Lyonnaise Potatoes and Some Pork Chops

I used to read music magazines—Downbeat, Metronome…. I was once reading an interview with the drummer Gene Krupa and he was asked, “You keep time for the band. How do you keep time?” He said, “I have a little chant, and it goes like this: “Lyonnaise potatoes and some pork chops, Lyonnaise potatoes and some pork chops.” So the first year I was working on a newspaper I’d be sitting in the corner going, “Lyonnaise potatoes and some pork chops” to make sure I had some kind of rhythm in the sentences. You can learn for one form of expression from another. You can listen to music and say, “There’s a way I can make this happen with language, with words.” 

PETE HAMILL

Writers Are Superstitious

My office has a lot of pulp novels in it, and I also collect carnival prizes from the 1930s and 1940s. They’re very vivid and painted in wacky colors and decorated with sparkles. I have about 10 or 12 of them. My favorite one is a hula girl, a little girl with an enigmatic face. The light coming into my room catches the sparkles. I also have a little statue of Freud. These are like totems. I think we writers are very superstitious. We don’t know why it’s working when it’s working, so we attach cause and effect. I’ll think, “It worked when I looked at the hula girl, so look at it and everything will be fine.” It sounds a little woo-woo, but I try to think what made something work and then I walk it back.

MEGAN ABBOTT

Develop a Certain Ease of Delivery

I’m a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy. There’s a question of pacing. You want short sentences and long sentences—well, every writer knows that. You have to develop a certain ease of delivery and make your writing agreeable to read.

JAMES SALTER

Writing Should Be Exploratory

Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express. When you enter into the dance with language, you’ll begin to find that there’s something before, or behind, or more absolute than the thing you thought you wanted to express. And as you work, other kinds of meaning emerge than what you might have expected. It’s like wrestling with the angel: On the one hand you feel the constraints of what can be said, but on the other hand you feel the infinite potential. There’s nothing more interesting than language and the problem of trying to bend it to your will, which you can never quite do. You can only find what it contains, which is always a surprise.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

It's Your Duty to Lie

There's an enormous difference between being a story writer and being a regular person. As a person, it's your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a writer it's your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life is only being a reporter, not a creator. You have to make your story bigger, better, more magical, more meaningful than life is, no matter how special or wonderful in real life the moment may have been.

RICK BASS

The Conquest of Loneliness

The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina…close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That’s the bloody price. I don’t know maybe it’s some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it’s part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period.

LEON URIS

What Is an Adjective?

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning “placed on top,” “added,” “appended,” “foreign.” Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

ANNE CARSON

Geography Is Important

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

Writers Are Like Spies

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

Who Could Not Want to Write a Poem?

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