For years I’d see reporters come in with lists of questions to ask. They had to get through that list, no matter what. You’d never do that with jazz artists. Forget the questions. Listen. Duke [Ellington] used to say to me, "I don’t want people listening to my music to analyze what the chords are or what we’re doing with the rhythms. I want them to open up to the music." It's the same thing with interviewing. I just listen, and the questions come from that.
NAT HENTOFF
At the end of a book, when I’m extremely exhausted, mentally fatigued, I sometimes sneak off into the yard and smoke a cigar, maybe six or seven times per book. That’s a bad habit I picked up when I lived in Berlin. … Occasionally, instead of having a Red Bull, as a twenty-year-old might, I resort to the Thomas Mann method, the Maria Mancinis, but not very often. Cigars are the perfect literary drug. I understand why Mann, Freud, and so many durable people smoked cigars. It really focuses the mind.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Readers of fiction are unique in that they want to empathize with characters who are different from them, even if those characters make decisions that they may not personally want to make, or may not personally agree with.
BRIT BENNETT
The most important piece of writing advice: Have something to say. Whenever I have trouble writing, it’s because I’m trying to write about something I don’t care about. Once I know what I’m trying to say, writing is a joy. Other advice: read, read, read.
GRETCHEN RUBIN
Writing is like playing the guitar. There’s no substitute for practice. Guidance and models and goals are good, and you have to listen to really good guitarists/read really good writers and pay attention to how they do it (listening to your exact peers fumble isn’t as helpful), but mainly you have to do it. With passion, for which there’s also no substitute.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing – I suppose that's what a vocation means – at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.
ROBERT LOWELL
Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.
ANNE LAMOTT
I love first sentences because they are full of promise. I like to think of them as an introductory handshake made of words, one that can’t be too limp, too strong, too eager or sweaty.
UNA LaMARCHE
The reason it’s worth standing up for punctuation is not that it’s an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapors when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
LYNNE TRUSS
Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.
ROBERT McKEE
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
Copyright © Jon Winokur 2019-2025. All rights reserved. Website by Wei-Haas Creative.
The trademark AdviceToWriters® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.