Read Yourself Dizzy

Read yourself dizzy. Know how we got from there to here. Know how to recognize clear language, powerful language, evasive or pretentious language. Know stuff about a lot of different things.

JEFF GREENFIELD

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

Don't Censor Your Characters

When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking. The important thing is not to censor them. What they are talking about may not seem to have anything to do with what you as a writer are writing about but it does.

AUGUST WILSON

Spend Some Time Living Before You Start Writing

Spend some time living before you start writing. What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, “Write what you know.” It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.

ANNIE PROULX

Art Doesn't Happen Magically

It is really arduous to make art. It is work. It doesn’t magically happen. Those writers who say, oh you know I wait and inspiration strikes, and magically a perfect sonnet will come. I’m like, you’re lying. That’s not how Wordsworth wrote, that’s not how Keats wrote, that’s not how anyone worked.

JOHN LOGAN

Write for Yourself

Advice to beginners: Write for yourself and yourself alone. Don’t try to please anyone else, and don’t be afraid of anyone.

SALLIE TISDALE

The Best Literature Is Always A Take

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes.

JULIO CORTÁZAR

You Write By Sitting Down and Writing

You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.

BERNARD MALAMUD

A Writer Should Get As Much Education As Possible

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

The Joy of Poetry

The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait. I think it's the greatest art.

SONIA SANCHEZ