Writing Is Facing Your Deepest Fears and Failures

Writing is facing your deepest fears and all your failures, including how hard it is to write a lot of the time and how much you loathe what you’ve just written and that you’re the person who just committed those flawed sentences (many a writer, and God, I know I’m one, has worried about dying before the really crappy version is revised so that posterity will never know how awful it was). When it totally sucks, pause, look out the window (there should always be a window) and say, I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing.

REBECCA SOLNIT

Don't Water It Down

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

ANNE RICE

Sex Is Hard to Write About

Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do--like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.

MARTIN AMIS

Write a Page Every Day

Write a page every day. That’s about 200 words, or 1,000 words a week. Do that for two years and you’ll have a novel that’s long enough. Nothing will happen until you are producing at least one page per day.

JOHN GRISHAM

You Have to Stick at It

What I did have, which others perhaps didn’t, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.

DORIS LESSING

Work Inspires Inspiration

Work inspires inspiration. Keep working. If you succeed, keep working. If you fail, keep working. If you’re interested, keep working. If you’re bored, keep working.

MICHAEL CRICHTON

Abandon Yourself to Mystery

I want my students to tack up a Samuel Beckett quotation on their office doors: “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The ability to fail is what distinguishes the ordinary writer from the great one. The one who actually wants to push herself or himself so far that they know they’re going to crash and burn. You must risk yourself in order to find out what it is you truly know. That usually means just abandoning yourself to mystery. Over time, the mystery itself will join these things together. Eventually, after weeks, or months, or years of not knowing, there will come a moment when you think, “Aw, yeah! That’s it! That’s it! That’s what I’ve been looking for!” The solution appears, so simple and so elegant that it almost seems mathematical. You think, “That's been staring at me for the past two years, three years. How come I couldn’t see it?” Well, the fact of the matter is you couldn’t see it because you can’t see the beautiful simplicity at first. You have to do a lot of messy work to get there.

COLUM McCANN

Each Book Creates Its Own Structure

It’s my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I’ve written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don’t know.

DON DeLILLO

It's Never Too Late

Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it's not something where—if you missed it by age 19—you're finished. It's never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the world—at any age. At least try.

ELIZABETH GILBERT

Don't Think Critically When You're Trying to Write

It’s not good to think very critically when you’re trying to write. Any sentence could be stifled by the critic in one if you allow him to get the upper hand. But, by and large, keeping in mind that I am a little wary of the critic in me, I think once you start trying to put images and words of dialogue together, in some way the imaginary world takes over and somehow shuts out all the harassing critical thoughts that you might otherwise entertain.

JOHN UPDIKE