Advice from Lydia Davis in Essays One

Further reading in Lydia Davis's 2019 collection, Essays One, shows that she's a really funny and brilliant innovative writer - so different from others in what she reads, writes, and thinks (her "stories" tend to be like really short essays or insights, remarkable for their dexterity and wit, but as far as I know she rarely writes to develop character or the arc of a plot over time); she's also a hell of a good translator, particularly from the French (translating Swann's Way is a monumental feat). That said, I'm not sure that her advice to writers, which makes up a large segment of the first half of this long collection, can really help a writer at the outset of his or her career; rather than pieces meant as instructive, they're more like a portrait of an artist: We read them and get great insight into how LD thinks and writes, but as pieces of advice, I don't know. I lot of what she writes about will be obscure or useless to most young writers; for ex., her command to "be curious" - well, sure, but what if you're not? Will this dictum make you so? She has a segment in one of her pedagogic pieces on knowing the difference between Latinate and Vulgite (romance/French and Germanic, if you prefer), but really most young writers or even advanced writers would be puzzled by that advice - though I think she's write, btw! (One of her class assignments was to come up w/ all of the words in English beginning w/ "wr" - starting, I guess, w/ write/writing/writer. Why?) But do love reading her essays, even as I engage in marginal quibbles with some of her observations. She encourages patience, which is great for her kind of work that verges on poetry - but for a serious fiction writer just starting out, I'd encourage the opposite: Write a lot, write every day, get your stories moving, don't wallow and ponder.