The Book Is a Curious Artifact

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

You Have a Beautiful Sentence — Cut It

Just one piece of general advice from a writer has been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and tried again. Finally she said, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice. It’s what I do when I write, the main job when I rewrite…. Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence — cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.

GEORGES SIMENON

Everything You Think Is Worth Writing

I continue to find this excellent advice. Today still, 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. And fundamentally, that’s what a large part of literature attempts to do—reproduce the flow of thought. Well at least the literature I love the most—Montaigne, Sterne, Diderot . . .” 

EMMANUEL CARRÈRE

Writing Is a Muscle

Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts.Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about.

COLIN NISSAN

Read Carefully

My approach to teaching writing is to teach reading -- how to read a text and how to read one's own text, from the point of view of an artist, to really try to take apart what happens, sentence by sentence by sentence, you just need to read very carefully, and with a different kind of hat on.

CHANG-RAE LEE

Writing Can Be a Dramatic Pursuit

Writing can be a very dramatic pursuit, full of catastrophes and disasters and emotion and attempts that fail. My path as a writer became much more smooth when I learned that, when things aren’t going well, to regard my struggles as curious, not tragic…. We have this very German, romantic idea that if you’re not in pain, and if you’re not causing pain by making your art, then you’re not really doing it right. I’ve always questioned that.… I mean, listen to the language we use to talk about creative process: “Open up your vein and bleed.” “Kill your darlings.” I always want to weep when people speak about a project and say: “I think I finally broke its back.” That is a really fucked-up relationship you have with your work! You’re trying to crack its spine? No wonder you’re so stressed out! You’ve made this into battlefield! We should know enough about the world to realize that anything that you fight fights you back.

ELIZABETH GILBERT

Tell a Good Yarn

I had a wonderful teacher, Irwin Blacker, and he was feared by everyone at the school because he took a very interesting position. He gave you the screenplay form, which I hated so much, and if you made one mistake on the form, you flunked the class. His attitude was that the least you can learn is the form. “I can’t grade you on the content. I can’t tell you whether this is a better story for you to write than that, you know? And I can’t teach you how to write the content, but I can certainly demand that you do it in the proper form.” He never talked about character arcs or anything like that; he simply talked about telling a good yarn, telling a good story. He said, “Do whatever you need to do. Be as radical and as outrageous as you can be. Take any kind of approach you want to take. Feel free to flash back, feel free to flash forward, feel free to flash back in the middle of a flashback. Feel free to use narration, all the tools are there for you to use.”

JOHN MILIUS

Join a Writer's Group

You have to decide how important this is to you. If it’s important enough, you won’t have any excuses. You’ll sit in the chair as long as it takes, you’ll write as many drafts as you need to, you’ll open yourself up to critique, you’ll work to improve your craft, you’ll persevere in the face of rejection. The best thing I did when I became serious about writing was to join a writing group. It’s important to find one where the members are dedicated to helping each other improve, rather than tearing each other down. I would advise any aspiring writer to join a supportive writing group, either online or in their community—and if you can’t find one, start one.

LAURA McHUGH

You Learn to Write Through Practice

You learn to write through practice, through writing, over and over, again and again. All those legions of apprentice writers out there would, I’m sure, wish it were different—how much easier simply to express your innate genius in finished form without having to bother with all that odious work. And all that reading. And the endless rewrites.

T.C. BOYLE

Creative Space

What has never lost importance for me, over these two and a half decades, is the creative space that absence opened up for me. Once I knew that the completed book would make its way in the world without me, once I knew that nothing of the concrete, physical me would ever appear beside the volume—as if the book were a little dog and I were its master—it made me see something new about writing. I felt as though I had released the words from myself.

ELENA FERRANTE