Forget Good Judgment

Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance. People with good judgment weigh the assurance of a comfortable living represented by the mariners’ certificates that declare them masters of all ships, whether steam or sail, and masters of all oceans and all navigable rivers, and do not forsake such work in order to learn English and write books signed Joseph Conrad. People who have had hard lives but somehow found themselves fetched up in executive positions with prosperous West Coast oil firms do not drink and wench themselves out of such comfy billets in order in their middle age to write books as Raymond Chandler; that would be poor judgment. No one on the payroll of a New York newspaper would get drunk and chuck it all to become a free-lance writer, so there was no John O’Hara. When you have at last progressed to the junction that enforces the decision of whether to proceed further, by sending your stuff out, and refusing to remain a wistful urchin too afraid to beg, and you have sent the stuff, it is time to pause and rejoice.

GEORGE V. HIGGINS

Awards Are Important

I was a little press writer when the National Endowment for the Arts came to my rescue and gave me an award. I couldn't buy a light bulb. Almost more than the money, the awards are important because they show that someone believes in you.

SANDRA CISNEROS

Digressions Are the Soul of Reading

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer – he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

LAURENCE STERNE

Don't Write a Memoir Unless You Have To

Don’t write [a memoir] unless you feel like you absolutely have to. It’s a painful process, kind of like pouring acid into an open wound or sticking chopsticks into your eyeballs or searching for metaphors that aren’t cliché. It’s hard emotional work. It’s hard writing work. Things you thought were sealed, emotions tucked neatly into a solved and resolved corner come frothing and festering out. Be prepared for tears and trauma and many hours thinking about ways to express those traumas in logical sentences.

JAIME LOWE

Use the Landscape

Use the landscape. Always tell us where we are. And don’t just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they’re great at this.

JANET FITCH

Stand-Ins

Many of the writers I know have a stand-in. Bellow has Herzog. Mailer had this character named Sergius O'Shaughnessy. Céline had Céline. Gombrowicz had Gombrowicz. They didn’t have stand-ins but they were stand-ins indeed labeled with their own name. A stand-in both frees you to draw on your own experience and to invent off of your own experience. It’s a mask. And in masks there is freedom.

PHILIP ROTH

Artists Live in a Constant State of Terror

One of the hardest things of all is to start. Just sitting down and getting over your own intimidations. Every professional songwriter I know — people who do it 100% for their living — is terrified every time they sit down to write. You’re always convinced that your next song is going to be your last, or that it’s going to be your worst, or that you’ll never be able to write anything as good as your hit. It’s a constant terror. I think all artists live in a constant state of terror. And part of our job is to know our own chaos well enough to be able to make sense of it when you can.

JANIS IAN

Create Dangerously

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

EDWIDGE DANTICAT

To Understand Is to Tremble

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calk, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven.... I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.

HAROLD BRODKEY

Learning to Write

I started writing because I was compelled to. When I was 13 or so, I spent two or three hours a day writing in that adolescent, struggling, angst-ridden way. By the time I was 21 I'd spent so much time doing it that I allowed a small practical idea to enter my thoughts: Well, if I'm doing this so much, maybe I can make something of it. I was learning to write, learning what it took to write.

SUSAN MINOT