The Only Advice I'll Ever Have For Writers

this is all of it mind you

From the Chatner’s vault, a post from 2018: The only traveling advice I will ever give you.

“In my admittedly limited travel experience, from which I am prepared to extrapolate wildly, all Australian people are on vacation an average of 400 days a year, and prefer to spend that time talking to Americans about carpentry, their future travel plans, national monuments, and the supplement/fake cold remedy Emergen-C. If you have ever filled a Ziploc baggie with multivitamins in preparation for a trip, you have just upped the odds of running into your Australian.”

I haven’t gotten any more tips than these, you understand. So it’s no good my trying to turn this into a series or a book of writing advice or anything like that, and in fact if you see me try to repeat it later, it’s only because I’ve either forgotten I wrote this one, or worse, I think there’s a lot of money in it and I’ve decided to behave in a lightly unprincipled manner. But this really is all the advice I have for writers, full stop.

I’m afraid most of this could only be useful after you’ve already gotten an agent and sold your book. I don’t have any advice about finding an agent, because the way I found mine was by writing jokes for free for a handful of websites in 2011 that no longer exist. Then an agent emailed me a few months later. As this is not especially replicable, you will have to find your own path.

But once you have done so, or even in the meanwhile, allow me to suggest the following:

1. Whenever you read your work, appear on a panel, or contribute to an anthology, make your biography as short as you can possibly stand it. There’s no need to make it any shorter than you can stand, of course; don’t cut accomplishments or publications you’re especially proud of, or try to make yourself sound like an innocent wandering mystic who just stumbled out of the desert.

But you can see for yourself there’s a substantial difference between:

“Daniel Lavery is a cofounder of The Toast and a former Dear Prudence at Slate; his most recent book, Women’s Hotel, was released in 2024,” and

“Daniel Lavery is a writer living in Michigan.”

The first is relatively brief but nevertheless manages to cover a fair amount; the second is brief for the sake of brevity, precious, and withholding.

If I wanted to make my bio shorter without becoming uncommunicative, I might write “Daniel Lavery is a writer living in Michigan¹ whose most recent book, Women’s Hotel, was released in 2024.”

This practice is more important at live readings, radio appearances, podcast recordings, and so on — anything where your bio is going to be read aloud by someone else, likely one of several bios they’re going to read throughout the course of the event — and a little less so for magazines, online publications, and anthologies, but it’s a good principle to live by.

When is the last time you attended a reading and thought, “I wish the authors had written longer biographies?” I would stake a substantial claim you have never had this thought. This doesn’t mean that every audience member is irritated and uninterested in you from jump, of course, merely that there’s only so much new information they can retain about a person during a reading, and that number is cut in half with every other writer who might be sharing the stage.

If people in the audience like your reading, they can always look you up afterwards, and can learn more about you from your website, your social media accounts, your CV, et cetera. You certainly should collect all your work in one place where readers can review it at leisure, but a performance bio ought to be short and to the point.

2. To that end, whenever you are invited to give a reading with other writers, be scrupulous about coming slightly under the time limit you are given. Be more than scrupulous! I myself am not a very scrupulous person in many manners, but I am in this one.

You may be given an exact time limit like eight minutes, or a broader range like five to ten; if you are given eight minutes, limit your reading to seven, and if you are given five to ten minutes, for heaven’s sake make it five. It may seem a little tiresome to rehearse your piece beforehand with a timer, but it is shockingly common for people to go over by a prodigious amount. And if there are, say, six other performers on the docket with you, and everybody goes over their limit by a mere four minutes, that’s nearly an extra half-hour of performance time.

Of course everyone in the audience presumably came to this event willingly, and are looking forward to it, but there’s a limit to how long any group of people can happily sit still and listen to other people read aloud. This limit is strongly influenced by expectation, and if they expect 40 minutes but get 65, they will not likely think, “How nice — an extra 25 minutes of entertainment!” They will instead be beset by dark and foreboding anxieties about expired parking, needing to run to the bathroom, whether they’ll miss their dinner reservations, and just who the hell is running this thing anyways. They like to believe they are in firm and competent hands, and that the event will begin and end roughly on time. At any rate, it’s always better to leave the audience wishing they’d gotten to hear a little bit more from you, rather than the opposite.

Readers go over their time so often, incidentally, only rarely because they are thoughtless or self-important. Most of the time it’s because they, like most other people, have a very bad internal sense of time and don’t realize it.² Sometimes it is in fact caused by modesty; it can seem self-aggrandizing to rehearse or time a piece beforehand, as if you thought you were Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London, especially if the event is a free one, organized by nonprofessionals, and has a relaxed atmosphere to it. In those cases many will choose something that “looks short” or at most try to Google “how many minutes read one page aloud average” and base their guess on that. But it won’t do. Read it aloud and with a timer; you needn’t speak very loudly or do it more than once. It’s not about maximizing your charisma as a public speaker — I think it’s perfectly fine to read plainly, so long as you sound reasonably clear and distinct — it’s just about time.

Keep things brief and the crowd will be yours; if the crowd is yours, Rome is yours.

3. Get yourself invited to Australia. This is my best piece of advice; if you follow nothing else, I encourage you to follow this one. Your publishers will almost certainly not have budgeted for you to go on book tour. Mine hardly ever do. Usually they’ll ask if there are any local bookstores I’d like to schedule a reading with, and occasionally they’ll arrange for me to appear at a book festival or college or two, many of which are able to put me up in a Best Western and reimburse me for travel, but beyond that, if I want to visit any other cities, it’s on my own dime.

Australia (and New Zealand, for that matter) is another story. Both Australia and New Zealand have a number of excellent writer’s festivals, many of which receive government funding, and they are often very interested in getting North American writers to attend. In fact, once you are on their list as a North American writer who is willing to visit, they often share that information with other nearby writer’s festivals, to make the most of you while you’re in town.

I’ve read at the writer’s festivals in Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington, and Auckland, many of them more than once, and it’s always been fantastic. I’ve had my travel and lodgings covered — not reimbursed, but covered — and often a per diem for meals that has given me more joy than I can possibly describe, and made me feel like Carrie Bradshaw with the Vogue corporate credit card. They’ve got money for book tours down there! Everyone with a book deal ought to know this, as far as I’m concerned.

Here is a list of all the 2025 Australian literary festivals, as well as one for New Zealand. Ask your agent and your publisher if they have any contacts on the Australasian festival circuit and encourage them to pitch you heavily. If they don’t know anyone, email me and I’ll be happy to put you in touch with some of mine.³

Go, if you can! It’s terrific, and once you’re on their list as a going concern, they’ll often invite you back.

4. You don’t have to blurb other people’s books, but if you do, blurb casually. It’s perfectly fine to just not do it. You’re not hurting anybody; they won’t die or risk professional failure without your testimonial, so if you find it too time-consuming or stressful you can certainly just say no if asked. But I think it’s a nice thing to do every once in a while.

No one is going to stop you at a signing ten years from now and say, “You blurbed a novel back in 2026 that really made me think less of you. You said it was luminous but it was merely competent.” This has never happened, and will never happen. Keep your blurb short (notice the running theme!) and don’t overlard it with praise. Try saying out loud something you liked about the book, as if you were talking to another person, and just write that, instead of worrying about phrases like “thrillingly evocative.”

Don’t take your imprimatur too seriously! If you agreed to blurb a book, read it, but after reading decide you think it’s only okay and not as good as you’d hoped, by no means should you send a soulful apology to the book’s publicist (or worse, its author who emailed you directly) explaining that it just didn’t meet your exacting standards. If you absolutely hate it, by all means beg off, but as long as there was something to appreciate about it, focus on what you liked and don’t worry about the rest. Again, ask yourself how many blurbs you remember as a reader – it’s simply a nice little courtesy you can offer someone you generally like, and not so big a deal it has the power to harm your own reputation.

5. Cut down on the number of blurbs appearing on the cover of your own book. Just as I don’t think audience members want to try to retain five new pieces of information about every writer onstage, I don’t think anyone glancing at your book on the New Releases table needs to read eight blurbs in a row to convince them one way or the other. Blurb fatigue is real! Every book can’t possibly be as good, as universally pleasing, as all their blurbs claim. That doesn’t mean you have to seek out aggressively modest blurbs like “This book is fine, if you like this sort of thing, which I don’t really,” but do consider limiting the quantity if you can’t limit the intensity.

I know there’s a limit to how much an author can influence their book’s cover copy, but it never hurts to ask. When Women’s Hotel was in final review, my publisher sent me cover copy with one blurb on the front and eight on the back. I asked if we could reduce the number of blurbs on the back to three, and to replace the rest with a brief summary of the book’s plot. Of course there’s almost always a plot summary on the inside dust jacket, but I’ve always liked being able to find out from flipping it over, without the bother of opening it. This is a small thing, but it’s often the small things that convince a casual browser to try something new.

Four seems like a reasonable number to me, although that’s an entirely arbitrary and capricious decision. Enough to satisfy your publisher’s marketing team that you’re not abandoning the idea of recommendation altogether, but not so much that you blush for shame at being over-praised, and that would-be readers don’t get turned off — after all, each individual blurb might feel warm yet plausible on their own, but the cumulative effect of unstinted praise can easily come across as insincere and overblown.

That’s all I’ve got for writers after a fifteen-year career. Keep everything as short as you can, and try to get yourself invited to Australia. Best of luck to you!

[Image via]

1. Or California, once again and temporarily, as the case may be. Where will I end up next!

2. Whereas I have a very bad internal sense of time passing and do realize it, only I forget all the time, so realizing it doesn’t do me much good at all.

3. Of course I can’t promise anything but I can at least put you in touch! Dannymlavery at gmail dot com.