A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It’s very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she’d been stood up by the man she planned to marry.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.
SUSAN SONTAG
The world has always been chaotic. Life is unpredictable…there is no form. And making forms gives you solidity. I think that's why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories that have beginnings, middles and ends, even when…the middle is at the beginning, and the beginning is at the end.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
Be aware that some people will not like what you do and, by extension, may not like you, or think they don’t. This is the age of the troll and the mob – there are people out there who enjoy being viciously negative about the work of others; often anonymously, of course. If your work gets noticed, some of this will come your way. Learn to distinguish between the useful criticism and the pointless spite. Absorb the former and ignore the latter. Or just take Andy Warhol’s advice: never pay attention to what they write about you; just measure it in inches.
PAUL KINGSNORTH
I was always a bit contemptuous of the first person. I was stupid about it. I thought it wouldn’t allow me to write about other people. But, in fact, it allows you to do it in a really interesting way because it’s all inflected by the subjectivity of the character. Once I stopped feeling self-conscious about it, then it moved quickly.
ZADIE SMITH
Writers generally do not like to read their work once it is published. We find mistakes. We find things that make us cringe. And the whole process kills whatever momentum we may be feeling. The body of work becomes a body of evidence in a case built against us. We find a writer we barely recognize, and who seems to want to pick a fight. See all our books lined up on the shelf. They are a museum, a graveyard. They are a chorus line, arranged side by side like the Rockettes. All that’s missing is the kicks.
ROGER ROSENBLATT
One of the main elements of creating suspense is making the reader understand what's at stake. The bigger the stakes for the characters, the more potential for suspense…. Creating suspense involves making the reader ask a question, then withholding the answer for as long as possible, without losing their interest. That means creating false leads, going on side quests, creating diversions, whilst maintaining the tension.
JOANNE HARRIS
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
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
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
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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