Be A Sublime Fool

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.

You must write every single day of your life.

You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.

I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.

May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise.

Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

RAY BRADBURY

That Sickening Feeling

You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

WILL SELF

Be Specific

Show, Don’t Tell. It’s coaching, not teaching. Be specific. If you can’t paint a picture of it, it’s an abstraction. If you can paint a picture of it, it’s a specificity. Good writing is specific writing, and specific writing is good writing. Be specific. “No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams—the five most golden words there ever were, for a writer. Don’t tell us it was hot, but instead, like Eudora Welty, remind us that the fading pink roses were the color of a bird dog’s panting tongue. That the ceaseless sound of the cicadas in the trees high overhead was like the sound of grain being poured into a metal bucket. Specificity is the lever, the pry bar, by which you lift up new universes and make readers believe all things.

RICK BASS

Empty Days Are Important

I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything.

MAY SARTON

Writing Well Is a Two-Stage Process

Writing well is a two-stage process: (1) write not so well; (2) fix it. Knowing that Stage 2 is coming, you can relax a little during Stage 1; your inner editor will diligently revise the clumsy, turgid bits later.

JIM HOLT

To Hell with Grammar

To hell with grammar, but only if you know the grammar first. To hell with formality, but only if you have learned what it means to be formal. To hell with plot, but you had better at some stage make something happen. To hell with structure, but only if you have thought it through so thoroughly that you can safely walk through your work with your eyes closed.

COLUM McCANN

Learn What to Leave Out

You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

BILLY COLLINS

Word by Word

Being a slow reader admitted me to books at a very basic level—word by word. That doesn't seem like bad preparation to me, if writers are people who essentially live in sentences.

RICHARD FORD

Three Characteristics A Work of Fiction Must Possess

Three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful:

1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot. 

2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it.

3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme.

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Inside-Out Characters

I don’t like to throw characters into a plot as though it were a raging torrent where they are swept along. What interests me are the complications and nuances of character. Few of my characters are described externally; we see them from the inside out.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE