Rules such as “Write what you know,” and “Show, don’t tell,” while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.
TOM ROBBINS
The main thing for me, always, is to give myself a good time at the desk. It’s based on the very straightforward assumption that if I’m having a good time, the beloved reader at the end of the process will be having a good time too.
KEVIN BARRY
I work virtually all day, every day. I come out after breakfast and I work until lunchtime, then I go in, get a bite to eat, come back out and work for the rest of the day. I’m not typing, not writing on the typewriter all that time. If you were to walk by in the field behind there and you looked in the window, you’d think, “Well, that guy’s just sitting in there daydreaming.” But an awful lot of the process is just thinking.
DAVID McCULLOUGH
I’ve seen plenty of students come in and say, I want to write a novel about blah blah blah. But you just can’t do it. You can only write a novel about a character who does something wrong, and see what happens from there. Novels are compendiums of bad behavior, and literature is the gossip about it. In other words, if you’re writing a piece of fiction, I’d urge you not to try to show anything—instead, try to discover something.
ETHAN CANIN
Good writing is Coco Chanel’s little black dress, but ly adverbs are women who wear too much jewelry and pin flowers in their hair. I like to rip them, tear them, strip them off until there’s nothing left but sleek, chic verbs.
FLORENCE KING
The ultimate way in which art can be political is if it engenders empathy, which is the thing that politicians can’t seem to do. If you feel like you know someone because you’ve spent two hours chronicling their life and story or you’ve seen some movie that gets you under your skin and in your heart, you can’t dismiss them as Other anymore.
LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA
If you want to capture ideas, you are lost. You are going to be detached from emotions and forget to live your life. You will be an observer and not a human being living his or her life. Forget taking notes. What is important remains, what is not important goes away.
PAULO COELHO
In the end it’s ironing the stuff. Getting out anything that’s extraneous. I don’t use adjectives if I can possibly get away with it. I don’t use adverbs. I try to make the verb do the work.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Whatever you do, don’t rely on memory. Don’t even imagine that you will be able to remember verbatim in the evening what people said during the day. And don’t squirrel notes in a bathroom—that is, run off to the john and write surreptitiously what someone said back there with the cocktails. From the start, make clear what you are doing and who will publish what you write. Display your notebook as if it were a fishing license. While the interview continues, the notebook may serve other purposes, surpassing the talents of a tape recorder. As you scribble away, the interviewee is, of course, watching you. Now, unaccountably, you slow down, and even stop writing, while the interviewee goes on talking. The interviewee becomes nervous, tries harder, and spills out the secrets of a secret life, or maybe just a clearer and more quotable version of what was said before. Conversely, if the interviewee is saying nothing of interest, you can pretend to be writing, just to keep the enterprise moving forward.
JOHN McPHEE
Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express. When you enter into the dance with language, you’ll begin to find that there’s something before, or behind, or more absolute than the thing you thought you wanted to express. And as you work, other kinds of meaning emerge than what you might have expected. It’s like wrestling with the angel: On the one hand you feel the constraints of what can be said, but on the other hand you feel the infinite potential. There’s nothing more interesting than language and the problem of trying to bend it to your will, which you can never quite do. You can only find what it contains, which is always a surprise.
MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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