It’s not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don’t take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you’re trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There’s no objective reason why they’re right. They just sound right to me.
MARTIN AMIS
My policy is to begin a story as late as possible, using flashback. But if you can open with, “He reached out for Steve’s throat,” and then pull back for the dispute, about why we were arguing. Hitchcock said, “You put the bomb under the bed.” You know that story?
“Mr. Hitchcock, how long do you hold a kiss on the screen?” some idiot student asked him a question at a film school. Hitchcock said, “Oh, I would say twenty, twenty-five minutes.”
“That’s a helluva long kiss, Mr. Hitchcock.”
“Yes, but first of all I would put a bomb under the bed.”
JOHN le CARRÉ
Don't overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced.
SARAH WATERS
One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
CYNTHIA OZICK
In Spanish as well as English you speak of a “loud color.” A “loud color” is a common phrase, but then the things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The choice to train to be an artist of any kind is a risky one. Art’s a vocation, and often pays little for years and years — or never. Kids who want to be dancers, musicians, painters, writers, need more than dreams. They need a serious commitment to learning how to do what they want to do, and working at it through failure and discouragement. Dreams are lovely, but passion is what an artist needs — a passion for the work. That’s all that can carry you through the hard times. So I guess my advice to the young writer is a warning, and a wish: You’ve chosen a really, really hard job that probably won’t pay you beans — so get yourself some kind of salable skill to live on! And may you find the reward of your work in the work itself. May it bring you joy.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Exercising is a good analogy for writing. If you’re not used to exercising you want to avoid it forever. If you’re used to it, it feels uncomfortable and strange not to. No matter where you are in your writing career, the same is true for writing. Even fifteen minutes a day will keep you in the habit.
JENNIFER EGAN
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things—childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer’s life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?
LAUREN B. DAVIS
A good ending, really, is a taking-into-account of everything that came before. Sometimes – not enough has come before. No bowling pins are up in the air, or not enough of them. The fabric from which a rich ending gets made is supplied in the earlier portions of the story…. If that early richness isn’t there, we get that sadly familiar feeling of begging the ending to work – stretching it and making it over-literal and so on.
GEORGE SAUNDERS
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
Copyright © Jon Winokur 2019-2024. All rights reserved. Website by Wei-Haas Creative.
The trademark AdviceToWriters® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.