Narrative Voice

A narrative voice allows you to say things you couldn’t otherwise. It frees you from the prison of the ego and the limitations of habitual thinking. One of the great mysteries of writing fiction, and one of the greatest pleasures, is the discovery of a voice that opens up a channel to impersonal, but specific, knowledge.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Unconscious Processing

Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

MARIA POPOVA

We Must Not Be Defeated

There is, I hope, a thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it’s just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats—maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats—but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. 

MAYA ANGELOU

The Surge

Writing can’t be planned for or predicted, and when it happens, when the surge begins, it brings a satisfaction like nothing else. There are finer sensualities, sure, and basic emotions that give joy or connection when released, but as far as giving me a sustained sense that this is who I am, this is what I do, a full-fathom immersion in writing is the ultimate verification. Alone at my attic desk, catching the flow of words, when the flow is there to be caught — or generating it when it is there to be generated — I break with my more tentative self, claim some more necessary seeming “I.” The change has everything to do with finding words and their sequence. The joy prolongs itself for a short time after I stop — a resonance, a psychic afterglow — then it tapers away, the other life resumes. But I am already thinking toward the next occasion.

SVEN BIRKERTS

There's a Place Beyond Words

There’s a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.

JERZY KOSIŃSKI

In Fiction, the Truth Doesn't Always Feel True

In fiction, the things that are realistic or literally true don’t always feel true. It happens in my writing classes over and over and again: the thing that everyone, including me, picks out as unbelievable sometimes is exactly the thing the writer will say, “But it really happened!” And it probably did. But it means they haven’t done enough to make that incident enter the world of the story, which becomes a reality with its own logic. When something genuinely surprising happens in a work of fiction, you have to be very in the story, and very in the moment, to make the reader accept it.

MARY GAITSKILL

Be Aware of Your Reader, but Only Subconsciously

Reading is hard enough. I realize I’m asking you to come along for a lengthy journey; you’re wasting a good chunk of your week with me, so let’s make this interesting and not too painful. But this is the paradox of the writer, because you must be aware of your reader, but only subconsciously, for if you think too hard about what they want, you will sink your ship before it even sets sail…. You are not only writing for yourself, of course, but you better be prepared to be, because often our works never see the light of day. And this seems fine. We think the world needs our stories but it doesn’t, really. It needs maths and sciences teachers.

REIF LARSEN

Be Kind to Yourself as a Writer

At a certain point, you have to be kind to yourself as a writer and trust your own motives. You have to have confidence that you’re coming from the right place. You have to allow yourself to let loose, pursue a good story, and create people who feel real. Not good, not bad, certainly not perfect—just real.

ANGELA FLOURNOY

Spend It All

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

ANNIE DILLARD

You Can Get Too Literal

I need to have spent sometime in a place, smelled it, seen the vegetation, the architecture, the brand names of the shops [to write about it]. But [even] if it’s do-able for me to revisit a place, I make a conscious decision not to because I trust the imagination’s memory to put it together. I think you can get too literal. I want the literal and the factual and the real to anchor the fictional dream, but I don’t want to be too loyal to the facts of the place and get bogged down with that. 

ANDRE DUBUS