Writing Is A Kind of Double Living

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN

Writing is a Way to Talk About Yourself

Writing became a way for me to talk about myself—or a character—in a really personal, surprising manner without any embarrassment. I was brought up to be an incredibly nice person, but not everything I wanted to say was nice.

LOUISE ERDRICH

So Many Books, So Little Time

So many books, so little time. When I was young and thought I had plenty of time, I often reread old favorites from start to finish. But these days I reread only bits and pieces, looking for a vaguely remembered tone or mood, a voice, a way of structuring a scene, or in the case of nonfiction, factual details, that I can borrow or learn from for my own work.

RUSSELL BANKS

Start Writing Something

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn’t matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN

Your Best Tools Are Short, Plain, Anglo-Saxon Verbs

Your best tools are short, plain, Anglo-Saxon verbs. I mean active verbs, not passive verbs. If you could write an article using only active verbs, your article would automatically have clarity and warmth and vigor.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

Create Vulnerable Characters

It’s always a part of my purpose as a storyteller to first create characters that the reader will be anxious for. You can’t be anxious for a character if you don’t care about the character, if you don’t in some way like, respect, or even love the character, or at least have affection for the character. And then, once I’ve established those characters, in whom the reader I hope has some emotional investment, then it’s perversely my job to make as many terrible things happen to those people we like as I can imagine.

JOHN IRVING

Tell It Straight

I learned a lot from James Joyce and Erskine Caldwell and of course from Hemingway … [but the] tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable, into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

The Fumblerules of Grammar

Don't use no double negatives.

Eschew obfuscation.

Never use a preposition to end a sentence with.

The passive voice should never be employed.

You should not use a big word when a diminutive would suffice.

It is bad to carelessly split infinitives.

About those sentence fragments.

Avoid clichés like the plague.

WILLIAM SAFIRE

Dialogue Is Easier Than Plot

It is much easier to write great dialogue (which is a talent and not really very much of an exertion) than to write great plots. So we playwrights do the next best thing to writing great plots: we write bad plots. And then we fill up the empty spaces with verbiage.

DAVID MAMET

Read Like Mad

Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.

SARAH WATERS