Writing Is A Performance

The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance—and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig—is to understand the nature of the occasion.

STEPHEN GREENBLATT

A Writer's Brain

A writer’s brain is full of little gifts, like a piñata at a birthday party. It’s also full of demons, like a piñata at a birthday party in a mental hospital. The truth is, it’s demons that keep a tortured writer’s spirit alive, not Tootsie Rolls. Sure they’ll give you a tiny burst of energy, but they won’t do squat for your writing. So treat your demons with the respect they deserve, and with enough prescriptions to keep you wearing pants.

COLIN NISSAN

Creative Incubation

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Writing Was Not Meant to Be An Esoteric Secret

Every writer’s assumption is that he is as other human beings are, and that they are more or less as he is. There’s a principle of psychic unity. [Writing] was not meant to be an occult operation; it was not meant to be an esoteric secret.

SAUL BELLOW

Procrastination

Vacuum entire house. Reorganize all closets and drawers. Paint exterior of house. Ask neighbors if they would like their house painted. Re-vacuum house. Write lead.

SUSAN ORLEAN

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

PAUL RUDNICK

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

JOHN BARTH

Writers can generate industrial quantities of procrastination before their first sonnet is rejected, or their first novel-outline-plus-sample-chapter is exorcised, burned and its ashes buried at sea. Are my pens facing north? Or magnetic north? What's that funny noise? Oh look, it's raining outside. My fingernails need cutting. I think my computer is going to break, better get it checked. Do I have toothache? Will I have toothache? The possibilities lend new meaning to the words eternity and purgatory.

A.L. KENNEDY

Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. ... It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It's much more relaxing actually to work.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes…. I didn’t always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth.

From my dick.

DAVID RAKOFF

If I owe you the song Tuesday, Monday night I really get to work on it.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

ALAIN de BOTTON

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.

MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

Move On

One of the great writer’s myths is the one about papering the walls with rejection slips. There are stories of proposals and manuscripts that were rejected twenty-five or thirty times and went on to become published books and even, in rare case, bestsellers. But these stories are so exceptional that when they do happen they immediately become part of publishing lore.

     Part of playing the publisher’s game is knowing when you have lost. If you have been flatly rejected by ten well-chosen editors then you will almost certainly be turned down by the next hundred. It would be far better to spend your time rethinking your idea, reworking your proposal, or maybe even abandoning that particular idea and moving on to something else.

JOHN BOSWELL

Writing Is Like Sculpture

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

ELIE WIESEL

Don't Dress Up Your Vocabulary

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.

STEPHEN KING

Don't Quit

Don’t quit. It’s very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it’s very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can’t get fired if you don’t write, and most of the time you don’t get rewarded if you do. But don’t quit.

ANDRE DUBUS

Finish Your First Draft

The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. "Finish your first draft and then we'll talk," he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.

DOMINICK DUNNE