Listen to Your Own Feedback

Feedback is great, from your editor, your agent, your readers, your friends, your classmates, but there are times when you know exactly what you’re doing and why and obeying them means being out of tune with yourself. Listen to your own feedback and remember that you move forward through mistakes and stumbles and flawed but aspiring work, not perfect pirouettes performed in the small space in which you initially stood. Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people. Write for other people, but don’t listen to them too much.

REBECCA SOLNIT

A Screenplay Is a Recipe, But Not the Meal Itself

A novel is a finished, literally stand-alone thing, and the novelist is the sole maker of it — one takes notes from an editor but on the whole, it’s all yours. I think of a screenplay as more like a recipe, but not the meal itself. I don't find that frustrating because I have this other life as a novelist and I’ve spent plenty of time alone playing God, and actually writing a screenplay is an opportunity to work alongside others, which is quite refreshing. 

IAN McEWAN

Read Widely

I went through a hundred books to write one book. But really I went through a lifetime of books to be able to write any book at all. If you don’t read widely, you can never have the strangely informed psyche of a fiction writer. So I occasionally feel guilty about having an apartment filled with unread books I purchased impulsively. But then I remind myself that it is only through hunting through the trash for random objects of beauty that we can build a world.

HEATHER O'NEILL

A Play Just Seems to Materialize

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

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

Middles and Ends

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

Never Pay Attention to What They Write About You

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

The First Person

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

Don't Read Your Published Work

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

Creating Suspense

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