You Don't Write Strangers as Strangers

One assignment I give my beginning fiction students is to read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. There are so many things to learn from that novel. I ask them to write one page to try to imitate Baldwin. Sometimes students realize how hard it is to write just one page of good writing. In Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin has one passage about taking a train ride. I point out to my students that he describes all the strangers as intimate friends. And he describes an intimate lover as a stranger. I think that’s what you want to learn from Baldwin. You don’t write strangers as strangers; you write strangers like your best friend, with that intimate feeling.

YIYUN LI

Raise Hell

Raise hell – big time. I want y’all to get out there and raise hell about damned near everything. My word, there’s a world out there that needs fixing. Get out there and get after it.

MOLLY IVINS

Nothing Is as Dangerous as a Sure Thing

I think that one of the problems with twentieth-century art is its preoccupation with subjectivity and originality at the expense of everything else. This has been especially true in painting and music. Though initially stimulating, this soon impeded the full development of any particular style, and rewarded uninteresting and sterile originality. At the same time, it is very sad to say, films have had the opposite problem -- they have consistently tried to formalize and repeat success, and they have clung to a form and style introduced in their infancy. The sure thing is what everyone wants, and originality is not a nice word in this context. This is true despite the repeated example that nothing is as dangerous as a sure thing.

STANLEY KUBRICK

Writing Is a Weapon Against Boredom

I still feel strongly that the one thing a writer has above all else, the reward which is bigger than anything that may come to him after huge advances and Hollywood adaptations, is the weapon against boredom. The question of how to spend his time, what to do today, tomorrow, and during all the other pockets of time in between when some doing is required: this is not applicable to the writer. For he can always lose himself in the act of writing and make time vanish. After which, he actually has something to show for his efforts. Not bad. Very good, in fact. Maybe too romantic a conceit, but this, I believed, was the great prize for being born … an author.

JULIAN TEPPER

How It's Written Counts

People mistakenly believe the best memoir is the one in which the grossest stuff happens. If that were true then everybody who was at Auschwitz would have written a best seller. People had way worse childhoods than I did and they didn’t sell as many books. How it’s written counts for something.

MARY KARR

Go In Fear of Abstraction

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as dim land of peace. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

EZRA POUND

Metaphor Is the Tendon Connecting Muscle to Bone

Metaphor is the tendon connecting muscle to bone. See what I did there? I used metaphor to describe metaphor. That’s how a writer does things. That’s some hard-ass penmonkey trickery, son. What? What? You gonna step? You gonna front all up in my face-grill? Ahem. Sorry. Where was I? Right. Metaphor takes a mundane part of the story and connects it to the larger experience of the audience. It says, “This little thing is like this bigger thing, this other thing.” Metaphor is less about fact and more about feel.

CHUCK WENDIG

You Are the Freest of All Artists

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it’s been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you’re letting the novel make its own shape, and you’re putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating. You can do absolutely anything; you are the freest of all artists. You’re not confined by a square on the wall or musical scales or the disciplines of verse, and you’re certainly freer than a film-maker who is dependent on the weather when he goes out to make his world. And it’s completely uncollaborative – you don’t have actors; producers; money pressures of any kind. It’s that freedom that is frightening in the end. So you have all that pleasure, but what you’ve also got to put into it – and you can’t do this consciously; it just demands it of you – you’ve got to put anxiety into it.

MARTIN AMIS

Listen Attentively

I listen attentively in bars and cafes, while standing in line at the checkout counter, noting particular pronunciations and the rhythms of regional speech, vivid turns of speech and the duller talk of everyday life. In Melbourne I paid money into the hand of a sidewalk poetry reciter to hear "The Spell of the Yukon," in London listened to a cabby's story of his psychopath brother in Paris, on a trans-Pacific flight heard from a New Zealand engineer the peculiarities of building a pipeline across New Guinea.

ANNIE PROULX

We Empathize, We Project

I don’t think that a writer who writes about loss (if I do) needs to have suffered loss himself. We can imagine loss. That’s the writer’s job. We empathize, we project, we make much of what might be small experience. Hemingway (as usual, full of wind) said “only write about what you know.” But that can’t mean you should only write about what you yourself have done or experienced. A rule like that pointlessly straps the imagination, confines one’s curiosity, one’s capacity to empathize. After all, a novel (if it chooses) can cause a reader to experience sensation, emotion, to recognize behavior that reader may never have seen before. The writer’ll have to be able to do that, too. Some subjects just cause what Katherine Anne Porter called a “commotion in the mind.” That commotion may or may not be a response to what we actually did on earth.

RICHARD FORD