Procrastination is an alluring siren taunting you to Google the country where Balki from Perfect Strangers was from, and to arrange sticky notes on your dog in the shape of hilarious dog shorts. A wicked temptress beckoning you to watch your children, and take showers. Well, it’s time to look procrastination in the eye and tell that seafaring wench, “Sorry not today, today I write.”
COLIN NISSAN
Should novels generally be six hundred pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It’s my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they’re apparently also not good enough to be shorter.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
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
Fiction, for me at least, is the best way to say things. I can be much more clear-minded if I allow my imagination to take the lead—never loosing the reins, of course, but at full gallop. I also believe that, if you are fortunate, you can access the unconscious through fiction; in my case, elaborate ideas emerge in a very organized manner. Fiction for me is a way of “writing what you don’t know about what you know,” to quote Grace Paley.
LUISA VALENZUELA
The secret is, I’m going to write some big old f—ing flops! I’m going to write some things that really don’t work. I don’t know what those are — you don’t set out to do that — but I’ve been very, very lucky and I know going in when I write a piece of theater, it can close in a night. I work on a movie, I know it can open and close and disappear. I’ve had enough to it to just know that you can’t control the outcome of something. You can only control the thing you make.
LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA
A capacity for solitude is a required literary trait, but I don’t know if it’s an acquired one. That is, I don’t know if you can teach yourself to be alone if you really just can’t bear it. Yes, I still have the capacity for solitude. It’s kind of like eye color. Not much you can do about it.
LORRIE MOORE
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
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
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 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
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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