“Character is Fate,” said Heraclitus in 500 B.C. or thereabouts. But “Our characters are the result of our conduct,” added Aristotle a hundred years or so later. We will find character and action even more inseparably entwined in fiction than they appear to be in life.
RUST HILLS
Names are terribly important. I spend forever coming up with names. Sometimes a character doesn’t work until I change his name. In Bandits, Frank Matusi didn’t work. I changed him to Jack Delaney and suddenly he opened up.
ELMORE LEONARD
First of all, you must have an agent, and in order to get a good one, you must have sold a considerable amount of material. And in order to sell a considerable amount of material, you must have an agent. Well, you get the idea.
STEVE McNEIL
Memoir is the intersection of narration and reflection, of storytelling and essay writing. It can present its story and consider the meaning of the story. The first commandment of fiction—Show, Don’t Tell—is not part of the memoirist’s faith. Memoirists must show and tell.
PATRICIA HAMPL
Repeat after me: Short is better than long. Simple is good. (Louder.) Long Latin nouns are the enemy. Anglo-Saxon active verbs are your best friend. One thought per sentence.
WILLIAM ZINSSER
It is not enough merely to love literature, if one wishes to spend one’s life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possibility of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.
HARLAN ELLISON
The writer is only free when he can tell the reader to go jump in the lake. You want, of course, to get what you have to show across to him, but whether he likes it or not is no concern of the writer.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Advice is tricky when it comes to comedy, because people are either funny or they are not. If someone is funny, there are many ways to get better. Most everything I know, I learned from Gary Shandling. Whenever we got stuck, he always said, “What is the truth here? What would someone actually do?” He pushed his writers to go deeper to the core.
JUDD APATOW
I don’t like to throw characters into a plot as though it were a raging torrent where they are swept along. What interests me are the complications and nuances of character. Few of my characters are described externally; we see them from the inside out.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
The process of poetry consists of three stages: The first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it.
PHILIP LARKIN
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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