The Voice Arrives Out of Thin Air

Truly, I just try to get out of my own way and inhabit the characters. I strive to get inside of them and leave myself in the dust, so I can consider their situations and dilemmas from a perspective that is not my own. If I can focus well enough to get there, the rest comes pretty naturally. The things they think and say and decide to do seem inevitable. The voice arrives out of thin air. When I’m writing character well, it’s not a very cerebral process. I feel the events rather than think them. I’ve gotta be inside the body and the psyche of my subject. If I can smell the coffee on my own breath, I know I’m not doing my job. My job is to jump through that empathic window and report on the human condition. Period. 

JONATHAN EVISON

So Much in the Novel Is Unexpected

I think a lot before I start writing, but I don’t think through everything, and when I do start a story—and this is especially true with stories, not novels—I already know what the story will be and so I don’t edit a lot. My first draft is often very close to my final draft. With a novel, it’s different. It’s such a tough thing to write a novel. I think through everything, but so much in the novel is unexpected, so you have to really let the control go, a little bit at a time.

YIYUN LI

Write the Book You Want to Read

I wrote the first book because I wanted to read it. I thought that kind of book, with that subject—those most vulnerable, most undescribed, not taken seriously little black girls—had never existed seriously in literature. No one had ever written about them except as props. Since I couldn’t find a book that did that, I thought, Well, I’ll write it and then I’ll read it. It was really the reading impulse that got me into the writing thing. 

TONI MORRISON

Revise Constantly

Another advantage of revising constantly, regardless of whether you’re ever going to “use” what you’ve written, is that you practice, constantly, reading with fresh eyes, reading as the person coming fresh to this, never having seen it before. This is a very important skill to develop, and one that probably develops only with time and practice (although some people recommend various tricks, such as printing different drafts of your work in different fonts).

LYDIA DAVIS

Don't Bludgeon Us Over the Head with Description

Don't bludgeon us over the head with description. A line or three about the character is good enough—and it doesn't need to be purely about their physical looks. It can be about movement and body language. It can be about what people think, about what goes on in her head. But throw out a couple-few lines and get out. Dialogue is where a character is revealed. And action. What a character says and does is the sum of her being. It doesn't need to be more than that: a character says shit, then does shit, then says shit about the shit she just did. In there lurks infinite possibilities—a confluence of atoms that reveals who she is.

CHUCK WENDIG

It's Time That Goodness Be Shown

If I were to commission a novel, I would ask the author for lots of things (that it be short; that it be written in free indirect speech; that it include funny, but frank, acknowledgment of women’s grooming rituals), but mostly I would want this notional novelist to take up the challenge of animating at least one character who is virtuous, not in the intimate way that everyone seems to be up close, but in a way that is obvious and legible in the book’s own universe. It’s time that goodness be shown in all its relentless torment and sacrifice.

ALICE GREGORY

Leave Room for the Characters to Change

The writer must always leave room for the characters to grow and change. If you move your characters from plot point to plot point, like painting by the numbers, they often remain stick figures. They will never take on a life of their own. The most exciting thing is when you find a character doing something surprising or unplanned. Like a character saying to me: “Hey, Richard, you may think I work for you, but I don’t. I’m my own person.”

RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON

Women in Fiction

As I began reading general fiction, I saw it as women using their bodies to try and make good boys do bad things: it was just a constant in literature of all kinds. So I wanted a woman who could be a whole person, which meant that she could be a sexual person without being evil. That she could be an effective problem solver, as women are in reality but not very often in fiction or on the screen. And that who she was sexually had nothing to do with it, except that it made her more fully human.

SARA PARETSKY

Writing Out of Real Life

Influences were young poets like Ed Dorn and Robert Creeley. In the years when I was young, the emphasis was on writers like William Carlos Williams, writing in the clearest, simplest American speech. Writing out of real life, and taking from real life, not embellishing but being as open-eyed and level as possible. I think that was the biggest influence, that was how I learned. It helped me as a young writer to not show off and not try to be romantic, or try to be funny, but to let the story be itself. And I did write to him [Williams] in my head for a long time, questioning whether he’d think something was arch or cute or showing off.

LUCIA BERLIN

Obscurity Is the Refuge of Incompetence

It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we “fail” to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence. 

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN