I use a library the same way I’ve been describing the creative process as a writer — I don’t go in with lists of things to read, I go in blindly and reach up on shelves and take down books and open them and fall in love immediately. And if I don’t fall in love that quickly, shut the book, back on the shelf, find another book, and fall in love with it. You can only go with loves in this life.
RAY BRADBURY
Unless I have a thorough soaking in all writers who have written in English then I cannot call myself an English writer. It’s a fantastic language, and to be ignorant of it as a writer is a sin that must exact the ultimate penalty, I think. If hell exists, that’s why one would go there, for calling oneself a writer and not knowing anything about English literature.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it's not something where—if you missed it by age 19—you're finished. It's never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the world—at any age. At least try.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
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
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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