Title Anxiety

/

Several times I’ve wanted to title something one thing, but have realized or been persuaded it isn’t a good idea. I’ve known for a long time that there isn’t a copyright on titles, but still . . . do I want to get into the confusion that causes? (Also, I’m rarely good at it. For years, Roger Angell, my editor at The New Yorker, titled most of my stories.) I mention this because while I don’t begin a story with a title in mind 95% of the time, I have anxiety about coming up with one, and when I do, it will often have been taken. So there it is: inherent title anxiety. It floats like a dark cloud over the story that does not yet exist.

ANN BEATTIE

All of Us Need an Editor

/

Editing is mostly a process of taking stuff that’s pretty good—or maybe terrific or potentially terrific—and working with the author over problems that come up: problems of tone, problems of clarity, problems of length, problems of one part fitting with another. Why has it suddenly gotten so much bigger here? What this person is saying doesn’t seem to match what she said when we first met her. Something’s happened, there’s a sag here, the energy’s gone out of the story—whatever, there are thousands of things. And young writers were terrified of this—they thought you were ruining their lives. But all writers come to absolutely depend on it. All of us, everywhere, need an editor—every single writer in the world needs an editor, or more than one.

ROGER ANGELL

Count Your Chairs

/

If you’re thinking of writing a short story with three scenes, it’s not the worst idea to scratch out a sketch of the town the story happens in, the living room where people sit and talk, the view from the windows, the traffic outside. All that is part of the story, and the more deeply you take charge of it, the more easily you keep the reader enchanted. Really bad writers don’t care about this stuff. They’re always having daring adventurers trying to get into “impregnable castles,” but then they figure the hell with it and cut to the next scene, where the hero is inside the castle. We, as “serious” artists, shouldn’t do that. If we’re going to have a dinner party for ten people, we’d better provide a dining room with ten chairs. If there are only eight chairs, there had better be two people who don’t have a place to sit down, or who don’t get invited.

CAROLYN SEE

Go Within

/

There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

History Has a Plot

/

There’s a strong belief—I think it’s utterly true—that [Edward] Gibbon, in writing The Decline and Fall [of the Roman Empire] was strongly influenced by [Henry] Fielding’s Tom Jones. There’s also a belief that Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is strongly influenced by his reading of Aeschylus and Sophocles. I believe that the artists are out front and have a great deal to teach historians about good writing and dramatic composition, which I consider the best history to be. Aristotle said, in criticizing great drama, that first you learn how to write well—a good sophomore in high school can do a surprisingly good description of a sunset—then you learn how to draw characters that can stand up and cast a shadow, and the last thing you learn to do is plot. That’s the skill that comes last, if it comes at all. That is where historians neglect a huge advantage. I think history has a plot. You don’t make it up; you discover it.

SHELBY FOOTE

Don’t Expect It to Be Easy

/

Carpenters don’t say, I’m just not feeling it today, or I don’t give a damn about this staircase and whether people fall through it; how you feel is something that you cannot take too seriously on your way to doing something, and doing something is a means of not being stuck in how you feel. That is, there’s a kind of introspection that’s wallowing and being stuck, and there’s a kind that gets beyond that into something more interesting and then maybe takes you out into the world or into the place where deepest interior and cosmological phenomena are at last talking to each other. I’ve written stuff amidst hideous suffering, and it was a way not to be so stuck in the hideous suffering, though it was hard, but also, hard is not impossible, and I didn’t sign up with the expectation that it would be easy.

REBECCA SOLNIT

Writing Is a Long Process of Terror

/

The way I see writing is it’s a long process of terror punctuated by periods of intense, unsurpassed pleasure. Because you’ve dealt with two months of terror before that, you have that purple patch for a week, maybe two weeks, when you know what’s going on, you know what you’re achieving, and words come easily. Then you go back to terror. And I’m not talking about terror in the sense of “I don’t know how to plot this chapter,” but the terror of, “Why am I even writing, what a ridiculous thing to do.”

TASH AW