Please Yourself

/

I had been writing for fifteen years and getting nowhere. Everything I had written was derivative, influenced by others. Then finally I decided to please myself. It was a great gamble, but finally I cut the umbilical cord, and in severing it I became an entity. I became myself.

HENRY MILLER

Internalize the Audience

/

Part of the storytelling ability is simply the anticipation of boredom and the introduction of a sudden heightening or surprise. To be a good storyteller you need to have first internalized the audience: that subvocal groan that says, “Okay, okay, get on with it.” Not that you always have to cater to the audience’s expectations: you can cross them up, frustrate them, prolong their tension, though that too can be a way of entertaining them. In any case, you have to be aware of their demands, whether you satisfy them or not.

PHILLIP LOPATE

Writing for Kids

/

If you're writing for kids, think about the age of the audience constantly. A big rule for writing middle-grade horror is that they have to know it’s a fantasy. The real world can’t interfere. There’s no divorce, no guns, no one ever dies. Once you’ve established that, you can go pretty far with the scares. Writing for teens is kind of the opposite. It has to be very real. They have to believe this is happening.

R.L. STINE

Limitations Mean Freedom

/

The way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom. Write a song on your lunch break. Paint a painting with only one color. Start a business without any start-up capital. Shoot a movie with your iPhone and a few of your friends. Build a machine out of spare parts. Don't make excuses for not working -- make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now.

AUSTIN KLEON

Your Life Is Your Present

/

God’s present to me is my own life. It’s not D. H. Lawrence’s or Tolstoy’s or Virginia Woolf’s—much as I might like it to be. And, whoever is reading this, your life is your present, your dowry, your donnée. No one on earth is going to have the same list of Most Important Characters as you.

CAROLYN SEE

Margaret Atwood’s Ten Rules for Writing Fiction

/

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10. Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visualization of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.