A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn't out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even.
NELSON ALGREN
To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.
ANNE LAMOTT
Dreaming and writing are Adam and Eve of the same process. Long before one ever writes a story…one works a story. You have ideas; and they stay there in your barely conscious mind; and you work them over. You masticate them like a puppy with a Christmas slipper until—finally—out comes a story. A significant part of that birthing process is informed by the dreaming. So the dreaming and the writing: elements of the same manufacture.
HARLAN ELLISON
The contemplation of excellence produces excellence, if not similar, yet parallel. All beauties, whether in nature or art, in physics or morals, in composition or abstract reasoning, are multiplied reflections, visible in different distances under different positions, of one archetypal beauty.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
We just start right off with scene one, and since we are on the film set all the time, there is no “Slow fade-in, camera tiptoes.” None of that. Just “Day” or “Night,” so that that cameraman knows how to light, not even “Morning” or “Evening.” There’s a minimum of fancy descriptions. I find with young writers, and some of them with very good ideas, that they get lost in technical descriptions of which they know very little. Nobody will say, “This is a great screenwriter because he always has the camera angles.” Just have good characters and good scenes and something that plays.
BILLY WILDER
People would say I portray the world in a bleak way. It’s not bleak to me. I think what is bleak is when you create a veil to make the world feel better. Literature is one place we should be able to experience bleakness and brightness and anything in between. Literature should not make people feel comfortable, it should challenge the readers. If a book confirms everything I know and everything I think, then that is disappointing.
YIYUN LI
If you think of writing as a form of self expression – a form of pleasure, a form of comfort, a way of comforting yourself, a way of even amusing yourself – I think you’re missing the point. For me, it’s a way of pulling things up and out – guts. Things that have not been spilt before. It depends on memory, on imagination. It depends, for me, on things that are very difficult.
COLM TÓIBÍN
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
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. 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
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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