Learn to Put Up with Boredom and Frustration

The best advice I know to give is to learn to put up with boredom and frustration. You have to sit through the dull times when nothing's coming and stay there, for however much time you've given yourself to write, even then. It doesn't have to be all day that you do this – it could be an hour, two hours maybe – but the ability to just stay there in the face of soul-wearying emptiness, that has to be developed just like any muscle. Because that's what imagination is: a muscle, and it has to be worked out. So you sit there in the face of nothing, or you write gibberish you know you're going to toss the next day. But you stay there. You work at it. You fill the time. And gradually, the empty days grow fewer, and the frustration periods shrink. You never lose them entirely, but they shrink.

PETER S. BEAGLE

Some Poems Are a Journey of Discovery

Poems start from a phrase, an image, an idea, a rhythm insistent in the back of the brain. I once wrote a poem when I realized I had been hearing a line from a David Byrne song entirely wrong, and I liked it my way. Some poems are a journey of discovery and exploration for the writer as well as the reader. I find out where I am going when I finally arrive, which may take years. 

MARGE PIERCY

We Authors Must Repeat Ourselves

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves — that's the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives — experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Avoid the Explanatory Mode

Avoid the Frederick Forsyth explanatory mode. I adore the way Forsyth breaks the narratives of his thrillers in order to dump data on the reader. Here’s an example: after a character in The Dogs of War discovers platinum deposits there follows a lengthy disquisition on the international platinum market, and shortly after this, a history of catalytic converters. I’m not complaining about this mode, but in writing about nature, I try to be more like John Le Carré. You don’t catch him explaining the history and workings of the British security services. He just puts two men in a club in Whitehall and you learn what you need from what they say. And what they don’t say. 

HELEN MACDONALD

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