Everything Else May Have to Give

Every human being has exactly the same amount of time, and yet consider the output of Robert Louis Stevenson, John Peabody Harrington, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, William Goldman, Neil Simon, Joyce Carol Oates, Agatha Christie, and John Gardner. How did they accomplish what they have? They weren’t deflected from their priorities by activities of lesser importance. The work continues, even though everything else may have to give. They know that their greatest resource is themselves. Wasting time is wasting themselves. When people ask them, “Where do you find the time?” they wonder, “Where do you lose it?”

KENNETH ATCHITY

Don't Be Afraid of Your Idea

Use your eyes and ears. Think. Read . . . read . . . and still read. And then, when you have found your idea, don’t be afraid of it—or of your pen and paper; write it down as nearly as possible as you would express it in speech; swiftly, un-selfconsciously, without stopping to think about the form of it all. Revise it afterwards—but only afterwards. To stop and think about form in mid-career, while the idea is in motion, is like throwing out your clutch half-way up a hill and having to start in low again. You never get back to your old momentum.

DAVID LAMBUTH

X Does and Does Not Equal Y

Metaphor is supposed to state the unknown in terms of the known. It is supposed to say X equals Y. Yet when we say “John is a lion,” we do not think of John with a mane, with four clawed paws, nor with a pompon tipped tail. We extract from “lion” the emotional equivalent we need and let the rest go. The real metaphoric formula is X does-and-does-not-equal Y.

JOHN CIARDI

Give The Audience Moments They Can Remember

I believe it was the late Rosalind Russell who gave this wisdom to a young actor: “Do you know what makes a movie work? Moments. Give the audience half a dozen moments they can remember, and they’ll leave the theater happy.” I think she was right. And if you’re lucky enough to write a movie with half a dozen moments, make damn sure they belong to the star.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN

Discipline Is Never A Restraint

Discipline is never a restraint. It’s an aid. The first commandment of the romantic school is: “Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, plot or structure--just let it come.” That’s not writing; that’s vomiting, and it leads to uncontrolled, unreadable prose. Remember: Easy writing makes hard reading, but hard writing makes easy reading.

FLORENCE KING

Do What Works

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

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

Film Is Behavior

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

Avoid Ambition

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

Allow Yourself to Write Poorly

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