Words on a Page

Technology has changed the way we think, talk. Everything was different before this somewhat abrupt technological advance. Our thinking is less meditative and somewhat more instantaneous. I don’t use a cellphone, because I want to keep thinking in a traditional manner. It helps me concentrate on words on a page. This has always been an important element in the way I work: simply the appearance of words on a page, letters in the word, words in the sentence. If I can go on for a minute, I think it started with “The Names,” which I wrote in the early 1980s: I recall clearly seeing the visual connection between letters, between letters in a word, words in a sentence. When I started working on “The Names” I decided to limit each page to a paragraph, one paragraph per page, which helped me in a visual sense to concentrate more deeply, and I’ve been doing it more or less consistently ever since. For example, there’s a phrase I remember at the end of “Underworld”: Raw sprawl. The word “raw” is contained in the word “sprawl.” That sort of thing became more apparent to me after “The Names.” I have to add this: I still use an old Olympia typewriter. It has large type and allows me to see more clearly the letters on a page.

Don DeLillo

It Never Gets Easier

It never gets easier to write. The fantasy exists that once certain hurdles have been gotten through, this art turns much simpler, that inspiration never falters, and public opinion is always affirmative, and there’s no struggle, there’s no torment, there’s no sense that the thing you’ve embarked on is a catastrophe.

LOUISE GLÜCK

We Fret About Words

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we’d rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

SUSAN SONTAG

The Secret of Good Writing

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

Discover Your Characters

I have writer friends who spend a great deal of time outlining and detailing the biographies of their major characters. Through this process, I am told, they discover the motivations underlying actions taken by these players as they move across the stage of the novel. This may very well be a powerful and productive way to construct an Iago or Sister Carrie. It is, however, not my way of discovery. I meet my characters the way I encounter people in life—at a place and in a situation where I have less knowledge than I’d like and am almost always, at first, paying attention to the least important details. After that, I’m in discovery mode.

WALTER MOSLEY

Write What You Imagine

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

GORE VIDAL

There's No Ideal Literary Style

Literary writing is an art, an aspect of an art form. It may be self-effacing or it may be grand, but if it is literature it has an artful intention, the language is being used in a characteristically elaborate manner in relation to the “work,” long or short, of which it forms a part. So there is not one literary style or ideal literary style, though of course there is good and bad writing.

IRIS MURDOCH

Pace Is Crucial

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

SARAH WATERS

Let Your Reader Breathe

It can be daunting, visually, from the very beginning, for a reader to realize he or she must focus and engage non-stop on a paragraph that goes on nearly the length of the page. It’s what’s in the paragraph that matters, of course, but still, remember to let your reader breathe. Be interesting, and take care of your reader.

RICK BASS

Find the Universal in the Local

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

WILLIAM TREVOR