The advice wasn’t to me personally, but I recall hearing Jay-Z say something along the lines of, don’t give people what they want, give them what they’re not expecting. It’s what I’ve always believed and it’s powerful to have your philosophy endorsed. I never want to deliver a novel that I think people are expecting, I love the challenge of creating something unique and surprising. It’s so important to write with freedom.
CECELIA AHERN
1. Make money
If we find we can make money writing books, by telling stories, we have the responsibility…of doing it as well and as profitably as we can.
2. Protect language
If human beings can protect the climate, we can certainly affect the language, and those of us who use it professionally are responsible for looking after it.
3. Have tact
We who tell stories should be modest about the job, and not assume that because the reader is interested in the story, they’re interested in who’s telling it. A storyteller should be invisible, as far as I’m concerned.
4. Service the story
As the servant, I have to do what a good servant should. I have to be ready to attend to my work at regular hours…. I have to keep myself sober during working hours; I have to stay in good health.
If you have faith in your writing, it’s easy. It’s when you remove that faith that things become difficult—when you start to think, this is stupid, this is idiotic, this is worthless, and so on. That’s the real fight: to overcome those kinds of thoughts.
KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD
What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: When you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use “for example” liberally. Show a draft around, and prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else.
STEVEN PINKER
One of the hardest things of all is to start. Just sitting down and getting over your own intimidations. Every professional songwriter I know — people who do it 100% for their living — is terrified every time they sit down to write. You’re always convinced that your next song is going to be your last, or that it’s going to be your worst, or that you’ll never be able to write anything as good as your hit. It’s a constant terror. I think all artists live in a constant state of terror. And part of our job is to know our own chaos well enough to be able to make sense of it when you can.
JANIS IAN
Hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV — I hate to say it — none of these make one an artist. … The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.
DAVID RAKOFF
Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, “Margaret has to die soon.” We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme. de Sevigne, and we are the only people in the world who write oxymoron in the margin of the Bible. Manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire, Strunk’s Elements in the bathroom, the Laramie City Directory explained away with “It might come in handy,” all strike fear in the GS-7 heart. Nobody really wants to sleep with a writer, but Silly Service workers won’t even talk to us.
FLORENCE KING
Writing is hard work. It is gathering ten times as much material as can ever be used. This information has to be gleaned to get the best possible use from it. The reader has to be convinced that the writer knows what he is writing about.
JOHN STEINBECK
Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.
ELMORE LEONARD
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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