What you're trying to do is hook one sentence to the sentence before and the next one to that sentence. And as you do, you're building a house…. The architect and the contractor, they know what the house is going to look like when it's done — and that's the big difference. I don't have any idea what it will look like when it's done. I don't have any idea whether it will even be done, because you don't know what you're doing when you're at work.
PHILIP ROTH
Usually, a story is triggered by a notion I have of a character in a particular situation, and the various reactions that character might have to the situation. My starting point is always the character. Person + event + reaction = what next? If something like setting or plot or a line of dialogue happens to be the spark, it’s not the kindling. Character is always the kindling.
PATRICK RYAN
A good style comes primarily from lack of pretentiousness, and what is pretentious changes from year to year from day to day from minute to minute. We must be ever more careful. A man does not get old because he nears death; a man gets old because he can no longer see the false from the good.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.
ANTON CHEKHOV
I had done a writer's workshop with Gordon Lish, the notorious creative writing teacher at one point many years earlier. But I'd never actually written. And I think to a great extent, the reason Kitchen Confidential sounds like it does is I just did not have the luxury or the burden of a lot of time to sit around and contemplate the mysteries of the universe. I had to wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning, write for an hour and a half, and then I had to go to work to a real job. So here I was. It was liberating in the sense that I had no time to think about what I was writing. And I certainly had no customer or reader in mind because I was quite sure no one would ever read it. That was, in many ways, a very liberating place to be. And I've kind of tried to stick with that business model since.
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.
MORRIS L. WEST
Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.
NICHOLSON BAKER
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.
KURT VONNEGUT
Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
GEORGE V. HIGGINS
Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.
SARAH WATERS
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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