The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen, or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and, if they publish it, maybe no one will read it.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Don’t leave a word misspelled [in your script]. With spell-check programs on most computers, it is easier to produce perfect, clean scripts. But you still have to read every word carefully. It’s a safe bet that a script will be rejected if it has half a dozen typos or other errors in the first ten pages. If you don’t care enough to make it clean, the rest of us don’t waste time reading it. The same goes for grammar. No excuses here.
TONY BILL
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. 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
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 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
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
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
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)
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
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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