The Shopping List Technique

Simply this: you sit down and make a list of the ten things that have to happen in your novel—the character actions or physical events without which your story simply cannot occur. Then, when you’re sure you’ve got pretty much the ten major “event beats” or character issues nailed down, you break each of those ten things into its own section and list the ten things that have to happen surrounding that event or supporting that character action. You take your time over this work, because this is the skeleton of the body of your work to come—the physical / emotional / action structure on which you’re going to build your novel.

DIANE DUANE

Serious Work Commences in the Unconscious

The foundation of all else is the recognition that serious work commences in the unconscious mind, or is first received there, and is transmitted in quantities and at rates always in control of the unconscious faculties. The prime skill and discipline, therefore, is learning how to serve and thus partly master that source and governor. The discipline, as usual, divides into spiritual and physical departments.

REYNOLDS PRICE

Don't Make It Up

The last rule of memoir club: don’t make it up. If you don’t remember or you don’t have artifacts, ask everyone around you. Take this opportunity to interview all the crushes you ever had. Small details trigger other memories or might lead to questions that wouldn’t normally arise. (Why didn’t you take me to prom? Did we smoke weed and THEN go to Subway or go to Subway and then smoke weed?) Details are important and getting them right is what makes writing good. This is your life but there were witnesses and they can help piece together what happened. It’s not always what you think or what you remember.

JAIME LOWE

No Smoking

Novelists always blah on about inhabiting the skins of their characters even when those characters are in circumstances remote from their own. I favour the opposite approach. Because I have always hated smoking in real life I don’t permit smoking in my fiction. Why should I pollute my own world? Go elsewhere if you want smoking; your presence as a reader is not only not desired but actively discouraged from my books.

GEOFF DYER

Keep a Paper and Pencil in Your Pocket

Have a low overhead. Don’t live with anybody who doesn’t support your work. Very important. And read a lot. Don’t be afraid to read or of being influenced by what you read. You’re more influenced by the voice of childhood than you are by some poet you’re reading. The last piece of advice is to keep a paper and pencil in your pocket at all times, especially if you’re a poet. But even if you’re a prose writer, you have to write things down when they come to you, or you lose them, and they’re gone forever. Of course, most of them are stupid, so it doesn’t matter. But in case they’re the thing that solves the problem for the story or the poem or whatever, you’d better keep a pencil and a paper in your pocket. I gave this big advice in a talk, and then about three hours later I told a student I really liked his work and asked how I could get in touch with him. He said he would give me his name and address. I looked in my pocket, and I didn’t have any pencil or paper.

GRACE PALEY

Objective Correlative

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

T.S. ELIOT

A Novel Takes Over a Writer's Life

I just write what I want to write. Quiet is very beautiful to me, the medium of everything that matters. I'm grateful for the patience of my readers, certainly. But the fact is that a novel takes over a writer's life for literal years. What I write, day by day and word by word, is much of my felt life. It would be a terrible capitulation to give up my explorations of quiet because of anxiety about the receptiveness of readers. I have found that readers are very much to be trusted.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

Readers Do No Work

I have a mantra in class: “Readers do no work.” If you’re James Joyce or Toni Morrison or any other writer lavishly blessed with the gifts of linguistic prestidigitation, you can presume that your readers signed up for the ride, expecting that some heavy lifting might be required of them. Most of us, though —and all of us in the realms of nonfiction and journalism — cannot presume that. It is for us to do the work first, so that none is required of our readers. Clear thinking leads to clear writing, which leads, most importantly, to clear understanding. 

KEVIN COYNE

The Three Necessary Elements in a Story

There are three necessary elements in a story—exposition, development, and drama. Exposition we may illustrate as “John Fortescue was a solicitor in the little town of X”; development as “One day Mrs. Fortescue told him she was about to leave him for another man”; and drama as “You will do nothing of the kind,” he said.

FRANK O’CONNOR

History Is Not a Science, It's an Art

History is one way of telling stories, just like myth, fiction, or oral storytelling. But over the last hundred years, history has preempted the other forms of storytelling because of its claim to absolute, objective truth. Trying to be scientists, historians stood outside of history and told the story of how it was. All that has changed radically over the last twenty years. Historians now laugh at the pretense of objective truth. They agree that every age has its own history, and if there is any objective truth, we can’t reach it with words. History is not a science, it’s an art.

URSULA K. LE GUIN