Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
JOHN UPDIKE
It's the writing itself that needs to be authentic, in other words; not the writer. Once I realized this, many years after college, I was suddenly free to begin, because I'd left my inhibitions behind. “Express yourself!” is the great rallying cry of all the arts—not just of fiction—but sometimes you have to escape yourself, just a little, to create something true.
JOHN WRAY
If you’re in school, don’t waste time in English courses. Learn skills not everybody knows, like court reporting or Japanese, so you can get part-time work at a decent wage. Don’t write short stories and poems unless you have a trust fund. No matter how perfect they are, no matter what prestigious magazine publishes them, each one will be 200 pages too short to pay the rent.
NELL ZINK
Fiction enables you to write coded versions of yourself that you know are true because you can decode them. Other people just think that's characterization. That's fine. You can, you can observe until the cows come home. But when you really have put a character together piece by piece, what makes it work is a piece of yourself. And until that happens, the character doesn't really have a being at all. So the real joining in fiction-writing is that sense of finding all the possibilities of your own character and awarding them in an organized way to the different characters of your creation.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Writing is physical. Thoreau said that over time an old poet learns to guard his or her moods as carefully as a cat watches a mouse. Hemingway advised writers to quit work each day with a bit of juice in the tank, knowing what would be coming the next day—a line of dialogue, a scene—so the writer could then slip more easily back into the dream of the story and not have to expend extra mental and physical energy—the sparks of friction—diving back down into the dream. He didn’t use those words—he compared the process instead to turning down the flame in a pilot lamp to the cool blue glow of just-waiting—but I like to think of it as a diving-down, a submersion, a re-immersion, into the subconscious: the wellspring of discovery, at which the traditional lens-shaped structure of the short story—six to eighteen pages—excels at delivering.
RICK BASS
Writer’s block, how to overcome it: write something substantial every morning, and while doing so forget entirely the impression you’re creating. That is, overcome ego.
PAUL FUSSELL
Collaborative workshops and writers’ peer groups are good inventions. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had. A good peer group offers mutual encouragement, amicable competition, stimulating discussion, practice in criticism, and support in difficulty. If you want to and are able to join a group, do so. If you long for the stimulus of working with other writers but can’t find or attend a local group, look into the many possibilities of forming or joining one on the Internet.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. It’s all about taking in as much of what’s out there as you can.... Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
SUSAN SONTAG
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.
NEIL GAIMAN
I always find that the novel I’m finishing, even if it’s turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don’t admit it, they’re not being honest. You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire — that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realize, no, it’s just this book.
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
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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