You Have to Have Enormous Discipline, Especially If You Like Your Drink

I write, preferably, staring at a blank wall. That’s not the best scenery for a writer—better for an artist, but not for a writer. I have a lovely study, but once you’re into it, it doesn’t make any difference. But the difficulty is cranking up the machine, getting it started. You can sit there for hours, actually. When you’re at an impasse, you have to go back to it. Every morning or afternoon, whenever you write, you have to go up and shoot that old bear under your desk between the eyes. That’s right. You have to have enormous discipline, especially if you like your drink. I know so many writers who went down the drain. If you like to drink, you can’t do it. It’s a reward. It should never be a crutch.

ROBERT LECKIE

Writers Can Generate Industrial Quantities of Procrastination

Writers can generate industrial quantities of procrastination before their first sonnet is rejected, or their first novel-outline-plus-sample-chapter is exorcised, burned and its ashes buried at sea. Are my pens facing north? Or magnetic north? What's that funny noise? Oh look, it's raining outside. My fingernails need cutting. I think my computer is going to break, better get it checked. Do I have toothache? Will I have toothache? The possibilities lend new meaning to the words eternity and purgatory.

A.L. KENNEDY

Readers Are More Sophisticated Than Critics

Readers, I think, are more sophisticated on the whole than critics. They can make the jumps, they can make imaginative leaps. If your structure is firm and solid enough, however strange, however unusual, they will be able to follow it. They will climb with you to the most unlikely places if they trust you, if the words give them the right footholds, the right handholds. That’s what I want my readers to do: I want them to come with me when we’re going mountain-climbing. This isn’t a walk through a theme park. This is some dangerous place that neither of us has been before, and I hope that by traveling there first, I can encourage the reader to come with me and that we will make the trip again together, and safely. 

JEANETTE WINTERSON 

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