Writing a Memoir Is Knocking Yourself Out with Your Own Fist

In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right. Sure, there’s the pleasure of doing work guaranteed to engage you emotionally—who’s indifferent to their own history? The form always has profound psychological consequence on its author. It can’t not. What project can match it for that? Plus you get to hang out with folks no longer on this side of the grass. Places and times you may have for decades ached after wind up erecting themselves around you as you work.

MARY KARR

The First Paragraph

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Cruising the Internet Doesn't Count as Writing

Cruising the Internet doesn't count as writing. Neither does answering e-mail. Before you check Twitter & FB and do other similar tasks that get in the way of writing, write first. (I really need to take my own advice here!)

TERRY McMILLAN

It Takes Time to Find Your True Voice

I think a writer’s voice is really his or her authentic, natural voice—the way she actually expresses herself and sees the world. But it takes time to get to that. I think the first many years of writing you tend to write the way you think you’re supposed to sound, and gradually (if you’re lucky) you begin dropping that affect and getting to what is your true voice. In time, you come to know that voice well enough that you know how to emphasize it, enrich it.

SUSAN ORLEAN

A Writer Should Get As Much Education As Possible

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Don’t Introduce 20 Characters in the First Chapter

Don’t introduce 20 characters in the first chapter. Another rookie mistake. Your readers are eager to get started. Don’t bombard them with a barrage of names from four generations of the same family. Five names are enough to get started.

JOHN GRISHAM

Swing for the Fences

Each time out should be a swing for the fences. Don't do base-running drills. You can do those on your own time.

TOBIAS WOLFF

The Purpose of Being a Writer Is Not to Express Oneself

The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.

SARAH MANGUSO

Life Is Not Always Explained

Life is not always explained. When I used to teach summer classes at Columbia, I would often take my students to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side. I would ask them to bring a notebook and to surreptitiously document, word for word, all the conversations they overheard. When we came back to the classroom we read these aloud. What we heard was fascinating. People never talk directly at one another. They seem to always talk in circles.

ANNIE DeWITT

Fictional Characters Aren't People

Fictional characters aren't people — except sometimes to readers who want them to be. And they're especially not people to those of us who make them up. Instead, characters are imminently mutable, cobbled-together bits of language reflecting the this's and that's of a writer's life — memory, fantasy, fears, desires, suppressed experience, shards of speech, half-noticed newspaper squibs, over-hearings, mishearings — all of it subjected to the writer's often whimsical will, then put on to the page for others.

RICHARD FORD