You Can’t Wait Until You’re in the Mood

You can’t wait to write until you’re in the mood. My God, if you waited until you were in the mood, it would take forever. You have to sit down. The name of the game is to put it in the chair.

HARRY CREWS

E.M. Forster on Plot

"The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot...."The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king." This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development.

E. M. FORSTER

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

A Novel is an Act of Love

A novel is a spot where language, movement, feeling, and thought jell for a moment, through the agency of, let's say, a particular volunteer, but it is not an object or a possession. It is an act of love.

JANE SMILEY

The Truth Is We Write for Love

Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us. That is also why we pretend to be hard-boiled, saying things like “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money” (Samuel Johnson). Not true. No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for love. . . . You must do it for love. If you do it for money, no money will ever be enough, and eventually you will start imitating your first successes, straining hot water through the same old teabag. It doesn’t work with tea, and it doesn’t work with writing.

ERICA JONG

People Read Fiction for Emotion

I was Sinclair Lewis's secretary-chess-opponent-chauffeur-protegé back when I was 24, and he told me sternly that if I could be anything else be it, but if I HAD to be a writer, I might make it. He also said, as he threw away the first 75 expository pages of my first novel: “People read fiction for emotion—not information.”

BARNABY CONRAD

Our Power is Patience

Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

KURT VONNEGUT

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

The Best Writing Advice

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was from Dwight Macdonald: “Everything about the same subject in the same place.”

JAMES ATLAS

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is, “Knock ‘em dead with that lead sentence.”

WHITNEY BALLIETT

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was probably something Ted Solotaroff told me years ago when he was my editor. Going over a manuscript line by line again and again he kept reminding me, “Remember, this is your book, not my book. You’re the one who’s going to have to live with it the rest of your life. I might publish 30 or 40 books this year, you’re only going to publish one, and probably the only one you’re going to publish in two or three years.”

RUSSELL BANKS

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was from William Zinsser: “Be grateful for every word you can cut.”

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

Best writing advice I’ve ever received: Sell everything three times.

MARGARET CARLSON

Best advice I ever got was from the Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu, who told me in Bucharest, before I emigrated: "Learn English. French is dead."

ANDREI CODRESCU

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received: “Don’t have children.” I gave it to myself.

RICHARD FORD

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is: Don’t answer the phone.

PATSY GARLAN

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.

DAVID GUTERSON

The best writing advice I’ve ever heard: Don't write like you went to college.

ALICE KAHN

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was, “Rewrite it!” A lot of editors said that. They were all right. Writing is really rewriting--making the story better, clearer, truer.

ROBERT LIPSYTE

Best advice on writing I’ve ever received: Finish.

PETER MAYLE

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is: “Write with authority.

CYNTHIA OZICK

I think the best advice on writing I've received was from John Steinbeck, who suggested that one way to get around writer's block (which I was suffering hideously at the time) was to pretend to be writing to an aunt, or a girl friend. I did this, writing to an actress friend I knew, Jean Seberg. The editors of Harpers forgot to take off the salutation and that's how the article begins in the magazine: Dear Jean....

GEORGE PLIMPTON

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was given to me, like so much else, by Hubert Selby, Jr.: to learn and to know that writing is not an act of the self, except perhaps as exorcism; that, in writing what is worth being written, one serves, as vessel and voice, a power greater than vessel and voice.

NICK TOSCHES

The Sole Secret of Short-Story Writing

I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

O. HENRY