It's Your Duty to Lie

There's an enormous difference between being a story writer and being a regular person. As a person, it's your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a writer it's your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life is only being a reporter, not a creator. You have to make your story bigger, better, more magical, more meaningful than life is, no matter how special or wonderful in real life the moment may have been.

RICK BASS

Avoidance

I think there is a tremendous amount of avoidance that goes on while writing. People used to ask me if I got writers block and I’d always say, “no” because I have never had that thing where you just sit and stare at the blank page and nothing comes. But then I realized that I did have writer’s block, it just didn’t take that form. The form was this incredible avoidance and I could think of so many things to do, and they were all totally legitimate things. I mean your taxes have to be done, right? All the things that interfere in life. I once made an experiment, if I quit writing would I have a lot of spare time? And after three weeks I realized that I could just quit and never notice. The time would just vanish like throwing a stone into the water, it would leave no trace. So unless I was willing to just carve out this time for writing, I was never going to get anything done. It is a dilemma that I think everyone faces.

CONNIE WILLIS

Think Critically About Any Piece of Art

Continue to think critically when you’re watching any piece of art, because even if you say, “I wish I had those two hours of my life back,” you’ll know a little bit more about your taste, about who you are as an artist, about what you respond to. So it’s never really a waste of time. I think that’s a good perspective to have both when it’s creating things that don’t work or seeing things that don’t work.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA

To Hell with Grammar

To hell with grammar, but only if you know the grammar first. To hell with formality, but only if you have learned what it means to be formal. To hell with plot, but you had better at some stage make something happen. To hell with structure, but only if you have thought it through so thoroughly that you can safely walk through your work with your eyes closed.

COLUM McCANN

Stop Thinking

It’s funny, I teach writing, and before I taught I never would have guessed the thing I say most often is: “Please stop thinking.” But people really write better without thinking, by which I mean without self-consciousness. I’m not calculating about what I write, which means I have very little control over it. It’s not that I decide what to write and carry it out. It’s more that I grope my way towards something—not even knowing what it is until I’ve arrived. I’ve gotten better over the years at accepting this. Of course, the intellect wants to kick in—and, in the later drafts, it should. But in the early stages of a book, I deal with potential self-consciousness by literally hushing the critical voices in my head. The voices that tell you: “Oh, those aren’t the words you want,” or “you shouldn’t be working on this part now,” or “why not use the present tense?”—on and on. Anyone who’s ever written anything is familiar with that chorus.

KATHRYN HARRISON

Letting Go

First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involve a loss of control. It’s a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often—completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages—I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

DON DeLILLO

Do Not Go Back to the Drawing Board

Now you may ask, what if my characters won’t talk to me? What if they won’t even visit? The only answer is to think and think some more, and then go out and read and look and listen some more. Do not sit and mope. Do not sigh. Do not throw up your hands and give up on the whole project. Do not go back to the drawing board. There is nothing more depressing than an empty drawing board. No, go back to the world, which is where all characters originally come from.

ALLEGRA GOODMAN

Read with a Red Pen

I try to base my revision on a re-reading of what I’ve done so far, imitating, so far as it’s possible, a first-time reader. That is, I try not to bring too many ideas about what the story is doing etc., etc. Just SEE what it’s doing. In other words, read along with a red pen, reacting in real-time as I go along, deleting, adding, etc. When the energy drops, then I know that’s where I have to really start digging in, i.e., turn away from the hardcopy and go to the computer. Repeat as necessary?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

Respect Writer's Block

When I sit down in order to write, sometimes it’s there; sometimes it’s not. But that doesn’t bother me anymore. I tell my students there is such a thing as “writer’s block,” and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now.

TONI MORRISON

Give Elbow Room to the Reader

The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters. The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space. Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost. Give elbow room to the creative reader. In other words, to the extent that this is all about you, leave that out.

JOHN McPHEE