Salman Rushdie’s Advice for Writers

In Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, he talks a lot about his writing process, and how he learned to write while under the fatwa. Below are snippets of advice gleaned from the book, and remember that this was written in the third person, so when there is a “he” or “Joseph Anton,” that refers to Rushdie:

1. Work Close to the Bull

“Stephen Dedalus was not Joyce, and Herzog was not Bellow, and Zuckerman was not Roth, and Marcel was not Proust; writers had always worked close to the bull, like matadors, had played complex games with autobiography, and yet their creations were more interesting than themselves.”

2. Let Your Attire Inspire Your Sentences

“In the photographs that survived of that time, assiduously preserved in large albums by Elizabeth, Mr. Joseph Anton was not well-dressed. His habitual daily attire was tracksuit trousers and a sweatshirt. The trousers were often green and the sweatshirt maroon … He should have shaved daily and worn crisp, cleanly pressed clothes, Savile Row suits, perhaps, or at least a smart shirt and slacks. He should have sat at his desk like Scott Fitzgerald in his Brooks Brothers suit, or Borges, nattily turned out in a stiff collar and cuff-linked shirt. Maybe his sentences would have been better if he had taken more care of his appearance.”

3. Don’t Feel the Need to be Loved

“He was beginning to learn the lesson that would set him free: that to be imprisoned by the need to be loved was to be sealed in a cell in which one experienced an interminable torment and from which there was not escape. He needed to understand that there were people who would never love him. No matter how carefully he explained his work or clarified his intentions in creating it, they would not love him … As long as he was clear about what he had written and said, as long as he felt good about his own work and public positions, he could stand being disliked.”

4. Write For Your People

“And many things happened about which he had not even dared to dream, awards, bestsellerdom, and, on the whole, popularity. India took the book to its heart, claiming the author as its own just as he had hoped to reclaim the country, and that was a greater prize than anything awarded by juries.”

5. Find the Language for your Subject

“The political and the personal could not longer be kept apart. This was no longer the age of Jane Austen, who could write her entire oeuvre during the Napoleonic Wars without mentioning them, and for whom the major role of the British Army was to wear dress uniforms and look cute at parties. Nor would he write his book in cool Forsterian English. India was not cool. It was hot. It was hot and overcrowded and vulgar and loud and it needed a language to match that and he would try to find that language.”

6. Don’t Review Books

“He wrote two other book reviews, for the British Observer, in which he found the book under consideration less wonderful than the author’s earlier work, and the authors of The Russia House and Hocus Pocus, John le Carre and Kurt Vonnegut, both friendly acquaintances until then, declared themselves his foes, too. This was what book reviewing did. If you loved a book, the author thought your praise no more than his rightful due, and if you didn’t like it, you made enemies. He decided to stop doing it. It was a mug’s game.”

7. Develop Patience

“He had left university in June 1968. Midnight’s Children was published in April 1981. It took him almost thirteen years just to begin. During that time he wrote unbearable amounts of garbage.”

8. Find Your Subject

“It was curious that so avowedly godless a person should keep trying to write about faith. Belief had left him but the subject remained, nagging at his imagination. The structures and metaphors of religion (Hinduism and Christianity as much as Islam) shaped his irreligious mind, and the concerns of these religions … were also his.”

9. Become Your Best Critic

“He resolved to set aside the many criticism others had made of his work and to make his own critique of it instead.”

10. Understand Yourself

“He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him.”