More and more, I’m coming to think that geography is as important as point of view. We’re always thinking of character or plot and arguing which comes first. But think about it: How much would we care about Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion if they weren’t traveling down the Yellow Brick Road trying to get to the Emerald City?
CAROLYN SEE
It’s part of a writer’s profession, as it’s part of a spy’s profession, to prey on the community to which he’s attached, to take away information – often in secret – and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it’s his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Poetry will always be my friend and confidant, whether it’s “good” or not, whether I publish it or not. In fact, I have a whole book’s worth of poems right now that have not seen the light of day and I’m not sure I care if they ever do. I never did care. I write for myself, to help me understand the world I live in and to honor the world that was given to me entirely by accident. Whatever I’ve been through in my life cannot compare to the gift of life. Against unfathomable odds, I was conceived and born. Against even greater odds, I have lived and continue to live. It is the greatest gift to wake up every morning into a swirling world and to be given air to breathe, water to drink, a sun and a moon, stars, rivers, trees, birds flitting and singing, ants making their homes beneath the sidewalks, a summer storm…I don’t know, who could not want to fall to their knees in gratitude? Who could not want to write a poem to give back?
DORIANNE LAUX
The best thing that can happen is for the theme to be nice and clear from the beginning. Doesn’t always happen. You think you have a theme and you then start telling the story. Pretty soon the characters take over and the story takes over and you realize your theme isn’t being executed by the story, so you start changing the theme.
PADDY CHAYEFSKY
F--- research! I say this, knowing that my works are thought to be well-researched and I am proud of the research in them. But in research there’s also death and destruction and self-loathing. You can do the research later. You cannot use “more research” as a crutch to justify your sloth. You are selling narrative not background. The most important truths you tell involve what you know about human behavior, not what color the Obersturmbannführer’s epaulets are. If you don’t know it, just bull on through and keep going. Make it up. Jam it with placeholders. It’s OK. At that stage you need momentum, not precision. That’s why it’s a first draft; that’s why there’ll be a second draft.
STEPHEN HUNTER
Simply this: you sit down and make a list of the ten things that have to happen in your novel—the character actions or physical events without which your story simply cannot occur. Then, when you’re sure you’ve got pretty much the ten major “event beats” or character issues nailed down, you break each of those ten things into its own section and list the ten things that have to happen surrounding that event or supporting that character action. You take your time over this work, because this is the skeleton of the body of your work to come—the physical / emotional / action structure on which you’re going to build your novel.
DIANE DUANE
I don't like to push forward with a story or novel unless it seems to me that the prose is strong enough to be permanent, even though I know very well that once the work is finished I will want to rewrite it. The pleasure is the rewriting. The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don't mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it’s simply true. The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
What strikes me when you talk to writers about the writing process is the incredibly anxious and ongoing battle between the inside and the outside—the struggle to solve being in the world sufficiently to feel what’s really going on, and being out of the world sufficiently to be able to protect yourself from what’s going on. Then to be able to assemble it in a removed and protected and safe environment. You constantly hear these stories about people like Turgenev sitting by a window, which had to be closed, with his feet in hot water. It’s a very elaborate balancing act to find a necessary womb that isn’t so far removed from the world of stimuli that it gets choked off at the root, and yet isn’t in the maelstrom. You want to see and feel the maelstrom but not be buffeted by it.
RICHARD POWERS
Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve met. Truth is not their enemy. It’s the bannister they grab for when feeling around on the dark cellar stairs.
MARY KARR
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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