Writing Advice from My Teachers

My new book, Guardians & Saints, is a collection of stories about care as a process of give-and-take that’s shot through with ambivalence. My characters are students and teachers, doctors and patients, parents and children. They are preoccupied with what it means to care for others, and be cared for, through unavoidable separations—growing up, leaving home, graduating, dying. 

All these give-and-takers love to give advice. When separations loom, I’ve noticed, people are often gripped by the impulse to advise. In its worst, most compulsive and alienating form, advice-giving denies the reality of separation. For the advice-giver, it’s a way to pretend to keep a connection while losing it—and this self-serving kind of advice is notoriously irritating to the person so advised. 

But there is also good advice, useful advice—and since Guardians & Saints is dedicated to teachers on whom I have depended for so much, I thought I’d honor them by sharing a bouquet of their best advice. Most of it is nominally writing-related, though I have gleaned larger lessons too. I hope you’ll find their wisdom as helpful as I have.

1. “Take it seriously.” This may be the most important writing advice I ever received. It is also the advice that I find most difficult to take. The advice was given to me by RIck Moody. We were sitting beside the Nihon River in Johnson, Vermont, and he’d just read fifteen pages of a manuscript that would become The Great Houses of Pill Hill (forthcoming from Soho Press in May 2026). At that meeting, he gently pointed out that I kept letting myself get away with tiny cheapnesses on the line level. I kept committing the sin of telling the reader what to think. Either I’d misunderstood my task as a writer, or—and he was pretty clear that this was truly the problem—I wasn’t taking the task of writing sufficiently seriously.

The novel features an interior decorator who uses her insights about space and décor to solve cold cases. She’s funny. She’s also chatty. She will sometimes ask a question and then answer it herself. Rick noticed that I’d not done enough to separate the narrator—that is, the narrating intelligence who shapes what the reader hears from the relentlessly monologuing main character—from that character who, with her wisecracks and asides, was leaving the reader no space at all in which to imagine her, to sense her dilemmas without her constant interference. It’s a serious thing to trust a reader—to make open-ended moves on the page, gestures that shape the reader’s experience without controlling it. Rick’s advice made me see both the need to grapple seriously with this problem and the difficulty of doing so.

2. “Have a practice.” I’ve heard this advice in different forms over the years. The first person who offered it to me was Anita Desai, and this was more than twenty-five years ago. I was a graduate student finishing my dissertation at MIT, and I had just enough room in my schedule for Anita’s workshop. Getting in was competitive; the application consisted of a piece of writing done in class, off-the-cuff, in response to this prompt: “Tell me about a party.”  I still think this is a great prompt. It gets right into thorny problems of point of view and character.

Anyway, as the workshop was coming to an end, we met to talk about what was going to happen to me after graduation. I didn’t have a job, and I didn’t expect to find one—the academic job market was utterly discouraging. She urged me—strongly, warmly—to keep writing. Whatever I did or didn’t do, she said, I should make the ritual of writing part of my everyday life. She was the first to suggest that writing was something I could build a life around.

3. “Don’t waste money on how-to-write books.” Robert Coover told me this. We were sitting in a coffee shop in Providence, Rhode Island, on the Brown University campus where he taught for many years. I mentioned that I was thinking about an MFA, but I had just finished up at MIT and I didn’t want to return to school right away. What to do in the meantime? Should I try a few how-to books? This question, I see now, was kind of dumb. What I really meant was: I’ve been in school my whole life, and that’s just come to an end. Who will be my teacher now? Maybe I was auditioning him for the job? Anyway, in his brilliant way, he heard the real question behind the dumb one, and he answered by getting straight to the point. Why read books about writing when you can read, you know, actual writing—and learn from that?

 

4. “In workshops, take what you can use right now—and forget the rest.” This fantastic advice came from the poet and novelist Nicholas Christopher, who was one of my teachers at Columbia. He believed that a writer can only take advice that he or she is ready to take. The same was true for readers: some people just may not be ready to hear what you’re saying in a particular story. In writing programs, where people are all different ages and bring different life experiences to the workshop, these mismatches are inevitable and not a big deal—though when you are boiling in the concentrated broth of the writing workshop, they can feel all-consuming. I’d get a roomful of kind comments, and it was always the one stinker that would throw me right off. Why can’t I please this person?

Nic’s written comments were just as spare and trenchant. If he didn’t like a passage, he’d put a line next to it and say, make this go faster. That was all. It was an incredible way of teaching, minimalist. On and off the page, he wanted to ensure that at least one clear signal came through the workshop’s noise.

5. “Let the best stand alone.” Binnie Kirshenbaum, another of my teachers at Columbia, had a special way of delivering this advice, as if she were announcing it, in voice of absolute gravitas right out of 1950s radio. She liked to give this advice when a writer was being indecisive on the page. Often I was reaching for an image, a metaphor, a turn of phrase; and instead of finding it, I would offer a few possibilities—and then, oh the shame of it, simply leave that mess on the page for the workshop participants to sort out. Binnie’s advice reminded me that I was abdicating my responsibility as a writer to make those crucial calls, to decide just which of those possibilities was, in fact, the best—that is, the one most clearly in service to the story. 

In preparing this article I’ve taken Binnie’s advice several times already, cutting many lines and phrases along with two whole paragraphs. Like my characters, I’m struggling to separate, to disconnect—to step back and say, that’s enough. Your turn.

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Diane Josefowicz’s latest book is Guardians & Saints: Stories, published in October 2025 by Cornerstone Press. Learn more, and sign up for her low-volume newsletter, What’s That Noise?, at www.dianejosefowicz.com.

GUARDIANS AND SAINTS

We’re born unfinished, in need of everything-love, food, attention, care. The linked stories in Guardians & Saints explore the ways in which modern orphans fail to thrive. A girl loses her mother only to re-find her, in altered form, in a grim institutional afterlife. A group of friends spins helplessly around the death of a beloved teacher when his selfless pedagogy is called into question. Faced with the incapacity of those they depend on, Diane Josefowicz’s characters appeal, with varying degrees of success, to stand-ins: teachers, mentors, therapists, guardians, and, occasionally, saints.

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Category: On Writing