Give Your Characters a Roll in the Hay

I’m really interested in writing about sex. I feel like it’s not often done well, and it’s sometimes done outrageously. I also get annoyed when writers are afraid to show pleasure. I’m tired of reading really dreadful sex scenes where everyone’s miserable and then eventually maybe one person has a reluctant orgasm. I thought, What if I tried to have a scene where people had sex and it was great? My characters do have sex in varying emotional states, and with various results. I took a class at Iowa with Allan Gurganus, and he picked my story to talk about in class…and he really liked that there was sex in it. He said, You should always give your characters a roll in the hay—they work hard, they deserve it. Which I thought was so funny. I tell my students that party scenes are really important in fiction because a party scene can go in any direction. Sex scenes can be similar. You’re putting characters together—what happens as a result?

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

Writing Well Involves Two Gifts

Writing well involves two gifts—the art of adding and the art of taking away. Of the two, the first is more important, since without it the second would not exist.

JOHN UPDIKE

The "Singular They"

Many of the language tenets that the purists and the snobs and the sticklers criticize are in fact perfectly logical according to the grammar of English. One example being so-called “singular they,” as in: everyone return to their seats. A number of the purists would claim this has a grammatical error: namely, the clash of concord between the plural pronoun “they” and the singular antecedent “everyone.” But in fact it would be the purists that are wrong and error-makers are right—because singular “they” has a long history in English, including Shakespeare and Jane Austen. And if, in fact, you analyze the semantics of it, it is not at all illogical, because “they” in that context is not in fact a plural pronoun but rather a bound variable.

STEVEN PINKER

A Story Is Devious

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.

JOY WILLIAMS

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

Good Writing Is Lean and Confident

Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

Life Goes On

Life goes on, and for the sake of verisimilitude and realism, you cannot possibly give the impression of an ending: you must let something hang. A cheap interpretation of that would be to say that you must always leave a chance for a sequel. People die, love dies, but life does not die, and so long as people live, stories must have life at the end.

JOHN O’HARA

It Takes Time to Find Your Voice

I think a writer’s voice is really his or her authentic, natural voice—the way she actually expresses herself and sees the world. But it takes time to get to that. I think the first many years of writing you tend to write the way you think you’re supposed to sound, and gradually (if you’re lucky) you begin dropping that affect and getting to what is your true voice. In time, you come to know that voice well enough that you know how to emphasize it, enrich it.

SUSAN ORLEAN

The Color of Poetry

The Japanese have this idea of the color of a poem. Bashō talks often about the colors of poems. I think what he means by that is the moods and the tones, the sort of aesthetic principles of them. And I think that you can’t just sit down and write that, you have to really embody it. That’s the hardest part: figuring out what tone or what mood you’re writing towards. A lot of this has to do with the themes you’re working with, or the mode that you want to present. That takes sometimes weeks, months — years, really — to develop before language comes to fruition. Language has its own register, like music, and depending on the “octave” or the tone that you’re using, there are connotations, there are meanings, implicit in tone.

OCEAN VUONG

Write About the Mortal Dreads

I talk about the things people have always talked about in stories: pain, hate, truth, courage, destiny, friendship, responsibility, growing old, growing up, falling in love, all of these things. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrous. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

HARLAN ELLISON