If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.
HILARY MANTEL
I like grit. I like love and death. I’m tired of irony. A lot of good fiction is sentimental. The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior and then he just dries up. I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments and take a chance on being corny than die a smartass.
JIM HARRISON
I was Sinclair Lewis's secretary-chess-opponent-chauffeur-protegé back when I was 24, and he told me sternly that if I could be anything else be it, but if I HAD to be a writer, I might make it. He also said, as he threw away the first 75 expository pages of my first novel: “People read fiction for emotion—not information.”
BARNABY CONRAD
God’s present to me is my own life. It’s not D. H. Lawrence’s or Tolstoy’s or Virginia Woolf’s—much as I might like it to be. And, whoever is reading this, your life is your present, your dowry, your donnée. No one on earth is going to have the same list of Most Important Characters as you.
CAROLYN SEE
Writer’s block is a tool — use it. When asked why you haven’t produced anything lately, just say, “I’m blocked.” Since most people think that writing is some mystical process where characters “talk to you” and you can hear their voices in your head, being blocked is the perfect cover for when you just don’t feel like working.
COLSON WHITEHEAD
This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
JOHN CLEESE
Persist. If you stop, then you’re removing yourself from the conversation. You have to keep going and weather rejection until you find the person who will open the door for you. You have to hold up your end of the bargain. Become the best writer you can because nobody owes you anything; you owe that to yourself.
JESMYN WARD
Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
JOHN IRVING
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of ours—an actress—was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn't plan what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a strange way to live.
JOAN DIDION
The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. . . . The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.
JANET MALCOLM
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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