Prescription for Writer's Block

My prescription for writer’s block is to face the fact that there is no such thing. It’s an invented condition, a literary version of the judicial “abuse excuse.” Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It’s a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.

THOMAS MALLON

Forget It

If you haven’t got an idea for one, forget it. If you haven’t got an idea you want to express on paper, in words, forget it. If you prefer putting paint on canvas, or rolls on your pianola or in your oven, forget it. You’re going to be with this novel for a long, long time, so you’d better have thought about it before you start writing it.

EVAN HUNTER

How to Promote Your Book on the Air

1. Decide and practice in advance what you're going to say on the air, then say it no matter what questions you're asked. Make your answers entertaining, staying focused on the subject of your book.

2. In most cases the interviewers have not read your book, and don't much care what you say; be respectful of them and their audience but remember they're interested in selling their show, not your book: that's your job.

3. Mention the title of your book, but if you plug it too often it only sounds obnoxious.

4. Before you ask your publicist to get you on "Oprah" or "NewsHour," watch the show for a week and figure out ways an episode could be built around you and your book.  And remember that, statistically speaking, almost no authors get on Oprah.

5. Publicity opportunities are limitless, and a good publicist will help you mine them, but a publicity plan will be only as effective as you are.

6. Send your publicist flowers! They get a lot of rejection pitching books; be the author they'll want to do a little something extra for.

RUSSELL PERREAULT (Publicity Director, Oxford University Press)

Write Because You Feel Like Writing

All this advice from senior writers to establish a discipline—always to get down a thousand words a day whatever one’s mood—I find an absurdly puritanical and impractical approach. Write, if you must, because you feel like writing, never because you ought to write.

JOHN FOWLES 

Move to New York City

Move to New York City. Get married. Buy an incredibly expensive apartment. Have children, a dog, a second home in the country. Lease an imported luxury automobile. Come the first of the month, I promise, you will have no problem writing.

BRUCE FEIRSTEIN

The Key to Literary Success

Literary success of any enduring kind is made by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public wants, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write anything to order.

LAFCADIO HEARN

Don't Try to Make the Shallow Seem Deep

Deliberately puzzling or confusing a reader may keep him reading for a while, but at too great an expense. Even just an “aura” of mystery in a story is usually just a lot of baloney. Who are these people? What are they up to? Provoking such questions from a reader can be a writer’s way of deferring exposition until he feels the reader is ready for the explanation of it all. But more likely it’s just fogging things up. A lot of beginning writers’ fiction is like a lot of beginners’ poetry: deliberately unintelligible so as to make the shallow seem deep.

RUST HILLS

The More An Audience Laughs, the More It Feels

The best playwrights—Tennesse Williams, for instance—will punctuate the most serious moment with an outrageous laugh. The audience delights in it. They need the relief. They need laughter. . . . The more an audience laughs, the more it feels. Shakespeare knew this—there’s comedy in his most serious plays.

JEROME LAWRENCE

You Can't Tell Or Show Everything

You can’t tell or show everything within the compass of a book. If you try to tell or show everything, your reader will die of boredom before the end of the first page. You must, therefore, ask yourself what is the core of the matter you wish to communicate to your reader? Having decided on the core of the matter, all that you tell him must relate to it and illustrate it more and more vividly.

MORRIS L. WEST

Success Is Hazardous to Your Health

I think what's most disturbing about success is that it's very hazardous to your health, as well as to your daily routine. Not only are there intrusions on your time, but there is a kind of corrosion of your own humility and sense of necessary workmanship. You get the idea that anything you do is in some way marvelous.

JOHN UPDIKE