Novels Are Never About What They Are About

Novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this til she is pretty far along with it.

DIANE JOHNSON

Make Them Care About What You Think

You better make them care about what you think. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. Otherwise it doesn’t work. I mean we’ve all read pieces where we thought, “Oh, who gives a damn.”

NORA EPHRON

You've Got to Work It Over

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

If You Have a Good Idea, Get It Out There

If you have a good idea, get it out there. For every idea I’ve realized, I have ten I sat on for a decade till someone else did it first. Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE.

JOSS WHEDON

Just Listen

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

Cigars Are the Perfect Literary Drug

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

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

Have Something to Say

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

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

Nothing Is So Solid As Writing

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