Art Is the Escape from Personality

I must count my writing as an essential part of the way in which I deal with life. I am however a rather derivative poet. I learn what I can from whom I can. I borrow heavily from my reading, because I take my reading seriously. It is part of my total experience and I base most of my poetry on my experience. I do not apologize for being derivative…. It has not been of primary interest to develop a unique poetic personality, and I rejoice in Eliot’s lovely remark that art is the escape from personality.

OLIVER SACKS

One Thought Per Sentence

One maxim that my students find helpful is: One thought per sentence. Readers only process one thought at a time. So give them time to digest the first set of facts you want them to know. Then give them the next piece of information they need to know, which further explains the first fact. Be grateful for the period. Writing is so hard that all of us, once launched, tend to ramble. Instead of a period we use a comma, followed by a transitional word (and, while), and soon we have strayed into a wilderness that seems to have no road back out. Let the humble period be your savior. There’s no sentence too short to be acceptable in the eyes of God.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

Writing's Not an Industrial Process

Writers find it difficult to trust themselves. It can seem such an inflated claim, that you are a writer. So you think you have to keep proving it, by persecuting paper with ink or pounding the keys, as if you need a self-justifying witness to your own strength of purpose. But there’s no point in having a healthy word-count, unless they’re the right words. Writing’s not an industrial process. You can’t measure your productivity day-to-day in any way the world recognizes. Compression is the first grace of style and takes hard labor. Your best days are sometimes those when you end up with less on the page than when you started.

HILARY MANTEL

The Wisdom of the Novel

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
MILAN KUNDERA

Readers Are More Sophisticated than Critics

Readers, I think, are more sophisticated on the whole than critics. They can make the jumps, they can make imaginative leaps. If your structure is firm and solid enough, however strange, however unusual, they will be able to follow it. They will climb with you to the most unlikely places if they trust you, if the words give them the right footholds, the right handholds. That’s what I want my readers to do: I want them to come with me when we’re going mountain-climbing. This isn’t a walk through a theme park. This is some dangerous place that neither of us has been before, and I hope that by traveling there first, I can encourage the reader to come with me and that we will make the trip again together, and safely. 

JEANETTE WINTERSON 

Why Would You Be Unable to Write?

Assuming that you are a professional and that you know how to write, why would you be unable to do so? If an electrician said, I have electrician’s block. I just can’t bend conduit. I can’t! I can’t! I can’t run wires! Help me, please! he would be committed. One thing would be certain, and that is that his paralysis in the face of his work would have only to do with him, and not with his craft. I’m of the old school, I guess, and I would call writer’s block laziness, lack of imagination, inflated expectations, or having-spent-your-entire-advance-in-Rio-de-Janeiro-and-taking-taxis-and-going-to-restaurants-you-can’t-afford-before-you-have-written-a-single-word-of-the-book-you-pitched-to-a-cretin-with-an-out-of-control-cash-flow.

MARK HELPRIN

Art Must Take Reality by Surprise

Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the “real” as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called “realist” novels—they’re nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth—the true feeling of a character—that is all. Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

FRANÇOISE SAGAN

All Good Books Are Alike

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

You Have to Be a Born Collaborator

Mr. Diamond and I meet at, say, nine thirty in the morning and open shop, like bank tellers, and we sit there in one room. We read Hollywood Reporter and Variety, exchange them, and then just stare at each other. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes it goes on until twelve thirty, and then I’ll ask him, “How about a drink?” He nods, and then we have a drink and go to lunch. Or sometimes we come full of ideas. This is not the muse coming through the windows and kissing our brows. We just sit together and discuss, having more or less settled on the them of what we’re trying to do and having discussed the three acts in which we divide our pictures. We start to do the dialogue, talking to each other, and we fight it out while we’re doing it. If the two of us agree it’s no good, we throw it away and try a third version. In other words, it is not one of those things where you kind of get nervous and angry and walk around and say, “That was the best line ever and you rejected it.” No, let’s find one that we both agree on. So you have to be a born collaborator.

BILLY WILDER

The Picture Dictates the Arrangement

Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene. It tells you.
 You don’t tell it.

JOAN DIDION