To Understand Is to Tremble

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I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calk, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven.... I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event.

HAROLD BRODKEY

A Novel Takes Over a Writer's Life

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I just write what I want to write. Quiet is very beautiful to me, the medium of everything that matters. I'm grateful for the patience of my readers, certainly. But the fact is that a novel takes over a writer's life for literal years. What I write, day by day and word by word, is much of my felt life. It would be a terrible capitulation to give up my explorations of quiet because of anxiety about the receptiveness of readers. I have found that readers are very much to be trusted.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

There's No Use Revising Something Bad

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I tell these students there’s no use in revising something that’s bad. I believe that, for short stories. It’s brief, very brief, from four to twelve pages, getting something done. I don’t believe in rewriting this one goddamned story. If the first draft is no goddamned good, it’s no good. It’s stupid to revise it, to me. The first draft has got to be loaded with most of it. Does it not? It can’t just be a shell of what’s going to be. I think it’s got to be exciting.

BARRY HANNAH

Get the Big Truth First

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A novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it.

RAY BRADBURY

Your Characters Are Like Children

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Your characters…are like children. You give birth to these children but you have to send them into the world and then they have to live their own lives. Some people will hate the characters, some people will love them, just like in real life. I like to imagine my characters going out into the world to interact with the readers by themselves. And I’m completely free from that. I just let go.

YIYUN LI

Telling the Truth Is a Ruthless Act

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I think telling the truth is kind of a ruthless act and – both in specifics since you do invade some privacies in fiction. And in the larger way, you are trying to – or I am trying to, as it were, rub humanity's face in the facts of our existence that there is much that is ignoble and desperate about being a human being. And my fiction is in part motivated by pointing these things out. So, yes, there is something ruthless and cruel, even to generate suspense as a bit of a tease, isn't it? So there's a kind of a sadistic element in the writer's attempt to keep the reader's interest.

JOHN UPDIKE

Plot and Character Emerge from the Word

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Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language. If you write a page a day for 30 days, and you pick the parts where the language is working, plot and character will start to emerge organically. For me, plot and character emerge directly from the word—as opposed to having a light-bulb about a character or event. I just don’t work like that. Though I know some writers do, I can’t. I’ll think, oh I have an insight about the character, and when I’ll sit down to write, it feels extremely imposed and lasts for two minutes. I find I can write for two lines and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level, and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there’s something more to say. This means I’ve hit on something unconscious enough to write about—something with enough unknown in there to be brought out. On some level I can sense that, and it keeps me going.

AIMEE BENDER

Everything You Think Is Worth Writing

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When I’m not working on anything, I’ll take a notebook, and for a few hours a day I’ll just write whatever comes, about my life, my wife, the elections, trying not to censor myself. That’s the real problem obviously—“without denaturalizing or hypocrisy.” Without being afraid of what is shameful or what you consider uninteresting, not worthy of being written. It’s the same principle behind psychoanalysis. It’s just as hard to do and just as worth it, in my opinion. Everything you think is worth writing. Not necessarily worth keeping, but worth writing.

EMMANUEL CARRÈRE

Don't Think!

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The intellect is a great danger to creativity…because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth—who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads “Don’t think!” You must never think at the typewriter—you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.

RAY BRADBURY