Fiction Is Payback

Write what you know. Bellow once said, “Fiction is the higher autobiography.” In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you. When people read my books “My Gym Teacher Was an Abusive Bully” and “She Called Them Brussels Sprouts: A Survivor’s Tale,” they’re often surprised when I tell them they contain an autobiographical element. Therein lies the art, I say. How do you make that which is your everyday into the stuff of literature? Listen to your heart. Ask your heart, Is it true? And if it is, let it be. Once the lawyers sign off, you’re good to go.

COLSON WHITEHEAD

Self-Doubt

My internal life as a writer has been a constant battle with the small, whispering voice (well, sometimes it shouts) that tells me I can't do it. This time, the voice taunts me, you will fall flat on your face. Every single piece of writing I have ever completed – whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review – has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess. Call it stubbornness, stamina, a take-no-prisoners determination, but a writer at work reminds me of nothing so much as a terrier with a bone: gnawing, biting, chewing, until finally there is nothing left to do but fall away.

DANI SHAPIRO

No Shame

You have to be shameless. You can’t worry about being decorous. This doesn’t mean that you have to be obscene and crazy and smear your pages with feces. That’s not the point. But shame won’t do. I couldn’t have written Sabbath’s Theater if I felt shame. I feel plenty of shame in my own life—don’t get me wrong. I’m just as shame ridden as the next person is. But when I sit down to write, I’m free from shame. When Portnoy isn’t enraged or lust ridden, I’m happy, just as when Mickey Sabbath is full of lust, I’m sitting in my studio inventing Mickey Sabbath in a state of horniness. I’m not horny when I’m sitting there writing it. So this is a crucial distinction that has to be made. Contrary to public opinion—such as it is—Zuckerman has no sex life whatsoever. In any of those books. I’ve found him being described as “the sex obsessed” and so on. It isn’t so.

PHILIP ROTH

Engage the Reader's Imagination

In my own writing, I have been accused of (or is it praised for?) being a minimalist, which I suppose means that I don’t write a whole lot. This is true. For the most part, I avoid adjectives and I definitely avoid adverbs, which also means that I tend not to describe much. I rarely describe what my characters look like or what they wear or how they do their hair. My hope is that this will either not be important or if it is important it will somehow surface within the text. But better yet, by avoiding descriptions and explanations, I allow the reader the freedom to picture for themselves what my characters, their clothes and haircuts look like and thus participate in the text. In other words, I hope my readers will read my work with imagination.

LILY TUCK

The Secret of Writing

I took a writing course in summer school in 1939, when I was in high school. But it didn’t work. The secret of writing was, to go and live in the library two or four days a week for ten years. I graduated from the library having read every single book in it. And along the way I wrote every day of every week of every month, for every year. And in ten years, I became a writer.

RAY BRADBURY

Don't Talk Down to Readers

Don’t talk down to readers. They may know as much as you do about your subject, or more. If they don’t, they don’t want to be told how lucky they are to have you tell them all about it. Military techno-thrillers are often packed with acronyms like SOSUS and AIM-9s and Pratt & Whitney J-57s, and even if you don’t know what the hell those things are, you feel you’re being talked to as an equal when you encounter them on the page (and these days, it’s not difficult to look them up). Same goes for nature. And as for technology. . . . 

HELEN MACDONALD

Force Yourself to Write

I always have a clock in front of me. Sometimes, if things are going badly, I will force myself to write a page in a half an hour. I find that can be done. I find that what I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I’m feeling inspired. It’s mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write. There’s a marvelous essay that Sinclair Lewis wrote on how to write. He said most writers don’t understand that the process begins by actually sitting down.

TOM WOLFE

Writing Is Facing Your Deepest Fears

Writing is facing your deepest fears and all your failures, including how hard it is to write a lot of the time and how much you loathe what you’ve just written and that you’re the person who just committed those flawed sentences (many a writer, and God, I know I’m one, has worried about dying before the really crappy version is revised so that posterity will never know how awful it was). When it totally sucks, pause, look out the window (there should always be a window) and say, I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing.

REBECCA SOLNIT

It's Harder to Write a Good Novel Than a Good Poem

I think its harder to write a good novel than a good poem. The poem, or the kind of poem we write nowadays, is a single emotional spear-point, a concentrated effect that is achieved by leaving everything out but the emotion itself. But the novel can’t do this. In the novel, the emotion has to be attached to a human being, and the human has to be attached to a particular time and a particular place, and has to do with other human beings and be involved with them…. Whereas the poet relies on the intensity with which he can say it, the novelist relies on the persuasiveness with which he can show it.

PHILIP LARKIN

Just Do It, Badly

Stop NOT writing. Just do it, badly. Just write the thing you need or want to write, that you are avoiding. That avoidance is costing you greatly, isometrically, and in general well-being. So can you find one measly hour, to write, badly?

ANNE LAMOTT