I don’t think writers should be worried about treading any lines between autobiography and fiction. You should write whatever you want to write. Once you label it fiction, it’s fiction, even if you give the protagonist a feeling you’ve felt, or your same hometown. All fiction is born out of some alchemy of observation, imagination, and personal experience.
RACHEL KHONG
I guess I don’t think of work as evolving. I think of writers as sitting down and starting from scratch every time—at least that is how it is for me. I don’t think of one book as having any relationship to the others. The books are not canvasses upon which I attempt to develop my voice, grow my themes, or evolve my concerns. They are not early or later drafts of one another. They are not in conversation with one another. They have no awareness of the others’ existence. They are merely narrative objects that I’ve worked hard on in order that they be the best (most interesting, most true, most beautiful, etcetera) I was then capable of. In retrospect, I could describe each book, but such a description would not constitute a description of an evolution, or a picture of a process, or the naming of a journey, not really. Writing is too disorderly for that—or at least mine is. I don’t mean to hide behind the mysteriousness of the creative act—although it certainly is mysterious, more afterwards than at the time—but I don’t think of the books as a deliberate attempt (by me) to form a body of work that can then be stepped back from and discussed (at least by me). That would be far too overdetermined.
LORRIE MOORE
The common conception of how novels get written seems to me to be an exact description of writer’s block. In the common view, the writer is at this stage so desperate that he’s sitting around with a list of characters, a list of themes, and a framework for his plot, and ostensibly trying to mesh the three elements. In fact, it’s never like that. What happens is what Nabokov described as a throb. A throb or a glimmer, an act of recognition on the writer’s part. At this stage the writer thinks, Here is something I can write a novel about. In the absence of that recognition I don’t know what one would do.
MARTIN AMIS
Over-writing is a bigger problem than under-writing. It’s much more likely you’ve written too much than too little. It’s a lot easier to throw words at a problem than to take the time to find the right ones. As Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century writer and scientist (no, not Mark Twain) wrote in a letter, “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”
HARRY GUINNESS
Amy Hempel says the ending of a short story should punch you in the heart, and, Lord, she knows just how to do that. But punching somebody in the heart isn’t about big sweeping gestures or sentimentality. Sentimentality is the anti-heart, a heart substitute, and nothing terrifies me more than tipping into it. I try to avoid it by keeping revelations as small, quiet, and specific to a character as possible. Another way is to leave a scene early, sometimes even before you’re ready to. If you resist the urge to tell a reader what happens in the end, or how to feel, you make space for their feelings. Whatever they bring to the page will always be superior to something you’ve handed them.
KIMBERLY KING PARSONS
Writing is facing your deepest fears and all your failures, including how hard it is to write a lot of the time and how much you loathe what you’ve just written and that you’re the person who just committed those flawed sentences (many a writer, and God, I know I’m one, has worried about dying before the really crappy version is revised so that posterity will never know how awful it was). When it totally sucks, pause, look out the window (there should always be a window) and say, I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Whatever you do, don’t rely on memory. Don’t even imagine that you will be able to remember verbatim in the evening what people said during the day. And don’t squirrel notes in a bathroom—that is, run off to the john and write surreptitiously what someone said back there with the cocktails. From the start, make clear what you are doing and who will publish what you write. Display your notebook as if it were a fishing license. While the interview continues, the notebook may serve other purposes, surpassing the talents of a tape recorder. As you scribble away, the interviewee is, of course, watching you. Now, unaccountably, you slow down, and even stop writing, while the interviewee goes on talking. The interviewee becomes nervous, tries harder, and spills out the secrets of a secret life, or maybe just a clearer and more quotable version of what was said before. Conversely, if the interviewee is saying nothing of interest, you can pretend to be writing, just to keep the enterprise moving forward.
JOHN McPHEE
People like to say that the best advice they can give to writers is to read a lot. And that's true, of course. But you shouldn't just read literature. You should read life. Read movies, and art, and people. Read everything around you, very critically. Then build your method out of that process.
ANTHONY VEASNA SO
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
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
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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