Read Something of Thrilling Quality

One of the best ways to get started writing is to read something of thrilling quality. I never read poetry or fiction, and anything that smacks of usefulness—science or biography—is off-limits. Essentially, I read literary essays. I like super-arrogant, high-level, brainy essays about aesthetics. I had a Nabokov jag for a couple of years: his Lectures on Literature. Kundera has two beautiful books of essays. There’s also Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Herbert has that wonderful book Still Life with Bridal. Brodsky is another one. And Benjamin. Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Benjamin. I love introductions. It’s a category in itself. All of my writers read Kafka, but I don’t read Kafka. I only have an interest in reading people who write about reading him.

KAY RYAN

"Write What You Know" Limits Us

Saying “write what you know” limits us from the outset - we only “know” a limited number of things, after all. I know the smell of honeysuckle on a summer’s day. I know what it’s like to have a toddler, to be a terrible bowler, to slurp up gin from my rat’s nest of a beard so as not to waste its herbal booziness. We should certainly write our experiences, but we cannot limit ourselves only to that. We should be encouraged then to have new experiences. To know and learn - gasp! - new things. Write with authority and authenticity. Marry experience with imagination in a ceremony upon the story’s page.

CHUCK WENDIG

Write What You Know

Write what you know. Every guide for the aspiring author advises this. Because I live in a long-settled rural place, I know certain things. I know the feel of a newborn lamb's damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities. And I know other kinds of emotional truths that I believe apply across the centuries.

GERALDINE BROOKS

You've Got to Work It Over

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Memoirists Must Show and Tell

Memoir is the intersection of narration and reflection, of storytelling and essay writing. It can present its story and consider the meaning of the story. The first commandment of fiction—Show, Don’t Tell—is not part of the memoirist’s faith. Memoirists must show and tell.

JUDITH BARRINGTON

A Feeling for Stories Is a Universal Human Disposition

I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory. The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place — irrespective of my subject — where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day. Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago.

OLIVER SACKS

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

Think Critically About Any Piece of Art

Continue to think critically when you’re watching any piece of art, because even if you say, “I wish I had those two hours of my life back,” you’ll know a little bit more about your taste, about who you are as an artist, about what you respond to. So it’s never really a waste of time. I think that’s a good perspective to have both when it’s creating things that don’t work or seeing things that don’t work.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA

You Write What You Write

All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself—though, thank God I had never committed them to paper—I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore.

JAMAICA KINCAID

Go Straight to What You Know Best

As you get older, you should get impatient with showing off in literature. It is easier to settle for blazing light than to find a language for the real. Whether you are a writer or a bird-dog trainer, life should winnow the superfluous language. The real thing should become plain. You should go straight to what you know best.

THOMAS McGUANE