Writers Wear Atrocious Clothes

Writers wear atrocious clothes when writing. So terrible that I have been asked, by the UPS man, “Are you all right?” An example: stretched-out pajama bottoms imprinted with cowboys on bucking broncos, paired with my husband’s red thermal undershirt (no guilt; he wouldn’t even wear such a thing in Alaska) and a vest leaking tufts of down, with a broken zipper and a rhinestone pin in the shape of pouting lips. Furry socks with embossed Minnie Mouse faces (the eyes having deteriorated in the wash) that clash with all of the above.

ANN BEATTIE

Every Writer Is a Political Writer

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.

GEORGE ORWELL

The Writing is the Glory of the Work

I like writing very much. I often ask my writing friends if they like to write, and they always say they don’t. They love the research, perhaps the fun after a book is published, but not the task of writing itself. I think that is the glory of the work. You have assembled all of this information. You have thought about it. You have dreamed about it. You’re ready. You are bursting with all of this and then you have this meticulous, but somehow not entirely rational, process of organizing it so that you communicate it transparently to other human beings. That is great fun.

RICHARD RHODES

The Human Puzzle

I was once at a coffee shop eating breakfast alone when I noticed a woman standing and talking to a table of people. She was young but prematurely aged, with badly dyed hair and lined skin. She was smiling and joking, but her body had a collapsed, defeated posture that looked deeply habitual. Her spine was curled, her head was slightly receded, and her shoulders were pulled down in a static flinch. She expressed herself loudly and crudely, but also diffidently. She talked like she was a joke. But there was something else to her, something pushing up against the defeat, a sweet, tough, humorous vitality that I could almost see running up her center. I realized that if I hadn’t looked closely, I would not have really seen this woman, that I would not have seen what was most human and lively in her. I wondered how many people saw it, or even if she herself saw it…. That kind of small, new, unrecognized thing is very tender to me, and I hate it when it gets ignored or mistaken for something ugly. I want to acknowledge and nurture it, but I usually leave it very small in the stories. I do that because I think part of the human puzzle is in the delicacy of those moments or phenomena, contrasted with the ignorance and lack of feeling we are subject to.

MARY GAITSKILL

Study Eudora Welty

I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! You must study these things to be a good writer. Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say, How’d she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together?

RAY BRADBURY

Dilettante vs. Straight-Up Writer

There are two dead giveaways that separate the dilettante from the straight-up writer. The dilettante absolutely won’t accept suggestions from an editor; the dilettante gets all pouty and retreats into rhetoric about “integrity”: “I’ll never change which to that, goddamnit! I have my integrity!” And the dilettante quits work before he or she is finished. How tempting it is not to do the last round of work on a piece, so that when it gets turned down, you can say to yourself, Well, it wasn’t my best work anyway. The straight-up writer makes some strong coffee and goes through the piece (the chapter, the book) one last time. How do you know it’s the last time? When you don’t have any more notes; when you don’t feel sick to your stomach; when everything you’ve written “fix?” about is fixed; when you can turn page after page and nothing jumps out at you. You do it and do it and do it until it’s done.

CAROLYN SEE

There Are Things More Important Than Your Art

I’ve known writers — I think it's true also of other artists — who thought that you had to put your art before everything. But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you’re just going to find that you can’t always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn’t. There are a number of things more important than your art. It’s wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals.

WENDELL BERRY

It's Like Braiding Your Hair

When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.

EDWIDGE DANTICAT

Allow Yourself to Let Loose

At a certain point, you have to be kind to yourself as a writer and trust your own motives. You have to have confidence that you’re coming from the right place. You have to allow yourself to let loose, pursue a good story, and create people who feel real. Not good, not bad, certainly not perfect—just real.

ANGELA FLOURNOY

The Positive Aspect of Self-Doubt

I have more self-doubt than any writer I've ever known....The positive aspect of self-doubt—if you can channel it into useful activity instead of being paralyzed by it—is that by the time you reach the end of a novel, you know precisely why you made every decision in the narrative, the multiple purposes of every metaphor and image.

DEAN KOONTZ