Respond to the Energy of the Story

My general approach to writing fiction is that you try to have as few conceptual notions as possible and you just respond to the energy that the story is making rather than having a big over plan. I think if you have a big over plan, the danger is that you might just take your plan and then you bore everybody. I always joke that it’s like going on a date with index cards. You know, at 7:30 p.m. I should ask about her mother. You keep all the control to yourself but you are kind of insulting to the other person.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

Release Your Imagination

I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?

TONI MORRISON

Conceal Nothing

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement—what we glimpse in our dreams—our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

JOHN CHEEVER

We're Looking for Hope

In conversations over the years with other writers and artists, about what we're actually supposed to be doing, I've been struck by how often, deep down, the talk becomes a quest for the same mysterious thing. Underneath the particular image in question, the particular short story or musical composition, we're looking for a source of hope. When a conversation about each other's work doesn't pivot on professional jargon or drift toward the logistics of career management, when it's instead deferential and accommodating, we're sometimes able to locate a kind of Rosetta stone, a key to living well with the vexing and intractable nature of human life. If any wisdom emerges in these conversations, it offers sudden clarification. It's the Grail shimmer. You feel it, and you can't wait to get to work.

BARRY LOPEZ

Writers Read

Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books.

JUDITH BARRINGTON

Serious Work Commences in the Unconscious

The foundation of all else is the recognition that serious work commences in the unconscious mind, or is first received there, and is transmitted in quantities and at rates always in control of the unconscious faculties. The prime skill and discipline, therefore, is learning how to serve and thus partly master that source and governor. The discipline, as usual, divides into spiritual and physical departments.

REYNOLDS PRICE

Rules for Writing

Rules [for writing] are excellent organizational tools and efficient reducers of cognitive load, but they are no substitute for contextual sensitivity and personal judgment.

MARIA POPOVA

Learn Punctuation

Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin.

ANNIE DILLARD

Get Beyond Divertissement

You must get beyond divertissement, sketch, anecdote, the interesting moment. You must get to the mystery of human personality. What is the line of the story that leads us to a point where we see or intuit something we haven't before?

JOHN L'HEUREUX

History Has a Plot

There’s a strong belief—I think it’s utterly true—that [Edward] Gibbon, in writing The Decline and Fall [of the Roman Empire] was strongly influenced by [Henry] Fielding’s Tom Jones. There’s also a belief that Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is strongly influenced by his reading of Aeschylus and Sophocles. I believe that the artists are out front and have a great deal to teach historians about good writing and dramatic composition, which I consider the best history to be. Aristotle said, in criticizing great drama, that first you learn how to write well—a good sophomore in high school can do a surprisingly good description of a sunset—then you learn how to draw characters that can stand up and cast a shadow, and the last thing you learn to do is plot. That’s the skill that comes last, if it comes at all. That is where historians neglect a huge advantage. I think history has a plot. You don’t make it up; you discover it.

SHELBY FOOTE