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

Story Writers Leave Stuff Out

Short stories are more like poems than like novels. Novelists put stuff in, because they are trying to represent a world. Story writers, as Poe implied, leave stuff out. They are not trying to represent a world. They are trying to express a single, intangible thing. The story writer begins with an idea about what readers will feel when they finish reading, just as a lyric poet starts with a nonverbal state of mind and then constructs a verbal artifact that evokes it. The endings of modern short stories tend to be oblique, but they, too, are structured for an effect, frequently of pathos.

LOUIS MENAND

Think of Reading Like a Balanced Diet

Some writers won’t read a word of any novel while they’re writing their own. Not one word. They don’t even want to see the cover of a novel. As they write, the world of fiction dies: no one has ever written, no one is writing, no one will ever write again. Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type while he’s writing and he’ll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. It’s a matter of temperament. Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra — they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

ZADIE SMITH

The Great Enemy of Clear Language is Insincerity

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

GEORGE ORWELL

Plot Promises

Plot offers the promise of Chekov and his gun, of Hitchcock and his bomb under the table. An event here leads to a choice there which spawns another event over there. Foreshadowing isn't just a literary technique used sparingly: it lurks in the shadow of every plot turn. Plot promises pay-off. A good plot often betrays this promise and does something different than the audience expects. That's not a bad thing. You don't owe the audience anything but your best story. But a plot can also make hay by doing exactly what you expect: show them the gun and now they want to see it fire.

CHUCK WENDIG

Start with the Novel's Climax and Work Backward

Plot means that every notable event is conditioned on previous events. Start with the novel’s climax (often the first thing you know about it, its most striking moment) and work backward, asking why-why-why. Then write forward. With proper buildup, a scene that means little in isolation can become as significant to readers as it is to you. Your plot will of course reveal character through conflict, but novel readers are super nosy, so be sure to work out some characters’ personalities in detail.

NELL ZINK

Why Wouldn't You Be Depressed?

Maybe plain old depression is to blame for much of what afflicts writers—the kind of depression that dogs people of all trades and none. The conditions are right. The work requires a deliberate cutting-off from other people; you have only yourself to depend on, because no one will do it for you; your income is uncertain; at the end of the process you surrender control, dependent on the judgment of strangers; you face a lot of rejection. Why wouldn’t you be depressed? The surprise is that thousands of people hurl themselves into this occupation, year after year.

HILARY MANTEL

A Writer's Voice

I think a writer’s voice is really his or her authentic, natural voice—the way she actually expresses herself and sees the world. But it takes time to get to that. I think the first many years of writing you tend to write the way you think you’re supposed to sound, and gradually (if you’re lucky) you begin dropping that affect and getting to what is your true voice. In time, you come to know that voice well enough that you know how to emphasize it, enrich it.

SUSAN ORLEAN

Don't Tie It Up Too Neatly

Gogol said that the last line of every story was: “And nothing would ever be the same again.” Nothing in life ever really begins in one single place, and nothing ever truly ends. But stories have at least to pretend to finish. Don’t tie it up too neatly. Don’t try too much. Often the story can end several paragraphs before, so find the place to use your red pencil. Print out several versions of the last sentence and sit with them. Read each version over and over. Go with the one that you feel to be true and a little bit mysterious. Don’t tack on the story’s meaning. Don’t moralize at the end. Don’t preach that final hallelujah. Have faith that your reader has already gone with you on a long journey. They know where they have been. They know what they have learned. They know already that life is dark. You don’t have to flood it with last-minute light.

COLUM McCANN

Any Excuse Not to Write

I don’t know which it is writers welcome the most: praise or interruptions. Writers, to a man, to a woman, welcome any reason, any excuse, not to write. I have, on occasion, facing a deadline, found it necessary to shave four times on the same day. I will answer a letter that has been sitting on my desk for as long as five minutes. (It’s usually from someone who wants to know how to get started as a writer. I can tell them how to start a career. It’s the mornings that are a problem.) After I get that out of the way, I’ll settle down—and take a call from a salesman who wants to sell me some toner for my copy machine. There comes that moment, though, when I’ve simply run out of creative ways not to be creative, and I’ll finally start to write. But not before I take the time to sharpen my pencils to the point where they’re able to perform brain surgery.

LARRY GELBART