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Margaret Atwood's Timeless Advice For Writers

Zi-Ann Lum— The Huffington Post Canada

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Ulf Andersen via Getty Images

VINCENNES, FRANCE - SEPTEMBER 13; Canadian writer Margaret Atwood attends the book fair America on September 13, 2014 in Vincennes, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)

Margaret Atwood took to Reddit on Monday to share her most colourful piece of advice for aspiring writers yet.

The renowned Toronto-based author participated in her third Ask Me Anything and said writers need a certain chutzpah to not let their own fear impede progress.

I think the main thing is: Just do it. Plunge in! Being Canadian, I go swimming in icy cold lakes, and there is always that dithering moment. “Am I really going to do this? Won’t it hurt?” And at some point you just have to flop in there and scream. Once you’re in, keep going. You may have to crumple and toss, but we all do that. Courage! I think that is what’s most required.

It’s solid advice from an author whose career has spanned nearly 50 years.

Atwood has over 40 volumes of poetry, fiction and non-fiction titles to her name. Her books have been translated into more than 40 language.

Renown for her dystopian novels, Atwood also teased curious fans by saying the book she’s currently working on is her “most frightening” work yet.

This isn’t the first time the Canadian author has delivered some sound advice to writers. It’s a common question she gets asked every time she makes herself available in an Ask Me Anything interview.

In 2013, Atwood advised those keen on writing to practice, practice, practice:

Read and read and write and write is the best advice.

The year before, she stressed the importance of building a record via a routine:

First – write something every day, no matter what. It could even be a shopping list. A letter. A journal entry.

She also stressed how critical it is to proofread your own work aloud:

Try reading your work out loud. You may be able to "hear" the live moments.

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Famous Authors' Writer Influences

Jonathan Franzen(01 of20)

"Kafka's 'The Trial' opened my eyes to the greatness of what literature can do, and made me want to try to create some myself." (credit:Getty)

Joyce Carol Oates(02 of20)

"There are so many. I've tried to be influenced by Poe, but I am probably more deeply influenced by Kafka. Though James Joyce was a thorough realist who would not have wished to write about counterworlds, except as hallucinatory fancies of his characters, I feel a writerly kinship with Joyce." (credit:Getty)

Jonathan Lethem(03 of20)

"I also loved Graham Greene’s novels, and he supplied me with a lot in terms of prose and structuring a book—proportion, and his immaculate realization of a scene. He puts a scene across brilliantly...I still feel Lewis Carroll fundamentally operating in what I like to do with dialogue, some of the ways that characters misunderstand each other, which basically come from Alice talking to impossible creatures like Humpty Dumpty or The White Queen. I also developed an appetite for writers who were working with the fantastic in other, more literary ways, like Kafka and Borges, very early on." (credit:Getty)

Brett Easton Ellis(04 of20)

"Early on Ernest Hemingway had a lot of influence on me. Joan Didion and Raymond Carver also had a lot of influence on me. But I like lots of writers... I like Robert Ludlum, Stephen King, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and the romantic life of Jack Kerouac, even though I am not interesting in his fiction -- but I liked his life." (credit:Getty)

Joan Didion(05 of20)

"I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they're perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes." (credit:Getty)

Thomas Pynchon(06 of20)

Jack Kerouac (On the Road in particular) (credit:Getty)

JK Rowling(07 of20)

"As a child, J.K. Rowling was a voracious reader. ‘The Little White Horse’, by Elizabeth Goudge, and ‘Manxmouse’, by Paul Gallico – a tale about a strange creature with a mouse's body, rabbit's ears and monkey's paws – were some of her favorite childhood tales. Another well-read novel was ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ by C. S. Lewis." (credit:Getty)

David Foster Wallace(08 of20)

Thomas Pynchon (particularly The Crying of Lot 49) (credit:Getty)

Jamaica Kincaid(09 of20)

"Kincaid said when she was young, she often read the Bible...She also enjoyed reading the dictionary. ‘I read the dictionary the way people read Nancy Drew,’ Kincaid said." (credit:Getty)

Jeffrey Eugenides(10 of20)

"The ancient Latin poets, obviously, Vergil and Catullus. The great Russians, Tolstoy and Nabokov. And the great American Jews, Bellow and Roth. Plus Henry James, J.D. Salinger, García Márquez, lots of others." (credit:Getty)

Karen Russell(11 of20)

"Flannery O'Connor, Kelly Link, Steven King, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mark Richard, Wallace Stevens, Carson McCuller, Mary Gaitskill, Alexander Hemon, Italo Calvino, Nabokov, Katherine Dunn, Ray Bradbury….yeesh, I could go on. I had this private/public reading split when I was a kid, Austen and Dumas and those Brontes for the adults, "Fear Street" and Frank Herbert in private." (credit:Karen Russell )

Gabriel Garcia Marquez(12 of20)

"But I did learn something [from James Joyce's Ulysses] that was to be very useful to me in my future writing—the technique of the interior monologue. I later found this in Virginia Woolf, and I like the way she uses it better than Joyce." (credit:Getty)

Maria Semple(13 of20)

"Philip Roth is my No. 1, because his books are so gloriously readable. Reading him feels like swimming in the ocean: it’s freeing and pleasurable to get swept about, but there’s always an underlying danger. (Yikes, is it obvious I’m in love with him?) The glove factory in 'American Pastoral,' the encounter with the gravedigger in 'Everyman' and the Halcion addiction that opens 'Operation Shylock' are my favorite examples of Roth’s skill, showmanship and power." (credit:Getty)

Haruki Murakami(14 of20)

"I just went toward Western culture: jazz music and Dostoevsky and Kafka and Raymond Chandler. That was my own world, my fantasyland. I could go to St. Petersburg or West Hollywood if I wanted. That’s the power of the novel—you can go anywhere. Now it’s easy to go to the States—everyone can go anywhere in the world—but in the 1960s it was almost impossible. So I just read and listened to the music and I could go there. It was a kind of state of mind, like a dream." (credit:Getty)

Ernest Hemingway(15 of20)

"Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Patinir, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Góngora—it would take a day to remember everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn’t an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious." (credit:Getty)

Vladimir Nabokov(16 of20)

"H. G. Wells, a great artist, was my favorite writer when I was a boy. The Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica, The Time Machine, The Country of the Blind, all these stories are far better than anything Bennett, or Conrad or, in fact, any of Wells's contemporaries could produce. His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasias are superb. There was an awful moment at dinner in our St. Petersburg house one night when Zinaïda Vengerov, his translator, informed Wells, with a toss of her head: 'You know, my favorite work of yours is The Lost World.' 'She means the war the Martians lost,' said my father quickly." (credit:Getty)

Ray Bradbury(17 of20)

"When I was seventeen I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogt—all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction—but my big science-fiction influences are H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. I’ve found that I’m a lot like Verne—a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally." (credit:Getty)

Ha Jin(18 of20)

"I’ve been reading [Isaac Bashevis] Singer’s novel Shadows on the Hudson. It’s a great novel. But, you know, he wrote in Yiddish. I can share the experience he described, but Nabokov and Conrad are different—they wrote in English. They were nonnative speakers and yet they are essential writers in the English language. I am part of that tradition. But of course, each writer has to find his own way. (credit:Getty )

Truman Capote(19 of20)

"These are the enthusiasms that remain constant: Flaubert, Turgenev, Chekhov, Jane Austen, James, E. M. Forster, Maupassant, Rilke, Proust, Shaw, Willa Cather—oh the list is too long, so I'll end with James Agee, a beautiful writer whose death over two years ago was a real loss. Agee's work, by the way, was much influenced by the films. I think most of the younger writers have learned and borrowed from the visual, structural side of movie technique. I have." (credit:Getty)

Hilary Mantel(20 of20)

"I’m sorry if it sounds pious, unoriginal and smug, but no book has mattered to me as much as the dirt-cheap Complete Works of Shakespeare I laid my hands on when I was 10. Previously I’d only read one scene from 'Julius Caesar' that I found in an ancient schoolbook. It definitely qualified as the best thing I’d ever read, and I almost exploded with joy when I found there was a whole fat book of plays. I was a strange child." (credit:Getty)

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