START WRITING

Start writing. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but START WRITING. There is NO SUCH THING as "too late" in the arts. Trust me. START.

PATTON OSWALT

Science and Writing Are Utterly the Same Thing

I think science and writing are utterly the same thing. They are completely rooted in passion and desire, if they're any good at all. You can fall in love with the natural world in the same way you fall in love with a person. There's that same sense of helplessness, of lacking control over how much of your life you want to devote to it.

ANDREA BARRETT

Writing Well Involves Two Gifts

Writing well involves two gifts—the art of adding and the art of taking away. Of the two, the first is more important, since without it the second would not exist.

JOHN UPDIKE

Our Power is Patience

Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

KURT VONNEGUT

Don't Try to Guess What Editors Want

Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

The Worst Thing You Can Do Is Censor Yourself

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

The Writer Must Rescue the Whispered and the Regrettable

If you look at social media, you see this leveling of American culture. Everyone has the same photo of the same beach, the same blue water, same wedding party, same slang, same songs, same movies. We have one lingua franca. We curate ourselves for mass consumption. But real speech, in the moment, in groups of two or three, tears at the veil. What we say that is not recorded. Drunken confession. Botched jokes. The rejected advance. Campfire at a deer camp. The novel as village gossip. The writer must rescue the whispered and the regrettable.

MATTHEW NEILL NULL

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