I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis…. Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.
CLIVE CUSSLER
When I describe things in my writing I never use writing adjectives. I don’t know what a writing adjective is. I always use acting adjectives. To me writing’s almost the same thing because you’re acting like a character and that’s what acting is all about, the moment. You don’t want to be result oriented, you don’t want to say, “Okay, this is what’s going to happen.” No, you start with your character and anything can happen, like life. You shouldn’t try to predestine where you’re gonna go and what you’re gonna see. You can hit the nail on the head, but you want the kind of freedom that allows for something you hadn’t even imagined to happen. I’m very much a man of the moment. I can think about an idea for a year, two years, even four years all right, but what ever is going on with me the moment I write is gonna work its way into the piece.
QUENTIN TARANTINO
I’ve always found the concept of the reliable versus the unreliable narrator peculiar, because I think all narrators are unreliable [laughs]. People tell you what they saw or what they think or what they felt, and they may be telling you the truth, but it might not at all be what someone else saw happen. Like, people always call Humbert Humbert an unreliable narrator. He’s very reliable. He’ll tell you exactly what he thought and felt in a lot of detail. And you also get a very clear sense of what Lolita is experiencing through him. But I don’t think of it as unreliable. I think more in terms, and this sounds really corny, I think more in terms of, Do I care what this narrator thinks and feels? Can he engage me? With students, the problem I see most often is that I don’t get a sense of what their narrators care about. What they want. What matters to them. That’s a bigger issue to me than whether or not they’re reliable in some way.
MARY GAITSKILL
I think one of the reasons I like writing first thing, early in the morning, is because that’s when I’m a bit sleepy, a bit off-guard, and I just put the words down on the page without thinking too much about them. When you’re wide awake, you’re thinking about how you sound to others. There’s the impulse to please or to sound cool. We all have that. So I like to put a block of words down while I’m half-asleep. I’ll use the word blah a lot—“He walked with the blah across the blah and blahed his blah until”—and keep moving, not worrying about the sentences or even making sense. Then I’ll chip away at the block of words later, when I’m awake and critical.
KEVIN BARRY
I have nothing against lovable characters; there are a great many wonderful ones out there, and no one ought to go out of his or her way to deny a character's best qualities for the sake of being called “uncompromising, hard-edged.” But our first obligation is to create interesting, suggestive, realistic, possibly even challenging situations, set our characters down in them and see where they go. Which may not be the way you wish they could; rather it is the way, given who they are, they must go.
ROSELLEN BROWN
The more I write, the more it seems to me that an idea becomes more powerful almost to the extent that I don’t understand it. When I start writing a book, it’s because I feel forced into a corner. I’m haunted by certain images or ideas or a kind of story, and I have to do it. When I was younger I would analyze my motives much more carefully. As I get older I don’t do that anymore. I just let it happen.
PAUL AUSTER
Writing should be pleasurable, it should be fun, it should be exploratory. You should be writing about things that surprise you. That is the instinct for all kinds of art. All you need to do, really, is to take that instinct and transform it into craft.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Know the story—as much of the story as you can possibly know, if not the whole story—before you commit yourself to the first paragraph…. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you?
JOHN IRVING
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
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
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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