You Write In Order to Change the World

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world.

JAMES BALDWIN

Fiction Is Association, Not Withdrawal

If you are inclined to leave your character solitary for any considerable length of time, better question yourself. Fiction is association, not withdrawal.

A. B. GUTHRIE, JR.

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

A Character Must Be More Than A Chess Piece

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing.

ANTHONY BURGESS

Be Ruthless About Protecting Writing Days

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.

J.K. ROWLING

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

“Show Don’t Tell” Is A Zombie Idea

The advice “show don’t tell” is a zombie idea, killed 40 years ago by the publication in English of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, yet still sadly wandering the literary landscape…. What is boring in fiction tends to be the hackneyed plots with all their tired old stage business, while the interesting stuff usually lies in what is called the exposition, meaning the writing about whatever is not us.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

Explain

I tell every comedy writer this simple, profound secret. It's called, “Explain.” If you risk not getting a laugh for 12 minutes, then you can tell the audience who these characters are. You introduce Bialystock in dire circumstances and Bloom as a genius accountant who dreams of beautiful girls in the wings. You explain who they are, what they want and when they run into it. Then they will know what is happening. You take time for verdant valleys of information for a reason: to reach mountain peaks of humor. In most sitcoms these days, you aren't even sure who the characters are. Instead, they are always going for the jokes.

MEL BROOKS

The Characters Want to Get Out

Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.

ELIE WIESEL

Writing A Novel Is A Painful and Bloody Process

Writing a novel is a painful and bloody process that takes up all your free time, haunts you in the darkest hours of night and generally culminates in a lot of weeping over an ever-growing pile of rejection letters. Every novelist will have to go through this at least once and in some cases many times before they are published, and since publication itself brings no guarantee of riches or plaudits, it’s not unreasonable to ask what sort of a person would subject himself to such a thing.

ALICE ADAMS