The Secret of Writing

It's hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It's the greatest secret of the world.

ANDREA BARRETT

Do Good Work

What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, nor who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say.

DAVE EGGERS

Write About People You Care About

You want to write about people you care about. You can dress them up any way you see fit. You can slam them together in composites or put knee breeches on them and let them fight in the Revolutionary War, but your characters ought to be some of the ten most important people in your life, or the six most creepy, or you’ll bore the socks off your readers, and yourself as well.

CAROLYN SEE

Never Read Bad Stuff

Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game. I don't know if you ever played competitive tennis, but you learn not to watch bad tennis; it messes up your game. Art's the same way.

JAMES LEE BURKE

The Reader Will Do Much of the Work

Writers get better at the craft once we learn to assume that the reader will do much of the work for us, filling in the blanks with their own experiences and lives. Plant a few key pieces of evidence, and your reader will dream up the connections.

ROGER ROSENBLATT

Start with a Hook

A good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.

ROLAND SMITH

Even a Great Storyteller Requires Professional Writing Skills

Few writers have what it takes to produce “great writing,” but even a great storyteller requires professional writing skills to get the story across to the reader. The difference between amateur writing and professional writing is rewriting.

MAEVE MADDOX

Punctuation Indicates How the Writer Hears the Prose

Punctuation…indicates how the writer hears the prose, as they create it. So I use ellipses, dashes and commas quite a lot, because they express how things sound to me. Exclamation marks convey moments of passionate overemphasis or profound disorder—like someone shouting in public or bursting into tears. So they make things briefly uncomfortable—and then we go on again.

JOANNA KAVENNA

Writing a Screenplay Is Like Climbing a Mountain

Writing a screenplay is like climbing a mountain. When you’re climbing, all you can see is the rock in front of you and the rock directly above you. You can’t see where you’ve come from or where you’re going.

SYD FIELD

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