Let the Writer Open His Mouth & Yap It Like Shakespeare

Never did tell you my theory of writing. If it isn’t spontaneous, right unto the very sound of the mind, it can only be crafty and revised, by which the paradox arises, we get what a man has hidden, i.e., his craft, instead of what we need, what a man has shown, i.e. blown (like jazz musician or rose)-

The requirements for prose & verse are the same, i.e. blow.-What a man most wishes to hide, revise, and un-say, is precisely what Literature is waiting and bleeding for-Every doctor knows, every Prophet knows the convulsion of truth.-Let the writer open his mouth & yap it like Shakespeare and get said what is only irrecoverably said once in time the way it comes, for time is of the essence-

JACK KEROUAC in a letter to Malcolm Cowley (1955)

Read Ceaselessly

The greatest symbol of what writing is about is the full text version of the Oxford English Dictionary. The CD-ROM version is nice, but the physical enormity of the printed text gives a writer a sense of humility (if that is still possible), because the mountain to be scaled is the language. Auden used to sit on the first volume while at the dinner table, the better to stay even with language and with dinner. Any good teacher I've ever had—and the best was John McPhee—stressed the enormity of choice English provides, its capacity for clarity and ambiguity, dullness and thrill. It is the greatest invention ever devised (and re-devised). And, of course, the only way to get anywhere as a writer is to have read ceaselessly and then read some more. Pound (that rat) says somewhere that it is incredible to him that so many "poets" simply pick up a pen and start writing verse and call it poetry, while a would-be pianist knows full well how necessary it is to master scales and thousands of exercises before making music worthy of the name. Playing scales, for a writer, means reading. Is there any real writing that has no reading behind it? I don't think so.

DAVID REMNICK

All Novels Should Be Journalism to Start

I think all novels should be journalism to start, and if you can ascend from that plateau to some marvelous altitude, terrific. I really don’t think it’s possible to understand the individual without understanding the society.

TOM WOLFE

A Writer Is An Eternal Outsider

Although it is not necessary for a writer to be a prick, neither does it hurt. A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct.

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

Writing Was Not Meant to Be An Occult Operation

Every writer’s assumption is that he is as other human beings are, and that they are more or less as he is. There’s a principle of psychic unity. [Writing] was not meant to be an occult operation; it was not meant to be an esoteric secret.

SAUL BELLOW

The First Draft

The only true creative aspect of writing is the first draft. That’s when it’s coming straight from your head and your heart, a direct tapping of the unconscious. The rest is donkey work. It is, however, donkey work that must be done.

EVAN HUNTER

Three Characteristics A Work of Fiction Must Possess

[The] three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful:

1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot.

2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it.

3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme.

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Ask Yourself Four Questions

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

GEORGE ORWELL

Things Keep Knotting Up

I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots—things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story—readers see an “unknotting” of sorts. Not what they expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable emotional experiences.

TERRY McMILLAN

Don't Worry About Success and Failure

You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.

ANTON CHEKHOV