Read the Best Writers

Read the best writers: maybe it would help to set a goal of one classic per year at least. Classics have stood the test of time, as we say. Keep trying them, if you don’t like them at first—come back to them. I tried Joyce’s Ulysses three times before I read it all the way through. (It helped that I was living in Ireland at the time, where I saw Joycean and Beckettian characters all around me.) I haven’t yet read Don Quixote, but I think I’ll actually enjoy it.

LYDIA DAVIS

A Novel Is Larger Than Your Head

The most important thing I’ve found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity. What do I mean by this? I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind). The connections, moods, metaphors, and experiences that you call up while writing will come from a place deep inside you. Sometimes you will wonder who wrote those words. Sometimes you will be swept up by a fevered passion relating a convoluted journey through your protagonist’s ragged heart. These moments are when you have connected to some deep place within you, a place that harbors the zeal that made you want to write to begin with. The way you get to this unconscious place is by writing every day. Or not even writing. Some days you may be rewriting, rereading, or just sitting there scrolling back and forth through the text. This is enough to bring you back into the dream of your story.

WALTER MOSLEY

The Last Collaborator Is Your Audience

The last collaborator is your audience…when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you’ve written. Things that seem to work well — work in a sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece — suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional or a little overlong or a little overweight or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping from an audience.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

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