An Artist Needs Passion

The choice to train to be an artist of any kind is a risky one. Art’s a vocation, and often pays little for years and years — or never. Kids who want to be dancers, musicians, painters, writers, need more than dreams. They need a serious commitment to learning how to do what they want to do, and working at it through failure and discouragement. Dreams are lovely, but passion is what an artist needs — a passion for the work. That’s all that can carry you through the hard times. So I guess my advice to the young writer is a warning, and a wish: You’ve chosen a really, really hard job that probably won’t pay you beans — so get yourself some kind of salable skill to live on! And may you find the reward of your work in the work itself. May it bring you joy.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

It's Your Duty to Lie

There's an enormous difference between being a story writer and being a regular person. As a person, it's your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a writer it's your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life is only being a reporter, not a creator. You have to make your story bigger, better, more magical, more meaningful than life is, no matter how special or wonderful in real life the moment may have been.

RICK BASS

Surprise Yourself

Surprise yourself. If you can bring the story — or let it bring you — to a place that amazes you, then you can surprise your reader. The moment you can see any well-planned surprise, chances are, so will your sophisticated reader.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK

What Is Easy to Read Has Been Difficult to Write

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labor of writing and rewriting, correcting and re-correcting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labor, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.

G.M. TREVELYAN

Delight in Words

Delight in words. Roll them around your tongue, and escort them gallantly onto the page. Words, like cooking ingredients, should be crisp, fresh, and of delight to the eye and tongue.

BEN SCHOTT

Write Characters Out of Yourself

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

EUDORA WELTY

It's a Strange Way to Make a Living

What happens is six months go by after I finish a book and I start to go out of my mind. I have no hobbies, I don’t garden, I hate travel. The impetus is not inspiration, just a feeling that I better do this. There’s something addictive about leading another life at the same time you’re living your own. If you think about it, it’s a very strange way to make a living.

ANNE TYLER

Nothing Can Break the Mood Like Bad Dialogue

Nothing can break the mood of a piece of writing like bad dialogue. My students are miserable when they are reading an otherwise terrific story to the class and then hit a patch of dialogue that is so purple and expositional that it reads like something from a childhood play by the Gabor sisters. ... I can see the surprise on my students' faces, because the dialogue looked okay on paper, yet now it sounds as if it were poorly translated from their native Hindi.

ANNE LAMOTT

One Writes Mainly to Rewrite

Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.

TED SOLOTAROFF

Think of Your Main Characters as Dinner Guests

Think of your main characters as dinner guests. Would your friends want to spend ten hours with the characters you’ve created? Your characters can be loveable, or they can be evil, but they’d better be compelling.

PO BRONSON