Why You Write

Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual's consciousness is a collection of memories we've cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it--with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited--it takes on a life of its own.

SUSAN ORLEAN

What If You Looked at Your Stories as Classified Information?

What if you looked at your stories as classified information? That means you only go into your characters’ minds on a need-to-know basis. If they absolutely need to think or feel something, you can let them do it; otherwise, let them alone. Don’t make a damn fool of yourself if you don’t need to.

CAROLYN SEE

Writers Take Words Seriously

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

Take Your Time But Don't Dawdle

Take your time but don’t dawdle. You have to get comfortable with experimenting and getting it wrong and also staring at the computer screen with nothing to type. All this discomfort and doubt and frustration in the beginning is just what you have to go through to get to the place where something begins to take shape. Sometimes this period can last a long time. Sometimes not. Either way, it’s just as necessary as the days where you feel like you’re transcribing something that already exists and your fingers can’t move fast enough to put down the words that flow so easily (these days are fun and worth waiting for).

BILL CLEGG

When You're Writing a Novel, You Are in Charge

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

Say All You Have to Say in the Fewest Possible Words

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

JOHN RUSKIN

What Makes a Writer

I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote simply for the money. What makes a writer is that he likes writing. Naturally, when he has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money.

P.G. WODEHOUSE

Detachment

When I'm writing, I like to gain distance from my work so I can tell how it will strike a reader who is seeing it for the first time. I do this through a trick I devised while I was living in Savannah writing Midnight—I would call my apartment in New York, the answering machine would pick up, I'd read the page of text I'd just written, then I'd hang up. A minute later, I'd call my apartment again and listen to the "message." Hearing my own voice reading the page over the phone—my voice having traveled 1,800 miles (900 each way)—gave me just the detached perspective I needed.

JOHN BERENDT

Ask a Reading Friend to Look at It First

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. 

MARGARET ATWOOD

You've Got to Work on Something Dangerous

You’ve got to work on something dangerous. You have to work on something that makes you uncertain. Something that makes you doubt yourself. You shouldn’t feel safe. You should feel, “I don’t know if I can write this.” That’s what I mean by dangerous, and I think that’s a good thing to do. Sacrifice something safe.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM