I was always terrified that people would read only halfway through a sentence and not be amused, so I tried to have jokes everywhere. I would worry that it wasn’t getting there quickly enough. That’s always the advice I give people who send me humor to consider: it needs to be funny from start to finish. I just never had the confidence to take my time, to build slowly. I’m too insecure a writer.
DAVE BARRY
Fiction, for me at least, is the best way to say things. I can be much more clear-minded if I allow my imagination to take the lead—never loosing the reins, of course, but at full gallop. I also believe that, if you are fortunate, you can access the unconscious through fiction; in my case, elaborate ideas emerge in a very organized manner. Fiction for me is a way of “writing what you don’t know about what you know,” to quote Grace Paley.
LUISA VALENZUELA
The passive voice is really good for only one thing: the weaselly notes in committee meetings where nobody wants to get blamed for whatever happened: “It was decided, after much discussion, to request the resignation of Mr. Edgemont,” or, “. . . to deny all collateral damage in the last military action.”
CAROLYN SEE
Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one’s influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one’s own.
OLIVER SACKS
Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene. It tells you. You don’t tell it.
JOAN DIDION
A script is to a movie as a blueprint is to a building. So many of the things that will later be major, visceral aspects of the storytelling— cinematography, music, sound effects, costume, performance, the rhythm of the editing—are only just indicated or assumed, and will be realized by a team of talented collaborators. The fiction writer has to serve all those functions alone, with his prose, selecting information so a handful of notes let readers hear the symphony. A screenwriter creates potential—a novelist has to fulfill it.
JOHN SAYLES
Editors make mistakes. By actual count, 121 publishers said “No thanks” to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds and Lolita were turned down too, again and again. The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Peter Principle, Watership Down, To Kill A Mockingbird—rejected, every one.
JUDITH APPLEBAUM
Art is memory. It is the excavation of so many memories we have had — of our mothers, our best and worst moments, of glorious experiences we have had with friends or films or music or dance or a lovely afternoon on a sloping, green hill. All of this enters us and, if we are artists, must be shared, handed over to others. This is why it is so important to know what came before you. It is also important to understand that things will follow you, and they may come along and make your work look pedestrian and silly. This is fine; this is progress. We have to work with what life presents to us, and we have to work as well as we can while we can.
MARTHA GRAHAM
I don’t trust my writing that is not written, although I work very hard in subsequent revisions to remove the writerly-ness from it, to give it a combination of lyrical, standard, and colloquial language. To pull all these things together into something that I think is much more alive and representative. But I don’t trust something that occurs to me and then is spoken and transferred immediately to the page.
TONI MORRISON
I think about how I conceptualize the audience. The trick is that they’ve got to be smarter and more worldly than me. So as I’m revising, I’m keeping that in mind. I cannot condescend, even a little bit. Every single choice that I make is motivated by that. On the small level. If I give you a repetition of something that actually doesn’t yield any more information, it’s kind of disrespectful for me to let that stand. If I cut the repetition, there’s a subtle improvement in our relationship because you see that I’ve valued you.
GEORGE SAUNDERS
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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