There are no rules. It’s amazing how willing people are to tell you that you aren’t a real writer unless you conform to their clichés and their rules. My advice? Reject rules and critics out of hand. Define yourself. Do it your way. Make yourself the writer of your dreams.
ANNE RICE
At every stage of writing a book, there is a sense of If only … If only I could find the time to write and if only I could figure out the third chapter and if only I could get my book finished. If only I could find an agent. If only some editor would buy my book. If only I could get a good publicist. If only the book would get reviewed. If only they would do more promotion. If only it would sell. It goes on like this forever, until you’re ready to start another book and kick off the cycle all over again.
ANN PATCHETT
My policy is to begin a story as late as possible, using flashback. But if you can open with, “He reached out for Steve’s throat,” and then pull back for the dispute, about why we were arguing. Hitchcock said, “You put the bomb under the bed.” You know that story?
“Mr. Hitchcock, how long do you hold a kiss on the screen?” some idiot student asked him a question at a film school. Hitchcock said, “Oh, I would say twenty, twenty-five minutes.”
“That’s a helluva long kiss, Mr. Hitchcock.”
“Yes, but first of all I would put a bomb under the bed.”
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Fine writing does not necessarily make a fine novel; you have concentrated so much on your undoubted skill at manipulating the English language you have forgotten the need for a developing story, a satisfactory beginning, middle and end. You have lost your reader in a welter of remarkable similes and striking metaphors. Readers are quick to pick up whether you are trying to communicate with them to the best of your skill and ability, or just showing off. The very density of fine writing can be off-putting — it's exhausting. If you're going to do it, at least put in lots of paragraphs.
FAY WELDON
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
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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