In my favorite creative writing class, we were made to practice collecting writing advice and to put it into the margins, covers, pages of our notebooks. It’s a habit I’ve never quite kicked. Jonathan Franzen came to visit our campus tonight. Overall I was not impressed by his ability to read straight from a piece of paper, digressing every so often to claim that he hadn’t looked at this particular talk since he’d written it over a year ago. Thanks for coming to our campus prepared, pal. I hope your commencement speech gives more confidence that you gave it some thought than tonight’s talk did. 

Although I wasn’t impressed by Jonathan Franzen at all, I will not be so silly as to say that I didn’t get anything out of his talk (or, what I think could have been much more enjoyable had I read it as an essay, like A Room of One’s Own). So here I give you, the writing advice I managed to scrounge up from his poorly-read-verbatim-essay:

• fiction is a vehicle of self-investigation
• you must love your characters, but you must be hard on them
• reading and writing fiction are forms of active social engagement - the making of friends and enemies
• literature is not about being nice
• there is a difference between your idea in the abstract and the work on the page: conceivable human behavior
• the reason that a character cannot do something is because you cannot do it
• the novel ought to be autobiographical - a reflection of your personal struggle to understand the world
• fiction is a dream that has meaning; it gives meaning to dreams
• the more autobiographical a work, the less it resembles the superficial details of a writer’s life
• literature cannot be a performance - it must entail risk, the unknown, darkness, surmounting resistance 
• a truism exists that each person has within him/her one novel: once you’ve written that one novel you must become someone different to write your next one
• all loyalties, familial and otherwise, are meaningless until they are challenged: make the people in your life you wish to write about rise to the occasion of being written about
• novels are about people
• the novel exists on a spectrum, with the indifference to human reality at one extreme and moralistic simplicity at the other; the things that we like tend to fall around the middle

and apparently you can watch the whole thing on youtube! yay?