One Must Be Drenched in Words

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

HART CRANE

Editors Make Mistakes

Editors make mistakes. By actual count, 121 publishers said “No thanks” to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds and Lolita were turned down too, again and again. The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Peter Principle, Watership Down, To Kill A Mockingbird—rejected, every one.

JUDITH APPLEBAUM

Your Mother Will Not Make You a Writer

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.

PAUL THEROUX

Be Interesting

The Number One rule, in my prose boot camps? Be interesting. This doesn’t necessarily mean zany or pyrotechnical; in fact those things can so often be like the loudmouth brayings of a narcissistic bigmouth who understands with his every drawn breath how deadly uninteresting he really is. There are infinite ways to be interesting. One way is to pursue, with passion, something, anything, beyond the realm of writing.

RICK BASS

One Must Be Poisoned by Emotion

I think that to write well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice—they all make fine fuel.

EDNA FERBER

Writer’s Block Is Real

In my experience, writer’s block is very real. You’ll be writing something and suddenly it stops. The characters stop talking. You’ve been happily just transcribing everything they’ve been saying, and suddenly they sit down and shut up. Suddenly, you are in deep trouble. It does happen. It’s very real.

NEIL GAIMAN

Write Anywhere

I can write anywhere. I made up the names of the characters on a sick bag while I was on an airplane. I told this to a group of kids and a boy said, “Ah, no, that’s disgusting.” And I said, “Well, I hadn’t used the sick bag.”

J.K. ROWLING

Get a Day Job, but Don't Get Too Good at It

The most defeatist thing I hear is, I’m going to give it a couple of years. You can’t set a clock for yourself. If you do, you are not a writer. You should want it so badly that you don’t have a choice. You have to commit for the long haul. There’s no shame in being a starving artist. Get a day job, but don’t get too good at it. It will take you away from your writing.

MATTHEW WEINER

If You Want to Write, You Can

If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.

RICHARD RHODES

Five Common Traits of Good Writers

(1) They have something to say.

(2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. 

(3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a “capacity for clear thought,” able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach.

(4) They’re geniuses at putting their emotions into words.

(5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.

JAMES J. KILPATRICK