You know who I imagine? The narrator. I imagine the narrator as an actual reader, reading what I’ve written and commenting to me about the voice and point of view. You have to be true to your narrator. The narrator is the supreme reader. And narrators may quibble with the narration you’ve created for them.
LORRIE MOORE
If you have something to say, write a book. Thoreau’s Kathmandu principle, the Colette principle (‘‘Break of Day’’ as diary), still holds: You can write anything, anything at all, if you’re honest, because we are each as bizarre and foreign to one another as the news from Kathmandu (as Colette’s life was to me). On the other hand. Writing is too hard to waste on the weirdness of your daily life, or at least on mine. I love to sock the reader into some odd time and place and let him breathe there and love it, and love the world for having such a place — and then to call for fireworks there with only a ballpoint pen. Possible books abound; I’d rather write an impossible page.
ANNIE DILLARD
History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have.
DAVID McCULLOUGH
The radar is on whether you know it or not. You cannot switch it off. You hear this piece of conversation from across the room, “I just can't stand you anymore...” That's a song. It just flows in. And also the other thing about being a songwriter, when you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer, you start to distance yourself. You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years, observing people, how they react to one another. Which, in a way, makes you weirdly distant. You shouldn't really be doing it. It's a little of Peeping Tom to be a songwriter. You start looking round, and everything's a subject for a song. The banal phrase, which is the one that makes it. And you say, I can't believe nobody hooked up on that one before! Luckily there are more phrases than songwriters, just about.
KEITH RICHARDS
Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, “Margaret has to die soon.” We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme. de Sevigne, and we are the only people in the world who write oxymoron in the margin of the Bible. Manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire, Strunk’s Elements in the bathroom, the Laramie City Directory explained away with “It might come in handy,” all strike fear in the GS-7 heart. Nobody really wants to sleep with a writer, but Silly Service workers won’t even talk to us.
FLORENCE KING
It is almost a lost cause to argue that unique means unduplicated—quite different from anything else in the world—and can not be modified by any such adjective as most. There are no degrees of uniqueness, except in American advertising. Everything is more unique than everything else.
JACK SMITH
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote. By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.
WALT WHITMAN
Here’s the distinction. There’s a profound difference between making something up and imagining it. You’re making something up when you think out a scene, when you’re being logical about it. You think, “I need this to happen so some other thing can happen.” There’s an aspect of controlling the material that I don’t think is artful. I think it leads to contrived work, frankly, no matter how beautifully written it might be. You can hear the false note in this kind of writing. This was my main problem when I was just starting out: I was trying to say something. When I began to write, I was deeply self-conscious. I was writing stories hoping they would say something thematic, or address something that I was wrestling with philosophically. I’ve learned, for me at least, it’s a dead road. It’s writing from the outside in instead of the inside out. But during my very early writing, certainly before I’d published, I began to learn characters will come alive if you back the fuck off. It was exciting, and even a little terrifying. If you allow them to do what they’re going to do, think and feel what they’re going to think and feel, things start to happen on their own. It’s a beautiful and exciting alchemy. And all these years later, that’s the thrill I write to get: to feel things start to happen on their own.
ANDRE DUBUS
Life is not always explained. When I used to teach summer classes at Columbia, I would often take my students to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side. I would ask them to bring a notebook and to surreptitiously document, word for word, all the conversations they overheard. When we came back to the classroom we read these aloud. What we heard was fascinating. People never talk directly at one another. They seem to always talk in circles.
ANNIE DeWITT
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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