Don’t number scenes. Scene numbers are only for shooting scripts. They are for breaking down scripts for location and budget purposes and to schedule the shoot. It’s wonderful if you’ve bought fancy software, but shut off the scene-numbering software.
TONY BILL
Always tell us where we are. And don’t just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they’re great at this.
JANET FITCH
When I’m working, when I’m writing, when I’m in the midst of it, or beginning it or ending it, the only reader that counts is myself. You know what they say in baseball, keep your eye on the ball? That’s the ball. I have to keep my eye on that, and never anything else. When I know I’m on the final draft—or think I am—I get to the end and then I prepare four or five copies and I mail them or get them to friends whose critical acumen I trust. I go and sit in her house and we talk about the book and I’ll tape record what they’re saying so I don’t have to take notes and not be involved in the conversation with them. And then I get them home and I transcribe them. And so I begin to make changes. Or if I think one person’s got it all wrong I ignore them. So the book is being described back to me in language which opens my thinking up. So even if they’re wrong, they’re right. There’s something to be gained, even if I think they’re wrong. So that’s what I do. It’s been a wonderful help.
PHILIP ROTH
Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Completing a book, it’s a little like having a baby. There’s a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
ANNE ENRIGHT
I write longhand pencil, and every other word’s crossed out. The words I strike are not usually because they’re clichéd, or not good words, but because they don’t reflect the character’s essential truth. Through a series of micro-choices made as I’m writing a sentence, I’m trying to find the true word, the word that reflects the character’s truth. Is that the smell she’s smelling in that bar? Is that the light she’s seeing in her car, with the snow falling? Is that really what she hears, and thinks and feels?
ANDRE DUBUS
For me, a project is an opportunity to interrogate a subject. When I really start writing, I get into a mode of circling. Before I can settle in any one position, my mind is already negotiating alternate positions. Each poem, image, or essay allows me to be in relation to a subject in a particular way.
CLAUDIA RANKINE
I have writer friends who spend a great deal of time outlining and detailing the biographies of their major characters. Through this process, I am told, they discover the motivations underlying actions taken by these players as they move across the stage of the novel. This may very well be a powerful and productive way to construct an Iago or Sister Carrie. It is, however, not my way of discovery. I meet my characters the way I encounter people in life—at a place and in a situation where I have less knowledge than I’d like and am almost always, at first, paying attention to the least important details. After that, I’m in discovery mode.
WALTER MOSLEY
Whatever the genre, I look for someone who is precise and economical in their style and hard-working in their prose. By that I mean they take the time to choose words that surprise me; they use metaphors that I’ve never heard before; and they avoid clichés like “The mortars slammed into the hillside.” I don’t want to read anything — not even a clause — that I’ve seen before. It’s just a waste of everyone’s time.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER
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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