Something Has to Change

I think there are very few rules that can’t be broken. I think there is only one that is very difficult to break. I have seen it broken, but not very often. It’s that something has to change. From the beginning of the story to the end, something needs to be different. The only time I’ve ever seen it successfully broken was a Grace Paley story called “A Conversation With My Father.” But as a general rule, something has to change. There has to be some source of tension. 

MARY GAITSKILL

Read It Out and Hear It

My ear is my critical tool as a writer, because it’s what catches the false notes. Your eye can very easily glide across the page, look down at the text and go, “Oh yeah, that’s fine.” But if you read it out and hear it, your ear will very quickly tell you when you’re not quite there.

KEVIN BARRY

Persist

Persist. If you stop, then you’re removing yourself from the conversation. You have to keep going and weather rejection until you find the person who will open the door for you. You have to hold up your end of the bargain. Become the best writer you can because nobody owes you anything; you owe that to yourself.

JESMYN WARD

There Are No Degrees of Uniqueness

It is almost a lost cause to argue that unique means unduplicated—quite different from anything else in the world—and can not be modified by any such adjective as most. There are no degrees of uniqueness, except in American advertising. Everything is more unique than everything else.

JACK SMITH

All Art Comes From Love

No one asks what Mozart means. Or an Indian raga or the little tripping dance of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to “Cheek to Cheek” in Top Hat. Forget about making things that are understood. I don’t know what Abba means, but I love it. Imagination is your creed; sentimentality and lack of feeling your foe. All art comes from love — love of doing something.

JERRY SALTZ

Practice, Practice, Practice

What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.

C.S. LEWIS

Make the Verb Do the Work

In the end it’s ironing the stuff. Getting out anything that’s extraneous. I don’t use adjectives if I can possibly get away with it. I don’t use adverbs. I try to make the verb do the work.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

Talent Is a Species of Vigor

They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that with persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor. 

ERIC HOFFER

Tell a Story

A writer’s greatest fear now is not that he’s going to be no good when he sits down to write. A writer’s greatest fear is that he’s going to be brilliant and that no one will read it, that no one can read it, that no one knows the difference because they read these stupid “How to write a screenplay” books. It’s made people into idiots. In the old days the writer’s greatest fear was always, this time out, it just isn’t going to happen. I just won’t have the stuff. Now the fear is that I’ll have it, but those little jerks from Harvard Business School won’t be able to understand it. Because these MBAs can follow instructions, they read these books and say your script has to have these characters and those turning points. They ask questions like, “Who are you rooting for at the end of the first act?”I was never conscious of my screenplays having any acts. I didn’t know what a character arc was. It’s all bullshit. Tell a story.

JOHN MILIUS

A Good Sentence

A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection. (If you want to puzzle your reader, that’s your own business.)

BENJAMIN DREYER