There’s Rilke and then there’s all the horses’ asses with their dubious advice. I think you know by now whom I most resemble, so let’s begin.

The title of your e-mail to me this week, “Just a Little Nudge,” was alarming. What forgotten deadline for a scholarship letter had passed? What law school was impatiently awaiting my reference for you?

I was relieved to read that you thought you needed the nudge:

I've been dancing around the idea of trying to write [a book] for the last few years; I was noticeably unprepared for the task in your class, but I honed my schedule and workload [and have spent time thinking about] aesthetics, form, etc. I've got (what I consider to be) a great idea, I've built my outline, and I've got a hundred or so pages of notes…. But here I am…constantly unhappy with what I hear when I read back my work. Am I just not ready yet? Should I look to extend my education and hope that even more coursework will get me there? How is it that you write?

Oh, that. I’m glad you didn’t ask about something slightly more difficult, like why the neutral B-meson shows a slight predilection for matter instead of anti-matter, forcing our universe’s hand to a happy outcome on the matter of being and nothingness.

Writing is easy, actually. Start with the fetishistic:

Never trust your laptop, back up your files often, but if it’s served you well during years of constant heavy work, pat its case lightly each time you get up from your labors and say, “Good dog.”

Buy several multi-packs of Pilot EasyTouch medium blue ballpoint pens. Best to buy all you can lay hands on, because there is no adequate replacement if the line is discontinued. Leave good spiral notebooks all over the house, but only one for each project. Be sure the covers are durable, that there are enough sheets, the paper of sufficient weight, and spacing between lines generous. A Bullet Space Pen in a pocket, always. A simple small digital recorder in a shirt pocket for car trips or during walks. Also a small Levenger leather notebook—the kind with the replaceable pads and miniaturized pen that clasps the notebook shut—in a back pocket. Plan for times when you’ll have no pockets: Swimming, pajama parties, CAT Scans, lovemaking. What will you do with your writing tools then?

Next, use them to get everything down without regard to quality or usefulness. Sometimes that will mean stepping out of the shower, where so much thinking gets done, and dripping on the cat in order to catch an idea before it runs down the drain. Admire the mythic ruthlessness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who it’s said turned his family’s car around on the way to vacation and drove straight home to write something down. Then he sold the car to pay for time to develop the idea, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Collect all notes from what my wife fondly calls the insanity journals and enter them into a Word document in emotional sequence, which is often not chronological. Begin to build each pointillist jot, in no particular order and regardless of difficulty, until you see a good reason not to continue with one. Delete the unfit. Sort and rearrange the sequence, listening for the chorale of sense. Have faith. Often it won’t be coherent until nearly the end. Cut redundancies. Continue to revise. Again. Again. And again. Yet again. A 500-word blog post, if it hopes to stay news, might need 4,000 words at the start, and days of distillation. Do not share this with my editor; he’d likely feel a moral imperative to increase my pay.

There are so many more aspects to the writing that can be seen, one-by-one or together like a nest of pickup sticks, only after long practice. We must begin again, each visitation bringing new appreciation of the task. Image, for instance, isn’t just visual, it’s the idea-feeling that shortcircuits time and connects self to the world. The prose informs itself through variety, music, and rhythm. Sensitive performance also suggests the right words, and therefore tone and meaning, in the same way that the limerick imposes limits and challenges that lead to it being most itself. Condense to reduce clutter, to elevate intention, and to increase intensity.

When you begin to hear what the piece wants to say, see if you still believe it. If you’re working well, you’ll be surprised to find you hadn’t thought of the thing you most believe. Pause now to read the chapter about disemboweled horses and emotional authenticity in Death in the Afternoon.

Listen to the metaphors lying half-hidden in your work. What potential for poetic cohesion do they contain? Those that are seemingly discordant are especially useful. Manipulate them; try minor keys and variations. Build in redundancy and echoes so the reader experiences mild déjà vu, another connection. Endings that emerge from this can be inevitable, surprising, rounded and complete. Remember that Tolstoy says he was stunned when Anna threw herself under the train at the end of his masterwork, even though he'd put her on the train when someone was crushed under its wheels in Chapter One.

Scuff the prose to return a little of its roughness and asymmetry, the way Japanese architects use an awkwardly-shaped log somewhere in the design of a milled-timber frame building. This pays a debt to the wildness from which the structure emerges.

Look for chances to simplify without losing anything. “Simplicity is the final achievement,” Chopin says. “After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” (Leonardo: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Longfellow: “In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.”)

A special note on humor: Most writers are not serious enough to be comic. It’s often the thing that comes after what I had thought was the final thing, a last reorientation of the crystalline structure, as if a magnet had touched it.

Is there some other craft you could aspire to? Because this one is like stacking marbles.

The good news about writing is that it is the process that makes it. Yes, you must try to become generous, humane, interested, informed, brave, and disciplined. But in the end you don’t have to be the person who writes solid prose. You just have to be the person who chooses to engage fully in the process of writing it. It’s like cutting firewood: I don’t have to worry about the magic of heat and light that will result. All I have to do is be prepared to swing the maul until the job is done. It’s hard, often frustrating work, and it’ll wear you out. But there’s a satisfaction in finding one’s way, by process, that makes me think of Henry Ford’s, “Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.”

The bad news about writing is also that process makes it. If you’re honest with yourself you’ll have the humility to defer full credit. Sure, you were there at the end; you arrived arm-in-arm with process. But process is always the life of the party and has lots of dance partners.

Writing is a need like the body’s need to burn energy before it can be at peace. Children kick and flop before sleep, the middle-aged engage in serial affairs and foreclosures, the dying claw the sheets. Are you sure you feel that awful need?