Every Word In a Script Must Count

The one thing that I would recommend to anybody, even though it’s quite a specific recommendation, is the screenplay for Michael Clayton, which to me is one of the greatest screenplays of this new century. The writer, Tony Gilroy, is great about how every word that you put in the script must count in a very different way than in a novel. You’re directing the reading experience in a much more specific way. You need to find a way to do the things you can do in a novel.

MEGAN ABBOTT

Give Elbow Room to the Reader

The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters. The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space. Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost. Give elbow room to the creative reader. In other words, to the extent that this is all about you, leave that out.

JOHN McPHEE

The Beginning Is the Most Important Part

The beginning of anything you write is the most important part. If you can’t catch someone’s attention at the start, you won’t have a chance to hold it later. Whether you’re writing a novel or an email, you should spend a disproportionate amount of time working on the first few sentences, paragraphs or pages. A lot of problems that can be glossed over in the middle are your undoing at the start.

HARRY GUINNESS

We Fret About Words

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we’d rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

SUSAN SONTAG

Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously

You have to be willing to look stupid, to stumble down unproductive paths, and to endure bad afternoons when all your ideas are flat and sterile and derivative. If you don’t take yourself too seriously, you’ll bounce back from these lulls and be ready for the music’s next visit.

GEORGE MEYER

Where to Start?

When starting a book, where to start? Tape up a poster-size sheet of graph paper. I’m not kidding. Draw big circles for sections/themes/plot points you already know about. (Use pencil) You’ll add details to each over time. For today, write one short shitty 1st draft of ANYTHING.

ANNE LAMOTT

Collaboration Is Marriage Without Sex

Collaboration is marriage without sex, and subject to many vexations. But pay no attention to them, because in one respect at least it is wonderful. The total result is frequently far more than the combined abilities of two people might give you.

GEORGE S. KAUFMAN

Be True to Your Narrator

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

Write A Book

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

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