It's a Matter of Personality

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I just like writing to be clear and concise. I don’t like a lot of words. This is my nature. I like to keep things simple and very much as they really are. I’m not one for fantasy and I’m not one for exaggerated writing, but this – I think – is a matter of personality. I’m not sure you can tell people how to do it. In fact I’m sure it’s a matter of personality. Style is! 

DIANA ATHILL

We All Face the Unexpected

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I'm like the little boy in the Charles Dickens story—I just want to make your flesh creep. And that's OK. But what I'm really interested in as a writer that I come back to time and time again is the intrusion of the unexpected and the strange into our everyday life. And I think that that's a kind of an honorable theme, because we all face unexpected things. We're going through one now as a society. I'd love to think that it would bring us together. I'm not sure that that will happen.

STEPHEN KING

Move the Goalposts or Remove Them Entirely

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We read a lot about writers who have a “butt in chair” philosophy, who crank out a minimum of 1,000 words every day rain or shine. If you are one of them, I am genuinely happy for you — and for me, because I get to read your books on a regular basis. But I’m also here to reassure people who don’t work this way that they are not alone. Sometimes it’s impossible to get writing done, especially for those of us who have other work to do, including care work for our children or parents. And sometimes, like now, the world is so in flux that our brains are filled with static and we can’t hear our own thoughts. At these times, surviving daily life is enough to occupy every corner of our consciousness.

EMILY GOULD

The Real Fun of Writing

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But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

The Block Has Always Been There

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I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Tell a Story

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A writer’s greatest fear now is not that he’s going to be no good when he sits down to write. A writer’s greatest fear is that he’s going to be brilliant and that no one will read it, that no one can read it, that no one knows the difference because they read these stupid “How to write a screenplay” books. It’s made people into idiots. In the old days the writer’s greatest fear was always, this time out, it just isn’t going to happen. I just won’t have the stuff. Now the fear is that I’ll have it, but those little jerks from Harvard Business School won’t be able to understand it. Because these MBAs can follow instructions, they read these books and say your script has to have these characters and those turning points. They ask questions like, “Who are you rooting for at the end of the first act?” I was never conscious of my screenplays having any acts. I didn’t know what a character arc was. It’s all bullshit. Tell a story.

JOHN MILIUS

How to Use a Library

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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

It's a Fantastic Language

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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

It's Never Too Late

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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