Neil Gaiman On Plotting

I tend to have a fairly loose approach to plotting in that I know kind of what I am doing, but it’s the kind of what you’re doing if you know you’re starting out in Seattle, and you’re going drive to New York, in an old car, and where you’re probably going to stop on the way, but you don’t know everything that’s going to happen, you don’t know where the car’s going to die on you, and you don’t know what’s going to happen with that hitchhiker. And so you try to put that stuff in and that makes it interesting.

NEIL GAIMAN

Love Your Characters

Love your characters. Ask yourself what underlay their acts and versions of the past. Sometimes I pray to see people I’m angry at or resentful of as God sees them, which heals both page and heart. And one big fat caveat: lead with your own talent, which may cause you to ignore all I’ve recommended.

MARY KARR

A Writer Is a Tyrant

Writing is a process that’s entirely totalitarian. A writer is a tyrant, a dictator. He has complete power over every comma, every sentence, every character. When I’m writing, I’m the boss — I’m in charge. When the book is published, the political nature of it changes completely. People can read my books in whatever way they want to. I don’t want any control over the process of reading, it’s democratic: and furthermore, between the reader and the book there opens up a space of complete freedom, which is also private. In a democracy, we have a private voting booth. It’s secret. So the difference between reading and writing is the difference between democracy and tyranny. 

PHILIP PULLMAN

It Had Better Be Quirky

You better make them care about what you think. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. Otherwise it doesn’t work. I mean we’ve all read pieces where we thought, “Oh, who gives a damn.”

NORA EPHRON

It's Like the Stories Are Already There

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there’s a house under there, and I’m pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That’s how I feel. It’s like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: “If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.”

STEPHEN KING

The Best Fiction Is Written Out of Early Impressions

Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the “successful” writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip – all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dinning-room table, with a child’s beautifully clear eyes.

JOHN UPDIKE

Plot and Character Emerge from the Word

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language. If you write a page a day for 30 days, and you pick the parts where the language is working, plot and character will start to emerge organically. For me, plot and character emerge directly from the word—as opposed to having a light-bulb about a character or event. I just don’t work like that. Though I know some writers do, I can’t. I’ll think, oh I have an insight about the character, and when I’ll sit down to write, it feels extremely imposed and lasts for two minutes. I find I can write for two lines and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level, and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there’s something more to say. This means I’ve hit on something unconscious enough to write about—something with enough unknown in there to be brought out. On some level I can sense that, and it keeps me going.

AIMEE BENDER

Rejection

I got a rejection letter from an editor at HarperCollins, who included a report from his professional reader. This report shredded my first-born novel, laughed at my phrasing, twirled my lacy pretensions around and gobbed into the seething mosh pit of my stolen clichés. As I read the report, the world became very quiet and stopped rotating. What poisoned me was the fact that the report’s criticisms were all absolutely true. The sound of my landlady digging in the garden got the world moving again. I slipped the letter into the trash…knowing I’d remember every word.

DAVID MITCHELL

Night Writing

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.

H.P. LOVECRAFT

Short Fiction Is a Special Discipline

Short fiction is a special, very different discipline, often requiring at least as much skill and effort as novel-writing. And while it's relatively easy to get away with a certain amount of bagginess and loose plotting when you're writing a novel, those things become quickly and mercilessly apparent if you're writing a short story.

JOANNE HARRIS