Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.
ANN PATCHETT
Make up a story.... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
TONI MORRISON
I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels. Sorry to start with such a commonplace observation, but no training is more crucial. To write a novel, you must first understand at a physical level how one is put together… . It is especially important to plow through as many novels as you can while you are still young. Everything you can get your hands on—great novels, not-so-great novels, crappy novels, it doesn’t matter (at all!) as long as you keep reading. Absorb as many stories as you physically can. Introduce yourself to lots of great writing. To lots of mediocre writing too. This is your most important task.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Your characters…are like children. You give birth to these children but you have to send them into the world and then they have to live their own lives. Some people will hate the characters, some people will love them, just like in real life. I like to imagine my characters going out into the world to interact with the readers by themselves. And I’m completely free from that. I just let go.
YIYUN LI
In a short foreword to his father’s novel, Anthony Puzo points out that in an early version of the screenplay, Coppola refers to Clemenza browning meat in a skillet. Mario Puzo scribbled on the draft, “Gangsters don’t brown. Gangsters fry.” Now, if you compare the novel to the screenplay, you discover something else. There’s no dialogue in that moment in the book. Clemenza is cooking spaghetti for his crew in the Corleone kitchen. In the screenplay, he invites Michael to learn how to cook for 20 men, and then proceeds to do a running commentary on his actions, right down to “frying” meatballs. So the scene becomes much more vivid and funny in the movie because of what he says—but both creators had a hand in that.
MALCOLM JONES
For me, writing a novel is very much tied to the idea of being a working writer. It's its own job. You have to be your own operations manager, your own managing director, your own HR person, your own accountant, all wrapped up in one. It involves having to be super organized and accountable, and to keep track of what you're doing at the most minute level — really boring stuff. Like, how many times have I used this word, is it too many? You have to have brainstorming sessions that you schedule for yourself, as if you were at a job. Stories, on the other hand, feel looser, more ephemeral, more intuitive. There’s also a lower sort of burden in terms of answering basic questions, which is nice.
ANTHONY VEASNA SO
To the extent that I begin with notes, I still begin everything by hand (the notes are short, but the hand is long). I move fairly quickly to the computer now and store notes there. As for typewriters, I haven’t used one in years, although I wrote my first three books that way. Very time-consuming. I used to believe that everything should be written out first before being subjected to a keyboard of any sort. One needed to feel the words coming down out of your arm, out your fingers and onto the paper. Then I felt one should do it all again percussively to the clackety-clack sound of a typewriter. But as for revising, well, computers really are God’s gift to writers. It took me a long time to accept even the possibility of that.
LORRIE MOORE
My former writing teacher, the essayist and cartoonist Timothy Kreider, explained revision to me: One of my favorite phrases is l’esprit d’escalier, “the spirit of the staircase” — meaning that experience of realizing, too late, what the perfect thing to have said at the party, in a conversation or argument or flirtation would have been. Writing offers us one of the rare chances in life at a do-over: to get it right and say what we meant this time. To the extent writers are able to appear any smarter or wittier than readers, it’s only because they’ve cheated by taking so much time to think up what they meant to say and refining it over days or weeks or, yes, even years, until they’ve said it as clearly and elegantly as they can.
HARRY GUINNESS
Constructing a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: pressing the button, and watching something emerge. To write one is to document and to develop at the same time. Not all sentences end up in novels or stories. But novels and stories consist of nothing but. Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel. They are the cells, the individual stitches. Their nature is at once solitary and social. Sentences establish tone, and set the pace. One in front of the other marks the way.
JHUMPA LAHIRI
This is the immutable law of the business: The only screenplays that aren’t tampered with are the ones that aren’t made. A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit. Everything else — just tear that motherfucker apart.
RICHARD PRICE
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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