Do It at Least a Few Times a Week

My downfall will be my ability to procrastinate and avoid writing. I do it so much that I had to install software on my computer to block the Internet and shame me when I inevitably attempt to check email or Twitter every nine to eleven seconds. I don’t believe you have to write every day, or at a set time for a set duration, to be a good and successful writer, but I do think you have to muster enough willpower to do it at least a few times a week in a focused way.

UNA LAMARCHE

Everything Must Be Intensified

All my great characters are larger than life, not realistic. In order to capture the quality of life in two and a half hours, everything has to be concentrated, intensified. You must catch life in moments of crisis, moments of electric confrontation. In reality, life is very slow. Onstage, you have only from 8:40 to 11:05 to get a lifetime of living across.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Books Are Never Going to Die

And that’s why books are never going to die. It’s impossible. It’s the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn’t only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

PAUL AUSTER

We Must Not Be Defeated

There is, I hope, a thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it’s just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats—maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats—but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. 

MAYA ANGELOU

Just Follow the Headlights

I love that line from E.L. Doctorow: “Writing a novel is like driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights—” but you keep going until you get there. I’ve learned over the years to just report back anything that I see in front of the headlights: Are they yellow stripes or white? What’s on the side of the road? Is there vegetation? What kind? What’s the weather? What are the sounds? If I capture the experience all along the way, the structure starts to reveal itself. My guiding force and principle for shaping the story is to just follow the headlights. That’s how the architecture is revealed.

ANDRE DUBUS III

Advice to Aspiring Co-Authors

Here's what you need to know before you agree to be a “co-author” for a celebrity or "expert":

1. Your “collaborator,” no matter how famous, will have a lot less expertise than promised, and you will have to do a great deal of research for which you'll receive neither credit nor compensation.

2. Your collaborator will not understand what writing involves, or how long it takes, or that a second draft is not a final draft (never show your collaborator a first draft) or that reading a chapter and making suggestions is not the same as writing it in the first place.

3. You and your collaborator will both believe that the work—and hence the money—has been unfairly divided.

4. In short, an amicable divorce is easier to pull off than a happy collaboration.

NANCY HATHAWAY

Read Something of Thrilling Quality

One of the best ways to get started writing is to read something of thrilling quality. I never read poetry or fiction, and anything that smacks of usefulness—science or biography—is off-limits. Essentially, I read literary essays. I like super-arrogant, high-level, brainy essays about aesthetics. I had a Nabokov jag for a couple of years: his Lectures on Literature. Kundera has two beautiful books of essays. There’s also Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Herbert has that wonderful book Still Life with Bridal. Brodsky is another one. And Benjamin. Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Benjamin. I love introductions. It’s a category in itself. All of my writers read Kafka, but I don’t read Kafka. I only have an interest in reading people who write about reading him.

KAY RYAN

There’s No Ideal Literary Style

Literary writing is an art, an aspect of an art form. It may be self-effacing or it may be grand, but if it is literature it has an artful intention, the language is being used in a characteristically elaborate manner in relation to the “work,” long or short, of which it forms a part. So there is not one literary style or ideal literary style, though of course there is good and bad writing.

IRIS MURDOCH

How to Arrange the Poems in a Manuscript

Here are the two ways to arrange the poems in a manuscript: a) when you submit a ms, front-load it. Put all your best poems right up front. (If you can’t tell which ones are your best, it’s too early for you to be thinking about publication.) Editors are among the few people who read mss from front to back; if you catch their interest early, they might just keep reading. b) after your ms has been accepted, tell the editor you’d like to change the order of the poems. An editor doesn’t want to get in the way of that, leaving you free to fiddle the poems into some kind of “creative” order. Remember that what editors are looking for above all else in a manuscript is a reason to stop reading it.

BILLY COLLINS

The Characters Arrive First

When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got — and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean.

WILLIAM GIBSON