Trust Your Own Judgment

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.

DORIS LESSING

Martin Amis's Rules for Writers

Write in long-hand: when you scratch out a word, it still exists there on the page. On the computer, when you delete a word it disappears forever. This is important because usually your first instinct is the right one.

Use any anxiety you have about your writing — or your life — as fuel: “Ambition and anxiety: that’s the writer’s life.”

Never say “sci-fi.” You’ll enrage purists. Call it SF.

Don’t dumb down: always write for your top five percent of readers.

Never pun your title, simpler is usually better: Lolita turns out to be a great title; couldn’t be simpler.

Watch out for words that repeat too often.

Don’t start a paragraph with the same word as previous one. That goes doubly for sentences.

Stay in the tense.

Inspect your “hads” to see if you really need them.

Never use “amongst.” “Among.” Never use “whilst.” Anyone who uses “whilst” is subliterate.

Try not to write sentences that absolutely anyone could write.

You write the book you want to read. That’s my rule.

You have to have a huge appetite for solitude.

Life Is Too Short for a Writer to Be Polite

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

JOHN UPDIKE

We Tell Lies for a Living

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.

NEIL GAIMAN

Anecdotes Don't Make Good Stories

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

ALICE MUNRO

Never Write in a Café

Never write in a café, especially in Europe. Ever since Hemingway, this has been the literary equivalent of what in mountain climbing is called the "tech weenie" (that is, someone who cannot get a foot off the ground but is weighed down with $10,000's worth of equipment). Literary skill, much less greatness, cannot be had with a pose, and exhibitionism extorts the price of failure. Also, have pity on the weary Parisians who have wanted only a citron pressé but have been unable to find a café where every single seat is not occupied by an American publicly carrying on a torrid affair with his moleskin.

MARK HELPRIN

All the Great Story Lines Are Great Practical Jokes

If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.

KURT VONNEGUT

Try to Keep All the Good Stuff Off the Page

What isn’t said is as important as what is said. In many classic short stories, the real action occurs in the silences. Try to keep all the good stuff off the page.

COLSON WHITEHEAD

Own Your Voice

Write like you write, like you can’t help but write, and your voice will become yours and yours alone. It’ll take time but it’ll happen as long as you let it. Own your voice, for your voice is your own. Once you know where your voice lives, you no longer have to worry so much about being derivative.

CHUCK WENDIG

Maya Angelou on Writing

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks “the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.” And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, “Okay. Okay. I’ll come.”

Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

Talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.

Tell the truth and not the facts.

If you are going to write autobiography, don't expect that it will clear anything up. It makes it more clear to you, but it doesn't alleviate anything.

The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects—nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs—ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I'm most happy to be a writer.

I see a yellow pad, and my knees get weak, and I salivate.

Poetry is the strongest language we have.