Learning from Giovanni's Room

One assignment I give my beginning fiction students is to read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. There are so many things to learn from that novel. I ask them to write one page to try to imitate Baldwin. Sometimes students realize how hard it is to write just one page of good writing. In Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin has one passage about taking a train ride. I point out to my students that he describes all the strangers as intimate friends. And he describes an intimate lover as a stranger. I think that’s what you want to learn from Baldwin. You don’t write strangers as strangers; you write strangers like your best friend, with that intimate feeling.

YIYUN LI

Find Your Own Shtick

You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.

HUGH MacLEOD

The Biographer Is Like the Professional Burglar

The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. . . . The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.

JANET MALCOLM

Take Your Misgivings Seriously

Self-doubt is the best friend and the worst enemy of the writer. Because being a writer isn’t like being a tennis player or a boxer, where you presumably have to hunt down and ruthlessly eliminate the source of any flickering shadow of suspicion that you might not be destined for victory. As a writer, you have to take your own misgivings seriously; you have to attend, now and then, to the little voice in your head or the booming baritone in your gut that wishes you to know that what you are writing is entirely without value. The trick, of course, is to know when to listen to it and when to tell it to shut its stupid fat face.

MARK O’CONNELL

Just Write a Little Bit Every Day

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

MADELEINE L’ENGLE

We're Looking for a Source of Hope

In conversations over the years with other writers and artists, about what we're actually supposed to be doing, I've been struck by how often, deep down, the talk becomes a quest for the same mysterious thing. Underneath the particular image in question, the particular short story or musical composition, we're looking for a source of hope. When a conversation about each other's work doesn't pivot on professional jargon or drift toward the logistics of career management, when it's instead deferential and accommodating, we're sometimes able to locate a kind of Rosetta stone, a key to living well with the vexing and intractable nature of human life. If any wisdom emerges in these conversations, it offers sudden clarification. It's the Grail shimmer. You feel it, and you can't wait to get to work.

BARRY LOPEZ

The Author Must Ask His Readers' Forgiveness

Having reached the end of his journey, the author must ask his readers’ forgiveness for not being a more skillful guide and for not having spared them empty stretches of road and troublesome detours. There is no doubt that it could have been done better.

SIGMUND FREUD

It's a Constant Struggle to Get It Down

We're all there trying to make the story, novel, or chapter as good as it can be. It’s a constant struggle to get it down, get it clear, and understand that your intentions are the same, whether you’re an undergraduate writing a short story or a writer with seven published novels. The continually reassuring thing is that we’re all novices when we start a new work.

ALICE McDERMOTT

Torture Your Protagonist

Torture your protagonist.
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

JANET FITCH

Write Every Day

I wake up, write three hours—a thousand words. The next day, I reread that thousand words I wrote yesterday. And then I write my next thousand words. And that goes on and on, until I get to the end of the novel. If you write every day, the next day ideas have bubbled up from someplace that you had no idea was there.

WALTER MOSLEY