Writing Is a Process

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One of the most important things that I teach them early on is that writing requires revision and that writing is a process. I teach undergrads and I think often undergrads don’t realize that. They think when you’re a writer, especially a creative writer, that you write something and it’s perfect and you hit send and it goes out to the world. They really don’t understand what a process it is and how there’s an entire group of people working together to revise your work, to refine your work, before it ever reaches an audience.

JESMYN WARD

It's Your Job to Get Better

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You should assume that you're worse than your professors, or the writers you admire, and that you have something to learn from them. But then, more importantly, assume that it's your job to get better than them. That's the basis of all student-teacher relationships, regardless of whether this person is actually your teacher or if they’re just someone you want to emulate. You're supposed to get better than them. So go do that. Otherwise what are you doing?

ANTHONY VEASNA SO

The First Draft

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I always think it’s better to put too much into the first and second drafts and then you can cut it back. But your first draft is partly you talking to yourself about a subject. And maybe you can’t get through that first draft without talking to yourself about that subject. You can always go back in the second draft and cut out the blibber-blabber and make it just the narrator talking about the story. One of the signals for me that I’m just talking to myself is when I use the word just. I don’t know why that is, but it’s a tic. And so, if I go into my file and I search for the word just, most every case will take me to a place where I’m sort of blithering on.

JANE SMILEY

Note Where the Energy Drops

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I try to base my revision on a re-reading of what I’ve done so far, imitating, so far as it’s possible, a first-time reader. That is, I try not to bring too many ideas about what the story is doing etc., etc. Just SEE what it’s doing. In other words, read along with a red pen, reacting in real-time as I go along, deleting, adding, etc. When the energy drops, then I know that’s where I have to really start digging in, i.e., turn away from the hardcopy and go to the computer. Repeat as necessary?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

Slow Writing

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Slow writing – like long exposure photography – can bring about a sense of saturation in the material, where the time taken in the making is experienced as present in the outcome. Dwelling takes time. It is not an end-gaining activity in which a acquires b, but a transformative and relational one in which a is changed – quite probably into something quite unanticipated. It involves a process of passive attention: waiting, without necessarily knowing what for – a quality that Ben Quash, in his book of that title, names as abiding.

ELIZABETH COOK

Kindness to the Self Is Key

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Kindness to the self is, I think, key. If we focus on feeling blocked, marooned in isolation separate from our creative selves, it’s easy to fall into self-blame or self-hatred. We may focus on the “failure” of not generating new work instead of recognizing that during this quiet period we might be laying down the groundwork for what we will write later; we may simply need to rest and regenerate before our next project coalesces.

KATE ANGUS 

Writing Is an Addiction

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Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.

JOHN UPDIKE

Be Kind When You Explain Something

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[When I write,] I get some images and I connect one piece to another. That’s the story line. Then I explain the story line to the reader. You should be very kind when you explain something. If you think, It’s okay; I know that, it’s a very arrogant thing. Easy words and good metaphors; good allegory. So that’s what I do. I explain very carefully and clearly.

HARUKI MURAKAMI