Writing is not typing. Thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing in your head and in sketches, maybe some typing, with revisions as you go, and then more revisions, deletions, emendations, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh, because a good writer is always a good editor of his or her own work. Typing is this little transaction in the middle of two vast thoughtful processes.
REBECCA SOLNIT
I work in the small building out back, and it’s just right for me. There’s no running water and no telephone. No distractions. Because it has windows on all four sides and a high ceiling, there’s no feeling of being boxed in. It’s off-limits to everyone but grandchildren. They come out anytime they wish—the smaller the better. I work all day and just about every day. I go out about eight-thirty in the morning, like I’m going to the train, come back in for lunch, look at the mail, then I go back again for the afternoon. We built it when I was writing The Great Bridge. Before that I rented a little studio from a neighbor who had built several of them, each on wooden skids. You could pick out a spot on his farm and he’d hook a studio to his tractor and drag it there for you.
DAVID McCULLOUGH
Naming, labeling, pegging, tagging will always increase the audience’s sense that it can control if not curb the writer. Just the way our readers constantly want us to repeat and write more of the kind of text that has pleased them in the past, whenever we strike out into a totally different direction, from sentimental liberal feminism to black satiric humor for instance, they’re disappointed because they want us to continue giving them more of the same. They’re terrified that some subversive, abrasive new aspect of any writer’s sensibility will disturb that philistine bourgeois experience: the reader’s pleasure.
FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY
I’ve tried very hard and I’ve never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels. I don’t search for exactitude in portraying people. I try to give to imaginary people a kind of veracity. It would bore me to death to put into my novels the people I know. It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the “fronts” people assume before one another’s eyes, and the “front” a writer puts on the face of reality.
FRANÇOISE SAGAN
I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used “terrible” six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain.
IAN FLEMING
I am sure this happens to everyone who’s tried to write anything, and particularly writers like me, who tend not to plan pieces but work on them organically (it’s inefficient, but I don’t seem to be able to do it any other way). It took me a long time to understand that sometimes, when I thought I was writing about ibises, I was really writing about homesickness, or when I thought I was writing about homesickness, what I was really writing about was ibises. Homes, not spiders; loneliness, not riparian forest. I learned to listen very carefully to what was going on between the lines, to always pay attention to what the words in front of you are really saying. It’s never too late to stop and start again (unless you’re on deadline).
HELEN MACDONALD
The choice between first- and third-person is usually a clear one—tied to whatever my initial thought was in regards to the story. And more often than not I choose third. I find the third-person more interesting to work with, more expansive. I wrote a story in the second-person once that I only attempted because I honestly could wrap my head around why that point-of-view choice made sense, given the main character and the subject matter, and that was a fun experiment that I think was successful. The point-of-view I’ve never tried but would like to try one day is the first-person plural—so wonderfully handled in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic.
PATRICK RYAN
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
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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