There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas, of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence—an overwhelming determination to succeed.
SOPHY BURNHAM
Have no unreasonable fear of repetition. True, the repetition of a particular word several times in the same paragraph can strike a jarring note, but ordinarily the problem arises differently. The story is told of a feature writer who was doing a piece on the United Fruit Company. He spoke of bananas once; he spoke of bananas twice; he spoke of bananas yet a third time, and now he was desperate. “The world’s leading shippers of the elongated yellow fruit,” he wrote. A fourth banana would have been better.
JAMES J. KILPATRICK
I've found with most young screenwriters, they try to tell their story through dialogue, through words, and not with action. What they don't understand is, film is behavior, creating an emotional situation that the character reacts to. When the story is told more with words than visuals, it makes for a bad, talky-talky screenplay, where the main character becomes very passive. The main character must always be active. He has to initiate the action.
SYD FIELD
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
First, you get the idea. It may germinate for a long time or it just pops into your head. And then you work out a structure. And when you feel confident enough, you start to write. And you have to allow yourself the liberty of writing poorly. You have to get the bulk of it done, and then you start to refine it. You have to put down less than marvelous material just to keep going to whatever you think the end is going to be—which may be something else altogether by the time you get there.
LARRY GELBART
I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing—tightrope walking comes immediately to mind—but it’s difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot.
CALVIN TRILLIN
The process of writing is a process of inner expansion and reduction. It’s like an accordion: You open it and then you bring it back, hoping that additional sound—a new clarity—may come out. It’s all for clarity.
JERZY KOSINSKI
Begin with something interesting rather than beginning with something boring; begin with action rather than beginning with background information; speak about the characters after they have appeared rather than having them appear after having spoken about them.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS, père
Examine what happens when you read. Young writers tend to forget or ignore what’s actually going on when they’re reading. Which is to say, when one reads, one has oral and visual hallucinations and it’s the writer’s job to control those oral and visual hallucinations. So I’m always trying to make young writers think about what goes on when they’re sitting in a chair and reading fiction.
RUSSELL BANKS
Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
NIKKI GIOVANNI
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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