Be Ruthless About Your Work

If you’re not ruthless about your work, you can’t be an artist of interest. Once something crystallizes, you have to be ruthless about presenting it; it doesn’t matter who gets hurt, starting with yourself. Your message in the ear of the reader is going to be worth the damage that’s done. You’ve got to be impersonal; you can’t look back. If, on the other hand, you go in the other direction and start thinking, “Will writing about this experience hurt me?”—well, then, you’re a bad writer, the kind who spends his life humping for The New Yorker. You spend your life hurting other people—not yourself.

NORMAN MAILER

There’s No Such Thing as a Great Screenplay

There’s no such thing as a great screenplay. Because they are not meant to be read. There are just great movies. What the screenwriter is ceding to the director is pace, mood, style, point of view, which in a book are the function of the writer. The director controls the writing room, and it’s in the editing room where a picture is made.

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

Creation Is a Long Journey

Creation is not a moment of inspiration but a lifetime of endurance. The drawers of the world are full of things begun. Unfinished sketches, pieces of invention, incomplete product ideas, notebooks with half-formulated hypotheses, abandoned patents, partial manuscripts. Creating is more monotony than adventure. It is early mornings and late nights: long hours doing work that will likely fail or be deleted or erased—a process without progress that must be repeated daily for years. Beginning is hard, but continuing is harder. Those who seek a glamorous life should not pursue art, science, innovation, invention, or anything else that needs new. Creation is a long journey where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don’t do is quit.

KEVIN ASHTON

Writing Is Like Taking an Exam

I myself tend to think of writing as much like taking an exam—the experience is deeply absorbing, my concentration is intensely focused, time seems suspended yet suddenly hours have elapsed. At the end of a day of writing, I feel drained. The point is that I don’t believe anyone has to innately love the process of writing to be a good writer, and to find it an immensely satisfying pursuit.

JAMES B. STEWART

Motherhood Feeds Art

I really do think motherhood feeds art. How that will be executed is another question. But having access to the emotional plane that comes with birthing a child: I can see the world through her eyes and notice things that I wouldn’t have noticed without her. I’ve lost out on time, but I’ve gained quite richly in other ways. At least that’s the theory I’m working with now.

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

Write to Your Mother

Write to your mother. Write to your best friend. Write to the love of your life. Write to your worst enemy. I think you’ll discover that the work for the enemy will be of highest quality. It will be the most daring and smart, because if someone is your enemy, she has the power to hurt you, and so you must hold her in very high regard and will take some pleasure in making her fear for her life.

OTTESSA MOSHFEGH

Walk Away

If I get frustrated, I’ll go eat something, I’ll go open another Diet Coke, I’ll go to the barn, I’ll distract myself, and then the parts in my brain that were working click and I get an idea. I read an article about how to learn to play a musical instrument. You practice, practice, practice on Friday, then you walk away. And then when you sit down on Saturday, you’re better. Not only because of all the practice, but also because of the walking away. I’m a firm believer in walking away.

JANE SMILEY

Style Is!

I just like writing to be clear and concise. I don’t like a lot of words. This is my nature. I like to keep things simple and very much as they really are. I’m not one for fantasy and I’m not one for exaggerated writing, but this – I think – is a matter of personality. I’m not sure you can tell people how to do it. In fact I’m sure it’s a matter of personality. Style is!

DIANA ATHILL

Novel vs. Screenplay

Which is harder? There are certain facts that cannot be disputed. A novel, usually, is many more words than a screenplay or stage play. More words mean more typing. More typing usually means more work, but in the many drafts and revisions of a dramatic work, it could all even out. (As for those who argue that revision is as hard as facing a blank page, I call b.s.) As a novelist who is just now making the transition to writing for television, I can say this: Somehow, you feel much more alone writing a novel than you do a dramatic work, if for no other reason than the implication of collaboration in the latter. With a novel, if you’re lucky, there’s an editor somewhere who will suggest fixes for egregious errors. The purpose of a screenplay, on the other hand, is to elicit collaboration from directors, actors, producers, etc.

KARL TARO GREENFELD

Everything Is Copy

We all grew up with this thing that my mother said to us over and over and over and over again, which was everything is copy. You know, you'd come home with some thing that you thought was the tragedy of your life - someone hadn't asked you to dance or…the hem had fallen out of your dress or whatever you thought was the worst thing that could ever happen to a human being. And my mother would say everything is copy. I now believe that what my mother meant is this: when you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.

NORA EPHRON