell.
And sometimes it's just a matter of pointing out
to a student, "Look what you've written here."
To be adept at language
is not only a marketable skill,
it's becoming scarce.
It's really more and more in demand,
more and more important.
I've seen my students excel in marketing and PR,
as I said speech writing,
editing, working in publishing,
working for magazines, online,
when you think about how much is dependent on language,
how many careers are dependent on language,
and writing fiction is something that you can do
as well as teach or edit
or write speeches for someone else.