I Want the Reader to Turn the Page

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research.

BARBARA TUCHMAN

It's Like Boiling Down

It’s like boiling down. Four pages can go through six, eight, ten drafts to get down. The beginning is always rewritten much more than the rest, because it’s the setting up of information as well as the telling of the story—that’s always much harder to juggle.

SUSAN MINOT

Certain Subjects Just Need Time

I don’t think that writer’s block exists really. I think that when you’re trying to do something prematurely, it just won’t come. Certain subjects just need time. . . . You’ve got to wait before you write about them.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Advice to Young Poets

Advice to aspiring poets: Poetry is not letter-writing cut up into lines. Become familiar with the poets that are the infrastructure of literature; read, read, read.

CYNTHIA OZICK

It is All There, in the Subconscious

I think I’ve been . . . trying to calculate and figure too much. I’ve stopped that now and am trying not to worry and just let it come out, because apparently it is all there, in your mind, in the subconscious, and the trick is to throw your conscious mind out of gear and just let it flow thru.

JAMES JONES

Your Senses Must Be Razor-Sharp

In order to write at a high level of competence you need a comprehensive vocabulary, a keen sense of overall structure, and an inner beat or cadence. Your senses must be razor-sharp. Alcohol blunts those senses even as it releases self-restraint. Therefore many writers feel they are getting down to the real story after a belt or two, little realizing they are damaging their ability to tell the real story.

RITA MAE BROWN

You Have to be Hurt Like Hell Before You Can Write Seriously

For Christ sake write and don't worry what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the waste-basket . . . . Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

Getting it Right

The writer Joan Didion and her late husband John Gregory Dunne had an expression for when a work was successful. They asked each other: Did the author “get it right?”

The line jumped out at me, for that is my measure as well and the only question that matters.

The language, the structure, the content, the message, the point, the moral, if there is one, the color, feel, smell, taste and texture of a thing, the arc of the narrative, beginnings, middles, and ends, the details, the rhythm, the resonance, the opening line—did I get it right?

If it isn’t right—if it’s hollow, or stupid, or naïve, or clumsy, or misguided, or annoying, or just plain wrong—I will undertake as many revisions as are required to fix it.

The most amount of time I have spent on a single line at a single sitting? 45 minutes.

 The most I have scrapped at one time? 425 pages—twice.

 But getting it right is the entire point of a day’s labor. If I succeed, I can at the least offer a reader a bit of clarity in a complicated world. If I don’t succeed, I just add to the noise.

DENISE SHEKERJIAN

Two Kinds of Editors

There are, it seems, two kinds of editors. The first kind cares mainly about himself, about how his editing performance reflects on him and getting ahead or getting stroked or getting to lunch, as the case may be. Such editors are not editors at all and ought to go to breakfast and stay there. A real editor, however, is a rare thing, and I've been lucky in working with a few. A real editor is focused totally on the writer's work and helping the writer realize a vision of the piece or the book he's set out to do. Editing requires a certain selflessness that is hard to find.

DAVID REMNICK

Any Fiction Should Be A Story

Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn’t a story.

MALCOLM COWLEY