I shock creative writing students, their tutors even more, when I say I only ever write one draft. But it’s true. It just comes out of my head through my ears on to the page. I finish, correct and tidy up, and that’s it. If I get stuck, or reach the end knowing this one just doesn’t work, I throw it away. There’s always another idea or three waiting in the wings, or the notebook.
SUSAN HILL
I love how E.L. Doctorow described his process and I’m paraphrasing here: It’s like taking a road trip at night. You know where you’re leaving from and where you’re going to, and some of the major landmarks along the way. The rest of the time, it’s pitch black, you can see 20 feet ahead of you in the headlights and you just have to figure it out. And sometimes getting lost or taking a detour from your intended route turns out more interesting.
LAUREN BEUKES
A cliché is an idea or technique that when first invented was so good—so great, in fact—that people have recycled it again and again and again for decades. Knowledge of your art form’s history is a basic necessity; an eye that spots a cliché when you see one and, more important, when you write one is an artistic imperative. For example, the idea that beautiful, young jet-setters enjoying unlimited cocaine and sex are in fact depressed and miserable is not a revelation. Thousands of plays, films, novels, and lyrics have sung that tune. The emptiness of indulgence has been a cliché in both high art and pop culture ever since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy and Gatsby. If the rich are your subject matter, investigate the multitude of characters created not only by Fitzgerald but Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward, Woody Allen, Whit Stillman, and Tina Fey, and all the films, plays, or television dramedies that featured songs by Cole Porter sung by Frank Sinatra, up to and including the HBO series Succession.
ROBERT McKEE
Everything I see or do, the weather and the water, buildings . . . everything actual is an advantage when I am writing. It is like a menu, or a giant tool box, and I can pick and choose what I want. When I am not writing, or more important, when I have nothing on my mind for a book, then I see chaos, confusion, disorder.
TONI MORRISON
I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.
MILAN KUNDERA
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
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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