Writing Advice from Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson’s legacy is impressive. The Haunting of Hill House is widely considered to be one of the best ghost stories ever written, and her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is also commonly referred to as a “masterpiece” (and I can’t say I disagree). Her dark and uncanny novels and short stories have been cited as inspiration by contemporary authors including Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, Carmen Maria Machado, and Donna Tartt, and The Shirley Jackson Awards are given annually to writers of outstanding psychological suspense and horror.
To me, Shirley Jackson is one of the greats, and it’s only recently that she is beginning to get due recognition. As a rule, I am not a huge fan of scary stories, but there is something just so unexpectedly luminous and terrifyingly real about her writing. I count her among my all-time favourite writers.
She was also a witty, generous, and unconforming person—just such a person as you might expect to be able to glean some shining little gems of writing advice from. And you wouldn’t be wrong. Here are some tips I’ve learned from Shirley Jackson:
Think your niche is too weird? Lean into it.
As a housewife and mother living in Vermont in the 1940s and 50s, who also contributed domestic-themed writing to publications like Good Housekeeping, Shirley Jackson may have fallen into the trap of thinking that she should become more “mainstream” with her writing. Did she? Certainly not.
Not only did Jackson publish six horror novels and scores of short stories, she also reveled in the rumours that she was a practicing amateur witch. She had a substantial library of books about the occult, and she was known to read tarot—apparently with uncanny accuracy. When her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, was involved with a contract dispute with the publisher Alfred Knopf, Shirley Jackson joked that she put a curse on Knopf that caused him to break his leg in a skiing accident. One critic wrote in the Associated Press, “Miss Jackson writes not with a pen, but with a broomstick.” And a Times article referred to her as “Virginia Werewoolf.”
Jackson loved these stories, and reporters and book reviewers ate them up. She wrote in her essay “Memory and Delusion”, “The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were.”
Is the daily grind getting you down? Use it as material.
Shirley Jackson was a full-time writer, as well as being a full-time mother, cook, and housecleaner. Her “genius” of a husband did very little, from what I can find out. Jackson was the main breadwinner, as well as the primary caregiver for their four children. Her son Laurence said of her, “She was always writing, or thinking about writing, and she did all the shopping and cooking, too. The meals were always on time.
Sounds exhausting to me! But Shirley Jackson found a way to transform what could have been a distraction and a drain into a source of writing material. She published both fictional short stories and humorous essays based on her family, and later collected them into two separate books: Life Among the Savages, and Raising Demons, which she referred to as “a disrespectful memoir of my children.”
Of these pieces, she wrote: “It is much easier, I find, to write a story than to cope competently with the millions of daily trials and irritations that turn up in an ordinary house, and it helps a good deal—particularly with children around—if you can see them through a flattering veil of fiction.”
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Waste Nothing
“A writer who is serious and economical can store away small fragments of ideas and events and conversations, and even facial expressions and mannerisms, and use them all someday. It is my belief, for instance, that somewhere in the back of my own mind is a kind of storeroom where there are hundreds of small items I am going to need someday, and when I need them I will remember them,” said Shirley Jackson in her essay “How I Write.”
Her advice, if we are to follow in her footsteps, is to make lots of notes, and to keep pads of paper and pencils all over the place. “All the time that I am making beds and doing dishes and driving to town for dancing shoes, I am telling myself stories,” she wrote.
And so if one is doing this excellent thing, and constantly observing, constantly tucking details away for later use, constantly wondering what would happen if…, it’s a great thing to jot these thoughts down. Of course, in these days of the ubiquitous cell phone with its note-taking app, you could always use that instead. It might prevent you from losing your multiple notes, and having the following Jacksonesque experience:
“I am apt to find, in the laundry list, a scribble reading, ‘Shirley, don’t forget—no murder before chapter five.’”
The most important thing.
So says Shirley Jackson: “All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing.”
